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 inherited a quarrel with France, to which the rivalry of Francis I. for the Empire gave a personal character. Almost equally formidable was the advance of Sultan Suliman up the Danube, and the union of the Turkish naval power with that of the Barbary States of northern Africa. Against Lutheran Germany the Catholic emperor might hope to rely upon the pope, and against France on England. But the attitude of the popes was almost uniformly disagreeable, while from Henry VIII. and Edward VI. Charles met with more unpleasantness than favour.

The difficulty of Charles himself is also that of the historian and reader of his reign. It is probably more instructive to treat it according to the emperor’s several problems than in strict chronological order. Yet an attempt to distinguish the several periods of his career may serve as a useful introduction. The two best dividing lines are, perhaps, the coronation as emperor at Bologna in 1530, and the peace of Crépy in 1544. Until his visit to Italy (1529) Charles remained in the background of the European stage, except for his momentous meeting with Luther at the diet of Worms (1521). This meeting in itself forms a subdivision. Previously to this, during his nominal rule in the Netherlands, his visit to Spain, and his candidature for the Empire, he seemed, as it was said, spell-bound under the ferule of his minister Chièvres. Almost every report represented him as colourless, reserved and weak. His dependence on his Flemish counsellors provoked the rising in Castile, the feebleness of his government the social war in Aragon. The religious question first gave him a living interest, and at this moment Chièvres died. Aleander, the papal nuncio at Worms, now recognized that public opinion had been wrong in its estimate of Charles. Never again was he under tutelage. The necessity, however, of residence in Spain prevented his taking a personal part in the great fight with Francis I. for Italy. He could claim no credit for the capture of his rival at Pavia. When his army sacked Rome and held Pope Clement VII. prisoner, he could not have known where this army was. And when later the French overran Naples, and all but deprived him of his hold on Italy, he had to instruct his generals that they must shift for themselves. The world had become afraid of him, but knew little of his character. In the second main division of his career Charles changed all this. No monarch until Napoleon was so widely seen in Europe and in Africa. Complexity of problems is the characteristic of this period. At the head of his army Charles forced the Turks backwards down the Danube (1532). He personally conquered Tunis (1535), and was only prevented by “act of God” from winning Algiers (1541). The invasion of Provence in 1536 was headed by the emperor. In person he crushed the rebellion of Ghent (1540). In his last war with Francis (1542–44) he journeyed from Spain to the Netherlands, brought the rebellious duke of Cleves to his knees, and was within easy reach of Paris when he made the peace of Crépy (1544). In Germany, meanwhile, from the diet of Augsburg (1530) onwards, he had presided at the diets or conferences, which, as he hoped, would effect the reunion of the church.

Peace with France and the Turk and a short spell of friendliness with Pope Paul III. enabled Charles at last to devote his whole energies to the healing of religious schism. Conciliation proving impossible, he led the army which received the submission of the Lutheran states, and then captured the elector of Saxony at Mühlberg, after which the other leader, Philip of Hesse, capitulated. The Armed Diet of 1548 was the high-water mark of Charles’s power. Here, in defiance of the pope, he published the Interim which was meant to reconcile the Lutherans with the church, and the so-called Reform which was to amend its abuses. During the next four years, owing to ill-health and loss of insight, his power was ebbing. In 1552 he was flying over the Brenner from Maurice of Saxony, a princeling whose fortunes he had made. Once again the old complications had arisen. His old enemy’s son, Henry II., had attacked him indirectly in Piedmont and Parma, and then directly in Germany in alliance with Maurice. Once more the Turk was moving in the Danube and in the western Mediterranean. The humiliation of his flight gave Charles new spirit, and he once more led an army through Germany against the French, only to be checked by the duke of Guise’s defence of Metz. Henceforth the waves of his fortune plashed to and fro until his abdication without much ostensible loss or gain.

Charles had abundance of good sense, but little creative genius, and he was by nature conservative. Consequently he never sought to impose any new or common principles of administration on his several states. He took them as he found them, and at most, as in the Netherlands, improved upon what he found. So also in dealing with rival powers his policy may be called opportunist. He was indeed accused by his enemies of emulating Charlemagne, of aiming at universal empire. Historians have frequently repeated this charge. Charles himself in later life laughingly denied the imputation, and facts are in favour of his denial. When Francis I. was in his power he made no attempt to dismember France, in spite of his pledges to his allies Henry VIII. and the duke of Bourbon. He did, indeed, demand the duchy of Burgundy, because he believed this to have been unrighteously stolen by Louis XI. from his grandmother when a helpless girl. The claim was not pressed, and at the height of his fortunes in 1548 he advised his son never to surrender it, but also never to make it a cause of war. When Clement VII. was his prisoner, he was vehemently urged to overthrow the temporal power, to restore imperial dominion in Italy, at least to make the papacy harmless for the future. In reply he restored his enemy to the whole of his dominions, even reimposing him by force on the Florentine republic. To the end of his life his conscience was sensitive as to Ferdinand’s expulsion of the house of Albret from Spanish Navarre, though this was essential to the safety of Spain. Though always at war he was essentially a lover of peace, and all his wars were virtually defensive. “Not greedy of territory,” wrote Marcantonio Contarini in 1536, “but most greedy of peace and quiet.” For peace he made sacrifices which angered his hot-headed brother Ferdinand. He would not aid in expelling the sultan’s puppet Zapolya from Ferdinand’s kingdom of Hungary, and he suffered the restoration of the ruffianly duke of Württemberg, to the grave prejudice of German Catholicism. In spite of his protests, Henry VIII. with impunity ill-treated his aunt Catherine, and the feeble government of Edward VI. bullied his cousin Mary, who had been his fiancée. No serious efforts were made to restore his brother-in-law, Christian II., to the throne of Denmark, and he advised his son Philip to make friends with the usurper. After the defeat of the Lutheran powers in 1547 he did not gain a palm’s breadth of territory for himself. He resisted Ferdinand’s claim for Wurttemberg, which the duke had deserved to forfeit; he disliked his acceptance of the voluntary surrender of the city of Constance; he would not have it said that he had gone to war for the benefit of the house of Habsburg.

On the other hand, Charles V.’s policy was not merely negative. He enlarged upon the old Habsburg practice of marriage as a means of alliance of influence. Previously to his election as emperor, his sister Isabella was married to Christian II. of Denmark, and the marriages of Mary and Ferdinand with the king of Hungary and his sister had been arranged. Before he was twenty Charles himself had been engaged some ten times with a view to political combinations. Naturally, therefore, he regarded his near relations as diplomatic assets. The federative system was equally familiar; Germany, the Netherlands, and even Spain, were in a measure federations. Combining these two principles, he would within his more immediate spheres of influence strengthen existing federations by intermarriage, while he hoped that the same means would convert the jarring powers of Europe into a happy family. He made it a condition of the treaty of Madrid (1526) that Francis I. should marry his sister Eleanor, Manuel of Portugal’s widow, in the hope, not that she would be an ally or a spy within the enemy’s camp, but an instrument of peace. His son’s marriage with Mary Tudor would not only salve the rubs with England, but give such absolute security to the Netherlands that France would shrink from war. The personal union of all the Iberian kingdoms under a single ruler had long been an aim of Spanish statecraft. So Charles had married his sister Eleanor, much against her will, to the old king Manuel, and then his sister Catherine to his successor. The empress was a Portuguese