Any assessment of Philip II's rule assumes the appearance of a paradox. In analysing the nature and impact of Philip II's rule and government, the author seeks to examine the extent of the changes in royal finance, the economic and social issues, the impact of religion -- both within Spain and throughout its Empire -- and the aims and motives behind the king's foreign policy.

Following Rivers of Gold and The Golden Empire and building on five centuries of scholarship, World Without End is the epic conclusion of an unprecedented three-volume history of the Spanish Empire from “one of the most productive and wide-ranging historians of modern times” (The New York Times Book Review). The legacy of imperial Spain was shaped by many hands. But the dramatic human story of the extraordinary projection of Spanish might in the second half of the sixteenth century has never been fully told—until now. In World Without End, Hugh Thomas chronicles the lives, loves, conflicts, and conquests of the complex men and women who carved up the Americas for the glory of Spain. Chief among them is the towering figure of King Philip II, the cultivated Spanish monarch whom a contemporary once called “the arbiter of the world.” Cheerful and pious, he inherited vast authority from his father, Emperor Charles V, but nevertheless felt himself unworthy to wield it. His forty-two-year reign changed the face of the globe forever. Alongside Philip we find the entitled descendants of New Spain’s original explorers—men who, like their king, came into possession of land they never conquered and wielded supremacy they never sought. Here too are the Roman Catholic religious leaders of the Americas, whose internecine struggles created possibilities that the emerging Jesuit order was well-positioned to fill. With the sublime stories of arms and armadas, kings and conquistadors come tales of the ridiculous: the opulent parties of New Spain’s wealthy hedonists and the unexpected movement to encourage Philip II to conquer China. Finally, Hugh Thomas unearths the first indictments of imperial Spain’s labor rights abuses in the Americas—and the early attempts by its more enlightened rulers and planters to address them. Written in the brisk, flowing narrative style that has come to define Hugh Thomas’s work, the final volume of this acclaimed trilogy stands alone as a history of an empire making the transition from conquest to inheritance—a history that Thomas reveals through the fascinating lives of the people who made it. Praise for World Without End “Readers will not find a more reliable guide to the maturing Spanish Empire. . . . World Without End reminds us that the far-flung Spanish Empire was the work of many minds and hands, and by the end their myriad stories carry a cumulative charge.”—The New York Times Book Review “A sweeping, encyclopedic history of the arrogance, ambition, and ideology that fueled the quest for empire.”—Kirkus Reviews “Literary power is a vital part of a great historian’s armoury. As in his earlier books, Thomas demonstrates here that he has this in abundance.”—Financial Times “A vivid climax to Hugh Thomas’s three-volume history of imperial Spain.”—The Telegraph “Thomas clearly excels in the Spanish history of religion, politics, and culture, [and] successfully shows that Spain’s global ambition knew no bounds.”—Publishers Weekly

CONTENTS: Preface; Lecture I: Managing the First Global Empire; Lecture II: The Messianic Vision of Philip II; Bibliographic Guide; Abbreviations; Notes.

Philip II is a fascinating and enigmatic figure in Spanish history, but it was his letrados--professional bureaucrats and ministers trained in law--who made his vast castilian empire possible. In Juan de Ovando, Stafford Poole traces the life and career of a key minister in the king's government to explore the role that letrados played in Spanish society as they sought to displace the higher nobility in the administration through a system based upon merit. Juan de Ovando was an industrious, discerning, and loyal servant, yet, like all letrados, he owed his position to royal favor. Ovando began his career as an ecclesiastical judge and inquisitor in Seville. From there, at the king's order, he undertook the reform of the University of Alcalá de Henares, one of his most enduring achievements. Appointed then to the supreme council of the Spanish Inquisition, Ovando was commissioned to investigate the Council of the Indies, over which he eventually presided. In this role, Ovando began codifying laws and collecting information about Spain's overseas possessions through the famed Relaciones geográficas--wide-ranging surveys of daily life in the New World. He devised long-term and forward-looking colonial policies for New Spain while, also serving as president of the Council of Finance, he sought to bring order to Spain's chaotic financial situation. Poole's biography of Juan de Ovando provides an intimate view of the day-to-day influence letrados wielded over the Spanish colonial machine.

Explores the architectural and artistic projects of Philip II of Spain, placing them in the wider context of the peninsular, European, and transoceanic Iberian dominions"

FOR three hundred years a bitter controversy has raged around the actions of Philip II. of Spain. Until our own times no attempt even had been made to write his life-history from an impartial point of view. He had been alternately deified and execrated, until through the mists of time and prejudice he loomed rather as the permanent embodiment of a system than as an individual man swayed by changing circumstances and controlled by human frailties. The more recent histories of his reign—the works of English, American, German, and French scholars—have treated their subject with fuller knowledge and broader sympathies, but they have necessarily been to a large extent histories of the great events which convulsed Europe for fifty years at the most critical period of modern times. The space to be occupied by the present work will not admit of this treatment of the subject. The purpose is therefore to consider Philip mainly as a statesman, in relation to the important problems with which he had to deal, rather than to write a connected account of the occurrences of a long reign. It will be necessary for us to try to penetrate the objects he aimed at and the influences, personal and exterior, which ruled him, and to seek the reasons for his failure. For he did fail utterly. In spite of very considerable powers of mind, of a long lifetime of incessant toil, of deep-laid plans, and vast ambitions, his record is one continued series of defeats and disappointments; and in exchange for the greatest heritage that Christendom had ever seen, with the apparently assured prospect of universal domination which opened before him at his birth, he closed his dying eyes upon dominions distracted and ruined beyond all recovery, a bankrupt State, a dwindled prestige, and a defeated cause. He had devoted his life to the task of establishing the universal supremacy of Catholicism in the political interests of Spain, and he was hopelessly beaten. The reasons for his defeat will be seen in the course of the present work to have been partly personal and partly circumstantial. The causes of both these sets of reasons were laid at periods long anterior to Philip’s birth.

Impoverished and exhausted after fifty years of incessant warfare, the great Spanish Empire at the turn of the sixteenth century negotiated treaties with its three most powerful enemies: England, France, and the Netherlands. This intriguing book examines the strategies that led King Philip III to extend the laurel branch to his foes. Paul Allen argues that, contrary to widespread belief, the king's gestures of peace were in fact part of a grand strategy to enable Spain to regain military and economic strength while its opponents were falsely lulled away from their military pursuits. From the outset, Allen contends, Philip and his advisers intended the Pax Hispanica to continue only until Spain was able to resume its battles--and defeat its enemies. Drawing on primary sources from the four countries involved, the book begins with a discussion of how Spanish foreign policy was formulated and implemented to achieve political and religious aims. The author investigates the development of Philip's "peace" strategy, the Twelve Years' Truce, and the decision to end the truce and engage in war with the Dutch, and then with the English and French. Renewed warfare was no failure of peace policy, Allen shows, but a conscious decision to pursue a consistent strategy. Nevertheless the negotiation for peace did represent a new diplomatic method with significant implications for both the future of the Spanish Empire and the practices of European diplomacy.

Philip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch in sixteenth-century Europe and a ferocious empire-builder, was matched against the dauntless queen of England, Elizabeth I, determined to defend her country and thwart Philip's ambitions. Philip had been king of England while married to Elizabeth's half-sister, Bloody Mary Tudor, a devout Catholic. After Mary's untimely death, he courted Elizabeth, the new queen, and proposed marriage to her, hoping to build a permanent alliance between his country and hers and return England to the Catholic fold. Lukewarm to the Spanish alliance and resolute against a counterreformation, Elizabeth declined his proposal. When under her guidance England's maritime power grew to challenge Spain's rule of the sea and threaten its rich commerce, Philip became obsessed with the idea of a conquest of England and the restoration of Catholicism there, by fire and sword. Elizabeth—bold, brilliant, defiantly Protestant—became his worst enemy. In 1586 Philip began assembling the mighty Spanish Armada, and in May 1588 it sailed from Lisbon. With superior seamanship and strategies, Elizabeth's navy defeated and drove off the Spanish fleet. Forced to retreat around the northern coast of Ireland and Scotland, Philip's ships ran into violent storms that wreaked havoc. It was the rivalry's climactic event.