The activities of Charles were so enormous that it is impossible in this short sketch even to mention them all. Besides his conquest of Francis and, through him, Italy, he saved Europe from the Turk. To Francis’s eternal dishonour he had made an alliance with the last great Turkish Sultan, Solyman the Magnificent. The baleful power which had conquered Constantinople less than a century before seemed to be sweeping on to spread its abominations over Western Europe; and history finds it difficult to forgive Francis for assisting its latest conqueror. Men remembered how Constantine Palæologus had fallen amidst smoke and carnage in his empurpled blazonry, heroic to the last; they forgot that the destruction of 1453 was probably the direct result of the Venetian and French attack under Dandolo in 1204, from which Constantinople never recovered. In talking of the “Terrible Turk” they forgot that Dandolo and his Venetians and Frenchmen had committed atrocities quite as terrible as the Turks’ during those days and nights when Constantinople was given over to rapine; and now the brilliant Francis appeared to be carrying on Dandolo’s war against civilization. So when Charles stepped forward as the great hero of Europe, and drove the Turks down the Danube with an army under his own leadership he was hailed as the saviour of Christendom; it is to this that he owes a good deal of his glory, and he nobly prepared the world for the still greater victory of Lepanto to be won by his son Don John of Austria. Moreover, it was during his reign that the great American conquests of the Spanish armies occurred, and the name of Fernando Cortes attained to eternal glory; and the Portuguese voyager Maghellan made those wonderful discoveries which have so profoundly influenced the course of history. There had been no man so great and energetic as Charles since Charlemagne; since him his only rival for almost super-human energy has been Napoleon. That pathetic and unhappy queen whom we call “Bloody Mary” had been betrothed to Charles for diplomatic reasons when she was an infant, but he had broken off the engagement and ultimately married Isabella of Portugal, whose fair face is immortalized by Titian in the portrait that still hangs in the Prado, Madrid. Auburn of hair, with blue eyes and delicate features, she looks the very type of what we used to call the tubercular diathesis; and there can be no doubt that Charles really loved her. Before he married her he had had an illegitimate daughter by a Flemish girl; ten years after she died Barbara Blomberg, a flighty German, bore him a son, the famous Don John of Austria. But while Isabella lived no scandal attached to his name. Unhappily his only legitimate son was Philip, afterwards Philip II of Spain.