The Reign of Charles V

The Reign of Charles V PDF

Author: William Maltby

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-17

Total Pages: 154

ISBN-13: 0230629083

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Why should we remember the reign of Charles V? What happened in those years that altered the course of history and helped to shape the world we live in today? Few ages have been more important to the history of Europe and America than the reign of Charles V. Charles ruled the first truly global empire, his sovereignty extending beyond Spain to the Netherlands, much of Italy, the Americas, and the Holy Roman Empire. His life saw the waning of the Renaissance, the religious transformation of Europe by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the emergence of Spain as a leading international power. At the same time, the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the establishment of a Habsburh empirein eastern Europe, and a series of wars with France, the Ottoman Empire and the German Protestants transformed European politics and the global economy. William Maltby's engaging new study not only looks at Charles V as a person, but also examines important critical issues: the emperor's policies and their consequences; the institional, economic and intellectual development of his various realms; and his military and diplomatic struggles. Concise and readable, it provides students and the general reader with an indispensable introduction to a reign that defies historical comparison, and an era that changed the world.

Emperor

Emperor PDF

Author: Geoffrey Parker

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-06-25

Total Pages: 663

ISBN-13: 030024102X

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This “elegant and engaging” biography dramatically reinterprets the life and reign of the sixteenth-century Holy Roman Emperor: “a masterpiece” (Susannah Lipscomb, Financial Times). The life of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But capturing the nature of this elusive man has proven notoriously difficult—especially given his relentless travel, tight control of his own image, and the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire. Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of early modern Europe, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. In Emperor, he explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler’s life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes.