Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor

In April 1521 a twenty-one year old emperor sat in the hall at Worms and listened to a friar decline to withdraw his books. Charles V had granted Luther safe conduct under pressure from the German princes, and the day after the refusal he read the assembly a statement in his own hand: that he was descended from a long line of Christian emperors who had upheld the faith, that a single friar must be wrong if his opinion stood against the whole of Christendom, and that he would stake his lands, his friends, his body and his soul on the old religion. The Edict of Worms followed, placing Luther under the imperial ban.

It changed nothing, and the reason is the shape of the empire itself. Charles ruled a federation of princes and free cities whose rulers held real power in their own lands, and he was simultaneously at war with France, defending Hungary and Austria against the Ottomans, and governing Spain and a new empire in the Americas. Whenever he turned to Germany, another front demanded him. The princes who protected Luther were not defeated for a quarter of a century.

When the reckoning came he won it and it did not help. He crushed the Schmalkaldic League at Muhlberg in 1547 and imposed an interim religious settlement, and within five years a coalition of Protestant princes with French backing had driven him out of southern Germany and forced him to terms. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 conceded the principle he had spent his reign resisting: that each ruler determines whether his own territory is Catholic or Lutheran, and subjects who dissent may emigrate. Religious unity in the empire was over, and it was an emperor who signed the paper.

Charles V spent two decades demanding a general council of the church, on the reasoning that the German quarrel could be settled only by a body Protestants might accept and that the abuses they attacked were real and needed reform. Successive popes resisted, fearing a council would revive conciliar claims against papal authority and knowing the emperor wanted it held on German soil. Trent finally opened in 1545, in imperial territory but Italian-speaking, and it defined doctrine against the Reformers rather than negotiating with them, which was the opposite of what Charles had wanted from it, though its decrees on clerical residence and seminaries were the reform he had asked for.

A second religious argument of his reign concerned the Americas. Reports of the treatment of indigenous peoples by Spanish settlers, pressed above all by the Dominican Bartolome de las Casas, led Charles to promulgate the New Laws of 1542 restricting the encomienda system, and in 1550 to order a formal debate at Valladolid between Las Casas and the humanist Juan Gines de Sepulveda on whether the peoples of the Indies could justly be subjected by force. That a reigning emperor suspended conquests and convened a disputation on the legitimacy of his own empire is unusual enough to be worth recording, whatever the limited practical effect.

In 1556 he did something no emperor had done in living memory: he resigned. He divided his inheritance, giving Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip and the imperial title to his brother Ferdinand, and retired to a house built beside the Hieronymite monastery of Yuste in Extremadura, where he lived with a small household, kept his clocks, and died in 1558.