CHARLES V was born at Ghent on the twenty-fourth day of February, in the year one thousand five hundred. His father, Philip the Handsome, archduke of Austria, was the son of the emperor Maximilian, and of Mary the only child of Charles the Bold, the last prince of the house of Burgundy. His mother, Joanna, was the second daughter of Ferdinand king of Aragon, and of Isabella queen of Castile.
A long train of fortunate events had opened the way for this young prince to the inheritance of more extensive dominions, than any European monarch, since Charlemagne, had possessed. Each of his ancestors had acquired kingdoms or provinces, towards which their prospect of succession was extremely remote. The rich possessions of Mary of Burgundy had been destined for another family, she having been contracted by her father to the only son of Louis XI of France; but that capricious monarch, indulging his hatred to her family, chose rather to strip her of part of her territories by force, than to secure the whole by marriage; and by this misconduct, fatal to his posterity, he threw all the Netherlands and Franche Compté into the hands of a rival. Isabella, the daughter of John II of Castile, far from having any prospect of that noble inheritance which she transmitted to her grandson, passed the early part of her life in obscurity and indigence. But the Castilians, exasperated against her brother Henry IV, an ill-advised and vicious prince, publicly charged him with impotence, and his queen with adultery. Upon his demise, rejecting Joanna, whom Henry had uniformly, and even on his death-bed, owned to be his lawful daughter, and whom an assembly of the states had acknowledged to be the heir of his kingdom, they obliged her to retire into Portugal, and placed Isabella on the throne of Castile. Ferdinand owed the crown of Aragon to the unexpected death of his elder brother, and acquired the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily by violating the faith of treaties, and disregarding the ties of blood. To all these kingdoms, Christopher Columbus, by an effort of genius and of intrepidity, the boldest and most successful that is recorded in the annals of mankind, added a new world, the wealth of which became one considerable source of the power and grandeur of the Spanish monarchs.
