How a string of deaths handed Charles V an empire spanning oceans
When Charles was born in Ghent in 1500, he stood to inherit only the Low Countries. Then Spanish heirs kept dying. By 1519 he held Spain, Naples, Sicily, Austria, the Netherlands and a growing American empire, the first realm described as one on which the sun never set.
His mother went into labour at a ball, and the people of Ghent reportedly spent three hours shouting the names of Austria and Burgundy through the streets. He was named after Charles the Bold, and his baptism gifts were a sword and a helmet, emblems of Burgundian chivalry. His parents were Philip the Handsome, son of Emperor Maximilian I, and Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, a match arranged as an alliance against France with no expectation that it would deliver the Spanish crowns.
The Spanish heirs John and Isabella both died in 1498, and their Portuguese nephew Miguel died as a baby in 1500. Philip himself died in 1506, when Charles was six, and Joanna, judged mentally unstable, was confined at Tordesillas. The boy grew up in Mechelen at the court of his aunt Margaret of Austria, tutored by Adrian of Utrecht, the future Pope Adrian VI, and raised on the knightly ideals of the Order of the Golden Fleece. He claimed Spain in 1516 as co-monarch with his mother and was elected emperor in 1519.
A popular Latin verse claimed the Habsburgs won lands by marriage while others fought, but his grandfather Maximilian waged 27 wars, and Charles spent most of his reign at war too. With no fixed capital, he made 40 journeys and passed about a quarter of his rule on the road. He outlawed Martin Luther at Worms in 1521, captured Francis I of France at Pavia in 1525, and saw Rome sacked by his own mutinous troops in 1527. Silver from Mexico and Peru repaid his bankers but drove widespread inflation.
He backed the Magellan voyage, which made the first circumnavigation of the globe. Worn down by Protestant princes, the Ottomans and France, he accepted the Peace of Augsburg and in 1556 split his lands between his son Philip II and his brother Ferdinand. His last years were spent at Yuste, a monastery in the Spanish region of Extremadura, where he died in 1558.
Source: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
