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through his diplomacy became the first king of Sardinia-Piedmont and thus established the foundation for the future Italian national state

When the War of the Grand Alliance broke out, Victor Amadeus in 1690 joined the Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs against Louis

The French defeat at Turin (1706) secured his position in Italy; and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave him the royal title as king of Sicily

the ruling house of Italy from 1861 to 1946

acquired considerable territory in the western Alps where France, Italy, and Switzerland now converge

raised to ducal status within the Holy Roman Empire, and in the 18th century it attained the royal title (first of the kingdom of Sicily, then of Sardinia). Having contributed to the movement for Italian unification, the family became the ruling house of Italy in the mid-19th century and remained so until overthrown with the establishment of the Italian Republic in 1946

Spain thus established complete hegemony over all the Italian states except Venice, which alone maintained its independence.

Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia (which had all been dependencies of Aragon), as well as Milan, came under direct Spanish rule and owed their allegiance to the sovereign according to their own laws and traditions.

From the beginning of Philip II’s reign, Italian affairs, which had originally been administered by the Council of Aragon, were coordinated by a Council of Italy in Madrid. At this council, the three major states—Naples, Sicily, and Milan—were each represented by two regents, one Castilian and one native. Sardinia remained a dependency of Aragon.

Peter III’s conquest of Sicily, where he reigned as Peter I, was the second major step in the Mediterranean expansion of Catalonia, marking the beginning of a long international struggle with serious domestic complications.

Alfonso III (1285–91), who inherited the mainland dominions, and his younger brother James, who received Sicily, valiantly tried to overcome the formidable opposition of the pope, the king of France, and the house of Plantagenet (Anjou). Alfonso seized Majorca because his uncle James had aided the French during their Crusade against Aragon. Once again the Aragonese nobles challenged the king, forcing him in 1287 to confirm his father’s General Privilege and to permit the nobles to control the appointment of certain royal councillors. After succeeding his brother as king of Aragon, James II (1291–1327) tried to secure an unchallenged title to that kingdom by yielding his rights to Sicily in 1295 and returning Majorca to his uncle James.

After securing a favourable alteration of his frontier with Murcia, James II occupied Sardinia in 1325. As Genoa disputed Aragonese rights there, his successors, Alfonso IV (1327–36) and Peter IV (the Ceremonious; 1336–87), were forced to wage a series of wars. Accusing his cousin, the king of Majorca, of disloyalty, Peter IV annexed Majorca permanently to the Crown of Aragon in 1343. In 1347 Peter provoked a constitutional crisis by naming his daughter as heir to the throne rather than his brother, the count of Urgel, who argued that women were excluded from the succession.

royal German family

of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century

The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg

statesman of the Carignan line of the House of Savoy, who, in the service of the Austrian Holy Roman emperor, made his name as one of the greatest soldiers of his generation

against the Turks in central Europe and the Balkans (1683–88, 1697, 1715–18) and against France in the War of the Grand Alliance (1689–97) and in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14)

His paternal ancestors were the dukes of Savoy, who later became kings of Sardinia, Sicily, and eventually of all Italy, while on his mother’s side the family included not only Roman patricians

king of Aragon from January 1336, son of Alfonso IV.

Peter had to contend with revolt in Sardinia throughout his reign; but he succeeded, by political and military means, in preparing the future reunion of Sicily to the Aragonese crown and was recognized by the Catalan Almogávares as duke of Athens and Neopatras in 1380.

Although the mercenaries succeeded in briefly installing Henry of Trastámara on the Castilian throne, Henry failed to honour any of his promises to Peter, and after 1369 Charles V of France took no trouble to conceal that he preferred his alliance with Castile to that with Aragon. As a result, Peter now pursued a complicatedly neutral approach to the Hundred Years’ War, with some bias in favour of the English.

When Justinian came to the throne, his troops were fighting on the Euphrates River against the armies of the Persian king

the Treaty of Eternal Peace was ratified in 532. The treaty was on the whole favourable to the Byzantines, who lost no territory and whose suzerainty over the key district of Lazica (Colchis, in Asia Minor) was recognized by Persia.

In Italy, the mother province of the Roman Empire in which the older capital city (Rome) was situated, Justinian found a situation similar to that in North Africa and particularly favourable to his ambitions.

The new edition, co-written with Eugenio F. Biagini, Reader in Modern British and European History at the University of Cambridge, covers a much wider range of relevant issues for the unification of Italy. New chapters have been devoted to questions such as the Italian language and the role of women in the process of unification, as well as to a series of relevant issues after 1861, such as the Venetian situation from 1862, and the problem of brigandage in the south once the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had been annexed by the Kingdom of Sardinia. This much enforces the original project, as a complete unification of Italy had, of course, not yet been reached in 1861. Moreover, Beales's original chapters have been completely overhauled to include recent historical scholarship on the subject. The original set-up of the Historical Problems series has been maintained in this new edition. All the original primary material is reprinted, while the new topics are illustrated by further documents, which now grow from sixteen to twenty-three. A brief chronology of events between 1748 and 1876 has also been added.

the very unification of Italy, forged through the annexation of several kingdoms and states, had to deal with the Pontifical States ruled by the Pope. The new Kingdom of Italy would have been meaningless without those lands, which occupied a large part of the central Italian peninsula, and without their capital, Rome.

But the inclusion of the Papal States into the new Italy was painful and not easy. When the Italian troops led by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia entered in Rome in 1870, Pope Pius IX refused to recognize the loss of his territories and the demise of his temporal power and declared himself a prisoner in the Vatican.

The Spanish Inquisition is commonly associated with torture, cruelty and oppression

The concept of inquisitions to root out religious heretics was not novel when, in 1478, Pope Sixtus IV authorised the creation of a Spanish inquisition

These newly united kingdoms, under joint monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, decided to set up such a body

War of the Polish Succession, (1733–38), general European conflict waged ostensibly to determine the successor of the king of Poland, Augustus II the Strong

The war resulted mainly in a redistribution of Italian territory and an increase in Russian influence over Polish affairs

After Augustus died (Feb. 1, 1733), Austria and Russia supported the election of his son Frederick Augustus II of Saxony as king of Poland

Philip II was a loyal son of the Catholic Church

Philip's sense of religious mission crucially shaped foreign and imperial policy

It was the 1590s before the Inquisition managed to extend its control over printed materials beyond Castile to the rest of Spain, and any resourceful person with a taste for suspect literature could obtain prohibited texts from Italy, France, and the Low Countries

In July 1830, the ‘bourgeois revolution’ in France ousted Charles X and the Second Bourbon Restoration, and a new era in Anglo-French relations ensued. The terms set down at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 following Napoleon’s defeat were now considered academic. Britain, as victor against France, had been obliged to uphold the articles of the various treaties, designed, as one of them stated, for the purpose of ‘maintaining the order of things re-established in France’. The quasi-constitutional Orleans monarchy of Charles X’s successor Louis-Philippe was therefore recognised by Britain

In a diplomatic dispatch of 1832, Lord Granville, British ambassador in Paris, noted that Perier, then president of the Council, believed that ‘the welfare of France and England and the peace of Europe depended upon an intimate alliance and concert between the two governments’

By 1848, once more heading foreign affairs (June 1846 to December 1851), the ‘Jupiter Anglicanus of the Foreign Office’ allowed Anglo-French relations to sink to a level not witnessed since 1814. He had orchestrated the creation of Belgium in 1831, a supposedly neutral country but one which would naturally  be pro-British and often anti-French

Pedro de Toledo (viceroy 1532–53) reorganized the Kingdom of Naples and placed it firmly within the Spanish monarchical orbit dominated by Castile.

The most important ruling body in the kingdom was the Collateral Council, comprising five regents presided over by the viceroy, with a judicial council and a financial council exercising their respective competencies at its side.

Sicily’s administration had existed apart from that of the mainland since 1282, when the island had revolted against Angevin rule and come under the Aragonese crown. In the 16th century Sicily remained the cornerstone of the Spanish Mediterranean policy against the Ottomans,

Valter Longo, a nutrition-obsessed Italian Ph.D. student, wrestled with a lifelong addiction to longevity.

“For studying aging, Italy is just incredible,

Italy has one of the world’s oldest populations, including multiple pockets of centenarians who tantalize researchers searching for the fountain of youth. “It’s nirvana.”