Spain

For over 150 years, writes Christopher Duffy, generations of Irish gentry sought service in the armies of the European powers.

H.T. Dickinson profiles a polished, intrepid and versatile military man; Peterborough was one of the most dashing soldiers who fought in the War of the Spanish Succession.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Douglas Hilt profiles a statesman, jurist and man of letters who devoted his generous gifts to the service of Bourbon Spain.

The King of Aragon was deeply involved in the religious wars of the thirteenth century in south-western France, writes Jan Read.

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