A Short History of the WorldWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
A Short History of the World
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
World history
On the whole, Charles, in alliance with Henry VIII, was successful
against Francis I and the Turk. Their chief battlefield was North
Italy; the generalship was dull on both sides; their advances and
retreats depended mainly on the arrival of reinforcements. The German
army invaded France, failed to take Marseilles, fell back into Italy,
lost Milan, and was besieged in Pavia. Francis I made a long and
unsuccessful siege of Pavia, was caught by fresh German forces,
defeated, wounded and taken prisoner. But thereupon the Pope and Henry
VIII, still haunted by the fear of his attaining excessive power,
turned against Charles. The German troops in Milan, under the
Constable of Bourbon, being unpaid, forced rather than followed their
commander into a raid upon Rome. They stormed the city and pillaged it
(1527). The Pope took refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo while the
looting and slaughter went on. He bought off the German troops at last
by the payment of four hundred thousand ducats. Ten years of such
confused fighting impoverished all Europe. At last the Emperor found
himself triumphant in Italy. In 1530, he was crowned by the Pope—he
was the last German Emperor to be so crowned—at Bologna.
Meanwhile the Turks were making great headway in Hungary. They had
defeated and killed the king of Hungary in 1526, they held Buda-Pesth,
and in 1529 Suleiman the Magnificent very nearly took Vienna. The
Emperor was greatly concerned by these advances, and did his utmost to
drive back the Turks, but he found the greatest difficulty in getting
the German princes to unite even with this formidable enemy upon their
very borders. Francis I remained implacable for a time, and there was
a new French war; but in 1538 Charles won his rival over to a more
friendly attitude after ravaging the south of France. Francis and
Charles then formed an alliance against the Turk. But the Protestant
princes, the German princes who were resolved to break away from Rome,
had formed a league, the Schmalkaldic League, against the Emperor, and
in the place of a great campaign to recover Hungary for Christendom
Charles had to turn his mind to the gathering internal struggle in
Germany. Of that struggle he saw only the opening war. It was a
struggle, a sanguinary irrational bickering of princes, for ascendancy,
now flaming into war and destruction, now sinking back to intrigues and
diplomacies; it was a snake’s sack of princely policies that was to go
on writhing incurably right into the nineteenth century and to waste
and desolate Central Europe again and again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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