Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500-58). For a man with no military leanings, it is ironic that Charles V's life was dominated by war. Crowned by the pope in 1519, he fought his first battle in 1535 at Tunis against the Turks, and much of his energy was devoted to preventing Turkish expansion westward into the Mediterranean and eastern Europe, Vienna itself coming under siege in 1529. Charles's lands were vast and bewildering in their complexity: they included the Netherlands, Burgundy, Spain, and various German fiefdoms, and his responsibilities included the nominal leadership of the Christian West. An onerous task indeed at such a time of turmoil and strife as the early 16th century.
Moreover, Charles was beset with internal and external problems: François I of France attempted to expand his domains at the expense of the empire in Italy and the Netherlands, Pope Clement VII wished to curb the temporal power of the empire, and the rising tide of Protestantism threatened the unity of Christendom, on which the empire rested.
Remarkably, Charles managed to counter, or at least contain, all these threats. The French were destroyed at Pavia in 1525, and François was captured, Rome was sacked in 1527, and the Protestant princes put to flight at Mühlberg in 1547. Nevertheless, the inherent contradictions in a political unit that was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire, meant that Charles, exhausted, retired to a monastery in 1556. Thereafter his domains were divided between the Austrian and Spanish branches of the Habsburg family.
— Toby McLeod
