Spain

The Count-Duke of Olivares, 1587-1645

During the years when France rose to predominance in Europe, writes J.H. Elliott, the Spanish Empire was governed by a man capable of gigantic designs, but lacking felicity in their outcome.

The Battle of Toro 1476

Townsend Miller describes the union of the crowns of Castile and Aragon, issued in Spain’s greatest century and accomplished amid civil war and in spite of foreign intervention.

The Search for the Seven Cities

One of the strangest episodes in the Spanish conquest of the New World was the quest for the mythical Seven Cities, first believed to stand on a mysterious island far out in the Atlantic Ocean, afterwards magically transported to the depths of America.

From the Maghgreb to the Moluccas, 1415-1521

C.R. Boxer writes that, taken in conjunction, the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of discovery in the fifteenth century form one of the watersheds of history, comparable to the twentieth-century conquest of space.

The Hospital of the Holy Spirit

For seven-and-a-half centuries, Rome's Santo Spirito has remained an “oasis of security and peace." Its foundation on the site of an Anglo-Saxon hospice, Iris Origo writes, was inspired by the dream that visited an early thirteenth-century pontiff.

The Islands Voyage, 1597

Alan Haynes recounts how Essex and Raleigh attacked the Azores, but failed to destroy the Spanish fleet

St Teresa and the Visionary Nuns

Stephen Clissold explains how, after twenty years of life as a nun, St Teresa began to experience visions and ecstasies which led her to found a reformed Carmelite convent in Avila.

Ali Bey in Mecca, 1807

Anthony Bonner traces the route taken by a Spaniard, from Barcelona, who set out on his long journey throughorth Africa to Mecca with the backing of Manuel Godoy.