Charles V: Europe's Last Emperor?

The city of Ghent, his birthplace in modern Belgium, celebrated the 500th anniversary of his birth on February 24th, 1500.

'I speak German to my horse, French to my ministers and Spanish to my God', Charles V once remarked, neatly encapsulating the complexity of his inheritance. The city of Ghent, his birthplace in modern Belgium, is currently celebrating the 500th anniversary of his birth on February 24th, 1500. The lottery of birth placed Charles at the centre of a genealogical network which covered half Europe. His father, Philip, was Duke of Burgundy. His grandfather was Emperor Maximilian of Austria. His mother, the wretched Joanna the Mad, was daughter of Isabella and Ferdinand, Spain's redoubtable 'Catholic Monarchs'. Through his mother he would inherit Spain and the bloodstained kingdom of Naples as well.

He was heir also to the fabulous possessions of the New World, and through his father he would become one of the great magnates of France as Duke of Burgundy. In due course, aged nineteen, he added the imperial crown to his glittering regalia. To be exact, he purchased it, backed by the great banking dynasty, the Fuggers, to outbid his two powerful contemporaries, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France. Henry accepted his defeat with good grace -- there was no way he could raise the colossal stakes.

Francis, by contrast, was bitterly resentful, triggering off the tragic chain of events that led to the Sack of Rome in 1527, when Charles's troops -- variously Spanish and Italian Catholics and German Protestants, and led by a French renegade, pillaged the 'Eternal City' and took Pope Clement VII hostage. An ironic by-product was that Clement personally crowned Charles, the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by a pope.

Irony often attended Charles. Although he was the intellectual and moral superior to his rival rulers Henry and Francois, he cut a poor figure compared to them. While they cavorted in renaissance splendour as Bluff King Hal and Francis the golden, Charles appears a bureaucrat and worse. His dazzling inheritance also bequeathed him, less happily, the notorious Hapsburg jaw. Conrat Meit's bust of the young Charles him as almost retarded: the brutal realism of Lucas Cranach's portrait of him aged thirty-three seems to exaggerate the jaw, and even Titian was hard put to mask it.

The deformity caused him acute physical problems. The pitilessly observant Venetians whispered that he was unable to close his mouth. He found difficulty in chewing and so swallowed his food in lumps. To wash it down, he drank copious quantities of wine and beer, making him appear a glutton.

But paradoxes continued. The Emperor who considered abolishing the Pope's temporal powers sat in judgment over Martin Luther. The most powerful man in a fast-changing Europe harked back to a medieval past, even challenging Francis to a knightly single combat. The ruler of a huge empire treated it like a private fiefdom, eventually dividing it between his brother Ferdinand and his son, Philip II of Spain. Yet in the end he had the moral courage to abdicate in 1556, retiring to a monastery and earning the praise of no less a person than Ignatius Loyola: 'The Emperor gave a rare example to his successors and proved himself to be a true Christian prince'. Exhausted, Charles died in the monastery in 1558.

Charles's birthplace, Ghent, was to play a role almost as confusing and equivocal as the man himself in European history. The city had a close relationship with England; a relationship born of trade but given a royal gloss: Edward III's third son was born here in 1340 and from it took his title John of Gaunt. It was originally the seat of the Counts of Flanders, but then, through a dynastic alliance, it became part of Burgundy.

Burgundy itself was as much an idea as a place; sometimes expanding as far south as Italy, sometimes pushing north, swallowing the towns of Flanders and northern France.

Charles's relationship with his birthplace was anythig but filial. When the citizens refused taxation to fund his endless wars he besieged the city ferociously, hanged the leaders of the revolt, abolished the city's priveleges and forced the citizens to build a castle at their own expense.

The Gentenaren evidently have long memories. A statue to the popular hero Jacob van Artevelde was erected in 1863, but Charles had to wait until 1966 for his monument. The inscription on the statue, in Flemish, states that it is 'the gift of the Spanish imperial city of Toledo to the birthplace of Charles V'. It is situated at the Prinsenhof, the royal palace where Charles was born, although the palace itself has long since vanished, and only now are the dilapidated buildings which replaced it being restored -- part of a general makeover of Ghent's city centre which reveals that the city, once swamped by industry, has architecture as noble as anywhere in Flanders.

Ghent is currently celebrating the 500th birthday of the man who was the last truly effective emperor in Europe. The centrepiece of the celebrations is a superb exhibition, illustrating Charles's world in the first half of the sixteenth century. darawing on museums and galleries within and without Flanders, including England, in addition to paintings and sculptures the exhibition includes artefacts of the time: musical instruments, armour, Charles's hunting crossbow, jewellery and furniture.

The Emperor's life coincided with the flowering of the High Renaissance, and the pictures alone are a vivid presentation of his development from adolescence to maturity, and of his friends, relatives -- and enemies. Ghent has still not forgotten ancient enmities -- prominent among the glittering exhibits is the parchment proclaiming Charles's condemnation of his native city.

The exhibition, which opened in the magnificently restored Abbey of St Pieter's, moves from Ghent to Bonn in February and then to Vienna and Toledo -- two other cities closely associated with Charles.

Ghent will continue to play host to a variety of events commemorating Charles until June. Two particularly interesting presentations are the Fine Arts Museum's exhibition 'Charles V and the nineteenth-century imagination' and, rather daringly, the Dr Guislain Museum and the Theaterhuis Victoria are presenting a project 'Insane Rulers' which, inter alia, questions the purpose of exhibiting and collecting evidence from the past.

Article by Russell Chamberlin
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