From the Treaty of Tordesillas and the inheritance of Charles V through the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the Escorial of Philip II, Lepanto and the union with Portugal, the catastrophe of the Armada, Cervantes and the Siglo de Oro of El Greco, Velázquez, Lope, and Calderón, the expulsion of the Moriscos and the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal, the broken tercios at Rocroi and the Peace of the Pyrenees, to the bewitched death of Carlos II in 1700. Slide across two centuries when the king of Spain ruled the most extensive empire of the early modern world.
Mediated by Pope Alexander VI Borgia, Spain and Portugal divide the unconquered world along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands — granting Brazil to Portugal and the rest of the Americas to Castile.
From the Treaty of Tordesillas and the inheritance of Charles V through the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the Escorial of Philip II, Lepanto and the union with Portugal, the catastrophe of the Armada, Cervantes and the Siglo de Oro of El Greco, Velázquez, Lope, and Calderón, the expulsion of the Moriscos and the revolts of Catalonia and Portugal, the broken tercios at Rocroi and the Peace of the Pyrenees, to the bewitched death of Carlos II in 1700. Slide across two centuries when the king of Spain ruled the most extensive empire of the early modern world.
Mediated by Pope Alexander VI Borgia, Spain and Portugal divide the unconquered world along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands — granting Brazil to Portugal and the rest of the Americas to Castile.
At sixteen, the Burgundian-born Charles of Habsburg — grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella, of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy — becomes king of Castile and Aragon. Three years later he is elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V, and a worldwide monarchy is born.
On 13 August, after a three-month siege, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán falls to Hernán Cortés and his coalition of Spaniards and Tlaxcalan allies. The lake-city is razed, the emperor Cuauhtémoc captured, and the empire of Moctezuma extinguished.
Six months after seizing him at Cajamarca, Francisco Pizarro has the captive Inca emperor Atahualpa garrotted in the public square — the famous 'room of gold' ransom paid in vain. In November the Spaniards enter Cuzco and the Inca empire passes to Castile.
Worn out by gout and forty years of war, Charles V hands the crowns of Spain, the Indies, Naples, Sicily, and the Netherlands to his son Philip II, and retires to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura to die two years later.
On 7 October, the galleys of the Holy League, commanded by Philip II's half-brother Don John of Austria, annihilate the Ottoman fleet of Ali Pasha in the Gulf of Patras. Some thirty thousand Turks die in a single afternoon; fifteen thousand Christian galley-slaves are freed.
After King Sebastian of Portugal dies childless at Alcácer Quibir and his great-uncle Cardinal Henry follows in 1580, Philip II claims the Portuguese crown by inheritance, takes Lisbon, and unites the two Iberian monarchies and their overseas empires under a single dynasty.
Philip II's great fleet of one hundred and thirty ships sails from Lisbon to escort the army of Flanders across the Channel to England. Storms, English fireships, and dogged Dutch and English gunnery wreck it in the Channel, the North Sea, and off the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.
From a Madrid press in January appears El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. By summer the knight-errant and his squire are being recognised in the streets of Spanish cities; within a few years the book is translated across Europe.
Beginning in Valencia in September, royal decrees order the expulsion of every Morisco — Christian descendants of Iberian Muslims — from Spain. Over five years some three hundred thousand are shipped to North Africa, depopulating Valencian and Aragonese countryside.
In June, Catalan reapers rise against billeted Castilian troops and murder the viceroy in Barcelona. In December, the Duke of Braganza is proclaimed João IV of Portugal at Lisbon. The count-duke of Olivares's grand project of a unitary Spanish monarchy collapses.
On 19 May, the twenty-one-year-old duc d'Enghien — the future Great Condé — breaks the Spanish tercios on the field of Rocroi in the Ardennes. The legend of the invincible Spanish infantry, undefeated for a century, ends in a single afternoon.
In his studio in the royal alcázar of Madrid, the king's painter Diego Velázquez completes The Family of Philip IV — Las Meninas — a vast canvas of the Infanta Margarita, her ladies, dwarves, dog, the painter himself at his easel, and the king and queen reflected in a mirror at the far wall.
On the river Bidasoa between France and Spain, the chief ministers Cardinal Mazarin and Don Luis de Haro sign the Peace of the Pyrenees, ending twenty-four years of Franco-Spanish war and arranging the marriage of Louis XIV to the Infanta María Teresa.
On 1 November, the childless and physically broken Carlos II dies at the alcázar of Madrid. By his last testament he leaves the entire Spanish inheritance to Philip of Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV — and the Spanish Succession war opens within months.