One of the principal differences separating the Italian Renaissance from the Spanish has been the civic character of the Italian humanists’ professional lives. Intense involvement in urban politics, crucial to the development of rhetoric and historical perspective in the works of Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini, has seemed to be missing in the careers of Spanish humanists. The careers of Spain's most renowned humanists, Antonio de Nebrija (1444-1522) and ‘the Greek Commander’ Hernán Núñez de Toledo (1470?-1553), have been the best exemplars of the academic, rather than civic, context of Spanish humanism: their humanist translations and editions of Latin and Greek texts were published after Nebrija and Núñez were incorporated into the university community as faculty.

Giampietro Carafa was seventy-nine when he was elected pope, but he was no senile old man. Tall, skinny, all nerves and bones, he seemed not to touch the ground when he walked. He was well read—he knew Italian, Latin, Greek, and Spanish—and possessed a remarkable memory. A temperate man at the table, he was equally moderate in his way of life; no one was ever able to attribute a scandal to him. His only indulgence was the wine he drank during his two daily meals, a wine so ‘powerful and fiery, black and thick, that you could cut it.’

The cumulative results of over thirty-five years of research by historians of Renaissance thought have established the importance of the Hermetic tradition in the intellectual life of Renaissance Europe. The studies of Frances Yates especially have focused the attention of historians of science upon the problem of the relationship of Hermetic magic to the development of modern scientific attitudes. Others have regarded the Hermetic tradition as a foundation of religious toleration in late Renaissance Europe. The studies of Yates, Walker, and Dagens have suggested that acceptance of the Hermetica, together with the remaining texts of the prisca theologia, by Renaissance intellectuals was manifested in practical life in ‘eirenic, reunionist opinions’ and efforts to effect a reconciliation between warring Catholics and Protestants at the end of the sixteenth century.

At the expiration of the Twelve Years’ Truce in 1621, the renewal of hostilities between Spain and the United Provinces opened another phase in the long struggle for mastery of the Low Countries. From the Spanish viewpoint, one of the most heartening events in the years immediately following was the capitulation of the city of Breda, of great strategic importance by reason of its location on the main route to Utrecht and Amsterdam. The Dutch resistance was vigorous, for it was only after a siege lasting many months that the city yielded to Ambrosio Spinola, military commander of the Spanish Netherlands, on June 5, 1625. Ten days later the news reached Madrid.