Biblioteca Historia de España
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El Imperio Español fue una de las más grandes creaciones políticas europeas. Fue concebido a principios del siglo XVI como una obra maestra renacentista construida por conquistadores como Pizarro y Cortés y modelada por administradores de gran talento como Antonio de Mendoza en México y Francisco de Toledo en Perú. El Imperio Español perduró trescientos años en la América continental y casi otros setenta en el Caribe y Filipinas. Hugh Thomas, con el estilo serio a la par que ameno que le ha granjeado tantos lectores en nuestro país, emprende un estudio completo de la génesis de este Imperio, mostrándonos como nunca hasta ahora las vidas y las hazañas de las dos primeras generaciones de exploradores, colonizadores, gobernadores y misioneros que abrieron el camino al enorme imperio americano de España. Desde la caída de Granada al viaje de Magallanes, pasando por el descubrimiento de Colón o la coronación de Carlos V, Hugh Thomas se embarca en una narración épica de una de las más grandes aventuras de la humanidad.

An enormous history of the 16th-century Spanish conquest and rise to global dominance; Spain profited greatly from this period of exploration, both by growing its empire and raising European consciousness of the future Americas. A remarkable account, masterfully narrated by a distinguished historian. ( )

Hugh Thomas has come through again! The Spanish Empire was not only a romantic idea, but an organization, and an enterprise which involved a relatively few people in the continental Spanish structure. Leading the reader through a sometimes confusing welter of religious, familial, and economic interactions, this is a very helpful companion to Samuel Eliot Morison's treatment of the nuts and bolts of oceanic exploration in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. The thorough man requires both, and the rewards of absorbing the two strands are tremendous.
sadly, the mapping is relatively poor, but the genealogical charts are just the thing to base even deeper reading on. Do start here, and the the second volume, about the Empire after the 1520's. ( )

This isn't so much the story of the Conquistadors themselves (although they play a large part) as of the political and social background to Spanish ventures into the New World between 1492 and 1522, i.e. from Columbus to Magellan. How did Spain get from giving an eccentric foreigner minimal sponsorship to go and look for China in the wrong direction to, barely a generation later, funding a much more serious foreigner to go and look for a way around the southern end of that "new" continent whose existence Columbus never accepted...? And perhaps more to the point, how did they manage to exercise any kind of control over what people were doing in the name of Spain on the other side of the Atlantic.

There are a lot more thrilling tales of document-drafting in back-rooms of Castilian monasteries than there are of shipwrecks or of men in armour marching thorough tropical rain-forests, but it's by no means dry and stodgy. It soon becomes clear that it was decisions taken in those thirty years that shaped the way South America and the Caribbean would develop, and led unintentionally or not to the wiping-out of the indigenous people of the Caribbean and the start of the transatlantic slave-trade. You can see Thomas finally losing patience with Bartolomé de las Casas, whose well-intentioned but flagrantly inaccurate reporting must be an irritation to all historians, at the moment when he suggests that the best way to protect the indigenous people would be to permit the import of black slaves from Africa. Somehow the alternative strategy, of restricting migration from Spain to people whose social status doesn't make it impossible for them to do manual work, never seems to have been considered seriously by anyone.

Very interesting, and certainly a good book to read before a visit to Seville... ( )