Emperor: A New Life of Charles V

Product Description
Drawing on vital new evidence, a top historian dramatically reinterprets the life and reign of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, ruler of the world’s first transatlantic empire
"Masterly."—William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal "Seldom does one find a work of such profound scholarship delivered in such elegant and engaging prose. Drawing deftly on an astonishing volume of documentary evidence, Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire.”—Susannah Lipscomb, Financial TimesSelected as a book of the year (2020) by Simon Sebag Montefiore in Aspects of History magazine 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.
Review
"Masterly."—William Anthony Hay,
Wall Street Journal
“An extraordinary man who achieves extraordinary things" requires an extraordinary biographer. In Parker, he has one. Seldom does one find a work of such profound scholarship delivered in such elegant and engaging prose. Drawing deftly on an astonishing volume of documentary evidence, Parker has produced a masterpiece: an epic, detailed and vivid life of this complex man and his impossibly large empire”—Susannah Lipscomb,
Financial Times
"No other scholar now has such a deep impact on the writing of the history of 16th-century European history."—Wim Blockmans, Rector Emeritus of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study
“An exhaustive biography of the remarkable Habsburg ruler coupled with important insights into the birth of the modern state system of Europe."—Francis P. Sempa,
NY Journal of Books
"Parker has given us a very impressive look at the greatest of the Hapsburgs, one which will certainly be the standard work on Charles for a long time to come."—
NYMAS Review
"A magnum opus of what Marc Bloch called ‘the historian’s craft’, both in terms of archival research . . . and, above all, in its narrative power. . . . Parker narrates with refreshing ease and in gripping detail a vast array of events, details and stages of the life of Charles V, from his early years to his legacy, covering the global geographies and local complexities of the Habsburg Empire."—Stefan Hanss,
History: Review of New Books
"A new landmark biography of the sovereign whose power and influence reached five continents and around whom the major events of Europe's high politics in the first half of the sixteenth century turned."—Kurt Stadtwald,
Lutheran Quarterly
"Parker employs his encyclopedic knowledge, archival know-how, and new primary sources to bring the first half of the sixteenth century alive for us—giving the starring role to a very human, harried, yet extraordinary Charles V."—Elizabeth A. Terry-Roisin,
Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies
"Researching the personality and reign of a 'European' ruler like Charles V presents serious challenges: the need to engage with a multitude of archives in different countries as well as primary source evidence in a wide vari