Charles was the son of Philip I the Handsome, king of Castile, and Joan the Mad. His grandparents were Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy, and Isabella I the Catholic and Ferdinand II.Holy Roman Emperor, king of Spain and archduke of Austria, b. 24 February 1500 (Ghent, Netherlands), d.21 September 1558 (San Jerónimo de Juste, Spain).
Charles was the son of Philip I the Handsome, king of Castile, and Joan the Mad. His grandparents were Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy, and Isabella I the Catholic and Ferdinand II.
Charles' father died when he was six years old. The young boy was raised by his aunt Margaret of Austria, who ruled the Netherlands. At the age of 15 Charles became the sovereign of the Netherlands. One year later, in 1516, Ferdinand II died, and Charles also took on the position of sovereign of Spain. He arrived in Spain with a large entourage from the Netherlands; unable to speak Spanish, he established what most Spaniards considered imposed foreign rule.
Soon after, in 1519, Maximilian I died, and Charles was elected king of Germany. His election to Holy Roman Emperor took place the same year, helped by the buying of votes. In Spain meanwhile a revolt of the Castilian cities - the comuneros - led to years of civil war.
Charles' empire now reached from Spain to the Netherlands, across Germany to Austria, into Italy south to Naples, and to South America. It was as heterogeneous as vast, a conglomerate in which Charles and his court represented the exponents of reaction against the new religious and social order.
Raised in the Netherlands under the influence of devotio moderna,a Catholic reform movement that promoted literacy among the people, Charles was determined to fight the rising Protestantism. He opened the imperial diet of 1521, where Luther had to defend his thesis, with his own conservative Catholic statement of faith. In the following year he introduced the Inquisition into the Netherlands.
In 1521 Charles returned to Spain, where the comuneros had been defeated, to sign 270 death warrants. But he stayed on in Madrid and established a truly Spanish court, and for the rest of his reign he was seen as a Spanish regent and relied heavily on Spanish troops and Spanish taxes.
During the next two decades Charles fought wars on several fronts to protect his vast empire. A war against France ended after years of fighting in a peace that re-established the previous status quo. But the pope had supported France, and Charles sent his Spanish troops and German mercenaries against him. His troops sacked Rome in 1529, but the only outcome was again the maintenance of the status quo. The pope crowned Charles in 1530, the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the pope.
The expansion of the Ottoman empire under Süleyman the Magnificent posed another threat. In 1532 Charles' and Süleyman's troops faced each other outside Vienna, but no decisive battle emerged. Charles turned to naval battle instead and entered North Africa, where he captured Halq-al-Wadi and Tunis in 1535 for a period. When the Hungarian capital fell to Süleyman in 1541 he tried a naval attack on Algiers in 1542, which failed dismally.
Charles' empire was now virtually bankrupt. His hopes to receive substantial gold income from Spain's American colonies did not materialize until 1550, when 17 Spanish ships delivered 3 million ducats and a second fleet a similar amount. The production of the silver mines of Potosí was insubstantial before the mid-1550s, and by 1556 the state debt amounted to 6,761,272 ducats.
In an attempt to secure new connections Charles married his widowed son Philip to Mary of England, but the English parliament refused to crown him. Unable to continue wars on several fronts, he abdicated, handed the reign over the Netherlands and Spain to Philip and retired in 1557 to a monastery in Spain. He continued to raise funds to support Philip's war against France and to assist the Inquisition in Spain.