Philip Ii Of Spain Quotes

Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts. It is epitomized in a historian’s statement about Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.

Sadistic brutality and mystical feeling go always hand in hand when the normal capacity for orgastic experience is lacking. This was as true of the inquisitors of the medieval church, of the cruel and mystical Philip II of Spain, as it is of any modern mass murderer.

Lucas de Heere’s painting from the 1570s, now at Sudeley Castle, its subject precisely Henry VIII’s family (see Plate 4). It is a portrait with no sense of chronology. The old king sits in full vigour on his throne, handing over his sword to an Edward who is well into his teens. On the king’s right hand is his elder daughter Mary, with the husband who by the 1570s was something of an embarrassing national memory, Philip II of Spain. While Philip and Mary are depicted with perfect fairness, and in what might be considered the position of honour, they yield in size and in body language to the star of the picture, Queen Elizabeth I, who upstages everyone else. The only figure as big as her is the lady whom she appears to be introducing to the gratified company, the personification of Peace. The message is clear: after all the upsets caused by her jovial but terrifying parent and her unsatisfactory siblings, Elizabeth is complacently pointing (literally) to her own achievement, a nation united in harmony.

1298: Seizure of the Gran Tavola of Sienna by Philip IV of France 1307: Liquidation of the Knights Templar by Philip IV 1311: Edward II default to the Frescobaldi of Florence 1326: Bankruptcy of the Scali of Florence and Asti of Sienna 1342: Edward III default to the Florentine banks during the Hundred Years’ War 1345: Bankruptcy of the Bardi and Peruzzi; depression, Great crash of the 1340s 1380: Ciompi Revolt in Florence. Crash of the early 1380s 1401: Italian bankers expelled from Aragon in 1401, England in 1403, France in 1410 1433: Fiscal crisis in Florence after wars with Milan and Lucca 1464: Death of Cosimo de Medici: loans called in; wave of bankruptcies in Florence 1470: Edward IV default to the Medici during the Wars of the Roses 1478: Bruges branch of the Medici bank liquidated on bad debts 1494: Overthrow of the Medici after the capture of Florence by Charles VIII of France 1525: Siege of Genoa by forces of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire; coup in 1527 1557: Philip II of Spain restructuring of debts inherited from Charles V 1566: Start of the Dutch Revolt against Spain: disruption of Spanish trade 1575: Philip II default: Financial crisis of 1575–79 affected Genoese creditors 1596: Philip II default: Financial crisis of 1596 severely affected Genoese businessmen 1607: Spanish state bankruptcy: failure of Genoese banks 1619: Kipper-und-Wipperzeit: Monetary crisis at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War

The dusty facts are that; Ferdinand II, the Regent of Castile, was 63 years old when he died on January 23, 1516; his wife Queen Isabella was 53 years old when she died on November 26, 1504; and Columbus had passed away almost 10 years prior on May 20, 1506. The earlier death of Isabella and the death of her children changed the normal succession of heirs, forcing Ferdinand to yield the government of Castile to Philip of Habsburg, the husband of his second daughter Joanna. The son of Joanna and her husband Philip I of Castile was Charles I, who would inherit Spain from his maternal grandparents as well as the Habsburg and Burgundian Empires of his paternal family. Thus, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella became the most powerful ruler in Europe and by 1516 King Charles I of Spain also ruled the Netherlands. In 1519 as Charles V, he became the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, King of Germany, as well as the King of Italy.

But in 1497, pressure from the Roman Church and Spain led the Portuguese crown to abandon this tolerance. Some seventy thousand Jews were forced into a bogus but nevertheless sacramentally valid baptism. In 1506, Lisbon saw its first pogrom, which left two thousand “converted” Jews dead. (Spain had been doing as much for two hundred years.) From then on, the intellectual and scientific life of Portugal descended into an abyss of bigotry, fanaticism, and purity of blood.* The descent was gradual. The Portuguese Inquisition was installed only in the 1540s and burned its first heretic in 1543; but it did not become grimly unrelenting until the 1580s, after the union of the Portuguese and Spanish crowns in the person of Philip II. In the meantime, the crypto-Jews, including Abraham Zacut and other astronomers, found life in Portugal dangerous enough to leave in droves. They took with them money, commercial know-how, connections, knowledge, and—even more serious—those immeasurable qualities of curiosity and dissent that are the leaven of thought. That was a loss, but in matters of intolerance, the persecutor’s greatest loss is self-inflicted. It is this process of self-diminution that gives persecution its durability, that makes it, not the event of the moment, or of the reign, but of lifetimes and centuries. By 1513, Portugal wanted for astronomers; by the 1520s, scientific leadership had gone. The country tried to create a new Christian astronomical and mathematical tradition but failed, not least because good astronomers found themselves suspected of Judaism.12 (Compare the suspicious response to doctors in Inquisition Spain.)

Catholic powers under the leadership of King Philip II of Spain challenged Ottoman naval control of the Mediterranean.

World History 101 - The Actual History History is not a record of truth, history is a record of triumph. The triumphant writes history as it fits their narrative - or to be more accurate, history is written by the conquerors for maintaining the supremacy of the conquerors, while the conquered lose everything. Let me give you an example. In a commendable endeavor of goodwill and reparations a descendant of the British conquerors, President Lyndon Johnson started Hispanic Heritage Week, which was later expanded into a month by another white descendant, President Ronald Reagan - fast forward to present time - during the Hispanic Heritage Month the entire North America tries to celebrate Native American history. But there is a glitch - Spanish is not even a Native American language. Native Americans did not even speak Spanish, until the brutes of Spain overran Puerto Rico like pest bearing disease and destruction, after a pathetic criminal called Columbus stumbled upon "La Isabela" in the 1500s. Many of the natives struggled till death to save their home - many were killed by the foreign diseases to which they had no immunity. Those who lived, every last trace of their identity was wiped out, by the all-powerful and glorious spanish colonizers - their language, their traditions, their heritage, everything - just like the Portuguese did in Brazil. The Spaniards would've done the same to Philippines on the other side of the globe, had they had the convenience to stay longer. Heck, even the name Philippines is not the original name - the original name of the islands was (probably) Maniolas, as referred to by Ptolemy. But when the Spaniard retards of the time set foot there, they named it after, then crown prince, later Philip II of Spain. Just reminiscing those abominable atrocities makes my blood boil, and yet somehow, the brutal "glory" of the conquerors lives on as such even in this day and age, as glory that is. That's why José Martí is so important, that's why Kwanzaa is so important, that's why Darna is so important - in the making of a world that has a place for every culture, not just the culture of the conquerors. No other "civilized" people have done more damage to the world than the Europeans, and yet, on the pages of history books their glory of conquest is still packaged as glory, not as atrocity. Why is that? I don't know the answer - do you? Trillions of dollars, pounds and euros in aid won't suffice to undo the damage - but what just might heal those wounds from the past, is if the offspring of the oppressors and the offspring of the oppressed, both hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, unravel the history as it happened, not as it was presented - what just might heal the scars of yesterday, is if together we come forward to learn about each other's past, so that for the first time in history, we can actually write "human history", not the "conquerors' history" - so that for the first time ever, we write history not as conquerors and conquered, not as oppressors and oppressed, but as one species - as one humankind.

España dejó tras de sí una religión e innumerables monumentos, una tradición y mucha literatura. Sobre todo, creó provincias y dominios que lograron madurar en los nuevos países independientes de América Latina. Gran Bretaña no lo hizo tan bien en Oriente Medio, África ni el Lejano Oriente. India y Pakistán son dos países en guerra; México y Argentina, no. Las guerras en América Latina son raras. En comparación con el resto del mundo, se nos antoja ahora un oasis de paz. La presencia de la madre patria continúa siendo una fuerte influencia sobre todo en la vida literaria; y la vida literaria sobresale con fuerza en la cultura hispanoamericana. Resulta permisible preguntarse si ocurrió alguna vez el ocaso de España y el fin de su imperio cuando se visita América Latina.