Through reference entries and primary documents, this book surveys a wide range of topics related to the history of the Spanish Empire, including past events and individuals as well as the Iberian kingdom's imperial legacy. The Spanish Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia provides students as well as anyone interested in Spain, Latin America, or empires in general the necessary materials to explore and better understand the centuries-long empire of the Iberian kingdom. The work is organized around eight themes to allow the reader the ability to explore each theme through an overview essay and several selected encyclopedic entries. This two-volume set includes some 180 entries that cover such topics as the caste system, dynastic rivalries, economics, major political events and players, and wars of independence. The entries provide students with essential information about the people, things, institutions, places, and events central to the history of the empire. Many of the entries also include short sidebars that highlight key facts or present fascinating and relevant trivia. Additional resources include an introductory overview, chronology, extended bibliography, and extensive collection of primary source documents.

The Spanish Empire was a complex web of places and peoples. Through an expansive range of essays that look at Africa, the Americas, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific, this volume brings a broad range of regions into conversation. The contributors focus on nuanced, comparative exploration of the processes and practices of creating, maintaining, and transforming cultural place making within pluralistic Spanish colonial communities. The Global Spanish Empire argues that patterned variability is necessary in reconstructing Indigenous cultural persistence in colonial settings. The volume’s eleven case studies include regions often neglected in the archaeology of Spanish colonialism. The time span under investigation is extensive as well, transcending the entirety of the Spanish Empire, from early impacts in West Africa to Texas during the 1800s. The contributors examine the making of a social place within a social or physical landscape. They discuss the appearance of hybrid material culture, the incorporation of foreign goods into local material traditions, the continuation of local traditions, and archaeological evidence of opportunistic social climbing. In some cases, these changes in material culture are ways to maintain aspects of traditional culture rather than signifiers of new cultural practices. The Global Spanish Empire tackles broad questions about Indigenous cultural persistence, pluralism, and place making using a global comparative perspective grounded in the shared experience of Spanish colonialism. Contributors Stephen Acabado Grace Barretto-Tesoro James M. Bayman Christine D. Beaule Christopher R. DeCorse Boyd M. Dixon John G. Douglass William R. Fowler Martin Gibbs Corinne L. Hofman Hannah G. Hoover Stacie M. King Kevin Lane Laura Matthew Sandra Montón-Subías Natalia Moragas Segura Michelle M. Pigott Christopher B. Rodning David Roe Roberto Valcárcel Rojas Steve A. Tomka Jorge Ulloa Hung Juliet Wiersema

Charles V, Emperor of Europe and the New World, is the central figure in the second volume of Hugh Thomas's great history of the Spanish Empire. It begins with the return of the remnants of Magellan's expedition around the world in 1522 and ends with Charles's death in 1558. In the decades between, the Spaniards conquer Guatemala, Yucatan, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru and Chile, and control the banks of the mighty River Plate; the audacious conquistador Francisco de Orellana journeys down the Amazon, Cabeza de Vaca walks from Florida to Mexico, Juan Vazquez Coronado pioneers into New Mexico and Hernando de Soto vainly pursues worldly riches in Florida, Mississippi and Georgia. Hugh Thomas writes vividly, conveying the conquerors' almost disbelieving sense of what they were achieving. The discovery and subjugation of so many native peoples raised enormous controversy within Spain about how they should be treated, a debate Thomas explores perceptively, with an eye for resonances have lasted centuries. Hugh Thomas brings alive one of the most extraordinary and influential moments in High Renaissance and world history.

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.

Napoleon’s forces invaded Spain in 1808, but two years went by before they overran the southern region of Andalucía. Situated at the farthest frontier of Napoleon’s “outer empire,” Andalucía remained under French control only briefly—for two-and-a-half years—and never experienced the normal functions of French rule. In this groundbreaking examination of the Peninsular War, Charles J. Esdaile moves beyond traditional military history to examine the French occupation of Andalucía and the origins and results of the region’s complex and chaotic response. Disillusioned by the Spanish provisional government and largely unprotected, Andalucía scarcely fired a shot in its defense when Joseph Bonaparte’s army invaded the region in 1810. The subsequent French occupation, however, broke down in the face of multiple difficulties, the most important of which were geography and the continued presence in the region of substantial forces of regular troops. Drawing on British, French, and Spanish sources that are all but unknown, Esdaile describes the social, cultural, geographical, political, and military conditions that combined to make Andalucía particularly resistant to French rule. Esdaile’s study is a significant contribution to the new field sometimes known as occupation studies, which focuses on the ways a victorious army attempts to reconcile a conquered populace to the new political order. Combining military history with political and social history, Outpost of Empire delineates what we now call the cultural terrain of war. This is history that moves from battles between armies to battles for hearts and minds.

An indispensable resource for investigating the history of the Byzantine Empire, this book provides a comprehensive summary of its overall development as well as its legacy in the modern world. The existence and development of Byzantium covers more than a millennium and coincides with one of the darkest periods of European history. Unfortunately, the Empire's achievements and brightest moments remain largely unknown except to Byzantine scholars. Through reference entries and primary source documents, this encyclopedia provides essential information about the Byzantine Empire from the reign of Diocletian to the Fall of Constantinople. The reference entries are grouped in eight topical sections on the most significant aspects of the history of the Byzantine Empire. These sections include individuals, key events, key places, the military, objects and artifacts, administration and organization, government and politics, and groups and organizations. Each section begins with an overview essay and contains approximately thirty entries on carefully selected topics. The entries conclude with suggestions for further reading along with cross-references., A selection of primary source documents gives readers first-hand accounts of the Byzantine world.

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