History of Europe and its lands. The European religious wars between German and Spanish rulers. The Reconquista ended Muslim rule in Iberia. By the 1490s a series of oceanic explorations marked the Age of Discovery, establishing direct links with Africa, the Americas, and Asia. Religious wars continued to be fought in Europe, until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. The Spanish crown maintained its hegemony in Europe and was the leading power on the continent until the signing of the Treaty of the Pyrenees, which ended a conflict between Spain and France that had begun during the Thirty Years' War. An unprecedented series of
Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism mechanism, which would subsequently be negotiated as an intergovernmental treaty outside of the EU framework, legitimacy under EU law. The two line amendment to Article 136 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which was approved by the European Council on 16 December 2010, reads: Due to the intergovernmental nature of the permanent lending mechanism, which was named the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the simplified treaty revision procedure could be used for the TFEU amendment as the EU's powers were not being increased. However, the amendment would not fulfill the German demand that the removal of