The Silver Century

Madrigalejo, in Extremadura, 22 January 1516. A king is dying in a borrowed house.

El Escorial seen from the south, across the water of its reservoir. The grey granite monastery and palace was begun in 1563 and finished in 1584. Philip II governed Peru, Milan, Flanders and Aragon from a desk inside it, entirely by letter. He never saw most of what he ruled, and a report from Brussels took weeks to reach his hand. Photograph: José Luis Filpo Cabana / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 3.0

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Contents — 9 sections

OPENING SCENE
A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD FROM FLANDERS INHERITS FOUR LEDGERS
TWO EXPEDITIONS AND ONE VOYAGE
THE MOUNTAIN THAT PAID FOR EVERYTHING
THREE FRONTS AT ONCE
A KINGDOM ADDED ON THE OLD TERMS
THE BILL ARRIVES IN CASTILE, AND ARAGÓN FINDS OUT WHAT ITS CHARTERS ARE WORTH
THE HOLLOWING OUT
OLIVARES PRESENTS THE BILL

OPENING SCENE

Madrigalejo, in Extremadura, 22 January 1516. A king is dying in a borrowed house.

Ferdinand of Aragon is sixty-three. He has been ill for months. He is travelling south towards Guadalupe when he can go no further, and he stops in a small house belonging to a friar.

That day he signs his last will. He dies in the night, and the record carries the date 23 January 1516.

The will leaves Castile to his daughter Joanna, and the running of it to her son. That son is in Flanders. He is fifteen years old.

Charles of Ghent has never set foot in Spain. He speaks French and Flemish and not a word of Castilian. The news takes about three weeks to reach him.

On 14 March, in the church of Saint Gudula in Brussels, he has himself proclaimed king. Not king of Spain. There is no such title and no such crown.

He is proclaimed king of Castile and, separately, king of Aragon. Two crowns on one head, and his mother is still the legal queen of one of them.

Within four years he will also be Holy Roman Emperor, elected with borrowed money. Within five, the towns of Castile will be at war with him over who pays for it.

Yesterday's session ended with a marriage that joined two people and left two countries standing. Today a world empire lands on top of that arrangement, and it lands inside only one of its halves.

Today's Core Question: If an empire belongs in law to just one of a monarchy's kingdoms, what happens when the bill finally arrives?

LOCKED AFTER THE PREVIEW

What's in the rest of Day 3

A FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD FROM FLANDERS INHERITS FOUR LEDGERS
TWO EXPEDITIONS AND ONE VOYAGE
THE MOUNTAIN THAT PAID FOR EVERYTHING
THREE FRONTS AT ONCE
A KINGDOM ADDED ON THE OLD TERMS
THE BILL ARRIVES IN CASTILE, AND ARAGÓN FINDS OUT WHAT ITS CHARTERS ARE WORTH
THE HOLLOWING OUT
OLIVARES PRESENTS THE BILL

Philip IV won in Catalonia in 1652 and put the constitutions straight back. Sixty-two years later a king standing in exactly the same position made the opposite choice, and wrote his reason into the decree. Day 4 begins with a childless king, a will, and a war fought inside Spain over who gets to inherit it.

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Back Continue to Day 4

OPENING SCENE

Charles at about sixteen, painted around 1515-16 by Bernard van Orley of Brussels. The chain on his chest is the collar of the Golden Fleece, the Burgundian order of knights whose sovereign he had been since his father's death, when he was six. Van Orley was the family's painter of choice: Charles's aunt Margaret of Austria, who raised him at Mechelen, made the artist her court painter in 1518.Bernard van Orley / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain