WINNER OF THE SPECIAL CITATION FROM THE PULITZER PRIZE COMMITTEE

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-month...The Armada is a work of art as well as of scholarship...It is so skillfully constructed, it reads like a novel—but an accomplished novel, by one of the best writers.”—New York Times

“In a splendidly entertaining book Professor Mattingly, calling up the resources of a lifetime of scholarship,...presents the true story in the framework of European history and, by a masterly arrangement of his chapters, brings out with clarity the interweaving of diplomacy, strategy, and politics.”—Saturday Review