Charles I of Spain

6 Key excerpts on "Charles I of Spain"

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  Spain 1474–1598

  • Jocelyn Hunt(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 CHARLES I AS RULER OF SPAIN BACKGROUND NARRATIVE When Ferdinand died, in February 1516, Charles was in his duchy of Burgundy, of which he had been ruler since his father’s death in 1506. He did not arrive in Spain until the September of 1517. In the interval, Archbishop Ximenez de Cisneros held his throne secure for him: but there were many who wanted Charles’ brother Ferdinand, Spanish by upbringing, and with no ties elsewhere, to take the throne. It is ironic that, in the event, Ferdinand was to become ruler of the Habsburg lands in Germany, and leave Castile. Charles made a poor impression when he arrived, with his protruding Habsburg jaw, surrounded by his Flemish courtiers, and unable to speak Castilian. The Cortes of Castile, meeting at Toledo showed extreme reluctance to hand over full power to this young representative of a foreign dynasty. In the event, equally suspicious of Ferdinand, they declared Charles and his mother Joanna to be joint-sovereigns. In practice the Queen was kept secluded in Tordesillas – perhaps with good reason, considering her unstable temperament – for the rest of her life, which lasted almost as long as her son’s reign. Charles left Spain in May 1520, following the death of his grandfather Maximilian, in order to ensure his election as Holy Roman Emperor (as Charles V) and did not return until the summer of 1522. His absence was marked by the Revolt of the Comuñeros, a rising of townspeople with long-standing grievances exacerbated by the departure of the King. Only with difficulty did royal troops eventually suppress the rebellion, but Charles found Spain at peace on his return. The next seven years were to be spent based in Spain, perhaps because Charles had recognised that the comuñeros ’ grievances must be addressed. During these years he married Isabella of Portugal. This marriage, and the birth of his son and heir in May 1527, pleased his Spanish subjects

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  Spain, 1469-1714

  A Society of Conflict

  • Henry Kamen(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Victory at Villalar established the Habsburg succession in Spain and set the country on a path radically different from that which the Catholic Monarchs had followed and the Comuneros had espoused. But it was in no sense a triumph for absolutism. Like the Catholic Monarchs before him, Charles sustained his authority over the aristocracy and the towns only by collaborating with them and making it unnecessary for them to claim more power than they already had. If there were no further revolts by the privileged classes in Spain it was because their interests were directed to lucrative careers in the rapidly expanding court and bureaucracy of the worldwide monarchy. There was likewise no triumph of Europe over Spain, which remained stubbornly impervious to foreign influence, absorbed only those Flemish and Italian currents that had already penetrated into the peninsula, and actually succeeded in Hispanising the emperor himself.

  Government under an absent king

  Though Charles was king of Spain, for the next thirty years Spain played no significant role in matters concerning Germany; nor – as we have noted – did Castile make any perceptible contribution to the ideas that Charles may have had about imperial power and policy. The enormous number of territories governed by Charles, from central Europe to the Pacific, were not an ‘empire’ in the old sense of lands acquired by conquest. Spaniards, in particular, preferred to call the lands associated with Spain a ‘monarchy’, by which they meant an association of independent states united only by obedience to the same dynastic ruler. Because each realm had its own separate laws and institutions it was impractical to devise a common central administration. Policy was necessarily decided at the centre, in the early 1500s through Chancellor Gattinara and then after his death through Charles alone. Imperial administration was always on the move, with no fixed centre other than the person of the emperor, who was usually accompanied by his secretaries and advisers.

  Charles respected the autonomy of his kingdoms and made no attempt to impose political or fiscal unity. To preserve his personal links with the more important realms he employed members of his family as governors or viceroys. In Spain Germaine de Foix, widow of Ferdinand the Catholic, was (in 1523) made viceroy of Valencia; and during Charles’s own absences the empress Isabella governed Spain. In Germany his brother Ferdinand was (from 1521) given charge of the Habsburg lands and in 1531 secured succession to the imperial throne by being elected King of the Romans. In the Netherlands Charles’s aunt Margaret of Austria (1518–30) and then his sister Mary of Hungary (1531–55) ruled. Elsewhere a number of viceroys ruled the non-Castilian territories in Spain, Italy and America; but each of them was required to act in liaison with a new system of administrative councils based on Castile.

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  Renaissance and Reformation

  • William R. Estep(Author)
  • 1986(Publication Date)
  • Eerdmans

    (Publisher)

  cujus regio, ejus religio). If there were those who lived in an area ruled by a prince who did not share their faith, they could move out of the territory without loss of honor or worldly goods. However, the Ecclesiastical Reservation stated that if a Catholic prelate changed his faith, he would be obliged to resign and give his position to one recognized by the Roman Church. Although the Augsburg treaty carried within it the seeds of future conflict, at that time it appeared to be the best possible solution to an increasingly complex religious conflict. What neither party counted on was the development of a vastly more aggressive and militant form of the Protestant faith: Calvinism.

  THE SPAIN OF PHILIP II

  “Most of the political and religious history of Europe during the latter half of the sixteenth century was determined by the ambitions of Philip II (1556-1598) of Spain, whom the dying Pope Paul IV had recognized as the strongest pillar of Catholicism.” Thus begins Harold Grimm’s evaluation of Philip II and his influence upon the history of Christianity in Spain and Europe.1 Although a Hapsburg and an admirer of his father, Charles V, Philip considered himself a Spaniard. He was born in 1527 in Valladolid. By the time he was eighteen, he had married a Portuguese princess; she gave him a son but she died in childbirth. When he was not quite thirty, he became king of Spain and the ruler of its far-flung possessions. The most powerful nation in Europe faced the last half of her “Golden Century” with confidence and pride—and Philip was almost equal to the task.

  The young king personified the Spanish ideal of the Catholic Reformation. In addition to his mother tongue, he was fluent in French, Latin, and Italian. He was also a patron of the arts and literature. He turned the Escorial Palace, itself a splendid example of Spanish architecture, into a museum housing his collection of art objects that had few rivals in Europe. Because of his love of books he built up a library of more than four thousand volumes. He was also a lover of music and a competent musician in his own right. Above everything else, the gifted young monarch was a devout Catholic. He attended mass every day, and he provided for a monastery in his palace. He supported the work of the Inquisition, giving its courts free rein to stamp out the Protestant heresy and to keep the moriscos and conversos

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  Revival: The Sixteenth Century (1936)

  • Charles William Chadwick Oman(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER VI TENDENCIES AND INDIVIDUALS. CHARLES V AND PHILIP II T HERE was one personage whose activities cover all the most important years of the century, and whose position was so abnormal and unprecedented that at the first glance it might seem that he ought to have become the dictator of Europe, and to have set his impress on the whole of Christendom. Yet he failed to do so. Napoleon, whose knowledge of history was somewhat sketchy, once expressed his surprise that Charles V did not succeed in mastering the world. Certainly his opportunities appeared to be great, and his personal character was high : though not a genius, he was a most level-headed, intelligent and hardworking monarch, not plagued with vices like his contemporaries Francis I and Henry VIII, and entirely destitute of the megalomania or ‘kaiserwahnsin ‘which ruined many princes of less ability in all ages. On the whole he was a moderate, well-meaning, religious man, with a strong sense of duty and an infinite capacity for hard work. The election of Charles as Emperor in 1519, in succession to his grandfather Maximilian, gave him a position which no sovereign since Charlemagne had enjoyed, since he was not only the sole owner of the heritages of Hapsburg, Burgundy, Castile and Aragon, and the possessor of the southern half of Italy, but also the titular head of the Holy Roman Empire. The imperial title had come to mean little when it was in the hands of princes with a moderate territorial endowment, like Charles’ great-grandfather Frederic III, 1 or the Schwartzburg, Palatine, Nassau, and Dutch emperors of earlier centuries. But the immense possessions of Charles outside Germany gave him a chance of making the imperial power a reality, after centuries of impotence. For no emperor before him had ever possessed such resources, territorial, financial, and military. Nothing looked more likely in 1519 than the establishment of a Hapsburg domination over all central and southern Europe

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  The Wars of Religion in Europe

  • Adolphus Ward, Martin Hume(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Perennial Press

    (Publisher)

  The main tie that bound together the various autonomous territories of which Spain consisted was the spiritual pride and religious exaltation cunningly promoted by Ferdinand the Catholic of Aragon and his wife the Queen of Castile as a means of unity. The activity of the Inquisition for seventy years since then (1490) had been popular with the majority of the people; for it had flattered their intensely individualistic pride to feel that they were of the elect, and that in the system to which they belonged there was no room for those upon whose faith lay the slightest suspicion. The ruler of Germany might be forced to hold parley with vassals who dared to deny the religious infallibility of the Church; the King Consort of England might for political reasons smile upon courtiers whose heresy was but thinly veiled, and do his best to temper the burning zeal of the churchmen; he might indeed, as he did, seek in marriage his schismatic sister-in-law. But the King of Spain in his own land must be able to look around him and see every head in his realm bowed to the same sacred symbols, and hear every tongue repeating the same creed. The day that it ceased to be so the binding link of the Spains was broken, and the powerful weapon in the hand of the King to force religious unity upon Christendom melted into impotence. Philip had been absent from Spain since June, 1554, and for these five years the country had nominally been governed by a gloomy widowed woman, his sister Juana, whose great sorrow had deepened the shadow of madness that had befallen her, as it had most of her kindred. In these circumstances it was natural that the Council of State should have exercised a more decided initiative in international relations than had previously been the case. The members of the Council were, so to speak, consultative ministers appointed by the favor of the King, and, as is usual in such cases, were more jealous of his prerogative than the sovereign himself.

  The traditional policy of Castile had been for many years to increase the hold of the Kings upon the patronage and temporalities of the Church in Spain, and to weaken the papal power even over ecclesiastical affairs. The struggles of Charles to this end against successive Popes had been bitter and almost continuous; but as he had usually been able to hold out rewards or threats, he had, especially with Clement VII (Medici) and Paul III (Farnese), on the whole been successful in his policy. With Paul IV (Caraffa) in the papal chair, and Alva and his troops thundering at the gates of Rome (1557), the persistence of the Council in their policy of encroachment upon the power exercised over the Spanish Church by the Papacy greatly strained the relations of the latter with the State; and they remained out of harmony until the death of Paul IV (August 15, 1559), when Philip was about to return to Spain.

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  War and Religion after Westphalia, 1648–1713

  • David Onnekink(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 The Role of Religion in Spanish Foreign Policy in the Reign of Carlos II (1665–1700) 1 Christopher Storrs In any attempt to assess the importance of religion in the conduct of international affairs in the generation following the peace of Westphalia in 1648, Spain, or the Catholic Monarchy as it was commonly referred in the early modern period, 2 represents an important test case. For one thing, Spain’s title to its developing empire in the Indies rested in part upon papal grant. 3 For another, in the century or more following the passage of the Catholic Monarchy to the Habsburgs, Charles I of Spain (the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) and his successors had established Spain as the leading secular champion of the Counter-Reformation. 4 In addition, there was a distinctive theological discourse surrounding that Monarchy. 5 In reality, the extent to which those monarchs subordinated the secular interests of the Monarchy to those of Christianity, Catholicism and the Church – and hence the validity of any simple black and white contrast between attitudes and conduct before and after 1648 – must be doubted. 6 On the other hand, when seeking a case study to assess the role of religion in the formulation and execution of foreign policy, few states would appear to be better candidates for examination than Habsburg Spain in view of the way early modern Spain was perceived by contemporaries – and by subsequent historians – as a polity in which domestic 7 and foreign policy were shaped, even skewed by religious concerns. In what follows, an attempt is made to determine just how far Spanish policy abroad was driven by the motor of religion in the reign of the last Spanish Habsburg, the last Habsburg Carlos II (1665–1700)

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