The Spanish Armada and the battle of Lepanto loom large in a remarkable period of international history shaped to a considerable extent by the deployment of sea power. Yet between 1581 and 1583, France also conducted a large-scale naval operation at great distance. A series of expeditions to the Azores reached a climax with the defeat in battle of a French fleet of sixty ships off the island of São Miguel in July 1582. Acting under the authority of Catherine de Medici and in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese throne, the commander Philippe Strozzi had not only led the most ambitious oceanic operation in French history up to that date and a bid to extend France's overseas empire but a serious challenge to Philip II's union of the Iberian crowns. Yet this was more than just a puzzling anomaly in France's foreign policy. It was also an act of royal authority and the pursuit of reputation and status by the queen mother that was entirely consistent with the domestic priorities of the crown in the context of the Wars of Religion.

On 26 April 1915 the governments of Great Britain, France, and Russia signed a treaty with the Italian Government settling the terms for Italy's entrance into the war on the allied side. The Treaty of London was the result of hard bargaining, particularly because of extensive Italian claims in the Adriatic which were resisted by the Russian government, and which would leave a difficult legacy for the postwar period. Nevertheless, the evolution of Italy from membership in a rival alliance system and potential foe to an active ally was completed after less than a year of neutrality. Italy's defection from the Triple Alliance was hardly a surprise to anyone with the slightest idea of Austro-Italian relations, and for over a decade before the outbreak of the war the strength of her commitment to Austria and Germany had been diluted by secret agreements with France.In Austria-Hungary leading naval and military officials took little trouble to conceal their mistrust; while unpopular measures by Habsburg officials could be counted upon to produce hostile demonstrations before the Austro-Hungarian embassy or consulates in Italy. Nevertheless, the French, although well aware of Austro-Italian friction, were never really sure of their southern neighbour and at times exhibited a suspicion of Italy which rivalled that of the Austrians. France and Italy were in a sense Mediterranean rivals and the development of the Italian fleet was followed closely by the French naval staff.

Histories of Chartism have tended to emphasize the hegemony of respectability within the movement, and with histories of the popular press have seen the 1830s as a decisive break with older radical traditions of sexual libertarianism, bawdy political culture, and a satirical, sometimes obscene print culture. However, the basis of this position is a partial reading of the evidence. Work on London Chartists has emphasized their moralistic politics and publications at the expense of their rich populist and satirical press and the clear survival of piracy and romantic literature well into the Chartist period. The neglect of an important early leader, Henry Vincent, has meant the bawdy, sensual, and sometimes scatological letters he sent to his cousin in London have been overlooked as a source on the moral life of the Chartist generation. This article will address this by studying Vincent's letters in the context of London's populist press, particularly the work of his friends John Cleave and Henry Hetherington. Vincent's humour and attitude towards sexuality clearly reflect a broader tendency in London radicalism, while his own efforts as a newspaper editor in Bath indicate that acerbic humour was an important aspect not just of Chartism's political critique, but of its appeal to the provincial working class.

Both the Entente and the Central Powers interpreted the ascension of Benedict XV to the papal throne in the fall of 1914 as signalling a reinvigoration of Vatican foreign policy. Indeed there was little reason to expect that Giacomo Delia Chiesa, elected successor to Pius X on the morning of 3 September, would be passive in a diplomatic sense. As Rennell Rodd, the British ambassador to the Italian court remarked a few days after Benedict's election, the new Pontiff's first acts gave promise of prefacing a ‘vigorous and interesting reign.’.

The sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca are well known for their sophisticated reflections on the Spanish conquest of the New World. But the nature of their responses seems far from clear and is subject to historiographical debate. Recent studies from the discipline of intellectual history suggest that the Salmantine theologians challenged the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Americas. Scholars associated with the field of post-colonial studies, on the other hand, forcefully stress their entanglement in Spain's imperial venture overseas. This article, however, argues that these seemingly irreconcilable approaches are not in fact mutually exclusive. It shifts our attention to the sorely neglected ius praedicandi, the right to preach the gospel, which served to translate the Spanish theologians’ deeply rooted belief in the hegemonic truth of the Christian faith into a discourse of otherwise ‘secular’ natural rights. In adopting this novel lens, the article makes a case for assessing the language of the university theologians in its own terms while simultaneously exposing the support of Salamanca for Spain's imperial venture.

During the eighteen months which immediately preceded the general election of 1906 many workers in Britain were adversely affected by the generally stagnant state of the economy and there was a considerable amount of agitation on behalf of the unemployed, particularly in 1905. Nevertheless, the economy began to improve in November of that year and unemployment as such did not play a very important part in the election, although the Labour candidates frequently gave it a leading place in their manifestos, putting forward a great variety of remedies. These ranged from demands for the recognition of the ‘right to work’ and the eight-hour day to pleas for the creation of a labour department with ministerial status. When Unionist candidates mentioned unemployment it was usually in the wider context of tariff reform, while Liberals who bothered to refer to the subject at all generally contented themselves with a passing reference to the need to approach the problem by reforming the land laws.

Although the field of peasant and rural studies has done much to redeem the reputation of peasants in general, historians generally continue to consider the Italian rural population in the early nineteenth century largely extraneous to the story of national unification. However, police reports, court records, and chroniclers from Bologna provide descriptions of collective action that suggest a complex pattern of interaction with both local authorities and the shifting political context. While it remains true that with few exceptions rural communities had little to do with the Risorgimento directly, already during the Revolutionary and Restoration eras they engaged in collective action that reflected independent initiative in engaging with various types of authority rather than political ignorance or blind adherence to religion.

In 1581 Antoinette de La Marck, the devout duchesse de Montmorency made a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Virgin at Montserrat in Catalonia. The next year her husband Henri de Montmorency, the governor of Languedoc, corresponded with the viceroy of Catalonia about the problem of banditry which was rife on both sides of the frontier. In 1583, Montmorency's servant carried letters to Charles Emmanuel, duke of Savoy, hidden in the soles of his shoes. During the festivities for the wedding of Charles Emmanuel to the infanta Catalina in 1585, Giuseppe Lercaro, Montmorency's Genoese-born intendant desfinances, spent some ten days in Barcelona concealed in the lodgings of Savoy's ambassador and had several clandestine interviews with both the duke and his new father-in-law Philip II. In 1588 Philip offered 100,000 francs towards the dowry of Montmorency's daughter Charlotte, provided that she married the son of the due de Guise and thus reconciled the two families whose rivalry had dominated the French political scene since the 1540s. These incidents, unremarkable as they may individually appear, formed part of the negotiations between Henri due de Montmorency and Philip II which, in notable contrast to those of the Spanish king with the Guise family, have been little studied by historians. Consequently, Montmorency's reputation now is generally that of a politique and patriot. This paper offers a rather different appraisal of him.

The signing of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini and Pius XI not only changed the status of the Vatican, it also transformed its financial position overnight. After decades of financial difficulty, the Vatican acquired a substantial capital endowment, the investment of which the pope entrusted to Bernardino Nogara. But as the diary of Nogara reveals, as a result of the pope's ambitious spending plans, the lack of a proper system of financial control in the Vatican, and, above all, the impact of the Wall Street crash, within less than two years the Vatican was losing money hand over fist. This article explains how Nogara reconstructed the finances of the Vatican in the wake of this disaster, and explores the links between the Vatican's first experience of playing the international capital markets and the pope's notions of social and economic ethics.