The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  As all this was going on, there was a simultaneous but not associated revolt in Valencia, known as the revolt of the germanías. In that city, nobles fled because of an outbreak of the plague and a rumored Turkish attack. The city guilds then took up arms with the idea of overturning noble dominance in favor of a more republican government. This revolt was suppressed by Charles’s viceroy in October 1521. With the defeat of the comuneros, the Habsburg succession in Spain was secured and royal power strengthened. Henceforth the cities’ influence in government would be reduced, though the Spanish monarchs would continue to have to collaborate to some extent with the nobility and the towns. Also, from this point on, the more isolationist forces in Castile that had resented foreign influence were marginalized; Castile would become ever more drawn into events elsewhere in Europe. By the time he arrived back in Spain in April 1522, Charles presided over a tamed Castile that henceforth became the “treasury and sword” of the Habsburg kings, as a sixteenth-century bishop observed.3

  In contrast to his initial unfamiliarity with Spain, Charles had grown up in the Netherlands, and knew its culture and circumstances very well. That does not mean, however, that he was able to rule more strongly there than elsewhere. He coveted the territory’s enormous wealth to fund his imperial ventures, but not surprisingly the people resisted having to contribute to his constant wars. Charles’s very capable regents were his aunt Marguerite from 1517 to 1530, then his sister Maria of Hungary from 1530 to 1555. They had to manage the difficult situation as Charles sought to reorganize the administration of the territory, which comprised a highly decentralized patchwork of governing structures and communities who tenaciously defended their rights and interests. The reorganization did little to strengthen Charles’s power. It gave each province its own representative body, which in turn gained increased control over finances. One area where Charles was more assertive was with religious politics. Referring to Protestantism, he said that “What is tolerated in Germany must never be suffered in the Netherlands.”4 Hence he introduced the Inquisition in 1522, ordered that heretical books be burnt, and instituted the death penalty for heresy in 1550. Naturally none of this managed to prevent the gradual penetration of new sects into the area. By the end of Charles’s reign, his high taxes, repressive religious policies, and delicate relations with the more assertive provincial bodies all set the stage for the open conflict that would erupt under his son Felipe II.

  Whether in Spain, the Low Countries, or Germany, Charles’s subjects often resented his multiple commitments to his other realms. There is no question that his empire was too vast to be governed effectively, encompassing too many competing (even contradictory) interests that he as the sovereign somehow had to reconcile. It is also unquestionable that these multiple commitments distracted Charles from being consistently engaged even during crises. The key example is Charles’s rule in the Holy Roman Empire, which came at one of the most disruptive times in all of central European history, with the outbreak of the Reformation. Charles believed that it was his duty to protect Christianity, but this does not mean he was fanatically orthodox. He had been raised in the humanistic piety of the Renaissance, influenced (as was Ferdinand) by the ideas of Erasmus. He honestly believed that the Church needed reform.

  For a long time, Charles hoped to arrange a peaceful resolution to the religious conflict in Germany. Yet he did come to regard Luther’s ideas as heresy, and openly proclaimed that he would feel “shame” if he let them spread throughout Christianity. Indeed, one of the reasons Charles came to oppose the Reformation is because he saw it breaking apart Christian unity. And because religion in the Reformation was inextricably intertwined with politics, Charles also accurately saw that the spread of Lutheranism undermined the unity of the Holy Roman Empire. German princes used Protestant ideas as a pretext to resist the emperor’s power. He long hoped that the pope would call a general Church council, to organize the combat against Protestants, but also to address some of the legitimate grievances the Lutherans had raised. The pope consistently refused, however. The unwillingness of the antagonists to compromise—including Charles, who insisted that Luther must simply renounce his teachings—was one of the key reasons that the Reformation not only splintered Christendom but also wrecked Charles’s reign as emperor.

  Charles met Luther personally at the Reichstag in Worms in April 1521. Luther gave his statement of principles, including the famous “here I stand, and can do no other.” Charles heard him out, but then saw no alternative other than to declare him an outlaw. At that point, Luther came under the protection of the Elector of Saxony, and his ideas continued to spread. Luther was not the only issue at this diet, since there were other problems in the Empire during the 1520s. The imperial knights, who were the lower nobility, revolted in 1522–3. In 1524 the Great Peasants’ War broke out. Charles was in Spain during both these events, so they were dealt with by the princes; their successful suppression of both uprisings helped bolster the princes’ power within the Empire. Charles next engaged German events at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530. By this time the Protestants themselves had begun to split, into factions around Luther and Ulrich Zwingli. Charles’s goals at this diet were to raise money for the fight against the Turks and also to try to foster some sort of religious compromise. He failed at both. The Habsburgs’ one major success from this diet was that Ferdinand was elected King of the Romans, Charles’s successor, in 1531. Throughout the rest of the decade Charles was distracted by his wars with France and the Turks. He pledged not to use force against the Protestants, but the religious conflict continued to escalate in part because of Protestant actions such as seizing Church lands.

  In the next decade, after more failed attempts at reconciliation, Charles turned to a military solution. The Diet of Regensburg in 1541 did see some good-faith negotiations from both the Catholic and Protestant sides, but even the agreement reached on certain points was then rejected by both Luther and the pope. Pope Paul finally in 1545 did call a council to meet at Trento, now in Italy but then part of the Empire. The Protestants refused to attend. Extremists increasingly drove politics. Several German princes and cities formed the Schmalkaldic League as a kind of defensive alliance against the Catholics, and also made a pact with Charles’s arch-enemy François I. When two more electors converted to Protestantism—the archbishop of Cologne in 1543 followed by the Elector Palatine in 1547—Protestants now had a majority in the imperial electoral college. This was a major threat from the dynastic perspective, since it meant that the electors could well choose a Lutheran as the next emperor, and the Habsburgs would lose the title. Charles now determined to go to war—not, he said, against Lutherans specifically but against the rebels of the Schmalkaldic League. He assembled his own alliance including the slippery Moritz of Saxony, who wanted to replace his cousin as elector of that territory.

  At the battle of Mühlberg in April 1547, Charles won what he regarded as the greatest victory of his life. Believing it God-given, he reportedly paraphrased Caesar, proclaiming, “I came, I saw, God conquered.”5 It was after this battle that Titian painted his well-known portrait of Charles on horseback, styling him not just as a Roman emperor but also as the defender of Christianity. This was the high point of Charles’s authority in the Empire, but that did not enable him to solve its many problems to his satisfaction. He advanced proposals to strengthen the governmental cohesion of the Empire, but even the Catholic princes resisted this as a power-grab by the emperor. He also encouraged the Reichstag to develop what became known as its “Interim,” an agreement by which Catholic principles were reemphasized while conceding to the Lutherans their right to have things like clerical marriage and communion in two kinds. Rather than a basis for reconciliation, the Interim just proved a further step toward separation.

  Events over the next several years were a disaster for Charles and ultimately convinced him to abdicate. When Charles publicly aired his desire that the imperial crown should alternate between the Spanish and Austrian
branches of the dynasty, princes Protestant and Catholic alike protested at the idea of being ruled by a Spaniard. Under the leadership of Charles’s traitorous former ally Moritz of Saxony, several rebellious Protestant princes made an alliance with the new French king, Henri II. In February 1552 Moritz’s forces staged a surprise attack on Charles, who was in Innsbruck, and almost captured him. In a humiliating turn of events, the great victor of Mühlberg was forced to flee over the Alps into Carinthia. That same year Henri launched an assault on several cities in Lorraine. Ferdinand now took over the negotiations to achieve a settlement with the Protestant princes and Moritz, while Charles suffered another embarrassing defeat when he tried to retake the city of Metz from the French in early 1553. From this point onward Charles, deeply depressed about the situation in the Empire, let Ferdinand manage events there. It was Ferdinand who negotiated the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This was a “religious peace” which later became known by the formula cuius regio eius religio, meaning that a ruler had the right to decide whether his territory (and hence his subjects) would be Catholic or Lutheran. Charles was disgusted with the outcome of Augsburg and refused to sign the final documents, leaving that to Ferdinand. It amounted not only to a defeat of Charles’s desire for unity and harmony in Christendom. Augsburg was also a seminal moment in the ongoing erosion of the imperial office’s authority.

  Much as the religious splits in the Empire tormented Charles for several decades, so too did the never-ending feuds with the French kings, particularly François I. This conflict became Charles’s chief foreign policy preoccupation. The wars were almost always started by François, a proud, duplicitous, unrelenting character who, though usually defeated by Charles, somehow always lived to harass him again another day. François’s aggression is at least partially understandable in that France was nearly surrounded by Habsburg territories on its northern, southern, and eastern borders. But the conflict between the Habsburgs and France went back to Maximilian’s time, and would persist into the eighteenth century and beyond. Charles and François fought over competing claims to Navarre, Burgundy, and northern Italy, especially Milan. Having already lost the imperial election to Charles in 1519, François seized upon the unrest of the comuneros revolt to attack Navarre in 1521, but his forces were successfully repulsed by a Spanish army. Northern Italy then became the scene of the two sovereigns’ recurrent wars. As one of the richest, most urbanized parts of Europe at that time, it was a worthy prize. Charles particularly coveted the duchy of Milan because he regarded it as the key strategic link between his lands in southern Italy (which he had from his Spanish inheritance) up through Tyrol, Franche-Comté, and finally to the Low Countries.

  In contending for control of northern Italy, Charles had to compete not just with the French but with the papacy as well. François attacked Milan in the autumn of 1524, but then in spring 1525 was resoundingly defeated by Charles’s armies at the battle of Pavia where François himself was taken prisoner. François signed the Treaty of Madrid with Charles in 1526 in which he renounced his claims in Italy and Flanders. As soon as he was free, he repudiated the treaty, even though Charles still held his two sons hostage as “guarantees.” Meanwhile, Pope Clement VII, afraid of Charles’s growing power in Italy, was supporting the French. Charles sent an army to Rome to intimidate the pope, but when its troops did not receive their pay, they mutinied, and sacked the Eternal City in May 1527. The pope had to take refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo for nine months. Charles apologized, but this event scandalized Europe. The French again invaded Italy in 1527, and once again were beaten in 1529. Another treaty, known as the Peace of Cambrai or “the Ladies’ Peace” was now negotiated by Marguerite, Charles’s aunt, and Louise of Savoy, François’s mother—though of course it did not last. Clement at least reconciled with Charles enough to crown him emperor in Bologna on 24 February 1530. It was Charles’s 30th birthday, and the last time a Holy Roman Emperor was crowned by the pope.

  François scandalized Christendom for his own part when he began collaborating with the Ottomans against Charles in 1534. He then broke the Peace of Cambrai by attacking northern Italy again in 1536. At this point Charles, anachronistically but admirably, offered to fight François in a duel, “with swords, capes and daggers . . . on land or on sea, in a closed field or in front of our armies, wherever he chooses,” as a way “to avoid the deaths of so many people,” in Charles’s own words.6 The new pope, Paul III, forbid such a resolution. Exhausted and out of money, both monarchs gave up the fight in 1537 in an agreement arranged by Éléonore, François’s wife and Charles’s sister. Predictably, François again went on the offensive in 1542 in both the Netherlands and Italy. For this campaign, Charles managed to rally to his side large forces from the Empire, as well as Henry VIII of England, and together they invaded France. François, who clearly never knew when to stop, tried attacking Naples again in 1544 but was forced back. François died in 1547, having caused untold death and suffering with his wars, and leaving the Habsburgs firmly in control of Milan and allied with Florence and Genoa. His son and successor Henri II resumed the conflict in 1552 when he allied with the Protestant princes and attacked Metz, Toul, and Verdun.

  As the professed defender of Christendom, Charles also had to take on the external threat of the Ottoman Turks. However, he devoted much less attention to this opponent than to many of his others. He made a few forays against the Turks when circumstances permitted, primarily in the Mediterranean, but apart from in that theater he did not see his realms’ interests as seriously threatened by them. He generally left Ferdinand to fend for himself against the sultan’s encroachments in central Europe. Turkish naval power increased substantially in the first decades of the 1500s, leading to the capture of the fortress of Rhodes in 1522. The Turks also struck an alliance with pirates along the Barbary Coast of northern Africa, who preyed on shipping in the western Mediterranean and assaulted some Spanish coastal towns. In 1534 Charles signed a peace treaty with François, which freed him to turn to the growing naval threat. The Castilian Cortes voted him extra funds, and he seized some of the wealth coming in from the Americas. Once he made an alliance with Genoa, which put its large navy at his disposal, all the pieces were in place.

  Charles determined to attack the pirates’ base of Tunis, which became one of the most resounding, if short-lived successes of his reign. With an enormous fleet of nearly 400 ships and some 30,000 men, Charles personally led the assault on Tunis in July 1535. His forces easily won the day, though the pirate leader Barbarossa escaped, retreating to Algiers. The victory at Tunis was immensely satisfying to Charles, and it was eulogized throughout southern Europe. It did very little to sap his enemies’ strength, however, and the pirates raided the Spanish and Italian coasts in 1536 and 1537. It was not until October 1541 that Charles was again able to cobble together enough money and allies to mount another large invasion fleet. This time he set off to conquer Algiers despite the late season. In contrast to Tunis, this expedition was a catastrophe: a storm hit the fleet, casting 150 ships ashore, and many men were lost. Charles had to pull out, embarrassed. In subsequent years, the pirate raids continued, and in 1551 they wrested Tripoli from Spanish control. In the end, Charles’s engagement with the Turkish threat yielded results no more positive than most of his other endeavors.

  One of the most striking things about Charles’s reign from the perspective of world history is also one of the things he was least interested in, namely the conquest of America. But the massive gains Spain (Castile, really) made in the Americas took place largely during his time. Firmly established in the Caribbean already by 1508, it was in 1519 that Cortés began his subjugation of the Aztec empire, just a few months before Charles was elected emperor. In 1535, as Charles was capturing Tunis during a lull in his fights with François, Pizarro was conquering the Incan empire. The territorial acquisitions—made in the name of the king of Castile and the Christian religion—were achieved by fewer than 1,000 conquistadors. And though Charles himself
had little to do with it, it was also during his reign that the structure for governing this new empire was elaborated. For all the impediments of distance and limitations of technology, that government was impressively efficient and reasonably fair. Impressive, too, is that it accepted Charles’s sovereignty, a testament to the strength of the monarchical idea. Both New Spain (i.e. Mexico) and Peru were organized as separate kingdoms ruled by the king of Spain, but governed by his viceroys in conjunction with councils called audiencias. The powers of the viceroys and the audiencias were designed to check and balance each other, largely so that the viceroy would never become too independent.

  One instance where Charles did take a direct interest in the affairs of “the Indies,” as they were known, concerned the plight of the native peoples: what rights did they have, and could they be enslaved? Slavery had technically been illegal since the time of Fernando and Isabel, but nonetheless the Indians came to be used as forced labor under the system of encomiendas. In this system, colonists were granted tracts of land as well as dominion over the tract’s indigenous inhabitants. To remedy this situation, the “New Laws” of 1542 abolished encomiendas and declared all Indian slaves free. Charles’s support for these propositions was not wholly humanitarian, since the Spanish monarchs feared that the encomiendas could become hereditary and give rise to a territorial nobility in the Americas that could then challenge royal power.