The Story of Don John of Austria

Don John of Austria: the emperor's bastard raised as a village boy, the victor of Lepanto at twenty-four, the governor of the Netherlands dead at thirty-one. Luis Coloma was a Jesuit and a novelist who worked from the Spanish archives, and his life of Don John was the standard one for fifty years. The account of Lepanto is written from the dispatches of men who were in the galleys. Fifty-nine plates, among them Titian and Turner, trace the galleys, sea battles and portraits of the age, giving the Lepanto dispatches a visual counterpart.