habsburg spain

Leonor, Queen of Portugal and Princess of Asturias and Girona (January 28, 1492) and his Husband Archduke Franz Josef of Austria (March 22, 1495) in 1510 July 1491: Afonso, Prince of Portugal dies at the age of 16 after falling from a horse, some time later it is discovered that his wife...

A strange situation of the Habsburg brothers, Charles V and Ferdinand I is that while Charles V and his wife Isabella of Portugal had only three surviving children, Ferdinand I and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary had thirteen children, all of whom reached adulthood, which what would happen if...

The pregnancy of Queen Marie Louise of Spain surprised herself most of all: she knew she was not a virgin, but she had thought she would die without ever having had any children. She had quietly bore the criticism of the childless state of her marriage, even when she wanted to scream that it was...

At the beginning of 1473 the 24 years old Nicholas of Anjou married the almost 16 years old Mary of Burgundy, dying less than two years later and leaving his young widow, pregnant with their second child, and their son Charles, only few months old, in the care of her father Charles the Bold...

In the 1640s, while it was busy fighting in the Thirty Years' war, Spain faced three revolts in Portugal (1640-1666), Catalonia (1640-1659) and Naples (1647-48). The former was successful, but the latter two were crushed. WI Catalonia was annexed by France and Naples won its independence...

In 1539, a tercio of Spanish soldiers fought an impressive last stand against an Ottoman force more than ten times its size led by famed admiral Hayreddin Barbarossa at the town of Castelnuovo (now Herceg Novi) in what is now Montenegro. While the Spanish were eventually overwhelmed and slain...