CHARLES V, Emperor. - Born at Ghent on 24 February 1500, died at San Jerónimo de Yuste on 21 September 1558. Son of Philip the Handsome, Archduke of Austria, and of Joanna the Mad, he inherited the Habsburg possessions from his paternal grandfather Maximilian of Austria (d. 1519), the possessions of the House of Burgundy from his paternal grandmother Mary of Burgundy (d. 1482), the kingdom of Aragon with the possessions in Italy from his maternal grandfather Ferdinand the Catholic (d. 1516), the kingdom of Castile with the possessions in America from his maternal grandmother Isabella of Castile (d. 1504). His father Philip had predeceased his paternal grandfather in 1506, and Joanna had gone mad in the same year.
His early education took place in the sumptuous Burgundian court (among the principal counselors was William of Croÿ, lord of Chièvres). His first stay in Spain found him disoriented, because of the formalism and severity of the court and because of the opposition of a nobility strongly anchored in its own "national" concerns. His political training continued under Cisneros and then under Mercurino da Gattinara: the latter had, in the spiritual and political-moral formation of C., an importance, precisely because he directed Charles's lofty feeling of pride and his craving for bonneur et réputation toward the grandiose myth of the empire; it is Mercurino who, against the interests and sentiments of the Spanish court, urges the sovereign to resolve European politics by making the "garden of the empire" his center, in that Italy which had given Mercurino his birth. The most concrete result of Mercurino's policy is Charles's imperial election (28 June 1519), an election obtained, on Charles's part, by bribing the electors and not without threats: by now that myth of universal monarchy had penetrated Charles's soul, to be revived and aired in theory and to be put into practice by every means. The outcome of the election had by now brought face to face, definitively and to the last drop of blood, the two great rivals: Charles and Francis I, the one intent on sustaining that imperial dream, the other on more realistically defending a policy of equilibrium that would at least save the kingdom of France. The struggle between the two protagonists is, logically, not merely engaged between two personalities, but resolves itself into the more general history of Europe: the battle of Pavia (1525), in which Francis I is taken prisoner; the treaty of Madrid (1526), by which the king of France is released but with the commitment to cede his rights over Italy and to hand over Burgundy to Charles; Francis's disavowal of the treaty, his alliance with Venice and with the Pope; the sack of Rome (1527) by the mercenary landsknechts in the emperor's service; the passage of Andrea Doria from the French camp to the imperial one and the failure of the French expedition against Naples; Francis's alliance with the Turks and Charles's anxieties, which drive him to sign the peace of Cambrai (1529); the coronation of Charles by Clement VII and the restoration of the Medici in Florence (1530); the resumption of war and Charles's weakness, pressed by Francis, by the Barbary corsairs, by the Turks, and by the widening of the Protestant revolution; the blocking of the Turks by Charles, peace with the Turks themselves, and the subsequent peace with Francis at Crépy (1544).
Charles's position in the face of the Protestant revolution oscillated between Christendom and political Europe, between defense of Catholic tradition and the implementation of that reason of state which was beginning in the sixteenth century to have its definers and supporters; on the one hand his sincere will as a Catholic to destroy heresy, on the other his concessions as a politician in search of the balance of forces and of the weakening of the German princes (and in order to weaken them he was careful to prevent a powerful counteroffensive on their part that would have placed him in a desperate situation). He dreams of being the definitive exterminator of Luther, but in the meantime he does not put his fierce resolve into practice; thus he proclaims himself guardian of orthodoxy, but does not oppose Henry VIII for fear of seeing him withdraw from his political-military neutrality; he declares himself and is devoted to the papacy, but (his anti-curial policy notwithstanding that the actual fault lay with the undisciplined militias) at a certain moment he indirectly brings about the devastation of Rome in the frightful sack of 1527. With the Diet of Speyer of 1526 he undertakes to permit the Lutherans the exercise of the reformed confession until the convocation of the Council; in 1529 he wants to take their freedom away from them again but then reconfirms it for fear of a war; he shows great irresolution about the opening of the Council as it was envisaged by Rome, and even after the collapse of the Schmalkaldic League he does indeed want the reestablishment of religious unity, but he wishes to keep for himself a "civil" supremacy over Christendom.
A sincerely religious spirit and a man of honor: thus Marino Cavalli, Venetian ambassador to him, describes him in a splendid passage: "his majesty is very religious: he hears two Masses every day: vespers and sermons only on feast days: he says many prayers: he confesses and takes communion four times a year; and from what one sees, he lives as a Christian and a private knight. He has no imperfection whatever, for he abstains from all vices; and in all his actions, down to the smallest, he is so composed and well ordered, so heedful and judicious, that no one could wish for better, with certain movements and certain words so prudent that they deserve to be admired by everyone. He always speaks humanely, never grows angry, never blusters; but always with justice on his lips, with hope in God and with grounding his affairs on reason. He is firm on points of honor and on every minutia contained in the treaties of peace and leagues that he has with others. He remits or defers the injuries done by his own men and his own, when it suits him for greater convenience. He is fixed in his opinions; he never does anything under apparent compulsion, and would rather let the world be ruined than do a thing under constraint" (E. Alberi, Le Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al Senato durante il secolo XVI, 1st series, II, Florence 1841, pp. 213-15). The ambassador's passage is from 1551, when, that is, a complex mystical moment, an intimate and penetrating awareness of human frailty, had gained the upper hand over the emperor's soul; that sad sense of death, which he had breathed in the youthful restlessness of the Burgundian environment, had increased with the years and the disappointments; that sense had been veiled by his ardent knightly spirit, by that constant craving of his to "ganar honra y fama perpetua" which he also instills in his son (K. Brandi, Berichte und Studien zur Geschichte Karls V., XII, in Nachrichten der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, 1935, p. 58); certainly he must also have taken much from the vast and at times subterranean Spanish mystical movements, but the question ought to be reexamined in depth (for example, it appears that under him the movement of the alumbrados was fiercely opposed: cf. Alonso de S. Cruz, Crónica del Emperador Carlos V, III, Madrid 1922, p. 19 ff. What is certain is that the environment was also saturated with non-heterodox mystical revivals: Francisco de Osuna, Bernardino de Laredo, etc.). Above all when the hope of the dream of universal monarchy sets, a heartbroken sense of the transience of human things gains the upper hand in the heart of the weary emperor, who abdicates in 1556 and retires to a monastery; even if the flashes of his former valor were not yet dead, if he continued to outline political advice for his son Philip II, a method that moreover continued the minuteness of instruction he had given on his son's education when the latter was a boy (cf. J. M. March, Niñez y juventud de Felipe II, I, Madrid 1941, pp. 81-212, 271-335; II, ibid. 1942, pp. 5-39). - See Pl. L.
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Massimo Petrocchi