British Isles but was defeated by storms
and by the skilled English captains who
had the advantage of lighter and more ma-
neuverable ships.
Philip did have success in Portugal,
where after the death of the childless King
Henry, he pressed a claim to the monarchy
through his mother, Isabella of Portugal.
Spanish armies invaded Portugal and the
country was annexed to Spain in 1580.
Spanish colonists built outposts in Florida
and in the Philippines, an archipelago
named for the king. Philip also oversaw
the building of the Escorial, a royal palace
near Madrid, where he spent most of his
time. Although he had raised a splendid
monument to the wealth and power of the
Spanish monarchy, he had emptied Spain’s
treasury with the many foreign wars, and
the expense of the ill-fated Spanish Ar-
mada. Income from the American colonies
dwindled, Philip’s taxes remained a heavy
burden on the people, and farmers suf-
fered a series of droughts and poor har-
vests. After his reign Spain entered a pe-
riod of slow decline from which it would
never completely recover.
SEEALSO: Charles V; Spanish Armada
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni ........
(1463–1494)
Italian scholar and philosopher, whose
writings became the most important
philosophical testaments of Renaissance
humanism. Born into a noble family, the
son of the Count of Mirandola and Con-
cordia, he was a precocious young student
of Latin and Greek, and left home for Bo-
logna at the age of fourteen to study canon
law, the law of the church. He gave up this
coursework and moved to Ferrara, where
he studied philosophy, and then to the
University of Padua, where he studied the
teachings of the ancient Greek thinkers
Plato and Aristotle. In Florence he met
Angelo Poliziano and the monk Girolamo
Savonarola, who would later establish a
puritanical dictatorship over the city. In
1485 Pico journeyed to Paris, where he
took part in lively scholarly debates over
the nature of philosophy and the teachings
of the medieval Scholastics. After return-
ing to Italy, he was soon embroiled in a
scandal after abducting the wife of a mem-
ber of the Medici clan, the powerful ruling
house of Florence. He was arrested and
thrown into prison, but eventually saved
from execution by Lorenzo de’ Medici,
whose friendship and patronage he had
won in Florence.
Pico’s studies in Italy and Paris had led
him to the conclusion that it was possible
to discover the underlying agreements of
Plato, Aristotle, and all the medieval reli-
gious philosophers—Christian, Muslim,
and Jewish—and bring these competing
schools of thought into harmony. He
wroteoutaseriesof900 Conclusions,
which was published in 1486 and which
he intended to defend in a grand conclave
of the best scholars of his day.
As an introduction to the900 Conclu-
sions, Pico wrote his famous essayOration
on the Dignity of Man. But his plans for a
council of scholars, before which he would
defend the points of his work, were
blocked on the orders of Pope Innocent
VIII, who appointed a church council that
studied and rejected most of Pico’s argu-
ments. When Pico responded with his
Apology, which in large part defended his
original arguments, the pope responded
by denouncing his entire body of work.
Sensing danger in the church’s formal dis-
approval of his thinking, and the pope’s
accusations of heresy, Pico fled Italy for
Paris, but was arrested in France on the
orders of the pope’s representatives and
imprisoned in the fortress of Vincennes,Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni