Ensayo sobre Felipe II, hombre de Estado

Rafael Altamira, one of the great Spanish historians of the last century, published this brief and entertaining essay initially in Mexico in 1950 with the intention of "being as scientifically objective as possible in history". The work proposes a psychological approach to King Felipe II, his formation and the influence of the general conditioning factors that he inherited; the result is extremely useful for the knowledge of a character and a fascinating and determining period of our history. The reader finds here elements to better understand conditions and explanations of the great decisions of the prudent king, of the successes and the limitations and contradictions in which he was immersed. The search for objectivity and adequate contextualization are always necessary, perhaps even more so in relation to Philip II, because although time has brought doses of "historical justice" to his figure, there are often still important background biases on the figure of him This is due to factors of various kinds, but to a large extent they respond to the roots in the popular imagination -and in historiography- of what Arnoldsson rightly called "the greatest collective hallucination of the West" -the Black Legend in its multiple variants- . In any case, there are still certain errors imported from a conception of History far removed from the objectivity pursued by this work. The book is completed with a transcription of the Discovery and Population Ordinances enacted by Felipe II in Valsaín, an excellent synthesis of the philosophy applied by the Spanish monarchy to the population enterprise of America. The Ordinances are a small masterpiece and an unequivocal example of the intelligence that guided that undertaking and of the humanist spirit imbued in Philip II by his training. Much of the success of the amazing process of founding hundreds of cities carried out by the Hispanic monarchy in a vast and unknown territory, thousands of kilometers from the metropolis, and in conditions of extreme difficulty, is due to the content of those Ordinances of the king Philip.