immediate ancestor of the two great sovereign dynasties--the
Austrian and the Austro-Spanish--which sprang from his
marriage with Mary of Burgundy and which dominated Europe for
a century after his death. His son Philip, heir to the
Burgundian sovereignty of the Netherlands, married (1496)
Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. Two
children, Charles and Ferdinand, were the fruit of this
marriage. Charles, the elder, inherited more crowns and
coronets than were ever gathered, in reality, by one
sovereign, before or since. Ferdinand and Isabella had united
by their marriage the kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, and, by
the conquest of Granada and the partial conquest of Navarre,
the entire peninsula, except Portugal, was subsequently added
to their joint dominion. Joanna inherited the whole, on the
death of Isabella, in 1504, and the death of Ferdinand, in
1516. She also inherited from her father, Ferdinand, the
kingdom of the Two Sicilies--which he had reunited--and the
island of Sardinia. Philip, on his side, already in possession
of the Netherlands and Franche Comté, was heir to the domain of
the House of Austria. Both of these great inheritances
descended in due course to Charles, and he had not long to
wait for them. His father, Philip, died in 1506, and his
mother, Joanna, lost her mind, through grief at that event.
The death of his Spanish grandfather, Ferdinand, occurred in
1516, and that of his Austrian grandfather, the Emperor
Maximilian, followed three years later.
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At the age of twenty years (representing his mother in her
incapacity) Charles found himself sovereign of Spain, and
America, of Sicily, Naples, Sardinia, the Low Countries,
Franche Comté, Austria, and the duchies associated with it.
The same year (1519) he was chosen King of Germany and
Emperor-elect, after a keen contest over the imperial crown,
in which Francis I. of France and Henry VIII. of England were
his competitors. On attaining this dignity, he conferred the
Austrian possessions on his brother Ferdinand. But he remained
the most potent and imposing monarch that Europe had seen
since Charlemagne. He came upon the stage just as Luther had
marshalled, in Germany, the reforming forces of the new era,
against intolerable iniquities in the Papal Church.
Unfortunately, he came, with his vast armament of powers, to
resist the demands of his age, and to be the champion of old
falsities and wrongs, both in Church and State. There was
nothing in the nature of the man, nor in his education, nor in
the influences which bore upon him, from either the Spanish or
the Austrian side of his family, to put him in sympathy with
lifting movements or with liberal ideas. He never formed a
conception of the world in which it looked larger to his eyes,
or signified more to him, than the globe upon his scepter. So,
naturally enough, this Cæsar of the Renaissance (Charles V. in
Germany and Charles I. in Spain) did his utmost, from the day
he climbed the throne, to thrust Europe back into the murk of
the fourteenth century, which he found it pretty nearly
escaped from. He did not succeed; but he gave years of misery
to several countries by his exertions, and he resigned the
task to a successor whom the world is never likely to tire of
abhorring and despising.
The end of popular freedom in Spain.
The affairs which called Charles V. away from Germany, after
launching his ineffectual edict of Worms against Luther and
Luther's supporters, grew in part out of disturbances in his
kingdom of Spain. His election to the imperial office had not
been pleasing to the Spaniards, who anticipated the
complications they would be dragged into by it, the foreign
character which their sovereign (already foreign in mind by
his education in the Netherlands) would be confirmed in, and
the indifference with which their grievances would be
regarded. For their grievances against the monarchy had been
growing serious in the last years of Ferdinand, and since his
death. The crown had gained power in the process of political
centralization, and its aggrandizement from the possession of
America began to loom startlingly in the light of the conquest
of Mexico, just achieved. During the absence of Charles in
Germany, his former preceptor, Cardinal Adrian, of Utrecht,
being in charge of the government as regent, a revolt broke
out at Toledo which spread widely and became alarming. The
insurgents organized their movement under the name of the
Santa Junta, or Holy League, and having obtained possession of
the demented Queen, Joanna, they assumed to act for her and
with her authority. This rebellion was suppressed with
difficulty; but the suppression was accomplished (1521-1522),
and it proved to be the last struggle for popular freedom in
Spain. The government used its victory with an unsparing
determination to establish absolute powers, and it succeeded.
The conditions needed for absolutism were already created, in
fact, by the deadly blight which the Inquisition had been
casting upon Spain for forty years. Since the beginning of the
frightful work of Torquemada, in 1483, it had been diligently
searching out and destroying every germ of free thought and
manly character that gave the smallest sign of fruitfulness in
the kingdom; and the crushing of the Santa Junta may be said
to have left few in Spain who deserved a better fate than the
political, the religious and the intellectual servitude under
which the nation sank.
Persecution of the Spanish Moriscoes.
Charles, whose mind was dense in its bigotry, urged on the
Inquisition, and pointed its dreadful engines of destruction
against the unfortunate Moriscoes, or Moors, who had been
forced to submit to Christian baptism after their subjugation.
Many of these followers of Mahomet had afterwards taken up
again the prayers and practices of their own faith, either
secretly or in quiet ways, and their relapse appears to have
been winked at, more or less. For they were a most useful
people, far surpassing the Spaniards in industry, in thrift
and knowledge of agriculture, and in mechanical skill. Many of
the arts and manufactures of the kingdom were entirely in
their hands. It was ruinous to interfere with their peaceful
labors. But Charles, as heathenish as the Grand Turk when it
suited his ends to be so, could look on these well-behaved and
useful Moors with no eyes but the eyes of an orthodox piety, and
could take account of nothing but their infidel faith. He
began, therefore, in 1524, the heartless, senseless and
suicidal persecution of the Moriscoes which exterminated them
or drove them from the land, and which contributed signally to
the making of Spain an exemplary pauper among the nations.
Despotism of Charles V. in the Netherlands.
In his provinces of the Low Countries, Charles found more than
in Spain to provoke his despotic bigotry. The Flemings and the
Dutch had been tasting of freedom too much for his liking, in
recent years, and ideas, both political and religious, had
been spreading among them, which were not the ideas of his
august mind, and must therefore, of necessity, be false. They
had already become infected with the rebellious anti-papal
doctrines of Luther. Indeed, they had been even riper than
Luther's countrymen for a religious revolution, when he
sounded the signal note which echoed through all northern
Europe. In Germany, the elected emperor could fulminate an
edict against the audacious reformers, but he had small power
to give force to it. In the Netherlands, he possessed a
sovereignty more potent, and he took instant measures to
exercise the utmost arbitrariness of which he could make it
capable. The Duchess Margaret, his aunt, who had been
governess of the provinces, was confirmed by him in that
office, and he enlarged the powers in her commission. His
commands practically superseded the regular courts, and
subjected the whole administration of justice to his arbitrary
will and that of his representative. At the same time they
stripped the States of their legislative functions and reduced
them to insignificance.
{1057}
Having thus trampled on the civil liberties of the provinces,
he borrowed the infernal enginery of the Inquisition, and
introduced it for the destruction of religious freedom. Its
first victims were two Augustine monks, convicted of
Lutheranism, who were burned at Brussels, in July, 1523. The
first martyr in Holland was a priest who suffered impalement
as well as burning, at the Hague, in 1525. From these
beginnings the persecution grew crueler as the alienation of
the stubborn Netherlanders from the Church of Rome widened;
and Charles did not cease to fan its fires with successive
proclamations or "placards," which denounced and forbade every
reading of Scripture, every act of devotion, every
conversation of religion, in public or private, which the
priests of the Church did not conduct. "The number of
Netherlanders who were burned, strangled, beheaded, or buried
alive, in obedience to his edicts, ... have been placed as
high as 100,000 by distinguished authorities, and have never
been put at a lower mark than 50,000."
Charles V. and Francis I. in Italy.
These exercises of an autocratic piety in Spain and the Low
Countries may be counted, perhaps, among the pleasures of the
young Emperor during the earlier years of his reign. His more
serious affairs were connected mainly with his interests or
ambitions in Italy, which seemed to be threatened by the King
of France. The throne in that country was now occupied by
Francis I., a cousin of Louis XII., who had succeeded the
latter in 1515, and who had taken up anew the Italian projects
in which Louis failed. In the first year of his reign, he
crossed the Alps with an army, defeated the Swiss whom the
Duke of Milan employed against him, and won the whole duchy by
that single fight. This re-establishment of the French at
Milan was regarded with exceeding jealousy by the Austrian
interest, and by the Pope. Maximilian, shortly before his
death, had made a futile effort to dislodge them, and Charles
V., on coming to the throne, lost no time in organizing plans
to the same end. He entered into an alliance with Pope Leo X.,
by a treaty which bears the same date as the Edict of Worms
against Luther, and there can be little doubt that the two
instruments were part of one understanding. Both parties
courted the friendship of Henry VIII. of England, whose power
and importance had risen to a high mark, and Henry's able
minister, Cardinal Wolsey, figured notably in the diplomatic
intrigues which went on during many years.
War began in 1521, and in three months the French were
expelled from nearly every part of the Milanese territory.
Pope Leo X. lived just long enough to receive the news. His
successor was Adrian VI., former tutor of the Emperor, who
made vain attempts to arrange a peace. Wolsey had brought
Henry VIII. of England into the alliance against Francis,
expecting to win the papal tiara through the Emperor's
influence; but he was disappointed.
Francis made an effort in 1523 to recover Milan; but was
crippled at the moment of sending his expedition across the
Alps by the treason of the most powerful noble of France, the
Constable, Charles, Duke of Bourbon. The Constable had been
wronged and affronted by the King's mother, and by intriguers
at court, and he revenged himself basely by going over to the
enemies of his country. In the campaigns which followed
(1523-1524), the French had ill-success, and lost their
chivalrous and famous knight, Bayard, in one of the last
skirmishes of their retreat. Another change now occurred in
the occupancy of the papal throne, and Wolsey's ambitious
schemes were foiled again. The new Pope was Giulio de'Medici,
who took the name of Clement VII.
Once more the King of France, in October, 1524, led his forces
personally into Italy and laid siege to Pavia. It was a
ruinous undertaking. He was defeated overwhelmingly in a
battle fought before Pavia (February 24, 1525) and taken
prisoner. After a captivity in Spain of nearly a year, he
regained his freedom disgracefully, by signing and solemnly
swearing to a treaty which he never intended to observe. By
this treaty he not only renounced all claims to Milan, Naples,
Genoa, and other Italian territory, but he gave up the duchy
of Burgundy. Released in good faith on these terms, in the
early part of 1526, he perfidiously repudiated the treaty, and
began fresh preparations for war. He found the Italians now as
ready to oust the Spaniards from their peninsula with French
help, as they had been ready before to expel the French with
help from Spain. The papal interest was in great alarm at the
power acquired by the Emperor, and Venice and Milan shared the
feeling. A new "Holy Alliance" was accordingly formed, with
the Pope at its head, and with Henry VIII. of England for its
"Protector." But before this League took the field with its
forces, Rome and Italy were stricken and trampled, as though
by a fresh invasion of Goths.
Sack of Rome, by the army of the Constable.
The imperial army, quartered in the duchy of Milan, under the
command of the Constable Bourbon, was scantily paid and fed.
The soldiers were forced to plunder the city and country for
their subsistence, and, of course, under those circumstances,
there was little discipline among them. The region which they
terrorized was soon exhausted, by their robberies and by the
stoppage of industries and trade. It then became necessary for
the Constable to lead them to new fields, and he moved
southwards. His forces were made up in part of Spaniards and
in part of Germans--the latter under a Lutheran commander, and
enlisted for war with the Pope and for pillage in Italy. He
directed the march to Rome, constrained, perhaps, by the
demands of his soldiery, but expecting, likewise, to crush the
League by seizing its apostolic head. On the 5th of May, 1527,
his 40,000 brigands arrived before the city. At daybreak, the
next morning, they assaulted the walls irresistibly and
swarmed over them. Bourbon was killed in the assault, and his
men were left uncontrolled masters of the venerable capital of
the world. They held it for seven months, pillaging and
destroying, committing every possible excess and every
imaginable sacrilege. Rome is believed to have suffered at
their hands more lasting defacement and loss of the splendors
of its art than from the sacking of Vandals or Goths.
The Pope held out in Castle St. Angelo for a month and then
surrendered. The hypocritical Charles V., when he learned what
his imperially commissioned bandits had done, made haste to
express horror and grief, but did not hasten to check or
repair the outrage in the least. Pope Clement was not released
from captivity until a great money-payment had been extorted
from him, with the promise of a general council of the Church
to reform abuses and to eradicate Lutheranism.
{1058}
Spanish Domination in Italy.
Europe was shocked by the barbarity of the capture of Rome,
and the enemies leagued against Charles were stimulated to
more vigorous exertions. Assisted with money from England,
Francis sent another army into Italy, which took Genoa and
Pavia and marched to Naples, blockading the city by sea and
land. But the siege proved fatal to the French army. So many
perished of disease that the survivors were left at the mercy
of the enemy, and capitulated in September, 1528.
The great Genoese Admiral, Andrea Doria, had been offended,
meantime, by King Francis, and had excited his fellow citizens
to a revolution, which made Genoa, once more, an independent
republic, with Doria at its head. Shortly before this
occurred, Florence had expelled the Medici and reorganized her
government upon the old republican basis. But the defeat of
the French before Naples ended all hope of Italian liberty;
since the Pope resigned himself after that event to the will
of the Emperor, and the papal and imperial despotisms became
united as one, to exterminate freedom from the peninsula.
Florence was the first victim of the combination. The city was
besieged and taken by the Emperor's troops, in compliance with
the wishes of the Pope, and the Medici, his relatives, were
restored. Francis continued war feebly until 1529, when a
peace called the "Ladies Peace" was brought about, by
negotiations between the French King's mother and the
Emperor's aunt. This was practically the end of the long
French wars in Italy.
Germany.
Such were the events which, in different quarters of the
world, diverted the attention of the Emperor during several
years from Luther and the Reformation in Germany. The
religious movement in those years had been making a steady
advance. Yet its enemies gained control of another Diet held
at Spires in 1529 and reversed the ordinance of the Diet of
1526, by which each state had been left free to deal in its
own manner with the edict of Worms. Against this action of the
Diet, the Lutheran princes and the representatives of the
Lutheran towns entered their solemn protest, and so acquired
the name, "Protestants," which became in time the accepted and
adopted name of all, in most parts of the world, who withdrew
from the Roman communion.
The Peasants' War and the Anabaptists.
Before this time, the Reform had passed through serious
trials, coming from excesses in the very spirit out of which
itself had risen and to which it gave encouragement. The long
suffering, much oppressed peasantry of Germany, who had found
bishops as pitiless extortioners as lords, caught eagerly at a
hope of relief from the overthrow of the ancient Church.
Several times within the preceding half-century they had risen
in formidable revolts, with a peasants' clog, or bundschuh for
their banner. In 1525 fresh risings occurred in Swabia,
Franconia, Alsace, Lorraine, Bavaria, Thuringia and elsewhere,
and a great Peasants' War raged for months, with ferocity and
brutality on both sides. The number who perished in the war is
estimated at 100,000. The demands made by the peasants were for
measures of the simplest justice--for the poorest rights and
privileges in life. But their cause was taken up by
half-crazed religious fanatics, who became in some parts their
leaders, and such a character was given to it that reasonable
reformers were justified, perhaps, in setting themselves
sternly against it. The wildest prophet of the outbreak was
one Thomas Münzer, a precursor of the frenzied sect of the
Anabaptists. Münzer perished in the wreck of the peasants'
revolt; but some of his disciples, who fled into Westphalia
and the Netherlands, made converts so rapidly in the town of
Münster that in 1535 they controlled the city, expelled every
inhabitant who would not join their communion, elected and
crowned a king, and exhibited a madness in their proceedings
that is hardly equalled in history. The experience at Münster
may reasonably be thought to have proved the soundness of
Luther's judgment in refusing countenance to the cause of the
oppressed peasants when they rebelled.
At all events, his opposition to them was hard and bitter. And
it has been remarked that what may be called Luther's
political position in Germany had become by this time quite
changed. "Instead of the man of the people, Luther became the
man of the princes; the mutual confidence between him and the
masses, which had supported the first faltering steps of the
movement, was broken; the democratic element was supplanted by
the aristocratic; and the Reformation, which at first had
promised to lead to a great national democracy, ended in
establishing the territorial supremacy of the German princes.
... The Reformation was gradually assuming a more secular
character, and leading to great political combinations"
(Dyer).
Progress of Lutheranism in Germany.
By the year 1530, the Emperor Charles was prepared to give
more attention to affairs in Germany and to gratify his
animosity towards the movement of Reformation. He had
effectually beaten his rival, the King of France, had
established his supremacy in Italy, had humbled the Pope, and
was quite willing to be the zealous champion of a submissive
Church. His brother Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, had
secured, against much opposition, both the Hungarian and the
Bohemian crowns, and so firmly that neither was ever again
wrested from his family, though they continued for some time
to be nominally elective. The dominions of Ferdinand had
suffered a great Turkish invasion, in 1529, under the Sultan
Solyman, who penetrated even to Vienna and besieged the city,
but without success, losing heavily in his retreat.
In May, 1530, Charles re-entered Germany from Italy. The
following month he opened the sitting of the Diet, which had
been convened at Augsburg. His first act at Augsburg was to
summon the protesting princes, of Saxony, Hesse, Brandenburg,
and other states, before him and to signify to them his
imperial command that the toleration of Lutheranism in their
dominions must cease. He expected the mandate to suffice; when
he found it ineffectual, he required an abstract of the new
religions doctrines to be laid before him. This was prepared
by Melancthon, and, afterwards known as the Confession of
Augsburg, became the Lutheran standard of faith.
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The Catholic theologians prepared a reply to it, and both were
submitted to the Emperor. He made some attempt to bring about
a compromise of the differences, but he demanded of the
Protestants that they should submit themselves to the Pope,
pending the final decisions of a proposed general Council of
the Church. When this was refused, the Diet formally condemned
their doctrines and required them to reunite themselves with
the Catholic Church before the 15th of April following. The
Emperor, in November, issued a decree accordingly, renewing
the Edict of Worms and commanding its enforcement.
The Protestant princes, thus threatened, assembled in
conference at Schmalkald at Christmas, 1530, and there
organized their famous armed league. But fresh preparations
for war by the Turk now compelled Charles to make terms with
his Lutheran subjects. They refused to give any assistance to
Austria or Hungary against the Sultan, while threatened by the
Augsburg decree. The gravity of the danger forced a concession
to them, and by the Peace of Nuremberg (1532) it was agreed
that the Protestants should have freedom of worship until the
next Diet should meet, or a General Council should be held.
This peace was several times renewed, and there were ten years
of quiet under it, in Germany, during which time the cause of
Protestantism made rapid advances. By the year 1540, it had
established an ascendancy in Würtemberg, among the states of
the South, and in the imperial cities of Nuremberg, Augsburg,
Ulm, Constance, and Strasburg. Its doctrines had been adopted
by "the whole of central Germany, Thuringia, Saxony, Hesse,
part of Brunswick, and the territory of the Guelphs; in the
north by the bishoprics of Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and
Naumburg ... ; by East Friesland, the Hanse Towns, Holstein
and Schleswig, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Anhalt, Silesia, the
Saxon states, Brandenburg, and Prussia. Of the larger states
that were closed against it there remained only Austria,
Bavaria, the Palatinate and the Rhenish Electorates"
(Hausser). In 1542, Duke Henry of Brunswick, the last of the
North German princes who adhered to the Papal Church, was
expelled from his duchy and Protestantism established. About
the same time the Archbishop-Elector of Cologne announced his
conviction of the truth of the Protestant doctrines.
The Schmalkaldic War.