by Sheila Hale
While in Germany, Charles had succeeded in bribing the Catholic electors to vote unanimously for the coronation of his younger brother Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and King of Bohemia and Hungary, as King of the Romans, a title intended to strengthen Ferdinand’s constitutional authority and ensure that he would succeed Charles, in the event of his death, as Holy Roman Emperor. Ferdinand’s coronation, however, inflamed the anti-imperialism of the most powerful German Protestant princes and free cities. Under the leadership of Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, and John Frederick, Landgrave of Saxony, they formed a defensive military alliance known as the Schmalkaldic League, so called after the town of Schmalkalden in the German province of Thuringia where they met in February 1531. In the coming years the League would continue to spread the causes of Lutheranism and anti-imperialism in northern Germany. By that time the German presses had churned out some 4,000 vernacular pamphlets. More and more Germans were beginning to share the view of the popular German freethinker who condemned the double-eagle Habsburg crest as ‘neither beautiful, well-formed, useful nor edible, but, on the contrary … ravenous, thievish, solitary, useless, warlike’.1
Although Charles much later in his reign recognized the growth of Protestantism in Germany as the most significant challenge of his entire reign, he was deflected by the more immediate threats posed by his struggles against France and the Ottoman Turks. In the early summer of 1532 the Protestant problem was temporarily defused by news of a second Turkish advance on Vienna led once again by Suleiman the Magnificent. At Nuremberg the Protestants agreed to provide an army in return for religious concessions. Charles, joined by Italian troops under the leadership of the young warrior cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici and Alfonso d’Avalos, took personal command of the combined forces. By the time his armies reached Vienna at the end of September the Turks had already retreated – not to return there for more than a century and a half. However, they continued to wreak havoc and terror in the Mediterranean under Suleiman’s admiral and viceroy of Algiers, Khair ed-Din, a brilliant naval tactician and pirate, who was known as Barbarossa to the Italians and Spanish upon whose shipping and coastlines he preyed, taking women and children into slavery, seeking out the most beautiful women for the sultan’s seraglio, subjecting even Christian babies to atrocities that appalled (and fascinated) Europeans, who were themselves no strangers to extreme violence. Charles’s advisers had been counselling him for some time to take action against Barbarossa; and one of the items high on his agenda for the rendezvous with the pope was the necessity of raising a fleet against the pirate king who had become his chief antagonist at sea.
Whenever the emperor travelled, his entire court travelled with him: lawyers, accountants, ambassadors, secretaries, barbers, physicians, artisans, entertainers, tradesmen, servants, the personal staff of guests – all accompanied by mules and carts laden with baggage and provisions and followed by a trail of beggars, whores and other unofficial hangers-on. As the procession entered the Venetian Republic, announced by drummers and infantry carrying light artillery and mounted captains in full armour, the older onlookers were inevitably reminded – some with a frisson of fear, some of the old diehard imperialists with nostalgia – of the invasions by Charles’s grandfather Maximilian not so many years before. On this occasion, although there was no love lost between the Habsburg emperor and the doge of the independent Republic of Venice, they exchanged polite messages while the Senate turned a blind eye as provincial governments destroyed bridges along the route to steer the itinerant court with its marauding landsknechts away from their territories.
When the entourage reached Bassano, Sanudo noted in his diary that the emperor was wearing court dress – a doublet of silver brocade, a fur collar, black hat and white shoes and stockings – and that the crowds of spectators were entertained by the sight of his favourite hunting hound travelling by his side in its own special carriage. Jacob Seisenegger, court painter to Ferdinand, for whom he had already portrayed the emperor four times, was travelling with the imperial party in order to do another portrait of him at Bologna. By then, however, Charles had made up his mind to sit also for Titian. The portraits, particularly the one (now lost) of Federico Gonzaga in armour, that he had seen in Mantua after his coronation had made an impression on him. No doubt he regretted the insulting one-ducat tip he had given Titian at Parma all the more when heard from his closest advisers just how good Titian was: Francisco de los Cobos, Alfonso d’Avalos, Ippolito de’ Medici, Ferrante Gonzaga, all of whom understood Italian painting better than he did, were admirers of the celebrated Venetian painter. And the Duke of Urbino, Federico Gonzaga’s brother-in-law, for whom Charles had a high regard, had commissioned three paintings from Titian in the previous summer.
The Duke of Urbino and Ippolito de’ Medici were with Federico Gonzaga in the party that greeted the emperor outside Vicenza and accompanied him to Mantua, where Charles looked forward to spending another holiday before his rendezvous with the pope. On 7 November, the day after he had entered Mantua with his imperial guest, Federico wrote to Titian, not once but twice:
Messer Titiano. Because it would be very dear to me to have you near me just now I beg you as hard as I can to come here as soon as possible, which would do me a singular pleasure.
And again:
Messer Titiano. I hope you will be content when you come here, as I hope you will for my sake, to have brought with you some fish [pesce suola, or sole], which would give me great pleasure and as I expect you shortly I will say no more than that I offer you, etc.
Like everyone who met the emperor in person Titian cannot have failed to be impressed by his extreme ugliness, his dignified bearing, his withdrawn but unfailingly courteous manner, and the eagle eyes upon which his contemporaries often commented. Lanky, pale-skinned with reddish-blond hair, beard and moustache, his nose turned up to a point, his lower lip protruding, Charles sported a Habsburg jaw so prominent that he could hardly close his mouth, his breath stank and his diction was slurred. He had lost his teeth at the age of fifteen in an accident with his litter and his face was often creased by the pain of the agonizing episodes of gout that attacked him with increasing frequency from his twenty-eighth year. Charles is supposed to have said – perhaps he repeated the comment to Titian – that he knew he was ugly but thanks to the painters who had depicted him as even uglier he made a less bad impression on those who saw him for the first time than he might have. Charles was not, however, unconcerned with his personal appearance. Although contemporaries commented on the simplicity of his costume he had his first white hairs removed when he noticed them in 1535.
His earnest and determined mind was not quick, enquiring or cultivated. He had resisted the efforts of his childhood tutors to give him a classical education, and unlike his extrovert brother Ferdinand, who was if anything too talkative and enjoyed making puns, Charles was so hesitant in conversation, so lacking in a sense of humour, at least in public, that some people thought him a little backward. He was also a very different character from his paternal grandfather, the highly educated and forward-thinking Emperor Maximilian, who spoke seven languages including good Latin.2 Charles, famously credited by Spaniards with the comment that one speaks French with ambassadors, Italian with women, German with stable boys and Spanish with one’s God, had been brought up speaking French, learned fluent Spanish and adequate Italian, but never mastered German or enough Latin to understand it when spoken by foreign ambassadors.
Lonely and reserved, the emperor took comfort in women, in music, which he enjoyed and understood more than the visual arts, in hunting and jousting, and in rich heavy meals accompanied by quantities of Rhine wine or beer. Despite his frail health he was an industrious and if anything over-conscientious statesman – more than 120,000 of his official letters have survived – as well as an expert horseman and a committed soldier. Maximilian, who had had Charles fitted with his first suit of armour when the boy was only twelve, may have regretted his heir’s less active mind,
but he would have been proud to know that after 1532 his grandson commanded his troops in person.
Perhaps the most distressing of the emperor’s afflictions was a tendency to depression and periods of lassitude that was probably inherited from his mother Juana, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, and that would be passed on to his grandson Don Carlos. Juana was already known as Joanna the Mad when, after the unexpected deaths of her older siblings and that of Isabella, the succession to the crown of Castile passed to her and her husband Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and through them to Charles, who was born in that same year; and after Philip’s death in 1506 she became completely crazed and incapable of rule. Charles was six when he inherited a claim to Burgundy, one of the richest areas of Europe, which at that time embraced much of what is now the Netherlands and Belgium.
Although Burgundy was neither politically nor economically united – and was at that time in French hands by previous agreement – the late-medieval duchy had created for the rest of Europe the ideal of what a princely court should be. Charles had been born there in Ghent and spent his childhood and early adolescence under the regency of his aunt Margaret of Austria, dowager Duchess of Savoy; and his youthful imagination was shaped by ancestral memories and stories of pomp, Gothic splendour and romance, traditions of chivalric honour, jousting in single combat, crusading knights and pious aristocracy represented by the Order of the Golden Fleece, which had been founded in 1430 by Duke Philip III of Burgundy. In the course of his reign Charles would create eighty-five new members of the order, mostly nobles of Burgundy, Spain and Germany but also some of his Italian generals including Alfonso d’Avalos and Ferrante Gonzaga; and he remained master of it until the year before his death. His identification with the style of a bygone age went so deep that on two occasions – in 1528 after Francis I had broken the Treaty of Madrid, and in 1536 when Francis tried to take Milan in contravention of the Peace of Bologna – he challenged the French king to single combat. Francis, who was at least as courageous as his arch-enemy and perhaps the better athlete, was merely amused by the suggestion.
It has been said that if Charles V was the last of the medieval emperors he was also the first king of Spain’s golden age.3 He inherited the Kingdom of Spain, its American dominions and its Aragonese possessions of Sicily, Naples and Sardinia on the death of his maternal grandfather Ferdinand in 1516. Spain, although ruled by a single monarchy since the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella had united Aragon and Castile, was still an association of quasi-independent provinces and noble estates. The two crowns were ruled under different constitutional and administrative systems, and the ‘Catholic Kings’, as they had been dubbed by Pope Alexander VI, were unable to stem aristocratic factionalism in Castile. Ferdinand furthermore had done everything he could to prevent the succession of his insane daughter and her foreign consort. When Charles arrived in 1517, he found a harsh and, compared to Burgundy, an uncivilized country. The Castilians in particular resented the ugly, inexperienced, teenaged ruler who spoke no Spanish and brought with him a complete retinue of 200 Burgundian counsellors, officials and courtiers, and even a choir of Flemish part-singers and their scores. Three years later an armed revolt of rebel citizens, known as the Comuneros, taught Charles a first lesson in statesmanship. He was abroad at the time – his absence from the kingdom was part of the problem. The revolution was quelled by a royalist army in 1521. But when he returned in the summer of 1522 he did everything within his power to reverse the failures of judgement that had caused the uprising and spent the next seven years in his kingdom, learning Spanish so well that it became his preferred language.
On Maximilian’s death in January 1519 Charles inherited the Habsburg possessions of Austria, the Tyrol and parts of southern Germany. It was the same year in which Hernán Cortés began his conquest of Mexico, but Charles and his advisers were more preoccupied by the election campaign for his grandfather’s successor as Holy Roman Emperor. The two other contenders were Henry VIII of England and Francis I, who was supported by Leo X. The electors – the German princes who inherited the right to vote for a new emperor – were in practice more like auctioneers who as everyone knew would award the title to the highest bidder. Henry soon dropped out of the race. Charles, who knew that without a Habsburg emperor the Netherlands would be vulnerable to the French and Austria to the German princes, outbid Francis. The election, which he won on 28 June, cost him 850,000 florins, more than one-third of it borrowed from the Fugger bank of Augsburg. It was the beginning of a practice of living on credit that would plague the rest of his reign and those of his heirs. Taxes in Spain and its dominions, and revenues from America, which until the 1550s averaged only some 200,000 to 300,000 ducats a year, were never enough to compensate for expenses. While his personal income rose from one million to one and a half million soldi, his wars in Germany and against France, which continued periodically for most of his reign, drew him deeper and deeper into debt, forcing him to borrow at interest rates that rose from 18 per cent in the 1520s to 49 per cent after mid-century, by which time he was irretrievably mortgaged to his bankers.
Ugly, plagued by mental and physical illness, surrounded on all sides by threats from the German Protestants, the French king and the Turks, Charles was at least extremely fortunate in his private life. When he was not yet two his parents had arranged an engagement to Louis XII’s three-year-old daughter Claude. Fortunately, as it turned out, for his personal happiness the negotiations for that and three other dynastically advantageous engagements broke down.4 Still a bachelor at twenty-six, with a four-year-old illegitimate daughter Margaret by a Flemish girl, he decided in 1526 to marry, sight unseen, his first cousin Isabella, the daughter of Emmanuel of Portugal. She was a popular choice with his Castilian subjects, who approved the continuation of the policy pursued by Ferdinand and Isabella to bring about a closer association between Castile and Portugal. And she brought with her an enormous dowry worth 900,000 ducats on paper.5 But when he saw her for the first time at their wedding in Seville, he was stunned by her elegant beauty and regal bearing, and fell immediately and deeply in love with her. Philip, the first of their seven children to survive into adulthood, was born a year after their marriage, Mary a year later and Juana in 1535. Although he strayed on his voyages abroad, Isabella remained the central love of his life. After her death in Toledo in 1539 from a miscarriage he retreated to a convent for seven weeks and for the rest of his life dressed in plain and increasingly threadbare black. Francis I proposed that he marry his daughter Margaret of France (later the Duchess of Savoy), but Charles refused to marry ever again even for sound political reasons.
The emperor whom Titian got to know at Mantua ruled on a scale that would not be matched before Napoleon. The story of his reign is the story of early sixteenth-century Europe, although he is seen in different ways by historians of the countries in which he ruled. Thanks to the dynastic marriages and fortuitous deaths that had given him the Netherlands, Spain and Austria, his monarchy (as it was called by contemporaries) embraced one-fifth of the population of Europe and touched on the Mediterranean, the North Sea and the far side of the Atlantic. But although he owned twice as much of Europe as Francis I, the two monoliths were evenly matched and their ruinously expensive wars would inevitably end in stalemate. France, although ringed by a chain of imperial dominions, had the advantage of administrative and territorial unity. Charles’s possessions were so geographically and culturally dispersed – the Holy Roman Empire alone consisted of over 200 princely states and free cities – that he was obliged to respect local laws and customs and they never adopted a common imperial currency. Dealing with a problem in one part of his realm meant that he could not control events elsewhere.
Charles V spent a quarter of his reign on the road (‘Kings’, he once told his son, ‘do not need residences’) and devised a courier and postal service that was the fastest and most secure in Europe. Nevertheless, messages carried by relays of mounted couriers took two we
eks to a month between Brussels and Valladolid, and armies moved at a rate of ten to thirteen kilometres per day. He could not have ruled his widely scattered possessions without delegating power, where possible to his relatives: to Ferdinand in Germany, Austria and Hungary; and in the Netherlands to his clever and charismatic aunt Margaret of Austria, who was succeeded as regent after her death in 1530 by his intelligent and energetic but less charming sister Mary, dowager Duchess of Hungary, who ruled the Netherlands for the next twenty-eight years. In all his dominions he pursued a policy of working as far as possible with existing authorities, instituting reforms tactfully and gradually, and flattering the vanity of powerful nobles. Viceroys, whose power was checked by councils directly answerable to the King of Spain, governed Sicily and Naples in his stead. It was the job of the governors of Milan, his power base in northern Italy after it reverted to him as an imperial fief in 1535, to defend the duchy from the threat of French invasion.
