Defeated by history

It is always interesting to tell students about the ancestry of the great sovereign Charles V of Habsburg. Born in Ghent, in present-day Belgium, on February 24, 1500 to Philip of Habsburg and Joanna of Spain, Charles boasted of grandparents definitely important. On the paternal side Maria, Duchess of Burgundy, and the Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg; on the maternal side Isabella, queen of Castile, and Ferdinand, king of Aragon (those, to be clear, who in 1492 had financed the expedition of Columbus).

If we took a map of Europe and tried to put together all the territories dominated by its relatives, a very long list would emerge: Castile, Aragon, Navarre, Southern Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, the Netherlands, Burgundy and Franche-Comté, Archduchy of Austria. Not counting possessions in North Africa, Central America and the Caribbean. With grandparents like this who knows what gifts Carlo received! His story is incredible: starting from 1506, due to the death of his father and the progressive mental instability of his mother, he became heir to all the lands governed by his grandparents. First duke of Burgundy, then at the age of 16 king of Spain, at 19 emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. For us poor mortals at that age it is legitimate to dream of a driving license and nothing more.
Yet, Charles is a loser by history: his political project which envisaged the construction of a composite Christian empire collided hard against the new trends that were developing in the modern age.

When we speak of empire we must make some clarifications. Charles did not wish to create a single European state unity, which would destroy local and national differences. Rather, he believed in an articulated system of political realities with their own laws and traditions which, in the event of conflicts and contrasts, found in the emperor a supreme judge, a peacemaker who could heal the inevitable clashes between the different powers, avoiding wars. We are therefore far from the idea of an emperor understood as absolute master and head of political life.

In addition to the Turks who were a constant thorn in his side, Charles found two irreducible enemies who fiercely opposed his intentions. On the one hand, the new modern states, in particular the national monarchies, mainly embodied by the kingdom of France of Francesco I, who represented an insurmountable obstacle because they were jealous of their newly conquered sovereignty. On the other hand, the fragmentation of Christianity which, starting with the Lutheran Reformation of 1517, irreversibly split Western Christianity. The winning ideas were no longer those of the past which saw the primacy of the whole (empire, a single Christianity) over the parts (single kingdoms, different confessions). In this case, unlike geometry, history has operated in the opposite way, making the parts win over the whole. For these reasons, for a long time, Carlo and his political project were considered a sort of remnant of the past. In fact Charles had been educated according to this perspective: he conceived of himself as emperor of Christianity and had not understood that the wind was now blowing in other directions. In the culture of humanism the individual was triumphing: in politics and religion this meant the rejection of any universal religious and political authority.

Today, in the light of what is happening after the invasion of Ukraine, however, it seems right to us to reflect on some suggestions that Charles's political project raises. The basic need of his action was to find a supranational institution that could guarantee peace and prevent conflicts from leading to war. Even our present, considering the stalemate of the UN, has a desperate need for the international community to equip itself with institutions that, with the force of law and legitimately, are able to curb the warlike and imperialist instincts of individual sovereign states. Certainly we cannot imagine that this authority is of an imperial, divine or dynastic nature, but it is possible to think of finding legitimacy in the common belonging of all peoples to a single human family.

The myth of the modern state still exerts an enormous fascination today but, looking at the present and the future, we need to give up something of our national egoism to imagine new forms of civil life in which there are laws and it is not ethnic-religious affiliations that hold society together.


Renato Bonomo
NP October 2022