Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

“ We do not wonder men loved him and were glad to die for him. He had a soul, and honor, and remembrance of friendship. He was a genius, superlative and bewildering. We can forget and forgive some things in such a man; but for such a sovereign as Charles V, what can we say, save that he was not so execrable as Philip II, his son? Charles, being Flemish in birth, both Flanders and himself considered him less Spaniard than Belgian. He was Emperor first and King of Spain afterward; and in Flanders he set the pageant of his abdication. ”

“ The nobility, the burghers, the peasants, all thrilled at his call. Now the moment had come for a great emperor, a second Charlemagne, to stand forward and regenerate at once religion and the empire. There was, however, at the head of the state, only Charles V., the grandson of Maximilian, a man weak where he ought to have been strong, and strong where he ought to have been weak, a Spanish Burgundian prince, of Romance stock, who despised and disliked the German tongue, the tongue of the people whose imperial crown he bore, a prince whose policy was to combat France and humble it. ”

“ Soon after, upon Christmas-day, the people of Rome, who had hitherto elected their Bishop, and reckoned that they and their Senate inherited the rights of the antient Senate and people of Rome, voted Charles their Emperor, and subjected themselves to him in such manner as the old Roman Empire and their Senate were subjected to the old Roman Emperors. The Pope crowned him, and anointed him with holy oil, and worshipped him on his knees after the manner of adoring the old Roman Emperors; as the aforesaid Poet thus relates:
Post laudes igitur dictas & summus eundem
Præsul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim ”

“ We have seen the rise of the nobility, from the time when the barbarian chiefs preferred living outside the walls of cities to the time when they rivaled the French cavaliers in courtly bearing and chivalrous bravery. Nor were the representatives of these two orders, the Pope and the Emperor, less powerful at the beginning of the sixteenth century than they had been before. Charles V. was the most powerful sovereign whom Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne, and the papal see had recovered by diplomatic intrigue much of the influence which it had lost by moral depravity. ”

“ Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out:265 Rome is our common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I. a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. ”

“ Peter’s and, placing a crown on his head, cried in a loud voice: “Life and victory to Charles, the great and pacific Emperor of the Romans, crowned by the hand of God!” and after three centuries and more of anarchy, barbarism, and hopeless degeneration, the empire was restored as the Holy Roman Empire, in the person of a Frankish warrior of the lands of the Belgæ, and destined to endure for another thousand years. ”

“ Charles was less fortunate in the part he took in the wars between Francis I and Charles V, the brother-in-law of his wife. He tried to maintain a strict neutrality, but his attendance at the emperor’s coronation at Bologna in 1530 was imperative in his double character of kinsman and vassal. The visit was fatal to him, for he was rewarded with the county of Asti, and this so displeased the French king that on the revolt of Geneva to Protestantism in 1532, Francis sent help to the citizens. Berne and Fribourg did likewise, and so expelled the duke from Lausanne and Vaud. ”

“ It would hardly be asserting too much to say that Charles, at the moment he ascended the Imperial throne, held in his hands the fortunes of the Reformation, so far as regards the countries of Southern Europe. Whether these were to be saved to Rome or not, seemed at this time to depend largely upon the attitude which Charles should assume towards the reform movement. Fortunately for the Catholic Church, the young emperor placed himself at the head of the Catholic party, and during his
reign employed the strength and resources of his empire in repressing the heresy of the reformers. ”

“ ISBN 90-5583-211-1.↑ In this context, the word 'republic' refers to 'the public well-being, the common good', and not to a form of government without a hereditary head of state.↑ Mary of Hungary, governor of the Habsburg Netherlands from 1531 to 1555. ”

“ The empire therefore went back to its rightful seat, and its title devolved upon Charles. His Lombard kingdom, added to the greatness of his Frankish domain, qualified him, without a competitor, for a supremacy to which he was called by the will of the Roman people, expressed through their spokesman, pope Leo the Third. Such was the conception admitted without dispute for centuries after the decisive event of the middle ages had taken place. The only differences in its statement concern the relative shares of the emperor, the pope, and the Roman people in the transaction. ”

“ During his abode at Rome, the citizens, in order to attach him to them, made him their senator, and the pope invested him with the kingdom, on condition that he should pay annually to the church the sum of fifty thousand ducats; and it was decreed that, from thenceforth, neither Charles nor any other person, who might be king of Naples, should be emperor also. Charles marched against Manfred, routed his army, and slew him near Benevento, and then became sovereign of Sicily and Naples. ”

“ Here on 24 February, 1525,—the emperor's twenty-fifth birthday,—the army of Charles won an overwhelming victory. Eight thousand French soldiers fell on the field that day, and Francis, who had been in the thick of the fight, was compelled to surrender. "No thing in the world is left me save my honor and my life," wrote the king to his mother. Everything seemed auspicious for the cause of Charles. Francis, after a brief captivity in Spain, was released on condition that he would surrender all claims to Burgundy, the Netherlands, and Italy, and would marry the emperor's sister. ”

“ Many figures conspicuous in history will appear, among them that of the great Emperor Charles V. He will be seen procuring imperial dominion over a people he did not know, and whose language he could neither speak nor understand; quarreling with the pope one day and threatening to subvert his throne, and becoming reconciled the next, in order that monarchism should be strengthened; sending savage hordes of armed men to crush out the spirit of religious liberty in his native Netherlands by blood and murder ”

“ MAXIMILIAN II. (1527–1576) , Roman emperor, was the eldest son of the emperor Ferdinand I. by his wife Anne, daughter of Ladislaus, king of Hungary and Bohemia, and was born in Vienna on the 31st of July 1527. Educated principally in Spain, he gained some experience of warfare during the campaign of Charles V. against France in 1544, and also during the war of the league of Schmalkalden, and soon began to take part in imperial business. ”

“ In May 1521 a treaty of alliance was signed at Rome between him and the emperor. Milan and Genoa were to be taken from France and restored to the Empire, and Parma and Piacenza were to be given to the Church on the expulsion of the French. The expense of enlisting 10,000 Swiss was to be borne equally by pope and emperor. Charles took Florence and the Medici family under his protection and promised to punish all enemies of the Catholic faith. Leo agreed to invest Charles with Naples, to crown him emperor, and to aid in a war against Venice. ”

“ When we look at the world as it appeared in the year 1500, an easy date to remember, and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born, this is what we see. The feudal disorder of the Middle Ages has given way before the order of a number of highly centralised kingdoms. The most powerful of all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a cradle. ”

“ Though we speak of an empire founded by Charles the Great, the use of the word should not be allowed to lead us astray into comparisons or analogies based on merely verbal resemblances. Charles was not an emperor of the type known to the Roman Empire of the classic Christian period, nor as a ruler can he be compared with Russian Czars or Napoleon the First. Neither as king nor as emperor was Charles an absolute monarch. ”

“ It was not as slaves, indeed, conquered by the legions of Rome, that the Germans had been incorporated in the empire; with their arms in their hands they had gained the rights of citizens and of lords of the empire, and when they had filled and transformed everything with the elements of their nature, the free development of events placed the imperial sceptre of the West in the strong right hand of a German prince. So Charles entered upon the government of that great Germanic-Roman empire into which the ancient Roman power had been transformed. ”

“ Charles V did not choose to surrender that which alone gave unity to his complicated empire. The German princes were allowed to have subjects of one religion only. That prerogative was denied to the Emperor. The imperial dignity, in its ideal character as the appointed defender and advocate of the universal Church, existed no longer. A monarch reigning over Catholic and Protestant alike was an inferior representative of unity and authority, and a poor copy of Charlemagne. ”

“ The extraordinary success of his Adagia, published in 1500, and of his early works, influenced by Thomas More (with whom he had been brought into contact during his stay in England as a protégé of Lord Mountjoy) , seems certainly strange in view of the unbending attitude taken by Charles V towards Lutheranism. But Humanism had become the fashion in high aristocratic and ecclesiastical circles, and neither the young emperor nor his gouvernante, Mary of Hungary, disguised their interest in the movement. ”

“ The government which was formed was too weak to weld Germany into a political whole, able to withstand the disintegrating influence of its own particularism and of the Habsburg dynastic interest; and Charles was left free to pursue throughout his reign the old imperial maxim, divide et impera. The Reichsregiment was to have independent power only during the Emperor's absence; at other times it was to sink into an advisory body, and important decisions must always have his assent. He was to nominate the president and four out of the Council's twenty-two members ”

“ It would probably organise a German national Church with slight dependence on Rome; it might establish a national government with no more dependence on Charles. Both these threatened interests took action; the Pope instigated Henry VIII to take away from the German merchants of the Steelyard their commercial privileges, and to urge upon Charles the prohibition of the meeting at Speier; he also suggested the deposition of the Elector Frederick as a warning to other rebellious Princes. The Emperor was nothing loth ”

“ Francis I. was the rival of Charles in the contest for Imperial honors. When the Electors conferred the title of emperor upon the Spanish monarch, Francis was sorely disappointed, and during all the remainder of his reign kept up a jealous and almost incessant warfare with Charles, whose enormous possessions now nearly surrounded the French kingdom. Italy was the field of much of the fighting, as the securing of dominion in that peninsula was the chief aim of each of the rivals. ”

“ Among the enemies of the German reformers none was more important than the young emperor. It was toward the end of the year 1520 that Charles came to Germany for the first time. After being crowned king of the Romans at Aix-la-Chapelle, he assumed, with the pope's consent, the title of emperor elect, as his grandfather Maximilian had done. He then moved on to the town of Worms, where he was to hold his first diet and face the German situation. ”

“ The general tendency seems to have been to accept too easily the accounts of the chroniclers of the east Frankish kingdom, which are favourable to Louis the German, and to accuse Charles of cowardice and bad faith. He seems on the contrary not to have lacked activity or decision. ”

“ The Pope had news of this carried secretly by his servants to Michael, Emperor of Constantinople; but he refused all assistance saying: “The Pope has an independent kingdom and one higher than mine; so he must act his own revenge upon his enemies.” Thereupon the holy Leo invited the unconquered Charles to come to Rome; following in this the ordinance of God, that, as Charles was already in very deed ruler and emperor over many nations, so also by the authority of the apostolic see he might have now the name of Emperor, Cæsar and Augustus. ”

“ Seldom has a nation had better cause to repent a fit of enthusiasm than Germany had when it realised the effects of the election of Charles V. Of his rivals Francis I would no doubt have made a worse Emperor, but the choice of Ferdinand-a suggestion made by Margaret of Savoy and peremptorily rejected by Charles himself-or of Frederick of Saxony, would probably have been attended with less disastrous consequences to the German national cause. In personal tastes and sympathies, in the aims he pursued within his German kingdom, and in his foreign policy Charles V was an alien ”