A boy with too many grandparents

Nothing about Charles was planned. He was assembled.

His four grandparents were Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy on one side, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile on the other. Between them they held Austria, the Low Countries, Aragon, Castile, Naples, Sicily and a new world nobody had finished measuring. In the ordinary run of things those inheritances would have gone in four directions.

Instead a run of deaths nobody could have arranged sent them all to one boy. His father died at twenty-eight. His mother's elder brother died at nineteen, her elder sister and that sister's son shortly after. By 1519 the whole pile had landed on a nineteen-year-old from Ghent with a Burgundian accent and a jaw the portraits do not flatter.

It is worth saying plainly, because the family has enjoyed the opposite version for four hundred years: the marriages were shrewd, and the arithmetic was luck.

The empire that had to ask

Here is the thing most summaries miss, and it is the most modern thing about him.

Charles could not simply take money. He had to ask for it, province by province, assembly by assembly, and be refused, and ask again. His territories kept their own laws, their own courts, their own languages and their own privileges, and he made no serious attempt to abolish any of it. Historians call this a composite monarchy: many countries under one ruler, each governed as though he were sovereign of it alone.

It meant an empire held together by negotiation, correspondence and an enormous amount of travel. He was on the road for most of his adult life. He crossed the Mediterranean, the Alps and the Channel more times than most of his subjects left their own parish.

Ghent · February 1540

The city that said no

And then there is the other half of the sentence.

In 1539 Ghent refused a tax. Ghent was a great cloth city with old liberties and a long memory, and it was also the town where Charles had been born.

He came in person. On 14 February 1540 he entered his birthplace with something like five thousand troops. He revoked the city's privileges, executed the ringleaders, fined it eight thousand guilders and took away its weapons. In April the Concessio Carolina stripped Ghent of the legal and political freedoms it had held since the Middle Ages, and a citadel was built to make the point permanent.

Nineteen years earlier the Castilian towns had made the same argument in arms, and had been destroyed for it at Villalar.

This is why the page has not been arranged to flatter. An empire that consults its provinces about taxes and razes their liberties when they answer wrongly is a genuinely interesting thing to have existed. It is not a kind thing, and pretending otherwise would make everything else here worth less.

What the empire did to people

The site's standing rule is that the dark side goes on the same panel as everything else, not in a room of its own at the back.

In the Americas. This was the empire of the encomienda, of the silver of Potosí worked under the mita, and of the asiento — the licensed traffic in enslaved people. In 1542 the New Laws were issued to restrain the worst of it. Under pressure from the colonists they were substantially rolled back. In 1550 and 1551, at Charles's own instance, Las Casas and Sepúlveda argued the question of conquest and human status before a junta at Valladolid. That the debate happened at all is to his credit. That it changed so little is not.

In Europe. His was an insistence on one religion wherever he had the power to insist. The placards, the Netherlands Inquisition of 1523, the first Protestant executions in Brussels the same year, the Bloedplakkaat of 1550. He accepted the coexistence of two confessions only at Augsburg in 1555, when military defeat left him nothing else — and he would not put his name to the settlement.

He was not a monster and he was not a liberal. He was a sixteenth-century Catholic prince with more power than the century knew what to do with, and both those sentences have to stand together.

Brussels · October 1555

Giving it away

He was fifty-five and looked far older. The gout had reached the point where he had to be carried. And in the great hall of the Coudenberg palace in Brussels he stood up in front of the assembled States and gave the Low Countries to his son Philip.

Spain followed in January 1556. The imperial title went to his brother Ferdinand, whose family already had Austria.

Which is the quiet, enormous fact of his life. The empire did not survive him by a single day. It had no common citizenship, no common law, no common budget, no continuing legal personality apart from the man. When he let go, it came apart along the seam he had cut himself: Spain and the Low Countries to one line, Austria and the Empire to the other.

He then sailed for Spain and went to Yuste, to a house built against the wall of a monastery, with a garden, a view, an extraordinary collection of clocks, and a cook. He died there on 21 September 1558.