Charles V

Charles V the ruler of the Spanish kingdoms from 1516 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1519, who governed the largest concentration of territories ever held by a single European monarch. His dominions stretched from the Netherlands to Spain, Italy, the Americas and the Philippines, and his reign shaped the early modern conflict between Catholic and Protestant Europe.

Inheritance and Accession

Charles was born in 1500 at Ghent, the son of Philip the Handsome of Habsburg and Joanna of Castile, and he inherited widely from both sides of his family. From his father he received the Burgundian lands and the Netherlands; from his mother, through his maternal grandparents Ferdinand and Isabella, he came to the crowns of Castile, Aragon, Naples and Sicily and the claims of Spain in the New World.

Educated in the Netherlands under his aunt Margaret of Austria, he spoke French and Dutch more easily than Spanish, and he arrived in Spain in 1517 as a foreign prince. His election as Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, funded by the immense loans of the Fugger bankers, made him the foremost sovereign of Christendom and set the stage for a lifelong rivalry with the French crown.

His empire was never a single unified state but a composite of many kingdoms and lordships, each with its own laws and institutions. Charles travelled constantly, ruling from Brussels, Saragossa, Augsburg and elsewhere, and his personal motto, plus ultra, declared his aspiration to go beyond the limits of the world.

Reign in Spain and the New World

The early years in Spain were troubled by the revolt of the Comuneros, townsmen and nobles who resisted his foreign officials and heavy taxation. The rising was defeated in 1521, and thereafter Charles ruled his Spanish kingdoms with growing skill, drawing on the advice of administrators such as his chancellor Mercurino Gattinara and the secretary Francisco de los Cobos.

The conquest of the Americas was carried out in his name. Hernan Cortes overthrew the Aztec empire and Francisco Pizarro destroyed that of the Inca, and Charles appointed viceroys and audiencias to govern the new territories. Silver from Potosi and Mexico poured into his treasury, financing his European wars, while the Laws of the Indies sought to regulate the treatment of the indigenous peoples.

He sought to defend the natives against the worst abuses, prompted by the protests of missionaries such as Bartolome de Las Casas. In 1550 he suspended the conquests for a time and convened the debate of Valladolid on the justice of Spanish dominion, a discussion that left opponents and defenders of colonial rule divided and has echoed ever since.

Wars against France and the Ottoman Empire

For most of his reign Charles was at war with the kings of France, first Francis I and then Henry II, who feared the encirclement of their kingdom by Habsburg possessions. The struggle ranged across Italy, the Netherlands and the Rhineland. The imperial troops defeated and captured Francis at Pavia in 1525, and in 1527 a mutinous army sacked Rome, forcing the pope to come to terms with the emperor.

On his eastern flank Charles confronted the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, whose armies advanced into Hungary and besieged Vienna in 1529. The emperor defended the Austrian inheritance, which he entrusted to his brother Ferdinand, and his naval forces checked Ottoman power in the Mediterranean at Tunis and elsewhere. The contest between the two empires set the frontier between Christian and Muslim Europe.

His Mediterranean campaign against the corsair states and the sultan consumed enormous resources, and the diversion of his armies to face the Turks repeatedly allowed the kings of France to recover in Italy. The sheer number of his enemies, France, the Ottomans and the Protestant princes within the empire, is the central problem of his reign.

The Reformation and the Imperial Diet

Charles inherited a religious crisis as well as a political one. Martin Luther's protest against the sale of indulgences grew into a movement that divided the empire, and at the Diet of Worms in 1521 the emperor condemned Luther as an outlaw, though he could not arrest him and the reformer was sheltered by the Saxon princes. The edict was never effectively enforced.

Absorbed by war with France and the Turks, Charles was unable to suppress the new faith, which spread among the princes and cities of Germany and beyond. He negotiated repeatedly, promising a general council and offering temporary toleration. In 1546 he defeated the Protestant Schmalkaldic League in battle, but his attempt to impose a religious settlement failed when the princes rose again.

In 1555, weary and in poor health, he presided over the Peace of Augsburg, which recognised the coexistence of Catholic and Lutheran states within the empire and left each prince to determine the religion of his own lands. It was a temporary answer that postponed for generations the great confessional conflict of the following century.

Abdication, Character and Legacy

In 1555 and 1556 Charles abdicated in stages, dividing his inheritance between his son Philip II, who received Spain, the Netherlands, Italy and the Americas, and his brother Ferdinand, who took the imperial title and the Austrian lands. He retired to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, where he died in 1558, having handed over a burden too large for any single person to carry.

Contemporaries noted his grave and deliberate manner, his weak chin and his taste for music and mechanical devices, and his deep sense of duty toward the Catholic faith. He saw himself as the defender of Christendom against heresy and the infidel, and his failures in that defence troubled him in his last years. He never learned to write and he never mastered a single language perfectly.

His reign marked the transition from the medieval ideal of a united Christian empire to the modern state system of competing sovereign powers. Through his division of his inheritance he created the Spanish and Austrian branches of the House of Habsburg, whose rivalry and marriage alliances shaped European politics for centuries. His empire proved to be the last of its kind.

See also

• Holy Roman Empire
• Reformation
• Peace of Augsburg
• Habsburg dynasty