![]() His new biography builds upon these earlier works, but it also incorporates much new research-first and foremost the discovery of several thousand untouched manuscripts from Philip’s regime, found just recently in a private collection in New York. ![]() Philip II has always been at the center of Parker’s remarkably broad and diverse body of scholarship, which includes a brief biography of Philip (1978) and a detailed study of Philip’s diplomacy and war making, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (1998). Parker’s Imprudent King follows in this tradition. To a larger public, Philip II remains a dark figure, an intriguer, an intolerant scourge of heretics, but scholars of Spanish history-among them, and most successfully, Geoffrey Parker-have discerned in Philip a more complex and sympathetic character. The major events of the 16th century seem to revolve around Habsburg Spain and its enigmatic sovereign, whose reign represented both the zenith of Spanish power and the beginnings of Spain’s precipitous decline. ![]() He ruled Europe’s first superpower and first world empire, juggling military and diplomatic commitments around the globe. In the tumultuous decades that followed the Protestant Reformation, an era populated by giants like Elizabeth I and William the Silent, Philip II of Spain towered above the rest. "THE HISTORY OF PHILIP THE SECOND,” historian William Hickling Prescott once wrote, “is the history of Europe during the latter half of the sixteenth century.” Prescott didn’t exaggerate. ![]() MHQ Review: Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II, by Geoffrey Parker Close ![]()
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