Spanish History

God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215 By David Levering Lewis W. W. Norton Hardcover (384 pages) List Price: $29.95 Lowest New Price: $7.49 Lowest Used Price: $12.39 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 21:18 Pacific 3 Jul 2008 More Info) Click Here Product Description: In this panoramic history of Islamic culture in early Europe, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian reexamines what we once thought we knew. At the beginning of the eighth century, the Arabs brought a momentous revolution in power, religion, and culture to Dark Ages Europe. David Levering Lewis's masterful history begins with the fall of the Persian and Roman empires, followed by the rise of the prophet Muhammad and the creation of Muslim Spain. Five centuries of engagement between the Muslim imperium and an emerging Europe followed, from the Muslim conquest of Visigoth Hispania in 711 to Latin Christendom's declaration of unconditional warfare on the Caliphate in 1215. Lewis's narrative, filled with accounts of some of the greatest battles in world history, reveals how cosmopolitan, Muslim al-Andalus flourished—a beacon of cooperation and tolerance between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—while proto-Europe, defining itself in opposition to Islam, made virtues out of hereditary aristocracy, religious intolerance, perpetual war, and slavery. A cautionary tale, God's Crucible provides a new interpretation of world-altering events whose influence remains as current as today's headlines. 8 pages of color illustrations; 4 maps.

Iberia By James A. Michener Fawcett Released: 1984-10-12 Mass Market Paperback (960 pages) List Price: $8.99 Lowest New Price: $4.55 Lowest Used Price: $0.58 Usually ships in 24 hours (As of 21:18 Pacific 3 Jul 2008 More Info) Click Here Product Description: "Massive, beautiful...Unquestionably some of the best writing on Spain...The best that Mr. Michener has ever done on any subject...Stunning...Memorable." THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Here, in the fresh, vivid prose that is James Michener's trademark, is the real Spain as he experiences it. He not only reveals the celebrated Spain of bullfights and warror kings, painters and processions, cathedrals and olive orchards; he also shares the intimate, often hidden Spain he has come to know, where toiling peasants and their honest food, the salt of the shores and the oranges of the inland fields, the congeniality of living souls and the dark weight of history conspire to create a wild, contradictory, passionately beautiful land, the mystery called Iberia.