A novel of the deep roots of the clash between Islam and the West The savagery of the Reconquest tore apart the world of the Banu Hudayl family. For the doomed Muslims of late-fifteenth-century Spain, the approaching forces of Christendom bring not peace but the sword. Capturing the brutality of a war both military and cultural-and the price paid by the innocent-Tariq Ali opens his Islam Quintet with a harrowing and profound historical fiction.

1474. Castile was the largest, strongest, and most populous kingdom in Hispania-- and Isabella ascended the throne, a female ruler in a male-dominated world. Her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon not only united their kingdoms, but began a royal partnership in which Isabella more than held her own. Tremlett chronicles Isabella's colorful life as she led her country out of the Middle Ages and harvested the ideas and tools of the Renaissance to turn her...

When the tolerant culture of Spain is shattered by the Inquisition, Isabel feels safe because of her Catholic upbringing and father's position as a respected doctor, until he is arrested for the family's secret Jewish heritage.

Examines the intelligence war behind the sea battles of 1588 to reveal lesser-known factors that led to England's dramatic victory, challenging popular theories to argue that the Spanish Armada was defeated by inclement weather and bad luck.

A fictionalized account of Spanish queen Juana de Castile traces her succession to the throne after the reign of Queen Isabel, her marriage to Philippe the Handsome, and the accusations of insanity that prompted her half-century tower imprisonment.

"How did a barren, thinly populated country, somewhat isolated from the rest of Europe, establish itself as the world's first superpower? Henry Kamen's impressive new book offers a fresh and highly original answer. Empire is a global survey of the two and a half centuries, from the late fifteenth to the mid-eighteenth, in which the Spaniards established the most extensive empire the world had ever known, ranging from Naples and the Netherlands to...