HABSBURG SPAIN - Spain and Portugal: A Reference Guide from the Renaissance to the Present - page 12

pursuit of his larger goals. Nor were they impressed when he secured
the title of Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V upon Maximilian's death
in 1519. Gradually, however, Spaniards warmed to this wide-ranging
ruler, who fought the French in Italy, the Turks in the Mediterranean,
and the Lutherans in Germany yet found time to cultivate their good-
will and develop an appreciation of their culture. They willingly sup-
plied men to wage his battles and began to refer to him gladly as “the
emperor,” taking pride in the fact that Spanish power was now being
displayed everywhere in Europe. Their king was also king of Naples,
Sicily, and Sardinia, duke of Milan and Burgundy, and bearer of a mul-
titude of other titles. The Habsburg network of alliances and marriages
extended from Portugal to Denmark and even for a few years included
England again, while placing Charles V's brother Ferdinand upon the
twin thrones of Hungary and Bohemia.
The grandeur of Spain's king-emperor was not confined to the Old
World. Building on the preliminary work of Ferdinand and Isabella;
Columbus, the pioneer of the Caribbean discoveries; Vasco Núñez de,
Balboa, who discovered the Pacific Ocean; and all those other authors
of empire, Charles V (the name by which he is generally known) con-
solidated Spanish rule in the Americas. Hernán Cortés conquered the
Aztec Empire in Mexico and dispatched his subordinates to push its
boundaries south through Central America and north into what
would become the southwestern United States. As these deeds were
redounding to the glory of Spain in the 1520s, Francisco Pizarro was
planning a parallel conquest of the Inca realm in the Andes. During
the 1530s Peru and its dependencies fell to a new cohort of conquis-
tadores, while other adventurers pushed through Amanzonian jun-
gles and probed the shores of the Río de la Plata (River Plate). By the
1540s Charles V was king of New Spain (in effect, everything north of
Panama) and Peru (all of South America minus the Portuguese foot-
hold in Brazil). Moreover, between 1519 and 1522 the ships of Fer-
nando de Magallanes (Ferdinand Magellan, formerly a captain in the
Portuguese service) crossed the Atlantic, rounded the southern tip of
South America, boldly traversed the uncharted Pacific, planted the
Spanish flag in the Philippine Islands (named after Charles's son) and
engaged Portuguese forces in what is now Indonesia. The surviving
ship and its handful of crew continued on across the Indian Ocean
and up the African coast to complete the first circumnavigation of the
globe. Although Magellan had been killed in the Philippines, he had
secured the archipelago for his master, and by the Treaty of Saragossa
(Zaragoza) in 1529 Portugal recognized this Spanish foothold in
Asia.