Charles V

Charles was born in Ghent in 1500 and inherited an extraordinary collection of titles: the Netherlands, Spain and its American empire, the Austrian lands, and in 1519 the Holy Roman Empire. He was, by the standards of the age, the most powerful ruler in Europe.

His reign was a long defense of that inheritance. He fought France in Italy and the Low Countries, held the Ottoman advance at Vienna, and confronted the Lutheran movement that divided the empire he was supposed to keep whole. At Augsburg in 1530 he tried and failed to reconcile the confessions, and he spent his last campaigns in North Africa and Germany.

Exhausted and in poor health, he abdicated in 1555 and 1556, dividing his lands between his son Philip and his brother Ferdinand, and retired to the monastery of Yuste in Spain, where he died in 1558. His reign fixed the shape of European politics for a century.

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