Drawing on vital new evidence, a top historian dramatically reinterprets the ruler of the world’s first transatlantic empire The life of Emperor Charles V (1500–1558), ruler of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and much of Italy and Central and South America, has long intrigued biographers. But the elusive nature of the man (despite an abundance of documentation), his relentless travel and the control of his own image, together with the complexity of governing the world’s first transatlantic empire, complicate the task. Geoffrey Parker, one of the world’s leading historians of early modern Europe, has examined the surviving written sources in Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Spanish, as well as visual and material evidence. He explores the crucial decisions that created and preserved this vast empire, analyzes Charles’s achievements within the context of both personal and structural factors, and scrutinizes the intimate details of the ruler's life for clues to his character and inclinations. The result is a unique biography that interrogates every dimension of Charles’s reign and views the world through the emperor’s own eyes.
Author
Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of European History and an Associate of the Mershon Center at The Ohio State University. He has published widely on the social, political and military history of early modern Europe, and in 2012 the Royal Dutch Academy recognized these achievements by awarding him its biennial Heineken Foundation Prize for History, open to scholars in any field, and any period, from any country. Parker has written or co-written thirty-nine books, including The Military Revolution: Military innovation and the rise of the West, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), winner of the 'best book prize' from both the American Military Institute and the Society for the History of Technology; The Grand Strategy of Philip II (Yale University Press, 1998), which won the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the Society of Military History; and Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), which won the Society of Military History’s Distinguished Book Prize and also one of the three medals awarded in 2014 by the British Academy for ‘a landmark academic achievement… which has transformed understanding of a particular subject’. Before moving to Ohio State in 1997, Parker taught at Cambridge and St Andrews universities in Britain, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, teaching courses on the Reformation, European history and military history at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He has directed or co-directed over thirty Doctoral Dissertations to completion, as well as several undergraduate theses. In 2006 he won an OSU Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has four children. In 1987 he was diagnosed as having Multiple Sclerosis. His latest book is Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (Yale University Press, 2014).
