ABSTRACT
The principal agent of peace and the principal architect of the new political order was the Emperor Charles v. Charles was the direct ruler of the Kingdom of Sicily and Naples and the indirect feudal overlord of all the rest of Italy north of the Papal State and west of the dominions of the Venetians. He thus held title to as much territory in Italy as any of his precursors, aspirants to hegemony over all of it - Frederick h , Carlo and Robert d’Angid (d’Anjou), Giangaleazzo Visconti. But unlike his precursors, his power base was not confined to Italy. He was the ultimate feudal overlord of ail the princes and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, which had recently been endowed with somewhat more effective central judicial and administrative organs. He was the immediate hereditary ruler of the Hapsburg dominions in Germany , most of the former Burgundian dominions in eastern France and the Low Countries, the Kingdom of Aragon with its Mediterranean dependencies and the Kingdom of Castile with its rapidly expanding empire in America. He was also a close ally, through his wife and colleague in government, of her father, the king of Portugal and head of the other rapidly expanding overseas empire. He thus held title to a greater part of the lands of Christendom than any of his Imperial predecesors since the time of Charlemagne; and he could bring
to bear on the Italian parts of his vast domain the authority he derived from all of it. He could at last enforce the Imperial feudal rights in northern Italy that had been all but forgotten since the mid-thirteenth century; and he could at last settle the dynastic question that had been used to justify rebellion in Naples ever since the mid-fourteenth century.1
