John H. Elliott has rightly observed that “Spain was a great European power for about three hundred years; that is, from the beginning of the 16th century until the dawn of the 19th, and for, perhaps, a hundred of those 300 years, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century […] the single most powerful force in the Western world.”
Those hundred years coincide with the reign of Philip II (1556–1598), son of the emperor Charles V; of his son, Philip III (1598-1621), and of his grandson, Philip IV (1621-1665). |
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