The main reason for this is that inheritance and luck created a monarch whose territories and ambitions affected every part of Europe, and large parts of Asia and the Americas too. This man was the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

His four inheritances:

• In his father's line Charles V was a Habsburg --  a south German family that had got a family member elected  emperor in the family in the thirteenth century and used that piece of luck to acquire Austria and a number of other principalities in central Europe.  Since 1438, all the emperors had been Habsburgs.   Maxmillian had bequeathed Charles with Austria, a claim to Bohemia and possibly Hungary, and (if he could be elected) the emperorship.
• Also, Charles's grandfather Maximillian got the matrimonial catch of his generation when he married Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy and his only heir.  So Mary, Charles' paternal grandmother, bequeathed him with the richest part of NW Europe, the industrial and commercial Low Countries (the modern Belgium, Netherlands, and more).

• Through Juana, Charles inherited from his maternal grandfather, Ferdinand, Aragon and Aragon's strong position in southern Italy and the Mediterranean.
• From Isabella, his maternal grandmother, Charles got Castile and its claim to the whole New World -- where an unimaginable empire was about to be built.

His first challenge was to secure the title of Holy Roman Empire.

Since the emperorship was still an elective honor, it was not a sure thing.  In fact, the two greatest monarchs of Europe, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France, were also young and ambitious and decided to compete with Charles.

All three threw vast amounts of money at  the seven princes and bishops of Germany who had the right to chose the emperor.
Charles had to muster all his resources. In the end, he got the imperial crown, but only at the cost of 850,000 florins, the cost of a major war; half a million of those florins were borrowed from Jakob Fugger, whom we've met before [K & M, 176; Hale, 233].

Despite the debts he assumed, Charles' partisans took the victory a sign of great things to come. His grand-chancellor, a man named Gattinara, told the new emperor "God has set you on the path towards world monarchy [K & M, 176]." But the election was also the beginning of a personal rivalry with King Francis that would last for years.

In the next year, Charles faced a greater challenge, a make or break situation. His new realm of Castile rose in revolt. The dissatisfaction with Charles was simple:  he was a foreigner, raised in Brussels, and dependent on counsellors and officials from the Burgundian lands. In 1520, he had asked the Castilian Cortes, or assembly, for money to go to Germany, which the Castilians feared would only be the first of many such requests. As soon as he left the country, the towns, which as important taxpayers had a key role in Castilian politics, rose in revolt.

Had the revolt succeeded, had the rebels wrung concessions from the new king, Charles would have been severely weakened, and not just in Castile. Fortunately for him, the great nobles of Castile, after some months of neutrality, decided that the towns' claims were more dangerous to their interests than their foreign king. They rallied their retainers and put down the revolt.

This was a fateful event. Castile, at this point quite a prosperous country, was now at the king's mercy. With the nobles firmly on side, Charles would henceforth have no more trouble raising taxes. It was conquered Castile, more than any other of his kingdoms, that would finance Charles's imperial ambitions.    His other realms, which had not revolted, remained more insulated from the demands of their lord; the silver mines of the New World, so important to Charles's son Philip, were not yet developed.

And it was not just money that Castile supplied. It was men, too. Castile was traditionally a crusader kingdom, and many of its people kept that military spirit alive. It was Castile that produced Cortez, Pizarro, the Duke of Alva, and many less known but equally ruthless and diligent soldiers. The alliance between the Castilian nobility and its new king would do much in the years to come to promote the interests of the house of Habsburg.

With the imperial crown on his head, Charles had title to the world. With Castile at his feet, he had the resources of a great ruler. What was Charles to do with them?

He had lots of choice. He had inherited not only the lands, but the ambitions and opportunities of four different royal lines.
 

• Coming with the inheritance of Maximillian was the possibility of making the emperorship into a strong German monarchy, plus claims to Hungary and Bohemia.   (Those two kingdoms he eventually ceded to his brother Ferdinand.)
• Coming with the inheritance of Ferdinand of Aragon were extensive interests in Italy, North Africa and the trade routes to the East. As we know, the old King Ferdinand of Aragon had been fighting the kings of France for years; Charles quickly found himself fighting King Francis and even the pope to secure the Aragonese position in Italy.
• Coming with the Burgundian inheritance of Mary were rich lands that also bordered France and a northern rivalry with France that went back to Charles the Bold and before.

With all these irons in the fire, and more, Charles's hands were full:   For most of his life he moved from country to country, war to war, problem to problem, and never was able to give his full attention to any for long.

For instance, from the beginning, Charles faced the Lutheran controversy and religious division in Germany. As emperor he felt it his duty to reunite the church. He told Martin Luther, he was descended from most Christian ancestors, and would follow their example in holding to the Catholic faith; in his own words: "I am determined to set my kingdoms and dominions, my friends, my body, my blood, my life, my soul upon it." [K & M, 178] But in actual fact, he often left the religious struggle for years at a time to go off to save a kingdom or dominion somewhere else.

Being an aspiring world ruler was a constant exercise in crisis management. The main reason that Charles got caught in this treadmill is that he had two great enemies. One of them was terrified by Charles; the other terrified him. The first was King Francis, who was not quite so timorous as I make him sound.  But Charles's inheritance almost entirely surrounded France, and this worried its king. Geography made them implacable enemies. Francis fought Charles hard, and would do anything to weaken him.

This included allying himself with Charles's other great enemy, the Turk. When Suleiman the Magnificent took the Turkish throne in 1520 -- a year after Charles succeeded his father -- he was ready to march west. It was Suleiman who gave Ferdinand the opportunity to become king of Hungary. Suleiman smashed a Hungarian army at Mohacs in 1526, and killed the Hungarian King Louis II. This left Ferdinand, his son-in-law, as heir, but also on the first line of Christian defense. In 1529, the Turks beseiged Vienna; they failed to take it, but there was always the danger that the next campaign would be the Islamic breakthrough into Germany. The Turks did take most of Hungary.

The Turks were also advancing on a different front, the Mediterranean one. By first supporting corsair fleets and then by direct action, the Turks extended their empire all the way to Algeria, threatening Italy and Sicily and even Spain itself in the process.

This Turkish threat did nothing to unify Christian Europe. Far from it. In Germany, the princes were more willing to fight to keep the emperor weak than to join him against the infidel. Lutherans prayed that Turkish pressure would prevent Charles from crushing them. Francis I, besides intriguing with Charles' other Christian enemies, went so far as to give winter harbor to a Turkish fleet operating against the emperor.

In such circumstances, it is no wonder that Charles never consolidated his disparate realms, or created a continuous, centralized empire on the Roman model. But it is doubtful that that was his goal. After Gattinara's death, Charles supervised his realms through a number of separate councils, with himself as the only connecting link. Charles, like his ancestors and even his rivals, thought mainly in dynastic terms. He seldom started a war out of sheer, Machiavellian self-interest;  he usually needed a legal or hereditary claim to fight for.

And his ultimate goal was a dynastic one:  What Charles wanted most of all was to leave his dominions to Philip, his son. That was denied him. Back in 1530, when Philip had been very young, Charles had given his brother Ferdinand the nod as his successor in Germany, as sort of an insurance policy. In the 1550s, when Philip was a grown man, Ferdinand refused to give up his claims to please his brother.

In 1555, Charles, worn out, abdicated his various titles, and went into monastic retirement.  The central European inheritance and the emperorship went to Ferdinand; Philip got the rest.

Charles spent his time in retirement, according to one story, trying to synchronize clocks, with no success; which, he said, just went to show the futility of making men think and act alike. This was meant as a comment on the religious difficulties of the time, but it could equally well apply to the problems of building an empire on the dynastic principle, out of discrete communities, each with their own customs and privileges.

But this story may be too romantic. Another says that Charles, ignoring his doctors' advice, gorged himself on fruit fish and game and died of too much high living [Bush, 226].

The second story is too negative, too. Charles may not have build a thousand-year Reich, but he did, for 36 years, convincingly play the part of the greatest monarch of Europe. He had his victories: at Pavia, in 1525, he captured the King of France in battle and wrung a huge ransom out of him; in 1535, he captured Tunis and made it a fortress against the advancing Turks; in 1547, he beat the Protestant princes in Germany.

Also, his court was the richest of its time, the resort of hundreds of great and lesser nobles looking for advancement, scholars and literary men hoping for patronage, and bankers lending him money and attempting to collect on past loans. And he did leave Philip half the world -- the New World and its riches -- and, in Spain, the strongest kingdom Europe had seen in quite some time.

But the glittering court rested on an uncertain foundation. That foundation  was war, a great multi-sided war, practically unstoppable because so many interests were involved, a war that was a far cry from the smaller conflicts wars that had afflicted the fifteenth century.  Vast resources were mobilized and devoured. It was Europe's misfortune that the kings had resources to waste.

Wars of this scale not only signified changes in international politics (if international is the word), they altered the practice of internal politics. Sixteenth century kings grew strong as they made war. Making war for personal honor and family interest was an acknowledged right of all princes. Assemblies might complain about the cost, but they usually agreed to raise taxes if the prince was at all reasonable. Kings always had a reason to tax when wars never stopped. In most places, the balance between prince and custom was tipped in favor of the prince.

Major monarchs gained much, though always less than they wanted. Their own subjects, and the minor princes on their borders, lost ground. Many weaker communities were incorporated into bigger ones, or became battlegrounds, as in the case of Milan, or Hungary, or later, Scotland. The conflicts of the time, of course, were only sharpened by the religious split that originated with Martin Luther. It is time to meet Martin, and see what he said that so upset Europe.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M.L. Bush, Renaissance, Reformation, and the Outer World
J.R. Hale, War and Society in Renaissance Europe 1450-1620
H.G. Koenigsberger and George L. Mosse, Europe in the Sixteenth Century
Colin McEvedy, The Penguin Atlas of Modern History

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.