Kinlight · The House of Habsburg

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

1500 – 1558 · Generation IX · Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1519–1556) · The marriage empire · Spanish Habsburgs

Portrait of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and, as Charles I, king of Spain, was born on 24 February 1500 in the Prinsenhof at Ghent, in Flanders, the eldest son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Castile. His four grandparents gave him an inheritance without parallel in Europe. From Mary of Burgundy came the Netherlands and the Burgundian lands, from the emperor Maximilian I the Austrian Habsburg territories, and from Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile the Spanish crowns, with their Italian kingdoms and a new empire opening up across the Atlantic. His father died in 1506, and Charles was brought up in the Netherlands by his aunt Margaret of Austria, with the theologian Adrian of Utrecht, later Pope Adrian VI, as his tutor.

The crowns came to him quickly. He was declared of age as duke of Burgundy in 1515, and after Ferdinand died in January 1516 he was proclaimed king of Castile and Aragon in Brussels, formally ruling alongside his mother, whose mental illness kept her confined at Tordesillas for the rest of her life. He reached Spain in 1517 with little Castilian and a circle of Burgundian advisers, and when he left again some two and a half years later the resentment he had stirred broke out in the revolt of the comuneros, which his supporters crushed. Meanwhile Maximilian had died, and in 1519 the German electors, courted with money borrowed from the Fugger bank, chose Charles as emperor over Francis I of France. He was crowned king of Germany at Aachen in October 1520.

At the Diet of Worms in 1521 Martin Luther refused to retract his writings, and Charles answered with the Edict of Worms, condemning his teaching and declaring him an outlaw. War with Francis I, fought above all over Italy, began the same year and kept returning for most of the reign. At Pavia in 1525 the imperial army destroyed the French and took Francis prisoner. He signed the Treaty of Madrid in captivity and disowned it once free. In March 1526 Charles married his cousin Isabella of Portugal at the Alcázar of Seville. The following year his unpaid and mutinous troops sacked Rome, but Pope Clement VII made his peace with the emperor and crowned him at Bologna in February 1530, the last time a pope crowned a Holy Roman emperor.

The Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent was the other great adversary. After the Hungarian king fell at Mohács in 1526, Charles’s brother Ferdinand claimed Hungary, and in 1529 the Ottomans besieged Vienna. At sea he took La Goulette and Tunis in 1535, but an expedition against Algiers in 1541 was wrecked by bad weather. In Germany the Lutheran princes presented the Augsburg Confession in 1530 and formed the Schmalkaldic League the next year. Charles finally went to war with them in 1546 and crushed them at Mühlberg in April 1547, yet the compromise he imposed afterwards, the Augsburg Interim, satisfied neither side. In 1552 Maurice of Saxony changed sides and allied with Henry II of France, and the emperor had to flee Innsbruck to avoid capture. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which Ferdinand signed in his name, let each prince choose between Catholicism and Lutheranism for his lands, an outcome Charles had spent his life trying to prevent.

The conquests of Mexico and Peru were carried out in his name, and he set up the Council of the Indies in 1524 and issued the New Laws of 1542 to curb the abuse of Indigenous people. American silver arrived in quantity only late in his reign, however, and his wars rested mainly on the revenues of Castile, Naples and the Low Countries and on credit. He borrowed some 28 million ducats over the reign, with the Fuggers and Welsers of Augsburg among his creditors, and the debts he left weighed on his heirs for decades.

Isabella died on 1 May 1539, and Charles never remarried. His later years were burdened by crippling gout. Between 1554 and 1556 he gave up his realms in stages. Naples went to his son Philip, who married Mary I of England in 1554, the Netherlands followed at a public ceremony in Brussels on 25 October 1555, and Spain and the Indies in January 1556. The imperial title passed to Ferdinand, dividing the Habsburgs into Spanish and Austrian branches. In his farewell speech at Brussels he reckoned up his journeys, among them ten to the Low Countries, nine to Germany and seven each to Spain and Italy. He reached Spain in September 1556 and settled at the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura early in 1557. Taken ill in August 1558 with what modern analysis identifies as malaria, he died there on 21 September. Philip later moved his body to El Escorial, where he lies with Isabella.

Place in the family

  • Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor was a 4× great-grandfather of Maria Theresa.
  • Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor was the second of 6 children of Philip I of Castile and Joanna of Castile recorded in this archive.
  • The archive records 43 of his descendants, across 15 generations.

Images

One of 10 people of The marriage empire (1440–1578) in this archive. The generations in which Habsburg marriages gathered Burgundy, Spain and Bohemia-Hungary into a single inheritance.

One of 7 people of Spanish Habsburgs (1500–1700) in this archive. The Madrid line, from the division of Charles V’s inheritance to the childless Charles II.

Line of descent: Rudolf I of Germany → Albert I of Germany → Albert II, Duke of Austria → Leopold III, Duke of Austria → Ernest, Duke of Austria → Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor → Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor → Philip I of Castile → Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

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Life

  • 1500 — Born
  • 1526 — Married Isabella
  • 1558 — Died

Sources

  1. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor · Wikipedia
  2. Charles V (Holy Roman emperor) · Encyclopaedia Britannica
  3. Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor · World History Encyclopedia

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