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who had spent his youth cavorting in the fleshpots of Madrid, he now required that all the grandees at court who wished to address him wear black from head to toe. He was stone-faced; famously, he’d smiled only three times in public. He was not naturally this way; in other circumstances Philip might have turned out very differently. The sadness that seemed to emanate from his royal person was less personal than historical. A tremendous weight was pressing down on Philip: The empire he’d inherited was tearing apart before his very eyes, and he felt powerless to save it. In fact, he believed—and here one runs up against the incredible narcissism of the Spaniard during the nation’s golden age—that his personal infidelities had caused every one of Spain’s recent disasters. It was as if his body were a map of the empire, and every eruption and desire that twitched through it caused upheavals and defeats from one end of the kingdom to the other.
    On the hot days of that spring and summer, as the news of Jamaica’s fall made its way to his court, Philip could be found at the Escorial, the palace built by his grandfather on the slopes of the Sierra de Guadarrama outside of Madrid. Constructed in gratitude for the victory over the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557, it contained art galleries, a library, a college, and a monastery. But Philip was not studying the masterpieces that were hung on the gallery walls, though they were magnificent and featured the faces he knew so well, those of his own family of Hapsburg kings; instead he could be found in the mausoleum, where he’d recently had the bodies of his ancestors brought together and placed in the marble pantheon. Courtiers gossiped about the long hours Philip spent there; he emerged, they reported, with his eyes red from weeping. But for Philip the hours spent alone in the dark, cool tomb were his new pleasure. “I saw the corpse of the Emperor, whose body, although he has been dead ninety-six years, is still perfect,” he wrote to a friend, “and by this it may be seen how richly the Lord has repaid him for his efforts in favour of his faith whilst he lived.” Still, the bodies of his illustrious dead comforted him less than one empty space; he spent hour after solitary hour kneeling on the stone floors, staring into the slot where his own body would lie. “It helped me much,” he admitted. How he envied the dead, who could not be humiliated by events and whose bodies had ceased to rebel against them. How, in his quiet moments, he wished to join them.
    Philip held in his hands reins of power that with a single twitch could unsettle the lives of men and women across the globe; it was an empire nearly two hundred years in the making, which now held in thrall millions of people of many different cultures. Sir Walter Raleigh ticked off the things Philip’s forefathers had overcome: “tempests and shipwrecks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extreme poverty and want of all things needful.” The Spanish had conquered them all and saw themselves as the new Israelites, chosen by God to drive the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula and then to reclaim the world for Christ. A Catalan author in the sixteenth century wrote that the Spanish Castilians believed “that they alone are descended from heaven and the rest of mankind are mud,” but in some ways they could hardly be blamed. How could a thinly populated backwater like Spain become the first global superpower since the Romans if God didn’t have a hand in their victories? What were the spurting riches of the New World but God’s reward to His faithful? How could Cortés have conquered the Aztecs with 550 men? It was absurd! And hadn’t a visionary told King Ferdinand, the co-founder of the nation, that he wouldn’t die until he entered Jerusalem in glory, a prediction Ferdinand fervently believed? A skeptic looking at the