The age of the conquistadores was already over when Philip II ascended the throne of Spain and the Indies. The leaders of the great entradas were nearly all dead. Some died prematurely of their wounds and their exertions, some by the knives of jealous rivals. A few—Cortés was one of them—spent their middle age in bored and litigious retirement. Not one was long allowed to administer for the crown the provinces he had conquered. Already by 1558 an administrative service, civil and ecclesiastical, had been created and was rapidly growing in numbers, efficiency and cost. The conquistadores had no successors in their own violent mould. Miguel López de Legazpi, who in 1561 undertook the conquest of the Philippines, had been an official in Mexico; his highly successful entrada was notable for diplomacy and organising ability rather than for skill in war and was, indeed, almost bloodless. Francisco de Ibarra, conqueror of Durango, and Francisco de Urdiñola, who founded Saltillo and settled Coahuila, were typical of the later generation of conquistadores, no strangers to violence on occasion, but entrepreneurs in silver-mining and cattle-ranching, organisers of settlements, rather than conquerors of semi-barbarous empires. There were, in fact, no empires left to conquer. In North America, Coronado's expedition of 1540 had revealed nothing but arid hills and apparently boundless prairies, occupied by great herds of ‘wild cattle’ and a scattering of equally wild Indians; no place for men who lived by their swords or by their wits.

On 25 June 1572 Sigismund Augustus, the last male descendant of the house of Jagiellon which had ruled in central and eastern Europe for nearly two hundred years, died at his favourite country residence at Knyszyn. This monarch of great dignity and exceptional humanity, gifted in languages, a good stylist and orator, a connoisseur of art and a passionate collector of tapestries, left his vast kingdom, largely his life-work, without an heir. This kingdom was a sort of union of various states which had previously been independent or semi-independent but which had been united under the Jagiellon dynasty. It included the kingdom of Poland, the grand duchy of Lithuania with its Ruthenian territories, the duchy of Mazovia, royal Prussia (Danzig Pomerania), ducal Prussia, the duchy of Curland, and Livonia. This vast federation, as well as being called a kingdom, was known as the Rzeczpospolita, a commonwealth of various nations or states, as Sigismund Augustus used sometimes to describe it. This emphasised the fact that the union consisted of several nations differing in creed, race and language, but together making a political unity, under one king, with a central parliament and a common foreign policy. It was obvious that the immediate future would show whether the idea of union which Sigismund Augustus had fostered during his reign, and had bequeathed to his dominions in his will, would survive his death and become a source of political strength in this part of Europe.

In May 1939 the treaty which Mussolini called the Steel Pact was signed in Berlin between Germany and Italy. It was a frankly aggressive treaty which intensified the intimidation of Europe by Hitler and Mussolini. It misled world opinion in a way which suited Hitler in that it concealed the weakness of Italy behind Germany's strength. Almost immediately after the conquest of Abyssinia Mussolini had sent large contingents of Italian ‘volunteers’ to fight for Franco. In its timing the Steel Pact seemed to crown the success of Franco and the Axis powers in Spain after nearly three years' fighting. The Germans had not engaged more than small groups of airmen, but Mussolini had exhausted both his armies and his economic resources. As soon as he had signed the pact he began to be afraid of its consequences. Hitler, however, felt more assured. By now Mussolini had followed his example and introduced anti-Semitic measures into Italy. Beyond the frontiers directly controlled by the Germans, the governments of Hungary, Poland and Rumania were glad to buy favour in Berlin by anti-Jewish gestures. The time of annihilation was not to come for two years yet. But the existence of the scapegoat through which one could curry favour was one of Hitler's weapons in the war of nerves which he manipulated in such masterly fashion. Everyone's life in eastern Europe was affected, what they heard or read or said or saw stimulated anti-Semitism and discouraged tolerance.

In the last year of the nineteenth century the American people re-elected William McKinley as President. By doing so, they ratified the liberation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. Probably not knowing what they were doing, and certainly unwilling to accept the full implications of their new situation, the American people had moved out on to the world stage, little better prepared for their new role than the Japanese had been when Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ broke the centuries-old, self-imposed blockade of the island empire.

William Jennings Bryan, who had fought for the economically unfortunate, above all for the angered and impoverished farmer, in 1896, had fought in 1900 against ‘imperialism’. But the sharp edge of discontent had been blunted by the flow of gold from South Africa and the Yukon, by a natural turn in the trade cycle, and the vague issue of ‘imperialism’ was not an adequate fighting theme. Flushed with an easy victory over an impotent Spain, and moving into a new boom period, the American people was convinced that it was living in the best of all possible republics, that it had nothing and no one to fear.

The politicians who felt this mood had no need to worry about re-electing the President and some of them took the chance to get out of the way an obstreperous hero of the brief Spanish-American war, Theodore Roosevelt, who had won the governorship of New York on the strength of his achievements with a regiment of irregular cavalry in Cuba.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (2–3 April 1559) was a belated recognition of the end of the imperial plans of the late Emperor Charles V. The last phase of the war between Habsburg and Valois had been precipitated by the octogenarian Pope Paul IV in his hatred of Spanish dominion in Italy. The principal combatants had fought it almost unwillingly, but the struggle had been as bitter as it was inconclusive and even more costly than previous wars. Now a new era was to dawn with the marriage of Philip II to Henry II's daughter, Elizabeth.

sang the poet Ronsard.

The change was even greater than men realised at the time. In less than ten years from the abdication of Charles V (1555/6) all political problems moved on to a completely different plane. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, the Reformation had been successful only where it had been allied with the state. When it became revolutionary, as it did in the German Peasants' War and in the Anabaptist movements of the Netherlands and northern Germany, it had been easily put down, because it had been supported only by the lower classes in town and country. Now, for the first time and quite suddenly, revolutionary movements became nationwide and included classes, or elements of classes, ranging from artisans to princes of the blood. Determined minorities tried to impose their views on whole countries. They had to build organised parties to match the power of the state.

Post-reformation Europe displayed on the surface a large measure of political diversity. The fragmentation of the universal church, it would appear, completed a process of political fragmentation which had been going on for centuries. With medieval natural law in decline, and the emergence of the modern sovereign state still in the future, the nations of western Europe became locked in conflict within—and with their neighbours—in search of a system of government which would lead them away from confusion and anarchy. Yet the historian who looks at western Europe at the end of the sixteenth century is, in general, impressed not by the diversity of the political systems in the process of formation but by their striking similarity. In the constitutional issues which confronted them, and in the manner of their solution, all the governments of the day had much in common, because the pressures upon them were more or less the same. The general pressure of economic and social forces burst through and flowed beyond the frontiers of the new nation states.

The whole of Europe was at this time, to a greater or less degree, subject to a double upward pressure: of prices and of population. The rise in population far outdistanced the rise in productivity and inevitably commodity prices were driven sharply upwards. In Spain, for example, the 1540s saw a savage rise in prices and the succeeding decades would see a tragic worsening of the whole situation as the Spanish economic system sagged under heavy overseas commitments, a debilitating war in the Netherlands, and a war of attrition at sea.

In Germany towards the end of 1929 employment melted away so rapidly that the prosperous period seemed to have been a mere illusion. In Austria the prosperity had been less convincing in any case, and soon the streets of Vienna seemed crowded with beggars. The Socialist Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Müller, resigned, and Hindenburg called upon the leader of the Centre party, Heinrich Brüning, to succeed him in the spring of 1930. Behind Brüning, and far more than he ever realised, intrigues were concentrating upon plans to make Hindenburg more of a pre-1914 emperor, and to reduce the powers of the Reichstag accordingly: these intrigues emanated from a ‘political general’ called Kurt von Schleicher, a friend of the President's son Oscar. When in July 1930 Brüning failed to get the agreement of the Reichstag to some deflationary measures of his, Hindenburg, encouraged by Schleicher, enforced them by emergency decree. Brüning thought it correct to dissolve the Reichstag, which had been elected in May 1928 in the prosperous period.

Elections were held on 14 September 1930: the results were like a bombshell for Germany and for Europe. The number of Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77 and the National Socialist Party (Nazis) shot up from 12 in the last Reichstag to 107: they were now the largest party after the Social Democrats. These Nazis were the followers of the Austrian agitator, Adolf Hitler, who had ignominiously failed to seize power in Munich in November 1923.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of 11 November 1918 the cease-fire sounded along the western front. It was the end of the first world war, which had killed not less than 10 million persons, had brought down four great empires and had impoverished the continent of Europe. The defeat of Germany, so long invincible to more than half the world, had been registered at dawn that day in the Armistice of Compiègne. Its heavy terms were in the main those proposed by Marshal Foch, the Allied generalissimo, and lay between the views of the British Field-Marshal Haig, who overestimated the German capacity for continued resistance and advocated more lenient conditions, and those of the American General Pershing, who had argued in favour of refusing an armistice and maintaining the Allied advance. This matched the attitude of the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a popular American demand for unconditional surrender. As it was, one month after the armistice, Ebert, head of the first government of the new German republic, greeted returning German formations at the Brandenburger Tor with the words: ‘No foe has overcome you … You have protected the homeland from enemy invasion.’

No less important in the long run than the terms of the armistice were the preconditions governing its signature. When the German government had applied to President Wilson on 4 October 1918 for an armistice it had adroitly proposed that peace negotiations, and not only those for an armistice, should be based upon the ‘fourteen points’ of his address of 8 January 1918, as amplified in his subsequent pronouncements.

A comparison between the countries round the Baltic and those round the Mediterranean in the middle of the sixteenth century sheds light L on conditions in the north at a time when the political situation was vastly different from the present one. Though in varying degrees, the European countries on the Mediterranean all had an ancient cultural heritage, and during the last few centuries they had evolved a new culture—the Renaissance—in conscious relation to classical antiquity. The former political disunity was partly overcome in France, was on the way to being overcome in the Iberian peninsula, but was still acute in Italy. At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, on the other side of an ‘iron curtain’, lay the cultural world of the Orient. For centuries it had given many impulses to southern Europe. Now the links were broken, and most of Europe's trade with the Far East followed new routes.

Similarly, in the middle of the sixteenth century the eastern and western sides of the Baltic belonged to different cultural spheres in religion, education, language and custom; the main line of demarcation was between Russia on the one side, and her neighbours Sweden-Finland and Poland on the other. But the dissimilarities to southern Europe were enormous. The northern countries were economically and culturally primitive compared with those in the south. The refinement of the Renaissance had as yet left only small traces in northern Europe, primarily in art. The Reformation's programme, however, had quickly and effectively reached northern Germany, Poland and Scandinavia, spreading not so much among the masses as in certain social groups—particularly the middle-class townspeople—and within government circles.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis ended a war that had become, if indeed it had not started as, ‘a race between spent horses’. It was a peace of exhaustion and it endured because for many years to come none of the states of western Europe felt strong enough to risk another general conflict. Yet although all were afraid to strike, some were still willing to wound. And the internal instability that afflicted all of them, bred of exhaustion and fevered by a crisis of conscience in religion, gave to any dissatisfied power repeated hopes of undermining the foundations upon which the 1559 settlement rested.

In that settlement the British Isles occupied a crucial position. For the treaties left one of the two outstandingly great powers of western Europe, France, hemmed in and all but encircled by the territories of the other, Spain. The dominions of Philip II of Spain ran almost all around France—from Spain itself through the Balearic islands, Sardinia, and Sicily to Naples, the Tuscan ports, Parma, and Milan, with dependent Corsica, Genoa, and Savoy-Piedmont linking on to Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. If the British Isles or at least England could be added to these, as during Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II (1554–8), then the ring would be complete and virtually unbreakable. If, on the other hand, the French could control England as well as Scotland, then the sea route through the Channel and the Straits of Dover could be closed to the Spaniards.