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.

The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. The author describes with intelectual brilliance and narrative talent the journey from Prague to Paris as a step by step journey reportage using contemporary French chronicles and vast medievistic literature as well as many beautiful illustrations. The result is an appealing account on medieval life, everyday and intelectual, mentality, grand European politics of the time or even medieval cuisine. The first part of the book presents the well-known facts of Charles IV life (brought up in Paris, his father’s John Luxemberg’s political and representational activities, his international goals, etc.). The middle part of the book brings a transcription of richly illustrated French chronicles. The third part analyses the importance of the meeting of the two most powerful European rulers of the time. Final and most original part consists of individual studies concerning practical organisation of medieval festivities, its logistic, transport, or culinary details, the court manners, relationships and symbolics. Šmahel draws from latest knowledge and methods from archeology and microhistory to cultural anthropology or iconography. This as a highly readable account of medieval time inspiring in its originality for expert historians as well as appealing to the general public.

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From a master chronicler of Spanish history comes a magnificent work about the pivotal years from 1522 to 1566, when Spain was the greatest European power. Hugh Thomas has written a rich and riveting narrative of exploration, progress, and plunder. At its center is the unforgettable ruler who fought the French and expanded the Spanish empire, and the bold conquistadors who were his agents. Thomas brings to life King Charles V—first as a gangly and easygoing youth, then as a liberal statesman who exceeded all his predecessors in his ambitions for conquest (while making sure to maintain the humanity of his new subjects in the Americas), and finally as a besieged Catholic leader obsessed with Protestant heresy and interested only in profiting from those he presided over. The Golden Empire also presents the legendary men whom King Charles V sent on perilous and unprecedented expeditions: Hernán Cortés, who ruled the “New Spain” of Mexico as an absolute monarch—and whose rebuilding of its capital, Tenochtitlan, was Spain’s greatest achievement in the sixteenth century; Francisco Pizarro, who set out with fewer than two hundred men for Peru, infamously executed the last independent Inca ruler, Atahualpa, and was finally murdered amid intrigue; and Hernando de Soto, whose glittering journey to settle land between Rio de la Palmas in Mexico and the southernmost keys of Florida ended in disappointment and death. Hugh Thomas reveals as never before their torturous journeys through jungles, their brutal sea voyages amid appalling storms and pirate attacks, and how a cash-hungry Charles backed them with loans—and bribes—obtained from his German banking friends. A sweeping, compulsively readable saga of kings and conquests, armies and armadas, dominance and power, The Golden Empire is a crowning achievement of the Spanish world’s foremost historian.