‘Bella gerant alii.’ In 1516, by means of traditional dynastic finagling, the house of Habsburg acquired the thrones of Castile and Aragon, or Spain for short: the most bellicose and spectacularly expanding state in Latin Christendom. Henceforth, it seemed, the Habsburgs would no longer be able to leave war to others.

Since concluding Castile’s civil conflicts in the 1470s, the Spanish monarchs had, by force of arms, reconquered parts of French Catalonia, and added other acquisitions to their realms: southern Navarre, the western Canary Islands, Melilla, much of the Caribbean, and the kingdoms of Granada and Naples. For what came to be known as the Spanish monarchy it was the start of the most sustained period of success – measured by the crude, but decisive, standards of victory in the field and expansion on the frontiers – any Western European state had achieved since the Roman Empire.

The siege played such a dominant role in both medieval and early modern warfare that it is difficult to overstate the significance of the twin revolutions in gunpowder artillery and fortification which together transformed fortress warfare and the face of Europe. The continent was to be marked by chains of new frontier and coastal forts, expanded naval bases, and girdles of earth-filled ramparts and bastions around towns, often sweeping away picturesque medieval walls and towers and replacing them by much lower-profile works. The rash of urban citadels by which so many rulers sought to guarantee their security would be matched by what Parker called the ‘demilitarised zone’ of central France following the Wars of Religion and the Fronde. Ruined fortresses litter the continent. The demolitions following most civil wars, rebellions, or frontier adjustments speak to the importance of fortified places. Whether it was the local power projected by castle or border fort or the major concentration of resources protected by walled towns or major fortresses, fortified places were the main objective of offensive operations.

For all of the obvious importance of warfare in the period when the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) was in power in Iran, relatively little has been written on the topic of the military in this formative phase of Iranian history. Jamil Quzanlu, Vladimir Minorsky, and Laurence Lockhart were the first to address the organisation and development of the army in the Safavid period. Their studies have since been supplemented by the work of Yahya Dhuka, Khanbaba Bayani, Masashi Haneda, Richard Tapper, Willem Floor, Walter Posch, Giorgio Rota, and the present author. Much work remains to be done, though, and what follows is therefore a preliminary survey.

Fighting for a unified national community went hand-in-hand with imagining it. Chapter four turns to the rearguard encounters which enabled the volunteers to do so, focussing on the provincial towns in which they trained and rested. Witnessing village life, encountering locals and reading about them in their trench press convinced them that they were not foreign interlopers in a distant war but adopted members of an extended antifascist family. In this way, peaceful contact helped them to rationalise their place within Spainߣs wartime violence and, by extension, continue contributing towards it on the frontlines. Their commitment to loyalist civilians did not stop at defending them from fascism, but rather extended to fighting for an egalitarian ߢNew Spainߣ free from historical exploitation. This chapter demonstrates how cross-cultural encounters generated opportunities to spread these antifascist messages to new communities, with the Commissariat working hard to initiate, manage and represent encounters in a militarily, and politically, favourable manner.

The women of the loyalist zone were a crucial component of the antifascist imagined community the volunteers believed they were fighting for. Chapter five shows that Spanish women ߝ although largely absent from subsequent accounts of the International Brigades ߝ were a major presence in the volunteersߣ lives, whether in the form of loyalist posters depicting heroic mothers beneath the shadows of German aircraft, news articles highlighting the tireless antifascist work taking place in rearguard factories, or letters from relatives back home encouraging the soldiers to fulfil their masculine duty by continuing to fight the enemy at the gates. Encounters could be even more direct, with many volunteers striking up relationships with young women in villages, finding themselves looked after by Spanish nurses in hospitals and pursuing opportunities for sex in brothels. To understand the origins, reception and impact of these encounters, this chapter investigates the volunteersߣ gendered assumptions about masculinity and femininity at a time of war. In so doing, it argues that encounters with women directly fed into their overlapping identities as men, as soldiers and as antifascists.

Sea power, classically defined as a strategy to control communications, was an essential asset for the creation of European maritime empires, enabling them to secure seaborne trade, open new markets, and acquire territory. It has often been conflated with seapower, a concept developed by the ancient Athenians to distinguish states like their own, whose economy, culture, and identity were enmeshed in the maritime sphere, from continental military powers like Sparta and Persia. In this period Britain, the only seapower Great Power, created an extensive maritime empire outside Europe, one combining colonies of settlement, like Australia, with those of occupation, and informal imperialism based on economic power. While many Continental European powers created maritime empires after 1815, they did so in the knowledge that their possessions would be exposed to British naval power in the event of war, and tended to focus on land and security rather than commerce.