Kaiser Karl V

Karl V, Kaiser (Ghent, 1500-58, San Geronimo de Yuste, Spain), grandson of the Emperor Maximilian I, and son of Philip of Burgundy and a Spanish mother (Joana), acceded to the Burgundian estates (Netherlands and Franche Comté) in 1506, and was declared of age in 1515. Through the death of his maternal grandfather he came to the throne of Spain in 1518, though only as joint monarch with his mother. By the death of Maximilian in 1519, he succeeded to the Habsburg possessions, and in 1520 was crowned emperor at Aachen. Finding himself within these few years arrived at a position of extraordinary power, he devoted his energies to the attempt to neutralize French expansion, and to the assertion of temporal and spiritual unity in imperial central Europe in face of the Reformation, which broke out at the beginning of his reign. By the decisions of the Diet of Worms in 1521 (see Wormser Reichstage) he sought to break the force and spirit of the new movement, but the rivalry with France immediately drew him away to Italy, leaving Germany without a resident ruler for nine years, during which the Reformation established itself. Karl V took Milan, defeated and captured Francis I at Pavia in 1525, subdued Pope Clement V, and sacked Rome in 1527. In 1530 he returned to Germany, presiding over the Diet of Augsburg, at which he vainly hoped to initiate the suppression of Protestantism. Turkish pressure drew him eastward in 1529 and 1532, and he was obliged to make concessions to the Lutheran party in the Religious Peace of Nuremberg (1532, see Nürnberger Religionsfriede).

The next years were taken up with further successful struggles against France, but in 1546 Karl began a campaign against the Protestant forces of the Schmalkaldic League (see Schmalkaldischer Krieg), which culminated in his decisive victory in 1547 at Mühlberg, in which the Elector Johann Friedrich of Saxony was taken prisoner. A well-known equestrian portrait by Titian shows Karl V as a knight in this battle. At the Diet of Augsburg (1547) Karl again sought unsuccessfully to stem Protestant influence. The Interim of Augsburg, however, made no headway towards unification. In the 1550s the tide turned against Karl, who faced a rising of the northern princes (the Fürstenre-volution of 1552), in the course of which his former lieutenant, Moritz von Sachsen, reduced him to military impotence. Karl, who had ceded Verdun, Toul, and Metz to France, without gaining the support he had hoped, wearied of a conflict to which he had fruitlessly devoted his whole life.

After the Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555, see Augsburger Religionsfriede), by which the spiritual division of Germany was officially recognized, Karl abdicated in favour of Philip II, as to the throne of Spain, and of Ferdinand I in respect of the imperial crown, withdrawing to a monastery in Estremadura. His undoubted political talent and force of character were worn down by the complexity of the situations he faced, and the tide of human thought and belief which he sought to arrest.