Alex Hammon’s Reviews > The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World > Status Update

This army and the ships that carried them had gathered from the vast corner of Charles's empire... Some twenty-six thousand fighting men aboard four hundred ships, carrying perhaps another twenty-five thousand crewmen, converged on this hotbed of Muslim piracy from all over the European Christian world. Treasures robbed from murdered Inca paid for the whole enourmous expedition, blood money begetting yet more blood.