Part 9 (1/2)
”Naked came I into the world, and naked I return to thee, thou common mother of mankind. To thee I dedicate my body, as the only return I can make for all the benefits conferred on me.”
Then kneeling, and holding the crucifix before him, with tears streaming from his eyes, and all unmindful of the attendants who were around, he breathed a fervent prayer of grat.i.tude for the past, and commended himself to G.o.d for the future. By slow and easy stages, as he was very infirm, he journeyed to the vale of Estramadura, near Placentia, and entered upon his silent, monastic life.
His apartments consisted of six small cells. The stone walls were whitewashed, and the rooms furnished with the utmost frugality. Within the walls of the convent, and communicating with the chapel, there was a small garden, which the emperor had tastefully arranged with shrubbery and flowers. Here Charles pa.s.sed the brief remainder of his days. He amused himself with laboring in the garden with his own hands. He regularly attended wors.h.i.+p in the chapel twice every day, and took part in the service, manifestly with the greatest sincerity and devotion.
The emperor had not a cultivated mind, and was not fond of either literary or scientific pursuits. To beguile the hours he amused himself with tools, carving toys for children, and ingenious puppets and automata to astonish the peasants. For a time he was very happy in his new employment. After so stormy a life, the perfect repose and freedom from care which he enjoyed in the convent, seemed to him the perfection of bliss. But soon the novelty wore away, and his const.i.tutional despondency returned with acc.u.mulated power.
His dejection now a.s.sumed the form of religious melancholy. He began to devote every moment of his time to devotional reading and prayer, esteeming all amus.e.m.e.nts and all employments sinful which interfered with his spiritual exercises. He expressed to the Bishop of Toledo his determination to devote, for the rest of his days, every moment to the service of G.o.d. With the utmost scrupulousness he carried out this plan.
He practiced rigid fasts, and conformed to all the austerity of convent discipline. He renounced his pension, and sitting at the abstemious table with the monks, declined seeing any other company than that of the world-renouncing priests and friars around him. He scourged himself with the most cruel severity, till his back was lacerated with the whip. He whole soul seemed to crave suffering, in expiation for his sins. His ingenuity was tasked to devise new methods of mortification and humiliation. Ambition had ever been the ruling pa.s.sion of his soul, and now he was ambitious to suffer more, and to abuse himself more than any other mortal had ever done.
Goaded by this impulse, he at last devised the scheme of solemnising his own funeral. All the melancholy arrangements for his burial were made; the coffin provided; the emperor reclined upon his bed as dead; he was wrapped in his shroud, and placed in his coffin. The monks, and all the inmates of the convent attended in mourning; the bells tolled; requiems were chanted by the choir; the funeral service was read, and then the emperor, as if dead, was placed in the tomb of the chapel, and the congregation retired. The monarch, after remaining some time in his coffin to impress himself with the sense of what it is to die, and be buried, rose from his tomb, kneeled before the altar for some time in wors.h.i.+p, and then returned to his cell to pa.s.s the night in deep meditation and prayer.
The shock and the chill of this solemn scene were too much for the old monarch's feeble frame and weakened mind. He was seized with a fever, and in a few days breathed his last, in the 59th year of his age. He had spent a little over three years in the convent. The life of Charles V.
was a sad one. Through all his days he was consumed by unsatisfied ambition, and he seldom enjoyed an hour of contentment. To his son he said--
”I leave you a heavy burden; for, since my shoulders have borne it, I have not pa.s.sed one day exempt from disquietude.”
Indeed it would seem that there could have been but little happiness for anybody in those dark days of feudal oppression and of incessant wars.
Ambition, intrigue, duplicity, reigned over the lives of princes and n.o.bles, while the ma.s.ses of the people were ever trampled down by oppressive lords and contending armies. Europe was a field of fire and blood. The cimeter of the Turk spared neither mother, maiden nor babe.
Cities and villages were mercilessly burned, cottages set in flames, fields of grain destroyed, and whole populations carried into slavery, where they miserably died. And the ravages of Christian warfare, duke against duke, baron against baron, king against king, were hardly less cruel and desolating. b.a.l.l.s from opposing batteries regard not the helpless ones in their range. Charging squadrons must trample down with iron hoof all who are in their way. The wail of misery rose from every portion of Europe. The world has surely made some progress since that day.
There was but very little that was loveable in the character of Charles, and he seems to have had but very few friends. So intense and earnest was he in the prosecution of the plans of grandeur which engrossed his soul, that he was seldom known to smile. He had many of the attributes of greatness, indomitable energy and perseverance, untiring industry, comprehensive grasp of thought and capability of superintending the minutest details. He had, also, a certain fanatic conscientiousness about him, like that which actuated Saul of Tarsus, when, holding the garments of those who stoned the martyr, he ”verily thought that he was doing G.o.d service.”
Many anecdotes are told ill.u.s.trative of certain estimable traits in his character. When a boy, like other boys, he was not fond of study, and being very self-willed, he would not yield to the entreaties of his tutors. He consequently had but an imperfect education, which may in part account for his excessive illiberality, and for many of his stupendous follies. The mind, enlarged by liberal culture, is ever tolerant. He afterwards regretted exceedingly this neglect of his early studies. At Genoa, on some public occasion, he was addressed in a Latin oration, not one word of which he understood.
”I now feel,” he said, ”the justice of my preceptor Adrian's remonstrances, who frequently used to predict that I should be punished for the thoughtlessness of my youth.”
He was fond of the society of learned men, and treated them with great respect. Some of the n.o.bles complained that the emperor treated the celebrated historian, Guicciardini, with much more respect than he did them. He replied--
”I can, by a word, create a hundred n.o.bles; but G.o.d alone can create a Guicciardini.”
He greatly admired the genius of t.i.tian, and considered him one of the most resplendent ornaments of his empire. He knew full well that t.i.tian would be remembered long after thousands of the proudest grandees of his empire had sunk into oblivion. He loved to go into the studio of the ill.u.s.trious painter, and watch the creations of beauty as they rose beneath his pencil. One day t.i.tian accidentally dropped his brush. The emperor picked it up, and, presenting it to the artist, said gracefully--
”t.i.tian is worthy of being served by an emperor.”
Charles V. never, apparently, inspired the glow of affection, or an emotion of enthusiasm in any bosom. He accomplished some reforms in the German empire, and the only interest his name now excites is the interest necessarily involved in the sublime drama of his long and eventful reign.
It is now necessary to retrace our steps for a few years, that we may note the vicissitudes of Austria, while the empire was pa.s.sing through the scenes we have narrated.
Ferdinand I., the brother of Charles V., who was left alone in the government of Austria, was the second son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Spain. His birth was ill.u.s.trious, the Emperor Maximilian being his paternal grandfather, and Ferdinand and Isabella being his grandparents on his mother's side. He was born in Spain, March 10, 1503, and received a respectable education. His manners were courteous and winning, and he was so much more popular than Charles as quite to excite the jealousy of his imperious and imperial spirit. Charles, upon attaining the throne, ceded to his brother the Austrian territories, which then consisted of four small provinces, Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, with the Tyrol.
Ferdinand married Ann, princess of Hungary and Bohemia. The death of his wife's brother Louis made her the heiress of those two crowns, and thus secured to Ferdinand the magnificent dowry of the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. But possession of the scepter of those realms was by no means a sinecure. The Turkish power, which had been for many years increasing with the most alarming rapidity and had now acquired appalling strength, kept Hungary, and even the Austrian States, in constant and terrible alarm.
The Turks, sweeping over Persia, Arabia, Egypt, Syria, all Asia Minor, crossing the straits and inundating Greece, fierce and semi-savage, with just civilization enough to organize and guide with skill their wolf-like ferocity, were now pressing Europe in Spain, in Italy, and were crowding, in wave after wave of invasion, up the valley of the Danube. They had created a navy which was able to cope with the most powerful fleets of Europe, and island after island of the Mediterranean was yielding to their sway.
In 1520, Solyman, called the Magnificent, overran Bosnia, and advancing to the Danube, besieged and captured Belgrade, which strong fortress was considered the only reliable barrier against his encroachments. At the same time his fleet took possession of the island of Rhodes. After some slight reverses, which the Turks considered merely embarra.s.sments, they resumed their aggressions, and Solyman, in 1525, again crossing the Danube, entered Hungary with an army of two hundred thousand men. Louis, who was then King of Hungary, brother of the wife of Ferdinand, was able to raise an army of but thirty thousand to meet him. With more courage than discretion, leading this feeble band, he advanced to resist the foe. They met on the plains of Mohatz. The Turks made short work of it.
In a few hours, with their cimeters they hewed down nearly the whole Christian army. The remnant escaped as lambs from wolves. The king, in his heavy armor, spurred his horse into a stream to cross in his flight.
In attempting to ascend the bank, the n.o.ble charger, who had borne his master bravely through the flood, fell back upon his rider, and the dead body of the king was afterward picked up by the Turks, covered with the mud of the mora.s.s. All Hungary would now have fallen into the hands of the Turks had not Solyman been recalled by a rebellion in one of his own provinces.