In 1588, the English fleet defeated the mighty Spanish Armada in the sea battle that author Garrett Mattingly refers to as "the focus of the first great international crisis in modern history." Winner of 1960 Pulitzer Prize and a model history as important to the scholar as it is engrossing for the general reader, Mattingly's 1959 book The Armada is the definitive story of that battle and its meaning.
"There is no other historian in the English speaking world who could give us a bird's-eye view of the scene from so many aspects. With his linguistic gifts and cultural sensibilities, Mattingly tells the story not merely from the English or Spanish viewpoints as hitherto; he follows all the contributory streams that ran toward the decisive events in the English Channel in that historic twelve-mont
