The Last Crusaders by Barnaby Rogerson

Author:Barnaby Rogerson [ROGERSON, BARNABY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS037010, HIS026000, HIS010000, REL015000, REL037010
ISBN: 9781468302882
Publisher: The Overlook Press
Published: 2012-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

Charles V aged twenty-two. (Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels)

But it was also a prescient statement of Charles’s distracting range of responsibilities. For when news reached him of the death of his other grandfather, Emperor Maximilian, Charles halted his personal progression, and, having ransacked the treasury of Spain for funds, dashed back to Germany to organise the acquisition of this branch of his inheritance. Although he was already the acknowledged heir, the formal election of a Holy Roman Emperor was always an expensive process. His old grandfather had candidly warned him that ‘much money’ would be the best argument among the seven German electors. Nor would anyone be won over by mere promises: hard cash was required. Call it what you wished: gift, loan, bribe, present, fee or indemnity, the spiritual-electors wouldn’t even begin to discuss where their vote might be placed before they had received a sweetener of four thousand gulden, while for the prince-electors you needed to add a nought. Then the real bargaining could start. Fortunately the Fugger brothers and their allies among the other bankers of that great financial city, Augsburg, were at hand to advance such enormous sums. The bidding, egged on by both Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France’s ambition to be elected Emperor, went through the roof. From the surviving account books we can trace the final deals that were struck. One hundred and eighty-four thousand gulden paid to the Count of the Palatinate, 52,800 gulden paid to the Bishop of Cologne. Only then could the tocsin be sounded thrice, the signal for pious citizens to fall down on their knees to pray to God to send down his grace on the Electors that they might choose a worthy Emperor. Charles was then acclaimed by the massed trumpeters of the Count Palatine and the Margrave of Brandenburg. His election ‘expenses’, at nearly a million gulden, broke all existing records.

But, in Charles’s own words, ‘it is so great and sublime an honour as to outshine all other worldly titles’. His Burgundian ancestors would have been thrilled to see how very far the Duchy had risen. In May 1520 the young Emperor Charles V crossed over to Dover and then on to Canterbury, where young King Henry VIII and his Queen Catherine of Aragon (Charles’s aunt) awaited him. This court was also embellished by Henry’s sister, Mary, who, having served her stint as a Queen of France (in a desperate attempt by the dying King Louis XII to father an heir), then married England’s leading sportsman of the day, the lusty young Brandon, a heroic figure on the international jousting circuit. This meeting was to be but a prelude of magnificence before the June gathering of the two Renaissance courts of France and England in a summer camp, ‘The Field of the Cloth of Gold’, on the coast of northern France. Fantastic entertainments, a duel of extravagant showmanship and some loose talk about crusading helped, just a little, to mask the deep mutual distrust between France and England.

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