CHARLES MARTEL (i.e. the Hammer), a renowned conqueror in the early annals of France. He deposed and restored Chilperic, king of France; and had the entire government of the kingdom, first with the title of Mayor of the Palace, and afterwards as Duke of France. He was the first to check the victorious career of the Saracens, who had overrun Spain and France. He defeated them with great slaughter near Tours, A.D. 732. He died in 741. See FRANCE.
CHARLES le Gros, emperor of the west in 881, king of Italy and Suabia, is memorable for his reverse of fortune. He was dethroned at a diet held near Mentz, by the French, the Italians, and the Germans, in 887; after which he was obliged to subsist on the bounty of the archbishop of Mentz. He died in 888.
CHARLES V., emperor of Germany and king of Spain, was son of Philip archduke of Austria, and of Jane queen of Castile. He was born at Ghent on the 24th February 1500, and succeeded to the crown of Spain in 1517. Two years afterwards he was chosen emperor at Frankfurt, upon the death of his grandfather Maximilian. He was a great warrior and politician; and his ambition prompted him to aspire to universal empire. He fought sixty battles, in most of which he was victorious. He took Francis I., the king of France, prisoner at the battle of Pavia, and afterwards sold him his liberty on very hard terms; yet when the people of Ghent subsequently revolted, he asked leave to pass through the dominions of Francis; and the generous king, so far from avenging the ill treatment he had experienced, received and attended Charles with the utmost pomp and magnificence. He sacked Rome, took the pope prisoner, and perpetrated cruelties which are said to have exceeded those committed by the northern barbarians; yet the pious emperor went into mourning on account of this conquest, forbade the ringing of bells, commanded processions to be made, and prayers to be offered up for the deliverance of the pope his prisoner; and at the same time forbore to inflict the slightest punishment on those who had treated the holy father and the holy see with such inhumanity. He is accused by some Catholic writers of favouring the Lutherans, whom he might easily have extirpated. But the truth is, he found his account in the divisions which that sect occasioned; and he never failed to take advantage of them, sometimes against the pope, sometimes against France, and at other times against the empire itself. He was a great traveller, and made fifty different journeys into Germany, Spain, Italy, Flanders, France, England, and Africa. Though he had been successful in many unjust enterprises, yet his last attempt on Metz, which he besieged with an army of 100,000 men, and which deserved to have succeeded, proved a total failure.
Vexed at the reverse of fortune which seemed to attend his latter days, and oppressed by sickness, which unfitted him any longer for holding the reins of government with steadiness, or guiding them with address, he resigned his dominions to his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip, and retired to the monastery of St Justus, near Placentia, in Estremadura.
About six months before his death, the gout, to which he had long been subject, after a longer intermission than usual, returned with a proportional increase of violence.
His shattered constitution had not strength enough remaining to withstand such a shock. It enfeebled his mind as well as his body; and from this period we hardly discern any traces of that sound and masculine understanding which distinguished Charles among his contemporaries. An illiberal and timid superstition depressed his spirit. He had no relish for amusements of any kind; and endeavoured to conform, in his manner of living, to all the rigour of monastic austerity. He desired no other society than that of monks, and was almost continually employed in chanting with them the hymns of the missal. As an expiation for his sins, he gave himself the discipline in secret, with such severity, that the whip of cords which he employed as the instrument of his punishment was found, after his decease, tinged with his blood. Nor was he satisfied with these acts of mortification, which, however severe, were not unexampled. The timorous and distrustful solicitude which always accompanies superstition still continued to disquiet him, and, depreciating all that he had done, prompted him to aim at something extraordinary, some new and singular act of piety which would display his zeal, and merit the favour of Heaven. The act on which he fixed was as wild and uncommon as any that superstition ever suggested to a disordered fancy. He resolved to celebrate his own obsequies before his death. He ordered his tomb to be erected in the chapel of the monastery. His domestics marched thither in funeral procession, with black tapers in their hands; and he himself followed in his shroud. He was laid in his coffin with much solemnity. The service for the dead was chanted; and Charles joined in the prayers which were offered up for the rest of his soul, mingling his tears with those which his attendants shed, as if they had been celebrating a real funeral. The ceremony closed with sprinkling holy water on the coffin in the usual form, and, all the assistants retiring, the doors of the chapel were shut. Then Charles rose out of the coffin, and withdrew to his apartment, full of those awful sentiments which such a singular solemnity was calculated to inspire. But either the fatiguing length of the ceremony, or the impression which this image of death left on his mind, affected him so much that next day he was seized with a fever. His feeble frame could not long resist its violence; and he expired on the 21st of September, after a life of fifty-eight years, six months, and twenty-one days. (Robertson's History of Charles V.) See SPAIN.