The World полностью

Charles, who combined German, Spanish, Burgundian and Portuguese blood, grew up in Bruges and, speaking first French, then Flemish and German, and later Spanish, was known as Carlos in Spain, Karl in Germany, Charles in Brussels. His face was like a hereditary cartoon of his complex domains: ‘he is tall and splendidly built, with a long face, beautiful light-blue eyes, his mouth and chin not as beautiful as his other features, a lopsided mouth with a drooping lower lip’. The elongated jaw and prominent lip – pathologic mandibular prognathism – was a feature of his Trastámara as well as his Habsburg ancestry, his mouth gaping open from elongated adenoids, ‘his tongue short and thick which means he speaks with great difficulty’. Yet he was irrepressibly ambitious with a vision of universal Christian monarchy and expansive empire, choosing the motto Plus Ultra – Further Beyond. He was energetic and dutiful, measured and capable of taking decisions on many fronts despite perpetual stress and constant travelling: ‘nine times to Germany, six times to Spain, seven to Italy, to Flanders ten times, four times to France, twice to England, twice to Africa, eight voyages in the Mediterranean, three in the seas of Spain’, he later recalled. Hunting, partying and womanizing – fathering illegitimate children along the way – were his relaxations, his favourite treats iced beer and oysters, but it was not surprising that he, like Suleiman, tended to melancholy. Given that his mother and grandmother were insane and that he himself suffered depression, it took an impressive constitution and personality just to survive. But he did better.

First he rushed to Spain to claim his kingdom. There he was received by his manic mother, whom he had not seen for twelve years. The sixteen-year-old knelt before Juana, who ‘asked the king three times if he was really her son he had grown so tall’ but confirmed his right to rule in her name. While in Castile, Charles had an affair with his step-grandmother, Germaine de Foix, the twenty-nine-year-old widow of King Ferdinand. Yet arrogant Flemish officials sparked a rebellion of Spanish comuneros. It was suppressed, its leader, a bishop, tortured on Charles’s orders, then garrotted.

This political funambulist was also negotiating election as emperor and coping with a seething religious crisis. His rivals François I of France and Henry VIII of England also fancied Charlemagne’s crown. ‘If you aspire to this throne,’ his grandfather Maximilian had advised, ‘you mustn’t hold back any resource.’ Charles borrowed from Fugger the Rich, paid 1.5 million florins to the electors and emerged as Emperor Charles V,^* whose first problem was Martin Luther. Charles summoned the faecal fulminator for trial by the princes. In April 1521, at the diet (imperial assembly) of Worms, Charles confronted Luther with his heretical diatribes.

‘I don’t trust in the pope,’ retorted the incorrigible Luther. ‘I’m bound by the Scriptures and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I can’t and won’t recant anything,’ and he made a knightly salute. Charles – sympathetic to Lutheran sentiments but convinced that papal authority and ritual were essential – ordered Luther’s killing or burning: ‘We want him apprehended and punished as a notorious heretic.’

‘Burn him! Burn him!’ shouted the Spanish, but Luther was secretly protected by his patron, Frederick III, bewhiskered elector of Saxony, whose retainers carried Luther triumphantly out. Charles let him escape and Frederick arranged his ‘kidnap’ by ‘armed robbers’ who hid him in a Saxon castle as Protestantism spread fast. One of the first princes to convert was the grand master of Teutonic Knights, Albert, who converted his Order’s Prussian lands into his own fiefdom. This younger son of the minor German family of Hohenzollern became duke of Prussia.

Charles’s chief rival was François of France, alarmed by having to face the Habsburgs on both borders; but, thanks to Luther, Charles had to fight popular Protestantism in a series of wars and peasant revolts – the start of 150 years of sectarian conflict, equivalent to the schism of Sunni–Shia in Islam. Yet he could not rule all his lands on his own, so he appointed his brother Ferdinand to be Austrian archduke in Vienna. Ferdinand, who was as pragmatic and able as Charles, had been brought up in Spain, speaking Spanish. The brothers were strangers. When they met after ten years, they spoke different languages. Yet, despite many crises, God and dynasty always came first.

‘Anyone who believes the empire of the entire world falls to anyone by virtue of men or riches is wrong,’ Charles told the Castilian assembly in 1520. ‘Empire comes from God alone.’ He added, ‘I’d have been content with the Spanish empire,’ which included ‘the gold-bearing world’ – America.