History · 1519 to 1558
The empire that could not be governed
Forty years of holding together something too large to hold
Charles V ruled Spain, the Low Countries, Austria, Naples, Sicily, Milan and the Americas, and was elected head of the Holy Roman Empire on top of all of it. He spent his reign travelling between these places because there was no other way to govern them. Then he did the thing emperors do not do: he stopped.
An election that was bought
The imperial crown was elective, and in 1519 there were two serious candidates: Charles and Francis I of France. Both borrowed enormously to pay the seven electors. Charles borrowed more — something over 850,000 florins, most of it from the Fugger bank of Augsburg — and won.
He was never free of that debt, or of the men who held it, and the pattern held for the rest of his reign: American silver arrived, and was spent before it landed.
Three problems, none of them soluble
France. Valois and Habsburg fought on and off for the whole reign, chiefly over Italy. Charles’s troops captured Francis I at Pavia in 1525; unpaid imperial soldiers sacked Rome in 1527, to Charles’s public horror and lasting discredit.
The Reformation. Charles presided at Worms in 1521, heard Luther, and outlawed him. It changed nothing. The Empire divided along confessional lines and stayed divided, and in 1555 the Peace of Augsburg conceded the principle he had spent thirty years resisting: that a prince decided the religion of his own territory.
The Ottomans. Suleiman took Belgrade in 1521, destroyed the Hungarian army at Mohács in 1526 and besieged Vienna in 1529. The eastern frontier absorbed men and money for the rest of the century and beyond.
Historian’s note
These were wars of religion as much as of state, and every one of them killed people who had no part in choosing them. This site records what happened and grieves all of the dead. It does not keep score.
The abdication
Between October 1555 and January 1556, in Brussels, Charles gave everything away in pieces. The Low Countries and Spain, with Naples, Sicily, Milan and the Indies, went to his son Philip II. The Austrian lands, and in due course the imperial title, went to his brother Ferdinand I.
This is the moment the house becomes two houses. A Spanish line and an Austrian line, related, allied, intermarried, and from that day distinct. Everything this site is chiefly about — the Netherlands, John of Austria, the five quiet centuries — runs down the Spanish and Burgundian side of that division.
Charles retired to a small house built against the monastery church at Yuste, in Extremadura, with his books, his clocks and a great deal of pain from gout. He died there on 21 September 1558, aged fifty-eight.
- Charles V
The man rather than the reign: how he lived, what he ate, and why he gave it up. - Spain, the Netherlands and the parting
1556 to 1700: what became of the half of the house this family descends from. - Was Charles V the first European?
A question worth asking carefully, and answering carefully.
Sources
- Geoffrey Parker, Emperor: A New Life of Charles V (Yale University Press, 2019).
- Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V, trans. C. V. Wedgwood (Jonathan Cape, 1939).
- Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (Allen Lane, 2016), on the Peace of Augsburg.
- Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), chapters 9–11.