CARLOS V BIOGRAPHY

•  Carlos was born in the Flemish city of Ghent in 1500. This is where he lived until he went to Castilla in 1517, so he did not speak spanish. This upset the Castillian nobylity, who viewed the monarch as a foreigner. They feared that they would lose their power and that Castillas`s riches wolud be assigned to other territories.

• In 1520, a series of dynastic alliances and premature deaths turned a twenty-year-old into the most powerful monarch in Europe. Grandson of the Catholic Kings, Carlos had inherited from them the crowns of Castile and Aragon, with their respective possessions in America and the Mediterranean, and reigned as Charles I of Spain from the age of sixteen

• Under his reign and that of his son and successor, Philip II, Spain became the first world power, arts and culture began its Golden Age and formed the largest colonial empire ever seen.