title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Still, other critics saw reflected in the government's response its attitude to the so-called "Irish Question". Nassau Senior, an economics professor at Oxford University, wrote that the Famine "would not kill more than one million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do any good". In 1848, Denis Shine Lawlor suggested that Russell was a student of the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser, who had calculated "how far English colonisation and English policy might be most effectively carried out by Irish starvation". Charles Trevelyan, the civil servant with most direct responsibility for the government's handling of the famine, described it in 1848 as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil"; he affirmed that the Famine was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected. God grant that the generation to which this opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part..."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Christine Kinealy has written that "the major tragedy of the Irish Famine of 1845–1852 marked a watershed in modern Irish history. Its occurrence, however, was neither inevitable nor unavoidable". The underlying factors which combined to cause the famine were aggravated by an inadequate government response. Kinealy notes that the "government had to do something to help alleviate the suffering" but that "it became apparent that the government was using its information not merely to help it formulate its relief policies, but also as an opportunity to facilitate various long-desired changes within Ireland".


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Some also pointed to the structure of the British Empire as a contributing factor. James Anthony Froude wrote that "England governed Ireland for what she deemed her own interest, making her calculations on the gross balance of her trade ledgers, and leaving moral obligations aside, as if right and wrong had been blotted out of the statute book of the Universe." Dennis Clark, an Irish-American historian and critic of empire, claimed the famine was "the culmination of generations of neglect, misrule and repression. It was an epic of English colonial cruelty and inadequacy. For the landless cabin dwellers, it meant emigration or extinction..."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The British government has not expressly apologized for its role in the famine. But in 1997, at a commemoration event in County Cork, the actor Gabriel Byrne read out a message by Prime Minister Tony Blair that acknowledged the inadequacy of the government response. It asserted that "those who governed in London at the time failed their people through standing by while a crop failure turned into a massive human tragedy". The message was well received in Ireland, where it was understood as the long-sought-after British apology. Archive documents released in 2021 showed that the message was not in fact written or approved by Blair, who could not be reached by aides at the time. It was therefore approved by Blair's principal private secretary John Holmes on his own initiative.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The famine remains a controversial event in Irish history. Debate and discussion about whether the British government's response to the failure of the potato crop, and the continued exportation of food crops and livestock, constituted a genocide, remains a subject of political debate. Most historians reject the claim that the famine constituted a genocide due, in part, to the lack of "intention" behind famine related deaths. For a mass-death atrocity to be defined as genocide, it must include the intentional destruction of a people.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 1996, the U.S. state of New Jersey included the famine in the "Holocaust and Genocide Curriculum" of its secondary schools. The curriculum was pushed by various Irish American political groups and drafted by the librarian James Mullin. Following criticism of the curriculum, the New Jersey Holocaust Commission requested statements from two academics that the Irish famine was genocide, which was eventually provided by law professors Charles E. Rice and Francis Boyle, who had not been previously known for studying Irish history. They concluded that the British government deliberately pursued a race- and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per retrospective application of article 2 of the Hague Convention of 1948.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Irish historian Cormac Ó Gráda rejected the claim that the famine was a genocide. He argued that "genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish", and he also stated that most people in Whitehall "hoped for better times for Ireland". Additionally, he stated that the claim of genocide overlooks "the enormous challenge facing relief agencies, both central and local, public and private". Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than a case of genocide. W. D. Rubinstein also rejected the genocide claim. James S. Donnelly Jr., a historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, wrote in his book, "Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-century Ireland":


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: the government's abject failure to stop or even slow down the clearances (evictions) contributed in a major way to enshrining the idea of English state-sponsored genocide in Irish popular mind. Or perhaps one should say in the Irish mind, for this was a notion that appealed to many educated and discriminating men and women, and not only to the revolutionary minority ... And it is also my contention that while genocide was not in fact committed, what happened during and as a result of the clearances had the look of genocide to a great many Irish.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Historian Donald Akenson, who has written twenty-four books on Ireland, stated that "When you see [the word "Holocaust" used with regard to the famine], you know that you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: In 2019, Maine legislators argued for the inclusion of education about Ireland and the famine in "The Holocaust Bill, An Act To Require Education about the Holocaust."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: The Irish state broadcaster RTÉ aired a two-part documentary titled "The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine" in November 2020. In it, Brendan O'Leary, Lauder Professor of political science, offered to use the term 'genoslaughter' rather than the term 'genocide' because, in his view, the term 'genoslaughter' is a more accurately descriptive term for the British response to the potato blight than the term 'genocide' is. O'Leary pointed out that the decision-making by the government of the day was based on capitalist principles rather than ethnicity; its aim was to reduce the tax burden on the middle-class (who were of both main ethnicities) by clearing the 'unproductive' landless poor from Ireland.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: According to Professor Liam Kennedy, an editorial in the "Irish Echo" by James Pius Sweeney stated: 'The genocide of the Great Famine is distinct in the fact that the British created the conditions of dire hopelessness, and desperate dependence on the potato crop through a series of sadistic, debasing, premeditated and barbarous Penal Laws, which deliberately and systematically stripped the Irish of even the least semblance of basic human freedom.' When blight struck the Irish were 'totally vulnerable'. This was a 'nuanced genocide', he continues, one that manipulated fate 'by pushing a people to the brink of annihilation and turning away so not to hear the wailing …'.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: However, Kennedy himself does not believe that the Famine constituted a genocide: "There is no case for genocide when you think of, as part of British government policies in Ireland, three-quarters of a million people working on public relief schemes. When you have three million people at one stage receiving soup from soup kitchens right across Ireland in their locality."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Historian Mark Tauger writes that a "nationalist literature" exists about the famine that obfuscates and ignores the effects of natural factors and instead places the entirety of the blame on the British government, which he compares to similar reductionist and inaccurate narratives from Ukrainian nationalists about the Soviet famine of 1930-1933. Tauger criticises these nationalistic perspectives as being ungrounded in reality and at odds with all scholarship on the matter, as even those historians most critical of British policymaking during the period accept potato blight as the main, overarching cause of the famine.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Professor of history John Leazer writes that the binary framing of the debate about the British government's, and particularly Trevelyan's, actions as being good or bad is "unsatisfactory", and that the entire debate surrounding the question of genocide serves to oversimplify and obfuscate complex factors behind the actions of the government as a whole and individuals within it.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Ireland's National Famine Memorial is situated in Murrisk Millennium Peace Park, a five-acre park overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in the village of Murrisk, County Mayo at the foot of Croagh Patrick mountain. Designed by Irish artist John Behan, the memorial consists of a bronze sculpture of a coffin ship with skeletons interwoven through the rigging symbolising the many emigrants that did not survive the journey across the ocean to Great Britain, America and elsewhere. It was unveiled on 20 July 1997 by then-President Mary Robinson. The Famine Commemoration Committee who led the project chose the site in Murrisk as they felt it was "...entirely fitting that the national famine memorial [..] be located in the west, which suffered most during the Famine with one in four of the population of Connaught dying in those terrible years."


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: It is also memorialized in many locations throughout Ireland, especially in those regions of Ireland which suffered the greatest losses, and it is also memorialized overseas, particularly in cities with large populations which are descended from Irish immigrants, such as New York City. These include, at Custom House Quays, Dublin, the thin sculptural figures, by artist Rowan Gillespie, who are portrayed as if they are walking towards the emigration ships which are docked on the Dublin Quayside.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: "Kindred Spirits", a large stainless steel sculpture of nine eagle feathers by artist Alex Pentek was erected in 2017 in the Irish town of Midleton, County Cork, to thank the Choctaw people for its financial assistance during the famine.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Among the memorials in Ireland are the National Famine Museum and Strokestown Park House in County Roscommon; the Irish Famine Exhibition in Dublin; the Jeanie Johnston: An Irish Famine Story, Dublin; EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Dublin; and the Doagh Famine Village in County Donegal.


title: Great Famine (Ireland)

text: Among the memorials in the US is the Irish Hunger Memorial near a section of the Manhattan waterfront in New York City, where many Irish arrived and the National Memorial to An Gorta Mór, in Philadelphia, a sculpture suggesting the multitudes with 35 life-size bronze figures arranged in clusters of vignettes. Ireland's Great Hunger Institute, at Quinnipiac University fosters a deeper understanding of the Great Hunger of Ireland and its causes and consequences through a strategic program of lectures, conferences, course offerings and publications. Ireland's Great Hunger Museum, at Quinnipiac University, hosts the world's largest collection of Great Hunger-related art including artefacts and printed materials. An annual Great Famine walk from Doolough to Louisburgh, County Mayo was inaugurated in 1988 and has been led by such notable personalities as Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. The walk, organised by Afri, takes place on the first or second Saturday of May and links the memory of the Great Hunger with a contemporary Human Rights issue.


title: Death Stranding

text: Death Stranding is a 2019 action game developed by Kojima Productions and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment for the PlayStation 4. It is the first game from director Hideo Kojima and Kojima Productions after their split from Konami in 2015. A Microsoft Windows port licensed by Sony was released by 505 Games in July 2020. A director's cut version was released for the PlayStation 5 in September 2021, followed by a release for Windows in March 2022.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game is set in the United States following a cataclysmic event which caused destructive creatures to begin roaming the Earth. Players control Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus), a courier tasked with delivering supplies to isolated colonies and reconnecting them via a wireless communications network. Alongside Reedus, the game features actors Mads Mikkelsen, Léa Seydoux, Margaret Qualley, Troy Baker, Tommie Earl Jenkins, and Lindsay Wagner, in addition to the likenesses of film directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn as supporting characters.


title: Death Stranding

text: "Death Stranding" received generally positive reviews, with critics praising its voice acting, soundtrack, and visuals, with more mixed opinions regarding its gameplay and story. The game was nominated for and won several awards, including for game of the year. By July 2021, the game had sold copies worldwide. Numerous commentators later noted that elements of the game resembled the COVID-19 pandemic, which began within a month of its original release.


title: Death Stranding

text: A sequel, "Death Stranding 2", is currently in development for PlayStation 5. A film adaptation is also currently in the works.


title: Death Stranding

text: "Death Stranding" is an action game set in an open world, and includes asynchronous online functions. Kojima refers to "Death Stranding" as the first "strand game", an original genre characterized by the game's incorporation of social elements. Kojima compared this genre to how his earlier game "Metal Gear"—now considered a stealth game—was called an action game during its release because the stealth genre had not been established.


title: Death Stranding

text: The player controls Sam Bridges, a porter for a company known as BRIDGES. The player is tasked with delivering supply cargo to various isolated cities known as KNOTs, as well as isolated researchers and survivalists, while also connecting them to a communications system known as the Chiral Network. The player is evaluated by the company and recipients based on their performance (including via "likes" similar to social networks), including whether the cargo was delivered, and if it is intact among other factors. These merits are, in turn, used to level up the player's statistics, such as stability and weight capacity, and increase their standing with individual locations and characters (which can improve rewards). How cargo is packed by the player, and the overall weight being carried, affect Sam's ability to navigate through the environments.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game extensively uses licensed music, most often from the bands Silent Poets and Low Roar, to score and enhance specific set-pieces and moments of traversal. When speaking on the use of music, Kojima said the music "would match this harsh but beautiful and pure environmental setting. I also felt somewhat of a connection to Low Roar and the game, the matching of Low Roar's acoustic but digital futuristic sound and the concept of "Death Stranding"." After the passing of Low Roar's front-man Ryan Karazija in 2022, Kojima said, "Without [Low Roar], "Death Stranding" would not have been born."


title: Death Stranding

text: The player's main enemies include otherworldly creatures known as "beached things" (BTs), MULE (a cult of rogue, bandit-like porters influenced by an obsession with cargo, who attempt to steal deliveries so they can deliver it themselves), and Demens, MULEs who have begun killing porters to claim their cargo. BTs are surrounded by a rain known as "timefall", which damages the player's armor and cargo by speeding up their deterioration. BTs are normally invisible, but Sam's suit is equipped with a robotic sensor referred to in-game as an "odradek" that points towards nearby BTs, and the player can then scan the area to reveal them.


title: Death Stranding

text: As Sam is a "Repatriate", he is taken to an underwater world known as the "Seam" if he is killed, where he can "swim" back to his body to revive himself. However, being killed and consumed by a BT also results in a destructive explosion known as a "voidout", which permanently damages the location of the death with an untraversable crater.


title: Death Stranding

text: As players expand the coverage of the Chiral Network, they can access maps of areas, and use blueprints to produce consumable items and structures with the Portable Chiral Constructor (PCC, a device similar to a 3D printer), including ropes, bridges, and power generators used for charging battery-powered equipment. The Network is also used as the basis for the game's online functionality, where players can leave supplies, structures, and messages that can be viewed and used by other players, although structures will eventually be destroyed by Timefall after some time. The player can also recover cargo lost by other players to complete their delivery. The player does not directly encounter other players in the world.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game is set in an apocalyptic United States, where a cataclysmic event known as the "Death Stranding" caused "Beached Things" ("BTs")—invisible creatures originating from the "Beach," lands thought to be unique to each person that is typically visited during near-death experiences and are said to be the link to the afterlife—to begin roaming the Earth. BTs are created from the dead via necrosis, and when they consume a living human being, they create an explosion on the scale of a nuclear bomb, known as a "voidout." They also produce rain known as "Timefall" that rapidly ages and deteriorates whatever it hits. These events damaged the country's infrastructure, leading its remaining population to confine themselves to remote colonies known as "Knot Cities," which form the remaining "United Cities of America".


title: Death Stranding

text: These colonies have since relied on the services of a company known as BRIDGES, whose porters brave the BTs, bandits, and terrorists to deliver supplies to the cities. Bridges also performs various governmental functions on behalf of the UCA. If they achieve a mental connection to a "Bridge Baby" (a "BB")—a premature child reflecting a state between life and death—it is possible for a person to sense the presence of a BT. Porters carry a BB with them, stored in a pod simulating the womb of a "stillmother." Depending on its severity, a condition known as "DOOMS" also allows a person to naturally sense, see, or even control a BT, as well as granting a variety of powers, such as teleportation or travel to other people's Beaches. There are also individuals known as "repatriates" who can travel back from "the Seam"—a place between the world of the living and the Beach—upon death. As such, these individuals can effectively return from death, though their deaths will still cause voidouts if killed during contact with a BT.


title: Death Stranding

text: Freelance courier Sam Porter Bridges (Norman Reedus) is transporting cargo to Central Knot City but is interrupted by Timefall and takes shelter. He receives assistance from Fragile (Léa Seydoux) in evading a BT. Sam arrives at his destination, where a citizen has committed suicide, with the corpse on the verge of necrosis. Due to being both a repatriate and having DOOMS, Sam is given an emergency assignment to accompany the disposal team to an incinerator to dispose of the corpse. However, an encounter with BTs causes a voidout that destroys Central Knot City.


title: Death Stranding

text: Sam revives in Capital Knot City and meets Deadman (Guillermo del Toro/Jesse Corti), a doctor from BRIDGES who has Sam deliver morphine to the dying President of the UCA: Sam's adoptive mother, Bridget Strand (Lindsay Wagner/Emily O'Brien). Bridget pleads with Sam to rejoin BRIDGES and help realize her dream of "reforming America" before succumbing to her illness. Sam takes her body for incineration but refuses to incinerate a Bridge Baby involved in the Central Knot City voidout. With the baby's assistance, Sam evades a horde of BTs and decides to adopt it as his own Bridge Baby; against UCA instructions to treat Bridge Babies as pieces of equipment, Sam gradually forms an emotional bond with it and nicknames it "Lou."


title: Death Stranding

text: Upon his return to Capital Knot City, Sam receives a message from his estranged sister Amelie Strand (also Wagner/O'Brien). She tells him that over the past three years, she led an expedition across what is left of the continental United States, making contact with isolated cities and settlements and setting up terminals that would connect them to the Chiral Network: a system that facilitates instant communication and data transfer across vast distances through the Beach. However, upon reaching the last city on the West Coast (Edge Knot City), Amelie was captured by a terrorist group to guarantee Edge Knot City's independence. She pleads for Sam to follow her expedition and complete the Chiral Network, thus "reforming America." As this pilgrimage ends at Edge Knot City, Sam can then rescue Amelie, and she can take Bridget's place as the President of the UCA. Sam reluctantly accepts the mission.


title: Death Stranding

text: Following the instructions of Die-Hardman (Tommie Earl Jenkins), Bridget's personal aide and Director of BRIDGES, Sam begins his journey from the east to the west coast of North America. Along the way, he delivers valuable cargo to various Knot Cities and settlements; helps research the Death Stranding with BRIDGES staff such as Mama and her twin sister Lockne (Margaret Qualley), Heartman (Nicolas Winding Refn/Darren Jacobs); and thwarts deadly plots by terrorists and their leader, Higgs Monaghan (Troy Baker). While connected to Lou, he occasionally experiences memories depicting Clifford Unger (Mads Mikkelsen) and his hospitalized wife and BB child. Sam is pulled into Clifford's Beach; there, he fights a BT manifestation of Clifford, who seeks his lost BB.


title: Death Stranding

text: After reaching Edge Knot City, Sam fights and defeats Higgs at Amelie's Beach. Higgs reveals that Amelie is an Extinction Entity: a godlike being manifested by the universe to trigger mass extinction events. Amelie is revealed as the true leader of Homo Demens, having conceived the Chiral Network to enable the Last Stranding, the end of life on Earth. It is also revealed that Amelie and Bridget are the same person; Bridget's soul separated from her body during early experiments into the Beaches and used the alias "Amelie" as a cover. However, Amelie is conflicted over her cosmological duties, finding the Last Stranding more humane than perpetual cycles of growth and extinction.


title: Death Stranding

text: With the help of allies made on his journey, Sam reaches Amelie and convinces her to delay the Last Stranding. Moved, she accepts but must separate herself and her Beach from the world forever. Sam is rescued by his BRIDGES allies, returning to the living. Die-Hardman becomes President of the UCA, and Fragile resolves to rebuild her company. However, Sam is told that Lou is dying. Although UCA law demands dying BBs are incinerated, Sam follows Deadman's advice and removes Lou from its pod in hopes of saving its life. In doing so, Sam connects with Lou one last time and discovers the memories he has viewed are his own: he is Clifford Unger's son, who Bridget Strand had transformed into one of the first BBs, accidentally killed alongside Clifford during a botched escape attempt, and resurrected by Amelie (which triggered the Death Stranding). The spirits of deceased BBs help save Lou's life, and Sam destroys his UCA cufflinks, going "off the grid" to live a peaceful life raising "Louise."


title: Death Stranding

text: After a lengthy corporate conflict with Konami as a restricted subsidiary, Kojima Productions closed in July 2015 and reformed as an independent video game developer and studio in December. The same month, Hideo Kojima announced his partnership with Sony Interactive Entertainment, at the time led by Andrew House, to make a new PlayStation game.


title: Death Stranding

text: Kojima revealed the game at Sony's conference during E3 2016 with a teaser trailer featuring music from Low Roar, whose music would later be used in the final game. The trailer was made possible with the technology of photogrammetry and motion capture. It featured Norman Reedus, who served as the basis for the protagonist. The game is the second collaboration between Kojima and Reedus, following the cancelled "Silent Hills". Kojima and Mark Cerny, lead system architect of the PlayStation 4, spent two weeks in January 2016 looking for a game engine on which to develop the game. One of the two remaining candidates had been used to create the teaser trailer. Guerrilla Games would later be announced as a collaborator on the development of the game, as it was providing their proprietary game engine, Decima. Kojima Productions' meeting room was recreated in the engine as a reference of accuracy, and for the purpose of testing physically-based lighting.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game entered full development in 2017. A few days before E3 2017, Kojima announced that the game would not appear during the usual Sony conference. In June, information came from Shawn Layden, president of Sony Interactive Entertainment America, affirming that "Death Stranding" was in fact in a playable alpha version, but he had not been able to categorize the game in a specific genre. The official soundtrack of the game, "", was released through RCA Records and Sony Interactive Entertainment on November 7, 2019, and features artists such as Chvrches, The Neighbourhood, Major Lazer, and Bring Me the Horizon. A teaser was presented during The Game Awards 2017 in December, where Kojima, Reedus and del Toro made appearances. Kojima also revealed that the team was unable to do any performance capture or voice-over for the third trailer in time for E3 2017 due to the 2016–17 video game voice actor strike, so it was delayed until the Game Awards.


title: Death Stranding

text: In February 2018, Emily O'Brien and Troy Baker joined the cast for the game. At the event, a new trailer was shown, showing gameplay for the first time. It also revealed that actresses Léa Seydoux and Lindsay Wagner were to be a part of the cast. On September 18, it was announced at Tokyo Game Show 2018 that Tommie Earl Jenkins would portray a key character in the game, and that Akio Ōtsuka, Kikuko Inoue, Nana Mizuki and Satoshi Mikami, veterans of the "Metal Gear" series, along with Kenjiro Tsuda, had joined the game's Japanese voice cast. In March 2019, Hideo Kojima said that "Death Stranding" was slightly behind its release date schedule, and that he himself was testing and adjusting the gameplay, day by day, defining that phase of development as "critical".


title: Death Stranding

text: A trailer released in May 2019 introduced Margaret Qualley as Mama and Nicolas Winding Refn as Heartman. Several character names were also revealed: Cliff (Mikkelsen), Fragile (Seydoux), Deadman (Del Toro), Die-Hardman (Jenkins), Higgs (Baker) and Amelie (Wagner). O'Brien, Jesse Corti and Darren Jacobs are credited for voice-over work in the trailer. Del Toro and Winding Refn both received a "Special Appearance" credit, with Kojima later explaining that their likenesses were only used and their voice and motion capture are performed by other actors. The same trailer also revealed the release date of November 8, 2019. In an accompanying blog post, Kojima explained that the game's core theme was "the true importance of forging connections with others", referring to the player's goal of "reconnecting" an isolated and fractured society, to bridge its divides, and to "create new bonds or 'Strands' with other players around the globe." Certain themes and elements of the story were influenced by Kojima's childhood and the deaths of his parents.


title: Death Stranding

text: During Gamescom that year, two more trailers were shown: the first showed one of the key elements of the video game, a "BB" (Bridge Baby), with the participation of the character "Deadman", played by Guillermo del Toro, the second introduces the character "Mama", played by Margaret Qualley. Furthermore, a 6-minute gameplay trailer was shown, which introduces in detail various game mechanics, such as the possibility of urinating and delivering packages to isolated delivery stations. This video also features the participation of Geoff Keighley, Canadian journalist and video critic, as a hologram that interacts with the main character Sam in the delivery station. Japanese writer Junji Ito appears as the model of the Engineer, which is voiced by Yuri Lowenthal. The film director was modelled after Jordan Vogt-Roberts, while director Edgar Wright provided his likeness for Thomas Southerland. Hirokazu Hamamura also made an appearance as the Collector. Liam O'Brien and Sam Lake were credited as the voice actor and model of Veteran Porter, respectively. Phillip North is portrayed by Tommy Wirkola.


title: Death Stranding

text: During the Tokyo Game Show conference, Kojima showed and commented live a 83-minute video dedicated entirely to the general features of the gameplay of the game. There Kojima proclaimed that he was open to developing a sequel to further solidify the "strand game" genre. On September 26, 2019, Kojima Productions announced that the game had gone gold, meaning that development on it had finished. In October 2019, it was announced that the game would be released on Microsoft Windows in mid-2020 by 505 Games, confirming rumors about a PC version that had existed as early as 2015. It was released on July 14, 2020. The same month during a segment of "Conan", comedian Conan O'Brien revealed that there is a character modeled after him in-game, with O'Brien having been digitally modeled during a visit to Kojima Productions' studio. A director's cut version of the game featuring new gameplay additions was released for the PlayStation 5 on September 24, 2021, followed by a release for Windows on March 30, 2022. The base game is scheduled to release for PC Game Pass on August 23, 2022, and features several unlockable items.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game's announcement at E3 2016 was met with a positive reception. In 2017, "Death Stranding" was nominated by Golden Joystick Awards in the category "Most Wanted Game". In June 2018, during the days following the E3 press conferences, "Death Stranding" reached the top ten in the most watched video game trailers on YouTube, with more than 4.5 million views.


title: Death Stranding

text: Upon release, "Death Stranding" received "generally favorable" reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Publications noted a range of reactions from reviewers across the board, with the game being praised for its unique concepts, lasting appeal, graphics, voice acting, and soundtrack, but also being considered to be bloated, frustrating, and slow-paced.


title: Death Stranding

text: Russ Frushtick of "Polygon" described "Death Stranding" as "the most advanced walking simulator the world has ever seen", and as being "composed entirely of fetch quests", but that it was "pretty damn fun once it gets out of its own way". Frushtick argued that the game "felt like two games in one", consisting of "a wholly unique open-world adventure with asynchronous cooperative multiplayer that allows me to feel like I'm part of a community, building a world from scratch" and "a long, confusing, deeply strange movie." Rating the game 7 out of 10, "Game Informer"s Matthew Kato wrote that the gameplay "really is as simple as it appears to be, and the elements around it – the story, combat, and lackluster mission objectives – aren't satisfying enough to anchor the title and get players invested." Gaming journalist Jim Sterling called "Death Stranding" "Hideo Kojima at peak indulgence" and found the game to be "annoying" and "boring", criticizing the game's intricate systems and details, which they felt did not enhance enjoyment but instead were implemented for the sake of realism or to "show off". Despite this, they praised the online social features, as well as certain segments that "[build] a nice little atmosphere". It is the fourth Kojima-directed game but only the 26th overall to be awarded a perfect 40/40 score by Japanese video game magazine "Famitsu".


title: Death Stranding

text: "Death Stranding" was also subject to review bombing on Metacritic. In December 2019, the website removed over 6,000 negative user reviews to prevent "potential score manipulation", judging them to be suspicious.


title: Death Stranding

text: In its debut week, "Death Stranding" was the best-selling physical game in Japan, with "Famitsu" reporting that the game had sold 185,909 copies. This made it the most successful debut for a new intellectual property in Japan for the eighth generation of video game consoles, overtaking previous record holder "Judgment". "Death Stranding" remained in the "Famitsu" top 30 best-selling physical games chart for five weeks, until December 15, having reached over 253,000 physical copies sold at that point. , the game's sales in Japan have reached 262,827 physical copies and an estimated 136,279 digital copies, for an estimated total of 399,106 sales in Japan.


title: Death Stranding

text: In the UK, the title debuted at number two on the physical sales chart, outsold by "". Its sales made it the second biggest PlayStation exclusive debut of the year, behind "Days Gone". According to Media Create, "Death Stranding" also debuted at number one in the physical sales chart for both Taiwan and South Korea. The game also topped the Italian and French selling charts. It placed second in the Switzerland charts.


title: Death Stranding

text: On the PlayStation Network, the game has reached an estimated total of 3million players, including an estimated 390,000 monthly active users, . According to SuperData Research's estimates "Death Stranding" sold 477,000 digital copies in its first month on Steam.


title: Death Stranding

text: Kojima stated in May 2020 that the game had sold enough to recoup the development costs and turn a profit, securing funding for Kojima Production's next project.


title: Death Stranding

text: In April 2021, publisher 505 Games' parent organization Digital Bros announced in a financial that the PC release had generated () in revenue , making it the company's highest-grossing game in 2020. In October 2021, Digital Bros announced that the PC release had generated . , the game has sold copies worldwide for the PS4 and PC platforms.


title: Death Stranding

text: The game won the award for "Best PS4 Exclusive" at the "IGN" Game of the Awards 2019, whereas its other nominations were for "Best Music/Score" and "Best Art Direction".


title: Death Stranding

text: Numerous commentators noted that the game's story and gameplay resembled the COVID-19 pandemic. The game's prescient similarities to the coronavirus crisis has drawn comparisons to the way in which a previous Kojima game, "" (2001), had anticipated 2010s phenomena such as fake news and echo chambers. A parody game set in a post-apocalyptic world devastated by COVID-19, "Walking Simulator", was released in March 2020.


title: Death Stranding

text: A sequel was first revealed to be in development in May 2022, when Norman Reedus participated in an interview with the outlet "Leo Edit" to discuss his work on the game. Speaking to Ilaria Urbinati, Reedus exclaimed, "We just started work on the second one". Later in the interview, he would reminisce about how, "the game came out, and it just won all these awards, and it was a huge thing", before reiterating that the development team had "just started part two of that". In response, game writer and director Hideo Kojima would post a series of photos on Twitter, cheekily depicting him punishing Reedus for confirming the game's existence while telling him, "Go to your private room, my friend".


title: Death Stranding

text: The sequel was teased with images revealed at numerous game expos featuring Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna, and Léa Seydoux. A first trailer for "Death Stranding 2" (stylized as DS2 and clarified to be a working title) was revealed at The Game Awards 2022, with the aforementioned teased actors confirmed as well as Troy Baker returning from the first game.


title: Death Stranding

text: On December 15, 2022, an film adaptation of "Death Stranding" was announced. Kojima Productions partnered with Alex Lebovici and his company Hammerstone Studios to produced the film alongside with Allan Ungar as the executive producer.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip II (21 May 152713 September 1598), also known as Philip the Prudent (), was King of Spain from 1556, King of Portugal from 1580, and King of Naples and Sicily from 1554 until his death in 1598. He was "jure uxoris" King of England and Ireland from his marriage to Queen Mary I in 1554 until her death in 1558. He was also Duke of Milan from 1540. From 1555, he was Lord of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The son of Emperor Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, Philip inherited his father's Spanish Empire in 1556 and succeeded to the Portuguese throne in 1580 following a dynastic crisis. The Spanish conquests of the Inca Empire and of the Philippines, named in his honor by Ruy López de Villalobos, were completed during his reign. Under Philip II, Spain reached the height of its influence and power, sometimes called the Spanish Golden Age, and ruled territories in every continent then known to Europeans. Philip led a highly debt-leveraged regime, seeing state defaults in 1557, 1560, 1569, 1575, and 1596. This policy was partly the cause of the declaration of independence that created the Dutch Republic in 1581. Philip finished building the royal palace El Escorial in 1584.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Deeply devout, Philip saw himself as the defender of Catholic Europe against the Ottoman Empire and the Protestant Reformation. In 1584, Philip signed the Treaty of Joinville funding the French Catholic League over the following decade in its civil war against the French Huguenots. In 1588, he sent an armada to invade Protestant England, with the strategic aim of overthrowing Elizabeth I and re-establishing Catholicism there, but his fleet was defeated in a skirmish at Gravelines (northern France) and then destroyed by storms as it circled the British Isles to return to Spain. The following year Philip's naval power was able to recover after the failed invasion of the English Armada into Spain. Two more Spanish armadas unsuccessfully tried to invade England in 1596 and 1597. The Anglo-Spanish war carried on until 1604, six years after Philip's death.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Under Philip, an average of about 9,000 soldiers were recruited from Spain each year, rising to as many as 20,000 in crisis years. Between 1567 and 1574, nearly 43,000 men left Spain to fight in Italy and the Low Countries (modern-day Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands).


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip was described by the Venetian ambassador Paolo Fagolo in 1563 as "slight of stature and round-faced, with pale blue eyes, somewhat prominent lip, and pink skin, but his overall appearance is very attractive. ... He dresses very tastefully, and everything that he does is courteous and gracious." Philip was married four times; all his wives predeceased him.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: A member of the House of Habsburg, Philip was the son of Emperor Charles V, who was also king of Castile and Aragon, and Isabella of Portugal. He was born in the Castilian capital of Valladolid on 21 May 1527 at Palacio de Pimentel, which was owned by Don Bernardino Pimentel (the first Marqués de Távara). The culture and courtly life of Castile were an important influence in his early life. He was entrusted to the royal governess Leonor de Mascareñas, and tutored by Juan Martínez Siliceo, the future archbishop of Toledo. Philip displayed reasonable aptitude in arts and letters alike. Later he would study with more illustrious tutors, including the humanist Juan Cristóbal Calvete de Estrella. Though Philip had good command over Latin, Spanish, and Portuguese, he never managed to equal his father, Charles V, as a polyglot. While Philip was also an archduke of Austria, he was seen as a foreigner in the Holy Roman Empire. The feeling was mutual. Philip felt himself to be culturally Spanish; he had been born in Castile and raised in the Castilian court, his native language was Spanish, and he preferred to live in the Spanish kingdoms. This ultimately impeded his succession to the imperial throne.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In April 1528, when Philip was eleven months old, he received the oath of allegiance as heir to the crown from the Cortes of Castile. From that time until the death of his mother Isabella in 1539, he was raised in the royal court of Castile under the care of his mother and one of her Portuguese ladies, Doña Leonor de Mascarenhas, to whom he was devotedly attached. Philip was also close to his two sisters, María and Juana, and to his two pages, the Portuguese nobleman Rui Gomes da Silva and Luis de Requesens, the son of his governor Juan de Zúñiga. These men would serve Philip throughout their lives, as would Antonio Pérez, his secretary from 1541.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's martial training was undertaken by his governor, Juan de Zúñiga, a Castilian nobleman who served as the "commendador mayor" of Castile. The practical lessons in warfare were overseen by the Duke of Alba during the Italian Wars. Philip was present at the Siege of Perpignan in 1542 but did not see action as the Spanish army under Alba decisively defeated the besieging French forces under the Dauphin of France. On his way back to Castile, Philip received the oath of allegiance of the Aragonese Cortes at Monzón. His political training had begun a year previously under his father, who had found his son studious, grave, and prudent beyond his years, and having decided to train and initiate him in the government of the Spanish kingdoms. The king-emperor's interactions with his son during his stay in Castile convinced him of Philip's precocity in statesmanship, so he determined to leave in his hands the regency of the Spanish kingdoms in 1543. Philip, who had previously been made the Duke of Milan in 1540, began governing the most extensive empire in the world at the young age of sixteen.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Charles left Philip with experienced advisors—notably the secretary Francisco de los Cobos and the general Duke of Alba. Philip was also left with extensive written instructions that emphasised "piety, patience, modesty, and distrust". These principles of Charles were gradually assimilated by his son, who would grow up to become grave, self-possessed and cautious. Personally, Philip spoke softly and had an icy self-mastery; in the words of one of his ministers, "he had a smile that was cut by a sword".


title: Philip II of Spain

text: After living in the Netherlands in the early years of his reign, Philip II decided to return to Castile. Although sometimes described as an absolute monarch, Philip faced many constitutional constraints on his authority, influenced by the growing strength of the bureaucracy. The Spanish Empire was not a single monarchy with one legal system but a federation of separate realms, each jealously guarding its own rights against those of the House of Habsburg. In practice, Philip often found his authority overruled by local assemblies and his word less effective than that of local lords.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip carried several titles as heir to the Spanish kingdoms and empire, including Prince of Asturias. The newest constituent kingdom in the empire was Navarre, a realm invaded by Ferdinand II of Aragon mainly with Castilian troops (1512), and annexed to Castile with an ambiguous status (1513). War across Navarre continued until 1528 (Treaties of Madrid and Cambrai). Charles V proposed to end hostilities with King Henry II of Navarre—the legitimate monarch of Navarre—by marrying his son Philip to the heiress of Navarre, Jeanne III of Navarre. The marriage would provide a dynastic solution to instability in Navarre, making him king of all Navarre and a prince of independent Béarn, as well as lord of a large part of southern France. However, the French nobility under Francis I opposed the arrangement and successfully ended the prospects of marriage between the heirs of Habsburg and Albret in 1541.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In his will, Charles stated his doubts over Navarre and recommended that his son give the kingdom back. Both King Charles and his son Philip II failed to abide by the elective (contractual) nature of the Crown of Navarre and took the kingdom for granted. This sparked mounting tension not only with King Henry II and Queen Jeanne III of Navarre but also with the Parliament of the Spanish Navarre ("Cortes", "The Three States") and the "Diputación" for breach of the realm specific laws (fueros)—violation of the "pactum subjection is" as ratified by Ferdinand. Tensions in Navarre came to a head in 1592 after several years of disagreements over the agenda of the intended parliamentary session.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In November 1592, the Parliament ("Cortes") of Aragón revolted against another breach of the realm-specific laws, so the Attorney General ("Justicia") of the kingdom, Juan de Lanuza, was executed on Philip II's orders, with his secretary Antonio Perez taking exile in France. In Navarre, the major strongholds of the kingdom were garrisoned by troops alien to the kingdom (Castilians) in a conspicuous violation of the local laws, and the Parliament had long been refusing to pledge loyalty to Philip II's son and heir apparent without a proper ceremony. On 20 November 1592 a ghostly Parliament session was called, pushed by Philip II, who had arrived in Pamplona at the head of an unspecified military force, and with one only point on his agenda—attendance to the session was kept blank on the minutes: unlawful appointments of trusted Castilian officials and imposition of his son as the future king of Navarre at the Santa Maria Cathedral. A ceremony was held before the bishop of Pamplona (22 November), but its customary procedure and terms were altered. Protests erupted in Pamplona, but they were quelled.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip II also grappled with the problem of the large Morisco population in the Spanish kingdoms, who had been forcibly converted to Christianity by his predecessors. In 1569, the Morisco Revolt broke out in the southern province of Granada in defiance of attempts to suppress Moorish customs. Philip ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos from Granada and their dispersal to other provinces.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Despite its immense dominions, the Spanish kingdoms had a sparse population that yielded a limited income to the crown (in contrast to France, for example, which was much more heavily populated). Philip faced major difficulties in raising taxes, and the collection was largely farmed out to local lords. He was able to finance his military campaigns only by taxing and exploiting the local resources of his empire. The flow of income from the New World proved vital to his militant foreign policy, but his exchequer several times faced bankruptcy.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Spanish culture flourished during Philip's reign, beginning the "Spanish Golden Age", creating a lasting legacy in literature, music, and the visual arts. One of the notable artists from Philip II's court was Sofonisba Anguissola, who gained fame for her talent and unusual role as a woman artist. She was invited to the court of Madrid in 1559 and was chosen to become an attendant to Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566–1633). Anguissola also became a lady-in-waiting and court painter for the queen, Elizabeth de Valois. During her time as a court painter, Anguissola painted many official portraits of the royal family, a sharp departure from her previous personal portraits.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Charles V had left his son Philip with a debt of about 36 million ducats and an annual deficit of 1 million ducats. This debt caused Philip II to default on loans in 1557, 1560, 1575, and 1596 (including debt to Poland, known as Neapolitan sums). Lenders had no power over the King and could not force him to repay his loans. These defaults were just the beginning of Spain's economic troubles as its kings would default six more times in the next 65 years. Aside from reducing state revenues for overseas expeditions, the domestic policies of Philip II further burdened the Spanish kingdoms and would, in the following century, contribute to its decline, as maintained by some historians.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The Spanish kingdoms were subject to different assemblies: the Cortes in Castile, the assembly in Navarre, and one each for the three regions of Aragon, which preserved traditional rights and laws from the time when they were separate kingdoms. This made the Spanish kingdoms and its possessions difficult to rule, unlike France, which while divided into regional states, had a single Estates-General. The lack of a viable supreme assembly led to power defaulting into Philip II's hands, especially as manager and final arbiter of the constant conflict between different authorities. To deal with the difficulties arising from this situation, authority was administered by local agents appointed by the crown and viceroys carrying out crown instructions. Philip II felt it necessary to be involved in the detail, and he presided over specialised councils for state affairs, finance, war, and the Inquisition.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip II played groups against each other, leading to a system of checks and balances that managed affairs inefficiently, even to the extent of damaging state business, as in the Perez affair. Following a fire in Valladolid in 1561, he resisted calls to move his Court to Lisbon, an act that could have curbed centralisation and bureaucracy domestically as well as relaxed rule in the Empire as a whole. Instead, with the traditional Royal and Primacy seat of Toledo now essentially obsolete, he moved his Court to the Castilian stronghold of Madrid. Except for a brief period under Philip III of Spain, Madrid has remained the capital of Spain. It was around this time that Philip II converted the Royal Alcázar of Madrid into a royal palace; the works, which lasted from 1561 until 1598, were done by tradesmen who came from the Netherlands, Italy, and France.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: King Philip II ruled at a critical turning point in European history toward modernity whereas his father Charles V had been forced to an itinerant rule as a medieval king. He mainly directed state affairs, even when not at Court. Indeed, when his health began failing, he worked from his quarters at the Palace-Monastery-Pantheon of El Escorial that he had built in 1584, a palace built as a monument to Spain's role as a center of the Christian world. But Philip did not enjoy the supremacy that King Louis XIV of France would in the next century, nor was such a rule necessarily possible at his time. The inefficiencies of the Spanish state and the restrictively regulated industry under his rule were common to many contemporary countries. Further, the dispersal of the Moriscos from Granada – motivated by the fear they might support a Muslim invasion – had serious negative effects on the economy, particularly in that region.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's foreign policies were determined by a combination of Catholic fervour and dynastic objectives. He considered himself the chief defender of Catholic Europe, both against the Ottoman Turks and against the forces of the Protestant Reformation. He never relented from his fight against heresy, defending the Catholic faith and limiting freedom of worship within his territories. These territories included his patrimony in the Netherlands, where Protestantism had taken deep root. Following the Revolt of the Netherlands in 1568, Philip waged a campaign against Dutch heresy and secession. It also dragged in the English and the French at times and expanded into the German Rhineland with the Cologne War. This series of conflicts lasted for the rest of his life. Philip's constant involvement in European wars took a significant toll on the treasury and caused economic difficulties for the Crown and even bankruptcies.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1588, the English defeated Philip's Spanish Armada, thwarting his planned invasion of the country to reinstate Catholicism. But war with England continued for the next sixteen years, in a complex series of struggles that included France, Ireland and the main battle zone, the Low Countries. It would not end until all the leading protagonists, including himself, had died. Earlier, however, after several setbacks in his reign and especially that of his father, Philip did achieve a decisive victory against the Turks at Lepanto in 1571, with the allied fleet of the Holy League, which he had put under the command of his illegitimate brother, John of Austria. He also successfully secured his succession to the throne of Portugal.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: With regard to Philip's overseas possessions, in response to the reforms imposed by the Ordenanzas, extensive questionnaires were distributed to every major town and region in New Spain called relaciones geográficas. These surveys helped the Spanish monarchy to govern these overseas conquests more effectively.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Charles V abdicated the throne of Naples to Philip on 25 July 1554, and the young king was invested with the kingdom (officially called "Naples and Sicily") on 2 October by Pope Julius III. The date of Charles' abdication of the throne of Sicily is uncertain, but Philip was invested with this kingdom (officially "Sicily and Jerusalem") on 18 November 1554 by Julius. In 1556, Philip decided to invade the Papal States and temporarily held territory there, perhaps in response to Pope Paul IV's anti-Spanish outlook. According to Philip II, he was doing it for the benefit of the Church.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In a letter to the Princess Dowager of Portugal, Regent of the Spanish kingdoms, dated 22 September 1556, Francisco de Vargas wrote:


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In response to the invasion, Pope Paul IV called for a French military intervention. After minor fights in Lazio and near Rome, Fernando Alvarez de Toledo (Duke of Alba and Viceroy of Naples) met Cardinal Carlo Carafa and signed the Treaty of Cave as a compromise: French and Spanish forces left the Papal states and the Pope declared a neutral position between France and the Spanish kingdoms.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip led the Spanish kingdoms into the final phase of the Italian Wars. A Spanish advance into France from the Low Countries led to their important victory at the Battle of St. Quentin in 1557. The French were defeated again at the Battle of Gravelines in 1558. The resulting Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis in 1559 secured Piedmont to the Duchy of Savoy, and Corsica to the Republic of Genoa. Both Genoa and Savoy were allies of Spain and, although Savoy subsequently declared its neutrality between France and Spain, Genoa remained a crucial financial ally for Philip during his entire reign. The treaty also confirmed Philip's direct control over Milan, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia. Therefore, all of southern Italy was under direct Spanish rule. Sicily and Naples were viceroyalties of the Crown of Castile, while Sardinia was part of the Crown of Aragon. In the north, Milan was a Duchy of the Holy Roman Empire held by Philip. Attached to the Kingdom of Naples, the State of Presidi in Tuscany gave Philip the possibility to monitor maritime traffic to southern Italy. The Council of Italy was set up by Philip in order to co-ordinate his rule over the states of Milan, Naples and Sicily. Ultimately, the treaty ended the 60-year Franco-Habsburg wars for supremacy in Italy. It marked also the beginning of a period of peace between the Pope and Philip, as their European interests converged, although political differences remained and diplomatic contrasts eventually re-emerged.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: By the end of the wars in 1559, Habsburg Spain had been established as the premier power of Europe, to the detriment of France. In France, Henry II was fatally wounded in a joust held during the celebrations of the peace. His death led to the accession of his 15-year-old son Francis II, who in turn soon died. The French monarchy was thrown into turmoil, which increased further with the outbreak of the French Wars of Religion that would last for several decades. The states of Italy were reduced to second-rate powers, and Milan and Naples were annexed directly to Aragon. Mary Tudor's death in 1558 enabled Philip to seal the treaty by marrying Henry II's daughter, Elisabeth of Valois, later giving him a claim to the throne of France on behalf of his daughter by Elisabeth, Isabel Clara Eugenia.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) were primarily fought between French Catholics and Protestants (Huguenots). The conflict involved the factional disputes between the aristocratic houses of France, such as the House of Bourbon and House of Guise (Lorraine), and both sides received assistance from foreign sources. Philip claimed descent from Constantine I and Charlemagne, justifying his intervention in French Wars of Religion and his continuing efforts to depose Henry IV of France.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip signed the Treaty of Vaucelles with Henry II of France in 1556. Based on the terms of the treaty, the territory of Franche-Comté in Burgundy was to be relinquished to Philip. However, the treaty was broken shortly afterwards. France and the Spanish kingdoms waged war in northern France and Italy over the following years. Spanish victories at St. Quentin and Gravelines led to the Treaty of Cateau-Cambresis, in which France recognised Spanish sovereignty over Franche-Comté.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: During the War of the Portuguese Succession, the pretender António fled to France following his defeats and, as Philip's armies had not yet occupied the Azores, he sailed there with a large Anglo-French fleet under Filippo Strozzi, a Florentine exile in the service of France. The naval Battle of Terceira took place on 26 July 1582, in the sea near the Azores, off São Miguel Island, as part of the War of the Portuguese Succession and the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). The Spanish navy defeated the combined Anglo-French fleet that had sailed to preserve control of the Azores under António. The French naval contingent was the largest French force sent overseas before the age of Louis XIV.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The Spanish victory at Terceira was followed by the Battle of the Azores between the Portuguese loyal to the claimant António, supported by French and English troops, and the Spanish-Portuguese forces loyal to Philip commanded by the admiral Don Álvaro de Bazán. Victory in Azores completed the incorporation of Portugal into the Spanish Empire.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip financed the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion. He directly intervened in the final phases of the wars (1589–1598), ordering the Duke of Parma into France in an effort to unseat Henry IV, and perhaps dreaming of placing his favourite daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, on the French throne. Elizabeth of Valois, Philip's third wife and Isabella's mother, had already ceded any claim to the French Crown with her marriage to Philip. However the Parliament of Paris, in power of the Catholic party, gave verdict that Isabella Clara Eugenia was "the legitimate sovereign" of France. Philip's interventions in the fighting – sending the Duke of Parma to end Henry IV's siege of Paris in 1590 and the siege of Rouen in 1592 – contributed in saving the French Catholic Leagues's cause against a Protestant monarchy.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1593, Henry agreed to convert to Catholicism; weary of war, most French Catholics switched to his side against the hardline core of the Catholic League, who were portrayed by Henry's propagandists as puppets of a foreign monarch, Philip. By the end of 1594 certain League members were still working against Henry across the country, but all relied on the support of the Spanish Crown. In January 1595, therefore, Henry officially declared war on the Spanish Crown, to show Catholics that Philip was using religion as a cover for an attack on the French state, and Protestants that he had not become a puppet of the Spanish Crown through his conversion, while hoping to reconquer large parts of northern France from the Franco-Spanish Catholic forces.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: French victory at the Battle of Fontaine-Française in Burgundy, 5 June 1595, marked an end to the Catholic League in France. The French also made some progress during an invasion of the Spanish Netherlands. They captured Ham and massacred the small Spanish garrison, provoking anger among the Spanish ranks. The Spanish launched a concerted offensive that year, taking Doullens, Cambrai, and Le Catelet; at Doullens, they massacred 4,000 of its citizens. On 24 April 1596, the Spanish also conquered Calais. Following the Spanish capture of Amiens in March 1597, the French Crown laid siege to it until it managed to reconquer Amiens from the overstretched Spanish forces in September 1597. Henry then negotiated a peace with the Spanish Crown. The war was only drawn to an official close, however, after the Edict of Nantes, with the Peace of Vervins in May 1598.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The 1598 Treaty of Vervins was largely a restatement of the 1559 Peace of Câteau-Cambrésis and Spanish forces and subsidies were withdrawn; meanwhile, Henry issued the Edict of Nantes, which offered a high degree of religious toleration for French Protestants. The military interventions in France thus failed to oust Henry from the throne or suppress Protestantism in France, and yet they had played a decisive part in helping the French Catholic cause gain the conversion of Henry, ensuring that Catholicism would remain France's official and majority faith – matters of paramount importance for the devoutly Catholic Spanish king.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In the early part of his reign Philip was concerned with the rising power of the Ottoman Empire under Suleiman the Magnificent. Fear of Islamic domination in the Mediterranean caused him to pursue an aggressive foreign policy.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1558, Turkish admiral Piyale Pasha captured the Balearic Islands, especially inflicting great damage on Menorca and enslaving many, while raiding the coasts of the Spanish mainland. Philip appealed to the Pope and other powers in Europe to bring an end to the rising Ottoman threat. Since his father's losses against the Ottomans and against Hayreddin Barbarossa in 1541, the major European sea powers in the Mediterranean, namely the Spanish Crown and Venice, became hesitant in confronting the Ottomans. The myth of "Turkish invincibility" was becoming a popular story, causing fear and panic among the people.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1560, Philip II organised a "Holy League" between the Spanish kingdoms and the Republic of Venice, the Republic of Genoa, the Papal States, the Duchy of Savoy and the Knights of Malta. The joint fleet was assembled at Messina and consisted of 200 ships (60 galleys and 140 other vessels) carrying a total of 30,000 soldiers under the command of Giovanni Andrea Doria, nephew of the famous Genoese admiral Andrea Doria.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: On 12 March 1560, the Holy League captured the island of Djerba, which had a strategic location and could control the sea routes between Algiers and Tripoli. As a response, Suleiman sent an Ottoman fleet of 120 ships under the command of Piyale Pasha, which arrived at Djerba on 9 May 1560. The battle lasted until 14 May 1560, and the forces of Piyale Pasha and Turgut Reis (who joined Piyale Pasha on the third day of the battle) won an overwhelming victory at the Battle of Djerba. The Holy League lost 60 ships (30 galleys) and 20,000 men, and Giovanni Andrea Doria was barely able to escape with a small vessel. The Ottomans retook the Fortress of Djerba, whose Spanish commander, D. Álvaro de Sande, attempted to escape with a ship but was followed and eventually captured by Turgut Reis. In 1565 the Ottomans sent a large expedition to Malta, which laid siege to several forts on the island, taking some of them. The Spanish sent a relief force, which finally drove the Ottoman army out of the island.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The grave threat posed by the increasing Ottoman domination of the Mediterranean was reversed in one of history's most decisive battles, with the destruction of nearly the entire Ottoman fleet at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, by the Holy League under the command of Philip's half brother, Don Juan of Austria. A fleet sent by Philip, again commanded by Don John, reconquered Tunis from the Ottomans in 1573. The Turks soon rebuilt their fleet, and in 1574 Uluç Ali Reis managed to recapture Tunis with a force of 250 galleys and a siege that lasted 40 days. Thousands of Spanish and Italian soldiers became prisoners. Nevertheless, Lepanto marked a permanent reversal in the balance of naval power in the Mediterranean and the end of the threat of Ottoman control. In 1585 a peace treaty was signed with the Ottomans.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: During Philip's reign Spain considered the Pacific Ocean a "mare clausum" – a sea closed to other naval powers. As the only known entrance from the Atlantic, the Strait of Magellan was at times patrolled by fleets sent to prevent entrance of non-Spanish ships. To end navigation by rival powers in the Strait of Magellan Spanish viceroy Francisco de Toledo ordered Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa to explore the strait and found settlements on its shores.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1584, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa founded two colonies in the strait: Nombre de Jesús and Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe. The latter was established north of the strait with 300 settlers. The new colonies suffered from high death rates; likely as consequence executions, brawls, violent encounters with indigenous peoples, and most important, diseases which were rife. Deeper contributing causes for failure of the settlement and death of most settlers may have been the poor mood settlers showed already from the beginning of the settlement. This mood can in part be explained by a series of difficulties the expedition had to go through between the departure from Spain and the arrival to the strait. Philip II's inaction despite repeated pleas by Sarmiento to aid the ailing colony has been attributed to the strain on Spain's resources that resulted from wars with England and Dutch rebels.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1587 English corsairs renamed Ciudad del Rey Don Felipe Puerto del Hambre, or "Port Famine"—most of the settlers had died by cold or starvation. When Sir Thomas Cavendish landed at the site of Rey Don Felipe in 1587, he found only ruins of the settlement. He renamed it Port Famine. The Spanish failure at colonizing the Strait of Magellan made Chiloé Archipelago assume the role of protecting western Patagonia from foreign intrusions. Valdivia and Chiloé acted as sentries, being hubs where the Spanish collected intelligence from all over Patagonia.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's rule in the Seventeen Provinces known collectively as the Netherlands faced many difficulties, leading to open warfare in 1568. He appointed Margaret of Parma as Governor of the Netherlands, when he left the low countries for the Spanish kingdoms in 1559, but forced her to adjust policy to the advice of Cardinal Granvelle, who was greatly disliked in the Netherlands, after he insisted on direct control over events in the Netherlands despite being over two weeks' ride away in Madrid. There was discontent in the Netherlands about Philip's taxation demands and the incessant persecution of Protestants. In 1566, Protestant preachers sparked anti-clerical riots known as the Iconoclast Fury; in response to growing Protestant influence, the army of the Iron Duke (Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba) went on the offensive. In 1568, Alba had Lamoral, Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency, Count of Horn executed in Brussels' central square, further alienating the local aristocracy. There were massacres of civilians in Mechelen, Naarden, Zutphen and Haarlem. In 1571, Alba erected at Antwerp a bronze statue of himself trampling the rebellious Dutch under his horse's hooves, cast from the melted-down cannon looted by the Spanish troops after the Battle of Jemmingen in 1568; it was modelled on medieval images of the Spanish patron Saint James "the Moorslayer" riding down Muslims and caused such outrage that Philip had it removed and destroyed.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1572, a prominent exiled member of the Dutch aristocracy, William of Orange (Prince of Orange), invaded the Netherlands with a Protestant army, but he only succeeded in holding two provinces, Holland and Zeeland. Because of the Spanish repulse in the Siege of Alkmaar (1573) led by his equally brutal son Fadrique, Alba resigned his command, replaced by Luis de Requesens. Alba boasted that he had burned or executed 18,600 persons in the Netherlands, in addition to the far greater number he massacred during the war, many of them women and children; 8,000 persons were burned or hanged in one year, and the total number of Alba's Flemish victims can not have fallen short of 50,000. Under Requesens, the Army of Flanders reached a peak strength of 86,000 in 1574 and retained its battlefield superiority, destroying Louis of Nassau's German mercenary army at the Battle of Mookerheyde on 14 April 1574, killing both him and his brother Henry.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Rampant inflation and the loss of treasure fleets from the New World prevented Philip from paying his soldiers consistently, leading to the so-called Spanish Fury at Antwerp in 1576, where soldiers ran amok through the streets, burning more than 1,000 homes and killing 6,000 citizens. Philip sent in Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, as Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands from 1578 to 1592. Farnese defeated the rebels in 1578 at the Battle of Gembloux, and he captured many rebel towns in the south: Maastricht (1579), Tournai (1581), Oudenaarde (1582), Dunkirk (1583), Bruges (1584), Ghent (1584), and Antwerp (1585).


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The States General of the northern provinces, united in the 1579 Union of Utrecht, passed an Act of Abjuration in 1581 declaring that they no longer recognised Philip as their king. The southern Netherlands (what is now Belgium and Luxembourg) remained under Spanish rule. In 1584, William the Silent was assassinated by Balthasar Gérard, after Philip had offered a reward of 25,000 crowns to anyone who killed him, calling him a "pest on the whole of Christianity and the enemy of the human race". The Dutch forces continued to fight on under Orange's son Maurice of Nassau, who received modest help from the Queen of England in 1585. The Dutch gained an advantage over the Spanish because of their growing economic strength, in contrast to Philip's burgeoning economic troubles. The war came to an end in 1648, when the Dutch Republic was recognised by the Spanish Crown as independent; the eight decades of war came at a massive human cost, with an estimated 600,000 to 700,000 victims, of which 350,000 to 400,000 were civilians killed by disease and what would later be considered war crimes.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In 1578 young king Sebastian of Portugal died at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir without descendants, triggering a succession crisis. His granduncle, the elderly Cardinal Henry, succeeded him as king, but Henry had no descendants either, having taken holy orders. When Henry died two years after Sebastian's disappearance, three grandchildren of Manuel I claimed the throne: Infanta Catarina, Duchess of Braganza; António, Prior of Crato; and Philip II of Spain. António was acclaimed King of Portugal in many cities and towns throughout the country, but members of the Council of Governors of Portugal who had supported Philip escaped to the Spanish kingdoms and declared him to be the legal successor of Henry.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip II then marched into Portugal and defeated Prior António's troops in the Battle of Alcântara. The Portuguese suffered 4,000 killed, wounded, or captured, while the Spanish sustained only 500 casualties. The troops commanded by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo the 3rd Duke of Alba imposed subjection to Philip before entering Lisbon, where he seized an immense treasure. Philip II of Spain assumed the Portuguese throne in September 1580 and was crowned "Philip I" of Portugal in 1581 (recognized as king by the Portuguese Cortes of Tomar) and a near sixty-year personal union under the rule of the Philippine Dynasty began. This gave Philip control of the extensive Portuguese empire. When Philip left for Madrid in 1583, he made his nephew Albert of Austria his viceroy in Lisbon. In Madrid he established a Council of Portugal to advise him on Portuguese affairs, giving prominent positions to Portuguese nobles in the Spanish courts, and allowing Portugal to maintain autonomous law, currency, and government. This is on the well-established pattern of rule by councils.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's father arranged his marriage to 37-year-old Queen Mary I of England, Charles' maternal first cousin. His father ceded the crown of Naples, as well as his claim to the Kingdom of Jerusalem, to him. Their marriage at Winchester Cathedral on 25 July 1554 took place just two days after their first meeting. Philip's view of the affair was entirely political. Lord Chancellor Gardiner and the House of Commons petitioned Mary to consider marrying an Englishman, preferring Edward Courtenay.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Under the terms of the Act for the Marriage of Queen Mary to Philip of Spain, Philip was to enjoy Mary I's titles and honours for as long as their marriage should last. All official documents, including Acts of Parliament, were to be dated with both their names, and Parliament was to be called under the joint authority of the couple. Coins were also to show the heads of both Mary and Philip. The marriage treaty also provided that England would not be obliged to provide military support to Philip's father in any war. The Privy Council instructed that Philip and Mary should be joint signatories of royal documents, and this was enacted by an Act of Parliament, which gave him the title of king and stated that he "shall aid her Highness ... in the happy administration of her Grace's realms and dominions". In other words, Philip was to co-reign with his wife. As the new King of England could not read English, it was ordered that a note of all matters of state should be made in Latin or Spanish.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Acts making it high treason to deny Philip's royal authority were passed in Ireland and England. Philip and Mary appeared on coins together, with a single crown suspended between them as a symbol of joint reign. The Great Seal shows Philip and Mary seated on thrones, holding the crown together. The coat of arms of England was impaled with Philip's to denote their joint reign. During their joint reign, they waged war against France, which resulted in the loss of Calais, England's last remaining possession in France.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's wife had succeeded to the Kingdom of Ireland, but the title of King of Ireland had been created in 1542 by Henry VIII after he was excommunicated, and so it was not recognised by Catholic monarchs. In 1555, Pope Paul IV rectified this by issuing a papal bull recognising Philip and Mary as rightful King and Queen of Ireland. King's County and Philipstown in Ireland were named after Philip as King of Ireland in 1556. The couple's joint royal style after Philip ascended the Spanish throne in 1556 was: "Philip and Mary, by the Grace of God, King and Queen of England, Spain, France, Jerusalem, both the Sicilies and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tirol".


title: Philip II of Spain

text: However, the couple had no children. Mary died in 1558 before the union could revitalise the Roman Catholic Church in England. With her death, Philip lost his rights to the English throne (including the ancient English claims to the French throne) and ceased to be King of England, Ireland and (as claimed by them) France.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's great-grandson, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, married Princess Henrietta of England in 1661; in 1807, the Jacobite claim to the British throne passed to the descendants of their child Anne Marie d'Orléans.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Upon Mary's death, the throne went to Elizabeth I. Philip had no wish to sever his tie with England, and had sent a proposal of marriage to Elizabeth. However, she delayed in answering, and in that time learned Philip was also considering a Valois alliance. Elizabeth I was the Protestant daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. This union was deemed illegitimate by English Catholics, who disputed the validity of both the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and of his subsequent marriage to Boleyn, and hence claimed that Mary, Queen of Scots, the Catholic great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was the rightful monarch.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: For many years Philip maintained peace with England, and even defended Elizabeth from the Pope's threat of excommunication. This was a measure taken to preserve a European balance of power. Ultimately, Elizabeth allied England with the Protestant rebels in the Netherlands. Further, English ships began a policy of piracy against Spanish trade and threatened to plunder the great Spanish treasure ships coming from the New World. English ships went so far as to attack a Spanish port. The last straw for Philip was the Treaty of Nonsuch signed by Elizabeth in 1585 – promising troops and supplies to the rebels. Although it can be argued this English action was the result of Philip's Treaty of Joinville with the Catholic League of France, Philip considered it an act of war by England.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587 ended Philip's hopes of placing a Catholic on the English throne. He turned instead to more direct plans to invade England and return the country to Catholicism. In 1588, he sent a fleet, the Spanish Armada, to rendezvous with the Duke of Parma's army and convey it across the English Channel. However, the operation had little chance of success from the beginning, because of lengthy delays, lack of communication between Philip II and his two commanders and the lack of a deep bay for the fleet. At the point of attack, a storm struck the English Channel, already known for its harsh currents and choppy waters, which devastated large numbers of the Spanish fleet. There was a tightly fought battle against the English Royal Navy; it was by no means a slaughter (only one Spanish ship was sunk), but the Spanish were forced into a retreat, and the overwhelming majority of the Armada was destroyed by the harsh weather. Whilst the English Royal Navy may not have destroyed the Armada at the Battle of Gravelines, they had prevented it from linking up with the army it was supposed to convey across the channel. Thus whilst the English Royal Navy may have only won a slight tactical victory over the Spanish, it had delivered a major strategic one—preventing the invasion of England. Through a week of fighting the Spanish had expended 100,000 cannonballs, but no English ship was seriously damaged. However, over 7,000 English sailors died from disease during the time the Armada was in English waters.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The defeat of the Spanish Armada gave great heart to the Protestant cause across Europe. The storm that smashed the Armada was seen by many of Philip's enemies as a sign of the will of God. Many Spaniards blamed the admiral of the Armada for its failure, but Philip, despite his complaint that he had sent his ships to fight the English, not the elements, was not among them.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: A measure of the character of Philip can be gathered by the fact that he personally saw to it that the wounded men of the Armada were treated and received pensions, and that the families of those who died were compensated for their loss, which was highly unusual for the time.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: While the invasion had been averted, England was unable to take advantage of this success. An attempt to use her newfound advantage at sea with a counter-armada the following year failed disastrously with 40 ships sunk and 15,000 men lost. Likewise, English buccaneering and attempts to seize territories in the Caribbean were defeated by Spain's rebuilt navy and their improved intelligence networks (although Cádiz was destroyed by an Anglo-Dutch force after a failed attempt to seize the treasure fleet). The Habsburgs also struck back with the Dunkirkers, who took an increasing toll on Dutch and English shipping.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Eventually, the Spanish attempted two further Armadas, in October 1596 and October 1597. The 1596 Armada was destroyed in a storm off northern Spain; it had lost as many as 72 of its 126 ships and suffered 3,000 deaths. The 1597 Armada was frustrated by adverse weather as it approached the English coast undetected. This Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) would be fought to a grinding end, but not until both Philip II (d. 1598) and Elizabeth I (d. 1603) were dead. Some of the fighting was done on land in Ireland, France, and the Netherlands, with the English sending expeditionary forces to France and the Netherlands to fight Spain, and Spain attempting to assist Irish rebellions in Ireland.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip II died in El Escorial, near Madrid, on 13 September 1598, of cancer. He was succeeded by his 20-year-old son, Philip III.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Under Philip II, Spain reached the peak of its power. However, in spite of the great and increasing quantities of gold and silver flowing into his coffers from the American mines, the riches of the Portuguese spice trade, and the enthusiastic support of the Habsburg dominions for the Counter-Reformation, he would never succeed in suppressing Protestantism or defeating the Dutch rebellion. Early in his reign, the Dutch might have laid down their weapons if he had desisted in trying to suppress Protestantism, but his devotion to Catholicism would not permit him to do so. He was a devout Catholic and exhibited the typical 16th century disdain for religious heterodoxy; he said, "Before suffering the slightest damage to religion in the service of God, I would lose all of my estates and a hundred lives, if I had them, because I do not wish nor do I desire to be the ruler of heretics."


title: Philip II of Spain

text: As he strove to enforce Catholic orthodoxy through an intensification of the Inquisition, students were barred from studying elsewhere, and books printed by Spaniards outside the kingdom were banned. Even a highly respected churchman like Archbishop Carranza of Toledo was jailed by the Inquisition for 17 years, for publishing ideas that seemed sympathetic in some degree with Protestantism. Such strict enforcement of orthodox belief was successful, and Spain avoided the religiously inspired strife tearing apart other European dominions.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: The School of Salamanca flourished under his reign. Martín de Azpilcueta, highly honoured at Rome by several popes and looked on as an oracle of learning, published his "Manuale sive Enchiridion Confessariorum et Poenitentium" (Rome, 1568), long a classical text in the schools and in ecclesiastical practice.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Francisco Suárez, generally regarded as the greatest scholastic after Thomas Aquinas and regarded during his lifetime as being the greatest living philosopher and theologian, was writing and lecturing, not only in Spain but also in Rome (1580–1585), where Pope Gregory XIII attended the first lecture that he gave. Luis de Molina published his "De liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia" (1588), wherein he put forth the doctrine attempting to reconcile the omniscience of God with human free will that came to be known as Molinism, thereby contributing to what was one of the most important intellectual debates of the time; Molinism became the "de facto" Jesuit doctrine on these matters, and is still advocated today by William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga, among others.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Because Philip II was the most powerful European monarch in an era of war and religious conflict, evaluating both his reign and the man himself has become a controversial historical subject. Even before his death in 1598, his supporters had started presenting him as an archetypical gentleman, full of piety and Christian virtues, whereas his enemies depicted him as a fanatical and despotic monster, responsible for inhuman cruelties and barbarism. This dichotomy, further developed into the so-called Spanish Black Legend and White Legend, was helped by King Philip himself. Philip prohibited any biographical account of his life to be published while he was alive, and he ordered that all his private correspondence be burned shortly before he died. Moreover, Philip did nothing to defend himself after being betrayed by his ambitious secretary Antonio Perez, who published incredible calumnies against his former master; this allowed Perez's tales to spread all around Europe unchallenged. That way, the popular image of the king that survives to today was created on the eve of his death, at a time when many European princes and religious leaders were turned against Spain as a pillar of the Counter-Reformation. This means that many histories depict Philip from deeply prejudiced points of view, usually negative.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: However, some historians classify this anti-Spanish analysis as part of the Black Legend. In a more recent example of popular culture, Philip II's portrayal in "Fire Over England" (1937) is not entirely unsympathetic; he is shown as a very hardworking, intelligent, religious, somewhat paranoid ruler whose prime concern is his country, but who had no understanding of the English, despite his former co-monarchy there.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Even in countries that remained Catholic, primarily France and the Italian states, fear and envy of Spanish success and domination created a wide receptiveness for the worst possible descriptions of Philip II. Although some efforts have been made to separate legend from reality, that task has proved extremely difficult, since many prejudices are rooted in the cultural heritage of European countries. Spanish-speaking historians tend to assess his political and military achievements, sometimes deliberately avoiding issues such as the king's inflexible Catholicism. English-speaking historians tend to show Philip II as a fanatical, despotical, criminal, imperialist monster, minimising his military victories (Battle of Lepanto, Battle of Saint Quentin, etc.) to mere anecdotes, and magnifying his defeats (namely the Armada) even though at the time those defeats did not result in great political or military changes in the balance of power in Europe. Moreover, it has been noted that objectively assessing Philip's reign would necessitate a re-analysis of the reign of his greatest opponents, namely England's Queen Elizabeth I and the Dutch William the Silent, who are popularly regarded as great heroes in their home nations; if Philip II is to be shown to the English or Dutch public in a more favourable light, Elizabeth and William would lose their cold-blooded, fanatical enemy, thus decreasing their own patriotic accomplishments.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: He ended French Valois ambitions in Italy and brought about the Habsburg ascendency in Europe. He secured the Portuguese kingdom and empire. He succeeded in increasing the importation of silver in the face of English, Dutch, and French privateers, overcoming multiple financial crises and consolidating Spain's overseas empire. Although clashes would be ongoing, he ended the major threat posed to Europe by the Ottoman navy.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Historian Geoffrey Parker offers a management-psychological explanation, as summarized by Tonio Andrade and William Reger: One might have expected that Philip—being a dedicated, persistent, and hard-working man, and being the head of Western Europe’s wealthiest and largest empire—would have succeeded in his aims. He didn’t. His endeavors were doomed by his own character, or at least that’s how Parker sees it. Drawing on studies in management science and organizational psychology, Parker argues that a successful manager of a large organization must keep attention on the big picture, must have a good strategy for dealing with copious information, must know how to delegate, and must be flexible. Philip failed on all counts. He was a micromanager who got bogged down in details, refusing to delegate and trying to read every dispatch that came to his desk. He obsessed and dithered, so that by the time his decisions were made and his orders reached the men meant to carry them out, the situation on the ground had changed. Philip was also inflexible, unwilling to abandon ineffective policies. Most pernicious of all was Philip’s tendency toward messianic thinking, a belief that he was doing God’s work and that heaven would support him with miracles.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip continued his father's style of "Majesty" (Latin: "Maiestas"; Spanish: "Majestad") in preference to that of "Highness" ("Celsitudo"; "Alteza"). In diplomatic texts, he continued the use of the title "Most Catholic" ("Rex Catholicissimus"; "Rey Católico") first bestowed by Pope Alexander VI on Ferdinand and Isabella in 1496.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Following the Act of Parliament sanctioning his marriage with Mary, the couple was styled "Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, France, Naples, Jerusalem, and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Princes of Spain and Sicily, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Milan, Burgundy and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol". Upon his inheritance of Spain in 1556, they became "Philip and Mary, by the grace of God King and Queen of England, Spain, France, both the Sicilies, Jerusalem and Ireland, Defenders of the Faith, Archdukes of Austria, Dukes of Burgundy, Milan and Brabant, Counts of Habsburg, Flanders and Tyrol".


title: Philip II of Spain

text: In the 1584 Treaty of Joinville, he was styled "Philip, by the grace of God second of his name, king of Castille, Leon, Aragon, Portugal, Navarre, Naples, Sicily, Jerusalem, Majorca, Sardinia, and the islands, Indies, and "terra firma" of the Ocean Sea; archduke of Austria; duke of Burgundy, Lothier, Brabant, Limbourg, Luxembourg, Guelders, and Milan; Count of Habsburg, Flanders, Artois, and Burgundy; Count Palatine of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, Namur, Drenthe, Zutphen; prince of "Zvuanem"; marquis of the Holy Roman Empire; lord of Frisia, Salland, Mechelen, and of the cities, towns, and lands of Utrecht, Overissel, and Groningen; master of Asia and Africa".


title: Philip II of Spain

text: His coinage typically bore the obverse inscription "" (Latin: "Philip, by the grace of God King of Spain et cetera"), followed by the local title of the mint ("" for Duke of Brabant, "" for Count of Holland, "" for Lord of Overissel, etc.). The reverse would then bear a motto such as "" ("For Peace and Justice") or "" ("The Lord is my helper"). A medal struck in 1583 bore the inscriptions "" ("Philip II, King of Spain and the New World") and "" ("The world is not enough").


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip was married four times and had children with three of his wives. He also had two long-term relationships with Isabel Osorio and Eufrasia de Guzmán.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's first wife was his double first cousin, Maria Manuela, Princess of Portugal. She was a daughter of Philip's maternal uncle, John III of Portugal, and paternal aunt, Catherine of Austria. They were married at Salamanca on 12 November 1543. The marriage produced one son in 1545, after which Maria died four days later due to haemorrhage:


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's second wife was his first cousin once removed, Queen Mary I of England. The marriage, which took place on 25 July 1554 at Winchester Cathedral, was political. By this marriage, Philip became "jure uxoris" King of England and Ireland, although the couple was apart more than together as they ruled their respective countries. The marriage produced no children, although there was a false pregnancy, and Mary died in 1558, ending Philip's reign in England and Ireland.


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's third wife was Elisabeth of Valois, the eldest daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici. The original ceremony was conducted by proxy (the Duke of Alba standing in for Philip) at Notre Dame prior to Elisabeth's departure from France. The actual ceremony was conducted in Guadalajara upon her arrival in Spain. During their marriage (1559–1568) they conceived five daughters and a son, though only two of the girls survived. Elisabeth died a few hours after the loss of her last child. Their children were:


title: Philip II of Spain

text: Philip's fourth and final wife was his niece, Anna of Austria. By contemporary accounts, this was a convivial and satisfactory marriage (1570–1580) for both Philip and Anna. This marriage produced four sons and one daughter. Anna died of heart failure 8 months after giving birth to Maria in 1580.


title: Cape Town

text: Cape Town (; , ) is one of South Africa's three capital cities, serving as the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. It is the legislative capital of the country, the oldest city in the country, and the second largest (after Johannesburg). Colloquially named the "Mother City", it is the largest city of the Western Cape province, and is managed by the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. The other two capitals are Pretoria, the executive capital, located in Gauteng, where the Presidency is based, and Bloemfontein, the judicial capital in the Free State, where the Supreme Court of Appeal is located.


title: Cape Town

text: Cape Town is ranked as a Beta world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. The city is known for its harbour, for its natural setting in the Cape Floristic Region, and for landmarks such as Table Mountain and Cape Point. Cape Town is home to 66% of the Western Cape's population. In 2014, Cape Town was named the best place in the world to visit by both "The New York Times" and "The Daily Telegraph".


title: Cape Town

text: Located on the shore of Table Bay, the City Bowl area of Cape Town, is the oldest urban area in the Western Cape, with a significant cultural heritage. It was founded by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) as a supply station for Dutch ships sailing to East Africa, India, and the Far East. Jan van Riebeeck's arrival on 6 April 1652 established the VOC Cape Colony, the first permanent European settlement in South Africa. Cape Town outgrew its original purpose as the first European outpost at the Castle of Good Hope, becoming the economic and cultural hub of the Cape Colony. Until the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and the development of Johannesburg, Cape Town was the largest city in southern Africa.


title: Cape Town

text: The city has a long coastline on the Atlantic Ocean, which includes False Bay, and extends to the Hottentots Holland mountains in the East. The Table Mountain National Park is within the city boundaries and there are several other nature reserves and marine protected areas within and adjacent to the city, protecting the diverse terrestrial and marine natural environment.