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'Hilarious, heartbreaking and utterly extraordinary.' Sunday Times 'Superbly entertaining' Financial Times 'Baroque, page-turning and often grimly funny' Tom Holland

The bizarre and little known story of how a hubristic Archduke became the puppet Emperor of Mexico - with tragic results and pivotal historical consequences for Europe and America.

'One of the most monstrous enterprises in the annals of international history,' said Karl Marx. ' A madness without parallel since Don Quixote,' said a future French president.

This is history's judgement on the events surrounding the ill-fated reign of Maximilian of Mexico, the young Austrian archduke who in 1864 crossed the Atlantic to assume a faraway throne.

He had been convinced to do so by a duplicitous Napoleon III. Keen to spread his own interests abroad, the French emperor promised Maximilian a hero's welcome, which he would ensure with his own mighty military support. Instead, Maximilian walked into a bloody guerrilla war - and with a headful of impractical ideals and a penchant for pomp and butterflies, the so-called new emperor was singularly unequipped for the task.

The ensuing saga would feature the great world leaders of the day, popes, bandits and queens; intrigue, conspiracy and cut-throat statecraft, as Mexico became the pivotal battleground in the global balance of power, between Old Europe and the burgeoning force of the New World: American imperialism.

The Last Emperor of Mexico is the vivid history of this barely known, barely believable episode - a bloody tragedy of operatic proportions, and a vital debacle, the effects of which would be felt into the twentieth century and beyond.