Imperial spain 1469-1716 [rare books]

A brilliant modern study of the sudden rise of a barren and isolated country to be the greatest power on earth, and of its equally sudden decline.

Outstandingly good. Here is not a scholar writing for other scholars, but a most readable. writer, who brings the political, social, religious. and intellectual movements of his chosen period as close to the modern reader as the ethics and limits of well-tempered scholarship permit Daily Telegraph