Los Austrias

European blood and boundless ambition run through the saga of Charles I, architect of an unprecedented imperial network. Numerous historians meticulously examine in this work how this monarch forged strategic alliances and took advantage of dynastic inheritances to consolidate his transcontinental power. The evangelization of the conquered territories contrasted with the customary slavery of other empires of the time, while American silver flowed to Madrid to sustain the Spanish Armada, which ended up crashing against England. In the fields of Flanders, the pikes of the tercios wrote memorable pages of military tactics and resistance. At the same time, Cervantes, Lope, and Velázquez brought cultural prestige to an empire whose seams were beginning to show. This duality defined the Spain of the Habsburgs: innovative in the arts and letters, but gradually overtaken in economic and administrative matters. Political decisions became complex and marked the second phase of the dynasty, as evidenced by the expulsion of the Moriscos. The Habsburg decline progressed amid insufficient reforms and international rivalries that undermined its European hegemony. The last of the dynasty, Charles II, managed with limitations a state that required profound transformations. "The Habsburgs" unravels the internal mechanisms of the dynasty that shaped the Modern Age. Grandeur and misery coexist in the legacy of foreign monarchs who ended up being genuinely Spanish.