Too Much for One Man
Thomas Penn: Kaiser Karl V, 23 January 2020
Emperor: A New Life of Charles V
by Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 760 pp., £25, May 2019,978 0 300 19652 8 Show More
by Geoffrey Parker.
Yale, 760 pp., £25, May 2019,
“... In late 1555 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and head of the house of Habsburg, returned to the Low Countries, where he was born: there, he began the long, slow process by which he abdicated in favour of his son Philip and brother Ferdinand. It was abundantly clear why such a transfer of power was necessary. It was a cold winter and Charles, white-haired, with shrunken gums exposing blackened teeth, his joints so crippled by gout that he was unable to sign documents with his bandaged hands, was exhausted, infirm and, in his mid-fifties, prematurely aged ... ”