In Scandinavia, the German house of Oldenburg ruled Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Greenland, the Faroe Islands and Sweden in a dynastic union (the Kalmar Union) from 1397. In 1523, Gustav Eriksson, from the house of Vasa in the Uppland region of Sweden, led a revolt which placed him on the throne in Sweden and Finland. In 1562, Catherina Jagiellon, daughter of Sigismund I of Poland and sister of his successor, Sigismund II, married John Vasa, duke of Finland, later King John III of Sweden. The result was a Vasa dynastic sphere of influence which embraced the eastern Baltic shore towards the end of the sixteenth century, destabilizing Scandinavian politics for the next two generations.

Nowhere was there a ‘nation state’ in the sixteenth century. That nineteenth-century framework does not fit these dynastic enterprises, which reflected family fortune more than national identity. Compound kingdoms were the rule rather than the exception. Some of them were contiguous states (England and Wales, Piedmont and Savoy, Poland and Lithuania, Castile and Aragon). Contemporaries recognized the strategic value of contiguity but did not overestimate it. Conformity (similarities in language, customs and institutions) counted for more. In any case, the vagaries of dynastic outcome often worked against contiguity, and relatively few states were able to capitalize on its benefits.

The kingdom of France was unusual in its size and coherence. Little by little it incorporated neighbouring principalities into its domain. The seizure of English Gascony in 1453 was followed by annexations in Burgundy (1477), Provence (1481) and Brittany (1491), which retained elements of legal, institutional or cultural autonomy while absorption took place. The long, historic process of French integration resumed in the first half of the seventeenth century, but it remained work in progress. The Bourbon monarchy incorporated Béarn in 1620, annexed Lorraine in 1634 and invaded Roussillon in 1641. The kingdom of France was the object of emulation and suspicion for its integration and power.

Dynastic configurations did not seem strange until the doctrine of sovereignty, articulated in the political writings of the French philosopher and legist Jean Bodin, posed the question of where power lay. Contemporaries found that hard to answer. The Spanish jurist Juan Solórzano Pereira summarized the experience of a lifetime in colonial administration in a compendium defending Spain’s colonial project. His Indian Politics (Politica Indiana) applied Bodinian sovereignty to the Spanish empire. Spain’s rule over its colonies fitted the model since they were juridically and administratively an integral part of Spain. Not so, however, its rule in Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia, the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples or the Netherlands. Solórzano called the latter ‘equally important’ (aeque principaliter), adopting a canon-law term for two dioceses which became united under one bishop. ‘These kingdoms,’ he wrote, ‘must be ruled and governed as if the king who holds them all together were king only of each one of them.’ Segmented sovereignty had advantages when it came to ruling disparate political entities. By guaranteeing the customs, laws and institutions of a particular country, composite rule became palatable to the local élites who made it work. The solution lay in the absent monarch being represented by regents or viceroys. Such ventriloquism required finesse to ensure that local notables did not feel alienated.

Composite monarchy stretched the bonds between rulers and ruled. The Scandinavian monarchy partially capsized with Swedish revolt in 1518–20. The Danish king, Christian II, led an invasion of southern Sweden which culminated in a massacre of almost a hundred leading figures of the Swedish élite in Stockholm. Among those killed was the father of Gustav Eriksson. The latter went on to lead the insurrection which defeated the Danes, before being elected King Gustav Vasa by the Swedish Estates on 6 June 1523, signalling Sweden’s defection from the union.

At the same time, the composite monarchy was tested in Spain. Setting out from Flanders to claim the thrones of Castile and Aragon as regent for his mother, Joanna, whose mental illness justified his being crowned while she was still alive, Charles V (Charles I of Castile) landed at Asturias in October 1517. But the Estates (Cortes) of Castile and León, meeting in Valladolid in January 1518, were not convinced by the arguments that they heard for that arrangement, addressing Charles as ‘Your Highness’ (Su Alteza), while referring to Joanna as ‘Majesty’ (Majestad). The representatives of eighteen towns submitted a petition, which Charles accepted, insisting that their queen retain her household, that he marry a Castilian and learn the language and allow Spaniards into his entourage, that his brother Ferdinand remain in Spain during his absences, and that the precious metals from the New World and all the offices and commands remain in the control of Spaniards. Even the royal domain was ring-fenced from Charles V’s possible exploitation. The deputies granted their new king a subsidy but were aghast to discover that their new ruler demanded yet more money in 1520.

By then, Charles had begun appointing Burgundians to positions in Spain by the simple expedient of naturalizing them. The notables of Toledo joined forces with other towns in a league (junta) of municipalities (comunidades). The clergy preached openly against the new regime and handbills were posted up in churches to rally support against the alien king. Troops sent to repossess Toledo were defeated and the comuneros drafted their grievances to present before Queen Joanna, recognizing her as their only legitimate ruler. They proclaimed the sacrosanct nature of agreements made between rulers and ruled and the contractual nature of monarchy. Working behind the scenes, those loyal to Charles V retained support wherever they could find it, especially in the countryside and among the Spanish gentry, who were often the leading notables (regidores) in towns. After a year of chaos and fighting, the comuneros were defeated at the battle of Villalar (23 April 1521) and the crisis passed. But, with a comparable situation in Valencia and resentments in Naples too, it was an early sign of how brittle large composite monarchies would be.

Female regents proved particularly skilful at the mediation that was required, as the succession of able regents in the Netherlands for Charles V and Philip II demonstrated. Charles’s aunt Margaret of Austria (regent from 1507 to 1515 and 1519 to 1530) was succeeded by his sister Mary of Habsburg (regent from 1531 to 1555). His illegitimate daughter Margaret of Parma (regent from 1559 to 1567) was hardly given a free hand, however, and her regency ended in tears. Even when composite monarchies developed a convincing myth of rule around a notion of personal loyalty to the dynasty among the upper echelons of the nobility, it was inevitable that the competitive forces for the favour of the monarch divided the élites of one country against those of another. The instabilities of composite rule in monarchies could be covered over, but they could never be removed.

Dynasticism was the dominant legitimizing principle. Even in the elective monarchies of eastern Europe, it was deeply ingrained. The oligarchies in Venice, the most enduring republic, were as dynastic as Europe’s society of princes. House, blood and lineage ruled the upper echelons of Europe’s aristocracy, legitimating power and the transfer of wealth, prestige and influence from one generation to the next. But the costs of dynasticism were high. In the later Middle Ages, it unleashed a civil war in England (the Wars of the Roses) and an international conflict (the Hundred Years War). In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, those costs remained burdensome. Dynastic politics were unpredictable and unstable. Unexpected deaths created ruptures, while marriage alliances had unforeseen consequences. Above all, dynastic interests did not naturally accord with those of Europe’s localities. As Europe’s states became more complex governing entities, so that mismatch caused tension and division.

OLDER CONFLICTS AND THEIR LEGACIES

Exploiting dynastic alliances and inheritances and the tensions among smaller political entities to their advantage, the larger dynastic states in western Europe pursued their competitive ambitions. The resulting battlegrounds became the test-bed for new military organizations and technologies as well as different ways of doing politics. The conflict zone of the Hundred Years War in francophone Europe, concluded in 1453, left a bitter legacy that was remembered on both sides of the Channel through the first half of the sixteenth century.

In Valois France, the memory was of military devastation and dismemberment. In Tudor England, Henry VIII, crowned ‘by the grace of God, king of England and France’ in 1509, evoked his illustrious Lancastrian ancestor Henry V and dreamed of recovering Guyenne. By the Treaty of Westminster (November 1511), Henry VIII joined the Holy League of Pope Julius II (pope from 1503 to 1513), King Ferdinand of Aragon and Venice to drive the French out of Italy. Naval operations began the following year, but the English Guyenne expedition met with disaster. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey rose to favour in Henry VIII’s eyes because he saved the day. His organizational skills were essential to the rebuilding of English naval and military forces and the success of the 1512–13 campaign east of Calais. Wolsey’s diplomatic finesse ensured the conclusion of hostilities with a treaty (London, August 1514) that was presented by Henry as bringing peace to Christendom. That became the sketch for a much grander meeting, also at London, in the autumn of 1518. Wolsey’s finest hour, it brought together the representatives of France, England, the empire, the papacy, Spain, Burgundy and the Netherlands to sign a mutual non-aggression pact (the Treaty of London, October 1518) by which Christendom’s divisions could be laid to rest. Despite the elaborate reconciliation between Charles and Francis, organized at Guînes in June 1520 (the ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’), such hopes were disappointed. The peace marked simply a pause in Anglo-French hostilities amid the Italian Wars, which recommenced in 1521.

Renewed English intervention on the continent followed. An expeditionary force to Brittany and Picardy in 1522, after Henry VIII’s treaty with the emperor at Windsor in June that year, culminated in a large English army led by Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk (the ablest English military commander of his generation), reaching within 50 miles of Paris and wreaking havoc on the way. The gains were minimal but the costs were huge. The English Parliament refused to grant additional taxation and Wolsey devised a ‘forced loan’ of a third of the estimated revenues of the clergy and one sixth of those of the laity (the Amicable Grant of 1525). The levy was bitterly resented and failed to furnish what was expected of it. In its aftermath, England sat on the sidelines despite French weakness in the later 1520s, and Wolsey’s downfall was assured.

In 1543, another large English expedition took place, one army led by the duke of Norfolk towards Montreuil (a failure), the other commanded by Suffolk successfully capturing Boulogne after a siege. In the subsequent peace (Ardres, June 1546), the English held Boulogne for eight years on condition that the stronghold was returned to France in 1554 upon payment of a large sum. In 1557, Mary Tudor reluctantly committed English forces in support of her husband, Philip II, and the defence of the Low Countries. In the process, Calais, England’s last foothold on the continent of Europe, was lost to France in 1558. England had nothing to show for almost half a century of intervention.

The Italian Wars, to which these English expeditions were a side-show, had begun with the ‘descent’ of the French king, Charles VIII, at the head of an expeditionary force, through the Alps to Naples in 1494. For at least a century before then, northern and central Italy  – excepting Venice, which prided itself on its stability – had been riven by rivalries between noble clans who identified themselves loosely with Italy’s pro- and anti-imperial factions. The Roman Orsini and the Este from Ferrara supported the papacy, while their bitter rivals the Roman Colonna and the Gonzaga of Mantua backed the imperial cause. The former supporters of the papal cause mostly rallied to the French, whereas the Colonna and the Gonzaga were among Charles V’s more reliable allies in the peninsula. The Visconti in Milan had been imperialists too, but they had been ousted from the duchy by Francesco Sforza, a mercenary captain, who founded a new ducal dynasty on unsteady foundations. In Genoa, rival clans were also confronted by periodic upsurges of republican sentiments. In Florence, the Medici gained ascendancy over their rivals, but their power-base was also vulnerable to popular republican sentiment. There were plenty of local quarrels for the French invaders to exploit.

Charles VIII’s invasion attempted to make good his dynastic claims to the kingdom of Naples, which the Angevins had ruled before the Aragonese dynasty installed itself there in 1442. The French counted on a revolt of Neapolitan nobles, which had taken place in 1486, some of whom had made their way to the French court. Charles VIII was encouraged in his endeavour by Ludovico Sforza, Francesco’s successor. The French king’s publicists presented the enterprise as justified by King Alfonso’s ‘tyranny’. The arrival of the French in Naples, they said, would put an end to burglary and robbery in a part of Christendom most vulnerable to the Turks, and install a regime of justice, the first stage in a Crusade and the recapture of Jerusalem.

In the short term, Charles VIII’s campaign was a success. On 22 February 1495, the French marched into Naples unopposed, following the abdication a few days earlier of the reigning Alfonso II and the flight of his successor, Ferdinand of Aragon. They held Naples briefly, only to be ousted in due course by the regrouped forces of Ferdinand. French attentions then turned to the duchy of Milan. The childless Charles VIII was succeeded by Louis XII, who had claims to Milan by virtue of his descent from the Visconti. In 1498, Louis’s army marched into the duchy and overthrew Duke Ludovico Sforza to consolidate the French power-base in northern Italy, while turning Genoa into a French dependency. In the longer term, however, the French expeditions destabilized the politics of the Italian states. They reignited latent fears in Christendom about the power of the reunited French kingdom, ones which Ferdinand of Aragon mobilized over the next two decades. In France, ‘bulletins’ (distant ancestors of the newspaper) were distributed in manuscript and print, presenting Italy as a ‘terrestrial paradise’, a rich plum ripe for the picking. That remained an alluring myth for those at the courts of Louis XII’s successors, Francis I and Henry II, who were persuaded that chivalric endeavour, military adventurism, liberating Italy, personal profit and service to the king added up to an unanswerable case for further Italian adventures.

What is commonly known as the ‘Italian Wars’ was experienced by contemporaries as successive phases in a long-drawn-out struggle for hegemony in the Italian peninsula, which became part of a wider Habsburg–Valois conflict. This provoked an arms race in which the scale of armies grew. The War of the League of Cambrai (1511–16) was succeeded by the Four Years War (1521–6) and the War of the League of Cognac (1526–30). In the mid-1530s, a further two years of campaigns focused on Franco-imperial control of the duchies of Milan and Savoy (1536–8). The final episodes of the Italian Wars (1542–6 and 1551–9) were protracted and fragmented. French intervention marked almost every phase until 1530, after which Habsburg predominance in the peninsula was mostly assured. Chased out of Milan in 1513, French forces returned in the first year of Francis I’s rule. Leading an army of 8,000 Gascons and 23,000 Landsknechte, he crossed the Alps in July 1515, overthrowing the Sforza dukes of Milan after two days of battle at Marignan (13–14 September 1515), where it was the timely arrival of the Venetian army to help the French that secured the victory. For a time, French dominance in northern Italy was assured by the ensuing peace at Noyon (August 1516).

Only five years later, however, Francis attacked the newly elected Emperor Charles on several fronts – in Luxembourg and Navarre. The emperor responded, having orchestrated an alliance with Pope Leo X, promising him Parma and Piacenza, by invading Milan in the name of Francesco II Sforza. The large contingent of French forces sent to recover the situation was defeated at La Bicocca on 27 April 1522. Nothing ventured, a further French army 30,000 strong encircled Milan in 1524 but could not dislodge the imperialists. In the wake of that defeat, Charles ordered his generals to push the campaign into France with an amphibious assault upon Marseille. Francis responded late in the season by leading a force across the Alps and invested Pavia. But imperialist reinforcements arrived from Germany and the French besiegers found themselves overwhelmed. Thousands of French troops were killed in the battle of Pavia (24 February 1525), or drowned in the river Ticino; 10,000 more were captured, including the French king himself.

The captive Francis was taken to Spain and kept under house-arrest, his release agreed only after he had signed a capitulation (Treaty of Madrid, January 1526), in which he formally abandoned all claims to Italy, the duchy of Burgundy and the lands of Charles’s Burgundian ancestors. Francis’s two sons stood surety for the treaty’s fulfilment but he swore a private oath that he had acted under duress. Upon his release just over a year later, the French king took advantage of the rejection of the Madrid Treaty by the provincial estates of Burgundy to delay its ratification, while his diplomats garnered support for the Valois cause. With the backing of the Medici pope Clement VII, guaranteeing the support of both the papacy and Florence, the French put the finishing touches to the League of Cognac (May 1526), whose other parties included Venice, Ferrara and Duke Francesco Sforza, newly restored in Milan after Pavia, but suspicious of the Habsburgs. Imperial forces under the renegade French prince of the blood Charles III, duke of Bourbon, launched a pre-emptive strike in the peninsula, aiming to overrun Florence and the Papal States. Finding the road to Florence blocked by heavy snow, they made for the Romagna and then marched on Rome itself. The city’s defences were so feeble that the invaders left their siege equipment behind, relying on ladders to take it. The duke of Bourbon was shot – Benvenuto Cellini claimed that he fired the bullet – as they forced their way in. In the resulting sack of Rome (6–12 May 1527) almost 10,000 of its citizens may have died and its churches and palaces were plundered.

The French seized on the impact of the slaughter in the peninsula. Another French army (up to 70,000 strong) marched across the Alps in August 1527, taking their revenge on Padua, which was captured and put to the sack, before moving southwards towards Naples. Meanwhile, the naval commander Andrea Doria seized control in Genoa, where the French established a dependency around the port of Savona. From there he assembled galleys for an assault upon Naples by sea. For a time it looked as though the collapse of Habsburg Naples was a foregone conclusion. However, victory eluded the French. Their army was decimated by plague and Andrea Doria deserted their cause, using his naval forces to relieve and retake Genoa for the Habsburgs. French forces capitulated at Savona, and a relief army, led by François de Bourbon, count of St Pol, was cut to pieces at the battle of Landriano (21 June 1529). That same month the emperor made peace with Pope Clement by the Treaty of Barcelona and set sail for Genoa, and thence to Bologna for his papal coronation (24 February 1530), in a visit which cemented imperial hegemony in the peninsula and restored battered imperial and papal reputations.

There would be further French incursions into the Italian peninsula over the following three decades, but they took place in the context of wider Habsburg–Valois confrontation. By 1530, the destabilizing effect of the Italian Wars in the peninsula had become evident. A young Florentine lawyer, Francesco Guicciardini, who would later write the most perceptive commentary upon them, already concluded in 1508 that the conflicts were ‘a flame, a pestilence which has entered Italy’. They ‘overturned states and their forms of government, as well as their ways of making war’. Like Guicciardini, his contemporary Niccolò Machiavelli sought to make sense of the impact of the Italian Wars. It was not merely the material consequences of warfare. The political world in the Italian states became more unstable as they sought to make alliances of convenience in league with those intervening from without and against one another.

Politics within these Italian states became more ruthless as a result. Court factions sought to remove their opponents by direct and indirect means. Political assassinations became more common. Banishment of leading opponents created further instabilities as exiles (fuoriusciti) tried to orchestrate their own comeback by destabilizing the regime which had expelled them. Opponents used rumour and gossip to undermine and disgrace each other. In Rome, the statue on a corner of the Piazza di Pasquino became, in the second decade of the sixteenth century, the place where political placards were posted. They were often venomous – those attacking Pope Leo X, for example, portrayed him as an untrustworthy Florentine financier who had bankrupted the papacy. By the mid-sixteenth century, when the papacy began to curb the excessive licence accorded to political posters, the ‘Pasquil’ had entered the political lexicon for a lampoon, and similar sites had opened up in Venice (the ‘Bocca’, near the Rialto) and Modena (the ‘Bona’, a statue on the corner of the Palazzo del Commune). Machiavelli and Guicciardini tried to understand the new princely courts. They sought to explain why Venice had survived as a republic when Florence failed to. They analysed the ways of conducting warfare. The political and military rules of engagement did not seem to abide by the norms of Christian morality. A lot depended upon good luck (fortuna) and naked power.

Above all, the Italian Wars undermined the credibility of the papacy and the emperor. As in the other states of the peninsula, the French invasion of 1494 proved to be a watershed for the papal dominions. Exploiting Rome’s political prestige as well as its unrivalled diplomatic sources of information, the popes and their servants called on foreign military and political help to strengthen control of their dominions. Essential to the process was the kingdom of Naples, which was theoretically a papal fief. The papacy claimed the rights to confirm the ruler in Naples, a bargaining position from which it was able to extort concessions from Ferdinand of Aragon but also from French contenders to the Neapolitan throne. Giuliano della Rovere, Pope Julius II, played the new and complicated politics to perfection – ‘worthy of the greatest glory if he had been a secular prince’, noted Guicciardini. Having secured his election by making promises to his rival, the Spanish-backed candidate Cesare Borgia (Pope Alexander VI’s nephew), he took the name of Julius. He thus recalled the memory of the fifth-century Roman pontiff who had triumphed over the Arian heresy, summoned a Church council to Rome and constructed the basilica of the Twelve Apostles. But the allusion was also to Julius Caesar, the Roman emperor who had put an end to intrigue and laid the foundations of empire.

Julius II then arrested his Borgia opponents and took over their authority in the Romagna. At the same time, he strengthened papal authority in Umbria and Ancona, while exploiting the Italian Wars to sequester Parma and Piacenza in 1512 when the French were pushed out, and Reggio and Modena as well. The pope led military forces in person to the siege and capture of Mirandola in January 1511. Not for nothing did he return to Rome through a triumphal arch that would have befitted Julius Caesar himself. Pope Julius had been the architect of the League of Cambrai (1508), which brought together the forces of the French and Emperor Maximilian I, ostensibly to conduct a Crusade against the Turks, but in reality to overrun Venice. Then, after the French crushed those assembled to defend the Venetian Republic at Agnadello (14 May 1509), Pope Julius executed a breathtaking volte-face. He formed a Holy League, made public in October 1511, with the Spanish and Venetians against the French.

Louis XII took his revenge by organizing a campaign of satirical pamphlets and verses aimed directly against Julius, ‘serf of the serfs’ – a pun on the Latin title adopted in papal bulls: ‘servant of the servants of God’ (servus servorum Dei) – and ‘prince of idiots’. The papacy was depicted as the source of schism in Christendom. Only temporal princes, with the French king in the lead, could heal Christendom’s profound malaise. Louis XII summoned a council of the Church to meet at Pisa in November 1511, while his troops invaded the Romagna and overran Ravenna. Adjusting to the new reality, Pope Julius declared the ‘little council’ in Pisa ‘schismatic’ and summoned his own to meet in Rome at the basilica of St John Lateran. It became a talking-shop, which highlighted the improbability of achieving any progress on the agenda of Church reform by that route.

The Italian Wars made other powers realize the full extent to which the papacy itself had become infected by the new politics, and the degree to which the popes were preoccupied by the temporal affairs of the Papal States. Ultramontane princes became more openly cynical towards holders of the papal office. Louis XII described Julius publicly as the son of a peasant, who needed to be beaten into obedience. Secular rulers accommodated themselves to the new scale of papal nepotism which the Italian Wars encouraged. Above all, they invested energy and money in influencing papal elections and, since the outcomes were generally unpredictable, the result confirmed the reputations of cardinals (the majority of whom were Italians) as slippery and untrustworthy.

The Italian Wars affected the credibility of the emperor as well. Much of northern Italy had once belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and various parts still owed fealty to the emperor. Maximilian I’s involvement in the early Italian Wars was proclaimed by the French as imperial aggrandizement. Charles V’s inheritance of the kingdom of Naples was opposed by anti-imperial cardinals in Rome, worried that the pope would become his ‘chaplain’. In Rome, Florence and Venice, and not just at the French court, the prospect of the emperor as duke of Milan was all the proof that was needed of imperial ambitions to rule Italy. Above all, the sack of Rome marred the imperial cause. Rome, the Jerusalem of Christendom, was wrecked and vandalized by predominantly Lutheran soldiery, acting in the name of the emperor. They carved the name of Martin Luther (the graffito is still there) into the walls of the rooms in the Vatican Palace, decorated by Raphael for Julius II in 1511–12. Those who took refuge from Rome in Venice and Florence remembered the event as a tyrannical imperial assault on Italy: ‘Italy, Italy . . . wake up, raise your honoured head, and heed well your latest woes’ went one madrigal. ‘Observe how wickedly your Pharisees have deprived you of the shadow of your remaining authority . . . recover your honour, exterminate the wicked faction, and its cruel tyrants.’ Nothing was more calculated to undermine Charles’s efforts to champion the agenda of Church reform at Rome or to increase the suspicions of those who already regarded imperial influence in the peninsula as an alien hegemony.

CHARLES V’S IMPERIUM: MYTH AND REALITY

‘No family has ever attained such greatness and power by means of kinship and matrimonial alliances as the House of Austria,’ wrote Giovanni Botero in his Reason of State (1589). His Spanish contemporary Juan de Mariana agreed: ‘Empires grow and extend themselves through marriages. It is well known that if Spain has come to be such a vast empire, she owes it both to the valour of her arms and to the marriages of her rulers.’ Marriage was, Erasmus reminded Charles V, ‘the greatest of human affairs’ and ‘generally considered as the unbreakable chains of general peace’. Like the Jagiellons, the Habsburgs married their close relatives to consolidate the dynasty; unlike them, they married early. Early marriage ensured Habsburg fecundity; intermarriage risked their health.

A dynasty was more than a family. It was a collectivity of inherited rights and titles that transcended individuals. Ancestral traditions lay at the heart of dynastic politics. In his famous speech condemning Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521, Charles V began with an explicit allusion to ‘my ancestors . . . . most Christian emperors, Archdukes of Austria and Dukes of Burgundy’, who had all defended the faith and ‘handed on these holy Catholic rites after their death by natural right of succession’. Dynastic rule was inherently conservative. A legitimate ruler did not merely claim to rule, but also to preserve the ‘rights’ and ‘privileges’ of his peoples – these being complementary and coterminous with the dynasty itself.

Dynasties functioned as clans, corporatist and hierarchical. Emperor Maximilian I, architect of the Habsburg dynastic construction, thought of himself, his daughter Margaret of Austria, and his grandson and probable inheritor Charles in the same breath, ‘one and the same, corresponding to the same desire and affection’. Charles would, in due course, refer to his young brother Ferdinand as someone ‘whom I love and esteem as my other self’. Their enemies, he told him, would seek to ‘disunite us, divide us the more easily in order to break our common power and bring down our house’. The fear of a house being divided against itself was a dynastic commonplace since family quarrels were destructive. All Europe’s ruling dynasties evolved an informal hierarchy within the clan. For the most part, the junior branches of a clan accepted the need for allegiance to the head of the dynasty and their role in advancing its common destiny in return for real protection of their personal interests.

The Habsburg dynastic construction applied these principles with finesse. Emperor Maximilian I was its principal architect. He first married Mary, the daughter of Charles the Bold, last duke of Burgundy. The death of the latter in battle in 1477 resulted in the implosion of the Burgundian state with Maximilian succeeding to its remnants. Then, following Mary’s early death in 1482, Maximilian married Bianca-Maria Sforza, the niece of the reigning duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza. He picked up the largest dowry of any prince before 1550 and rights to inherit the duchy if the dynastic cards stacked up that way. From his first marriage, he had two children, Philip and Margaret. They were key dynastic assets, and he placed them with skill, marrying them to children of the newly conjoined dynastic Hispanic union, Isabella, queen of Castile, and Ferdinand, king of Aragon. Archduke Philip (the Handsome) married the infanta Joanna in October 1496, while the infante John (Juan) married Archduchess Margaret in April the following year.