Charles V Becomes Holy Roman Emperor

On 26 October 1520 the eldest son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Castile was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

Charles was born 24 February 1500, and by the time he became the emperor he had already been King of Spain, Archduke of Austria, Duke of Burgundy, and Lord of the Netherlands since he was a kid. He had basically be born to inherit a big chunk of the planet, and this one chin man “brought together under his rule extensive territories in western, central, and southern Europe, and the Spanish colonies in the Americas and Asia. As a result, his domains spanned nearly four million square kilometers and were the first to be described as “the empire on which the sun never sets”. The title of Holy Roman Emperor was basically icing on the cake.

Charles V was Katharina of Aragon’s nephew, and he was engaged for a short while in 1507 to Katherina’s sister-in-law, Mary Tudor, but  the engagement was broken when her brother, Henry VIII, and Thomas Wolsey decided to use her to make a pact with France instead. He was then later engaged to his first cousin, Katherina’s daughter Mary, when she was a small girl, but decided he couldn’t wait for her to grow up to secure his heirs and wed another first cousin — Isabella of Portugal — instead in 1526. Ah, the amusing incest of the royal families!

Charles V would later use his relationship to Katherina of Aragon  as an excuse to give Henry VIII a hard row to hoe over the English king’s attempt to divorce his Spanish wife in favor of Anne Boleyn. In fact, he would keep meddling in English politics for the next several decades, finally culminating in his son’s marriage to the emperor’s former fiancee, Queen Mary I. However, that bedevilment was still years in the future when Charles was crowned, so Henry VIII was probably initially pleased as punch to have the Holy Roman Emperor as his nephew-in-law.

Anyway, Charles went on to have many, MANY historical things happen during his reign that did not (surprising as it is to a Tudor historian like myself) involve either Henry VIII or his children. Charles’s armies humbled several powerful men, including the King of France, Pope Clement VII, the Duke of Cleves, and the Ottoman Empire’s Suleiman the Magnificent.

Strangely, for such a powerful man Charles V was not very power-hungry. When he was in his early 50s, Charles started abdicating his various thrones and giving rule of his territories to his eldest son and his younger brother. Charles retreated from court life to live in seclusion at the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, where lived alone in a small room with multiple clocks on every wall. Although reclusive in person, the former emperor maintained correspondence with heirs and acted as a sort of unofficial advisor. Charles died six years after he retired, on 21 September 1558, from what is believed to have been malaria. His mortal remains now lie in the Royal Pantheon of the Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.