Okay, lets just start with the fact that this far from the most engaging book I’ve read. It is by no means poorly-written, and it is well organized and presented. But, I’m no hurry to go through it all again.
This is a large, detailed look at Holy Roman Emperor Charles V from birth to death. It is broken up into four parts, with a kind of epilogue at the end of each part. The main chapters are focused on events, while the first three epilogues try to focus on what Charles was like as a person. This is actually a good way to handle it, and helps out the book as a whole.
Mostly, the main part of the book is chronological, tackling events as they come. But there are some exceptions fairly late in.
First, chapter 13 is about the New World, and steps back quite a ways to present everything that had been going on there as a coherent whole. This is sensible, and justified, since it is pretty much all happening off stage as far as Charles’ life is concerned. He is the ruler of Spain, and Spain ends up in charge of two large empires in the New World at this time, but none of this happens on his express orders, he does not ever see these new lands himself, everything he knows is purely intellectual exercise. Given that, his preferred treatment of his lands there is fairly good. He was against enslaving the locals, or even effectively enfeuding them with the encomienda system. (If the mines needed slaves as workers, let them be shipped over from Africa. — Sadly, Parker doesn’t even start to try to unpack that idea.) But, people ambitious enough to actually go adventuring in the New World are more interested in money and power. There are objections, they are listened to, and when the crown tries to halt the abuses by the newly empowered, there are revolts. These are put down, but the abuses persist.
Second, chapter 14 deals with his familial relations, starting with his three illegitimate daughters. This is another ‘roll-up’ chapter, dealing with events decades apart (in this case, from conception, to birth, to life, to acknowledgement, or not). The other main topic of the chapter is his illegitimate son, Gerónimo, better known as Don Juan of Austria. Charles’ relations with all of these children are very inconsistent, ranging from use in dynastic politics to near-abandonment. Don Juan himself is only posthumously acknowledged as his; Parker leaves it to the reader to try to imagine the impact of this revelation on his legitimate children, but it is also rightly out of the scope of this book.
There’s only another three chapters after this which deal with the end of his reign, and his all too short retirement to a monastery, where he dies of malaria. The final chapter deals with how he has been seen ever sense, and the final epilogue deals with thoughts on his reign. There’s no solid answers there (and I don’t think any are possible), but he does come to some interesting conclusions that the entirety of his lands were indeed too much for one man or government to handle, and Charles only managed it because he built the system that—mostly—kept things balanced. To continue would need another Charles V, and no one is going to be so… “him” as to manage the job.
It should be noted that not only is this a large and complicated book, on a complicated man, but there’s a lot of showing what went into the book. The appendices start just over the halfway mark. They have their own interest, as he draws heavily from Charles V’s Memoirs, which are often considered to be fake. Here he talks about his reasons for accepting it as real. He also talks about Charles’ corpse, and whether one study actually was of one of his fingers, another document (the Last Instructions), which he considers fake while others have accepted it, and whether Charles had another illegitimate daughter.
Because Charles V was so central to his time, if you want to understand the early Sixteenth Century, you need to know about him. I can’t say how other biographies hold up to this one, but it is good, but is more on the scholarly side than the general reader side.
