ABSTRACT
Charles V took seriously his obligation as the leading Christian monarch, the natural protector of Christendom, to face and repel the Ottoman Turkish advance which in the 1520s had suddenly become more menacing than ever before. God, it seemed, by endowing him with an unprecedented accumulation of kingdoms and lordships, had also placed on him duties of this kind which he could not shirk. The Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands; the Austrian provinces and Franche-Comté; the imperial title; the Spanish kingdoms and the rather tenuous Spanish foothold in North Africa; Naples, Sicily and Sardinia, and from 1535 onwards Milan, not to speak of the Spanish empire in America with its immense potentialities: all this gave him a position for which there was no precedent. Gattinara and the intellectuals with whom, until his death in 1530, he surrounded the emperor, argued that Charles was destined to carry on and consummate the work of Charlemagne. ‘God’, the chancellor told him in 1519, ‘has set you on the path to a world monarchy’ 1 ; and there were many contemporaries who hoped, and many others who feared, that these words might be a statement of fact. It was all too easy for Charles to see both Francis I, the ally of the infidel, and Henry VIII, an apostate from the true faith, as unworthy and less than truly Christian princes and his moral inferiors.
