On the eve of the 400th anniversary of Philip II’s death James Casey rejects the traditional portrayal of the Spanish ruler as a cruel despot and argues his achievements were more the result of an extraordinary sense of duty fully in tune with the hopes and aspirations of his people. Next year there occurs the anniversary of the death of one of the most controversial rulers in European history: Philip, king of Spain from 1556 to 1598. Ever since William of Orange’s Apology of 1580, he has been portrayed as a monster of calculating cruelty — an image reinforced by Verdi’s great opera Don Carlos. He had the misfortune to live at a time of unparalleled ideological warfare in Europe, between the Protestant North and the Catholic South, and, as one of the protagonists in the fray, was converted into a figure of hate by the nascent forces of printed propaganda. A classic work of modern historiography — Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) — pays tribute to the king who more than any other left his stamp on that age, but reminds us that rulers were themselves constrained by long-termm processes of history and geography.