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This chapter focuses on royal and princely entries as well as royal visits. Beginning with Ferdinand III's proto-entry into Seville in 1248, it traces the subtle changes that occurred in how kings entered or visited the great city on the banks of the Guadalquivir, from Alfonso XI's iconic entry in 1327 to Philip II's solemn entry in 1570. It then draws the important distinction between the prince or king's first visit to a city and subsequent sojourns there. The first entry usually, but not always, called for some unusual or unique gesture. Most often this meant that the king would enter the city and progress along a pre-selected route under a palio (a canopy or baldachin). The chapter also looks at the triumphal entry of Fernando of Antequera into Seville after his great victory over Granada's armies in 1401.

This section argues that the Thirty Years War was not inevitable and that it was fundamentally a struggle over the German constitution; ultimately, all German rulers including the emperor had a vested interest in reaching a compromise. Germany was dragged into war by the Bohemian uprising against Habsburg rule. The conflict was prolonged by the inability of either Ferdinand II or Ferdinand III or the German princes to prevail and by the interventions of Denmark, Sweden and France. However, neither the Emperor, nor Denmark, Sweden or France were able to prevail and impose their will on the Reich. The war wrought huge destruction but it also resulted in the Peace of Westphalia, a new constitutional law that endured until 1806. Key figures in this section are Frederick the ‘Winter King’, Wallenstein, Gustavus Adolphus, Bernhard of Weimar, Maximilian of Bavaria.

Against the traditional view that the Reich declined after the Peace of Westphalia, this section argues that Ferdinand III and Leopold I forged a viable synthesis of German monarchy and German liberty. They were aided by a general desire for peace and by the need to defend the Reich repeatedly against France and the Turks. The Reichstag again became the central decision forum for negotiation between emperor and princes. Leopold I shrewdly exploited his position as overlord and supreme judge and the court at Vienna became a central vehicle of imperial authority. Leopold's reaffirmation of the crown's special relationship with the church (Reichskirche) and the cities further strengthened his position. He inspired plans for the economic regeneration of the Reich (J.J. Becher) and for academies of arts and sciences (Leibniz), schemes for religious reconciliation (Spinola, Molanus, Leibniz) and new writing about the nature of the Reich (Conring, Hugo, Pufendorf, Leibniz).

In late fourteenth and fifteenth-century Castile, Mary continued to be used as a patron of royally-led warfare against Muslims. As Ferdinand of Antequera, regent of Castile, and the so-called Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand II and Isabel, invoked her on the battlefield and converted mosques into her churches, they often modeled themselves on legends about past Marian heroes, such as Ferdinand III. Ferdinand III’s sword, held by his effigy in front of a statue of Mary in Seville’s cathedral-mosque, became a Marian relic that rulers often took with them on campaign against the Muslims of Granada. These monarchs were particularly devoted to the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose statue was believed to have been buried in 711 by Visigoths to protect it from the invading Muslims and then unearthed in the era of Christian reconquests. Similar legends gave other Marian statues Visigothic connections and made them into guarantees of Spain’s essential Christianity.

This chapter studies refugee settlement in the Holy Roman Empire's eastern regions. The Swedish invasion of Poland began during the first week of July of 1655, sparking a flight of refugees across the Commonwealth's western border to the neighboring region of Silesia. Even before the Swedish army arrived, a group of Jews from Great Poland wrote to the Holy Roman Emperor, the Habsburg Ferdinand III, asking permission to enter his territory. However, the Swedish army got to them before Ferdinand's response, so they were forced to cross into Silesia without permission. Once there, they wrote a second letter to the emperor in which they gave a moving description of their sufferings. The emperor gave them the permission they wanted on August 22. These two documents—the Jews' letter and the emperor's response—deepen one's understanding of the refugee experience in the mid-1650s in a number of ways. The Jews' letter suggests that even in cases where a central authority in the Commonwealth was willing to allow the Jewish refugees to return, there were still hostile local forces trying to prevent them from doing so. Meanwhile, the emperor's response indicates that the refugees' choice to make for Silesia, Bohemia, and Moravia as safe havens was a function not only of those regions' geographical proximity to Poland but of the generous terms of travel and settlement that Jews were granted there.

This chapter looks at the Infantazgo during the reign of Alfonso VIII. Beginning as early as the tenth century, the royal women of León-Castile laid claim to a little-understood share of the crown's patrimony, known as the Infantazgo. These Infantazgo properties were usually a significant source of power and income; their possession appears to be a major factor in the unusual prominence of certain women in the Leonese-Castilian monarchy. Contrary to previous assumptions, the Infantazgo did not disappear in the mid-twelfth century. It was altered, certainly, by the upheavals that attended the partition of León and Castile in 1157. But it endured, to last through the reign of Alfonso VIII and well into the reign of his grandson, Ferdinand III. Eventually, of course, the Infantazgo's significance did fade, due to the changes of the mid-thirteenth century. Ferdinand III's unification of León and Castile radically altered the kingdom's axes of power. The old domains of the Infantazgo, especially those on the Leonese-Castilian border, lost some of their strategic and economic value as a result.

Although Mary had been invoked by Christian men of war fighting Muslims as early as the eleventh century, her role as a saintly patron of the so-called Christian reconquest of Iberia first became visible during the crusading Christian victory over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. At Las Navas, Mary’s image appeared on the Castilian royal war banner. Between Las Navas and the Christian victory at Salado in 134o, the association between Mary and the rulers of Castile and Aragon as leaders of Christian warfare against Muslims increased. Thirteenth- and fourteenth-century kings like James I, Ferdinand III, Alfonso X, and Alfonso XI made her as important to their royal-self image as Christ was, developing something that could be called Marian monarchy. They also used Mary to claim and Christianize conquered Muslim territory, making the main mosques of many towns into churches dedicated to her.

Chapter 3 approaches the notion of trophy through historical accounts of the Christianization of the Córdoba and Seville Islamic temples in the thirteenth-century and the late-fifteenth-century conquest of Granada. The first two examples on Córdoba and Seville are relevant to explore the way in which medieval chronicles (mainly Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada and his entourage) turned the narrative of the Christianization of mosques into one of the central topics of the restoration myth. The sixteenth-century narratives about the taking of the Alhambra in Granada explain the continuity of this triumphal reading within the humanist model of chorography and urban eulogy (Lucius Marineus Siculus, Luis de Mármol Carvajal, and Francisco Bermúdez de Pedraza).

Chapter 7 seeks to understand the priorities of Spanish foreign policy by considering the outlooks of several key individuals: Haro, the counts of Peñaranda and Fuensaldaña, and the marquises of La Fuente and Castel Rodrigo, as well as of Philip IV himself. The peacemaking process was compromised by the valido’s need to obtain a settlement that would be sufficiently honourable to justify his enjoyment of the king’s favour. Efforts to conclude an agreement with France after 1648 were accordingly doomed to fail. For the time being this did not matter, because Spain’s armies were able to exploit the Frondes in order to make dramatic gains on all fronts. Even after 1648, relations with the government in Vienna augured well, and by 1657 there was a strong likelihood of Austrian military assistance in exchange for a marriage between the emperor’s son and the Infanta María Teresa.

This chapter shows how, as the majority of al-Andalus fell to the northern Iberian Christian kingdoms, Granada survived as an independent emirate for another 250 years. This was due in no small part to the military and diplomatic skills of the early Nasrid kings. Ibn al-Ahmar, a farmer from the area around Jaen became the first of these and he laid the foundations for what was to be the jewel in Granada’s crown: the Alhambra. Later rulers would add to this imposing fortress, bringing to it an aspect to the Nasrid dynasty for which they are famed: their love for art and poetry. This period saw alliances made and broken between the first Nasrid kings and their Castilian counterparts Ferdinand III and Alfonso X, and attempts on the part of the Christians to destabilize the ruling family through alliances with the rebellious Malaga branch of the Nasrids, the Banu Ashquilula.

This chapter delves into the European historical background in depth, while highlighting the relevant parallels to the Middle East. It addresses the causes of the outbreak of the Thirty Years War and the origins of the war’s incremental escalation. It will outline the interventions by Denmark and Sweden (1625 and 1630) into the war, as well as the French intervention against Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor in 1635, after which the war became irreversibly internationalised