SON OF THE ALHAMBRA

Last of the Spanish Renaissance men, Diego Hurtado de Mendoza (15041575) was a master of the humanist disciplines as well as an act ive diplomat whose correspondence provides insight into the workings of power politics in the first post-Machiavellian decades.This account of Mendoza's diplomatic career is a living commentary on the mid-sixteenth century, the time of the Spanish Inquisition and the Reformation, with its upheavals in the European balance of power.