About the book: 2016 / The reign of Charles V - a powerful sovereign who ruled over a large part of Europe and the New World... It was under him that the Siglo de Oro - the Golden Age began The Spanish Empire, when it became the flagship of all Catholic Europe and the Americas. The unification of the richest lands in Western, Southern and Central Europe and the conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula, as well as the territories of modern Guatemala, Colombia and Venezuela, Peru and Chile... The greatest cultural achievements - the dramaturgy of Lope de Vega and Calderon, the creation of “Don Quixote” by Cervantes, the unprecedented rise of Spanish painting, captured in the paintings of El Greco, Velazquez, Murillo and Zurbaran. How did the first of the empires on which the sun never set live? What was the reason for its political and cultural flourishing? How was what later became known as Latin America created? Read about it in a fascinating study by British historian Hugh Thomas.