In the last sentence we have anticipated the national prostration of the eighteenth century, following upon the exhaustion of the previous one. It remains to summarise the events which intervened. Ferdinand and Isabella were succeeded by their grandson, Charles I of Spain, better known as the Emperor Charles V of Germany. He was the son of their daughter, Joanna, who had been married to the Archduke Philip of Austria, son of Emperor Maximilian of Germany. Thus Charles brought Spain under the rule of the great Hapsburg family, which even to the present time has provided monarchs for Germany and Austria. Joanna died insane, and the taint of her disease clung to her descendants. Born in Ghent in 1500 and educated in Flanders, Charles I at the death of his father in 1506 inherited the Netherlands. On the death of Ferdinand in 1516 he became King of Spain, and in 1519 was elected Emperor of Germany, the defeated competitor being Francis I of France. The rivalry between these two led to a protracted war, fought out chiefly in Italy, on the possession of which each had fastened his ambition. Francis was made captive at the battle of Pavia in 1527 and forced into a treaty of peace; but the war was renewed two years later and Charles’ troops under the renegade Frenchman, Constable of Bourbon, entered Rome and sacked it, taking the Pope prisoner. This, however, was but an incident in the political game, for Charles, as became a grandson of the Catholic Kings, was a staunch Defender of the Faith, and endeavored to impose it upon his Protestant subjects in Germany and the Netherlands. For the good of their souls he subjected them to the ravages of war and the horrors of the Inquisition, and for the filling of his military chest mulcted them by fines as well as taxation. Then at the age of fifty-five, exhausted in mind and body by his heroic exertions on behalf of Catholicism and his own ambitions, and by his various forms of self-indulgence, he handed over the Imperial Crown to his brother, Ferdinand, and the Kingdom of Spain and his “dear Netherlands” to his son, Philip. He himself, under the plea of caring for his soul’s welfare, retired to the monastery of San Juste, whence he continued to meddle with affairs of State, meanwhile surfeiting his appetites and making a collection of clocks and watches. His bedroom commanded a view of the High Altar of the Church and was decorated with Titian’s _Gloria_, in which picture the artist has represented the ex-Emperor in a white robe, welcomed by the Virgin at the throne of God; while his hopeful son, Philip, is among the mortals who gaze up devoutly at the imperial apotheosis.