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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.4 (2004) 648-650



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Emperor Charles V, Impresario of War. By James D. Tracy (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2002) 344pp. $70.00

The quincentennary in the year 2000 of Charles V's birth in Ghent, Belgium, produced a bumper crop of academic and popular appraisals of the Holy Roman emperor who ruled a composite set of territories that stretched across nearly half of Europe. Much like the 1992 reappraisals of Christopher Columbus' voyage to the Caribbean, the Charles V commemorations discarded the nationalist and romantic portraits of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in favor of more comparative and multisided considerations.

Tracy's new book is a welcome addition to this new Charles V literature. It evaluates Charles V's military campaigns and the critical intersection of finance, statecraft, and parliamentary consent that allowed a ruler steeped in a chivalric ethos to wage incessant war. That Tracy has produced one of the most original evaluations of Charles V should come as no surprise to those familiar with his previous works—a body of scholarship that ranges from Erasmus of Rotterdam to merchant empires, [End Page 648] urban walls and fortifications, and the political and financial history of late medieval and early modern Holland.

Much of the new work on Charles V has either taken a wide-lens overview, as in Blockmans' or Maltby's precise surveys of his reign, or explored the artwork and literature that Charles' propagandists fostered in their effort to promote the Habsburg prince as a universal Christian emperor.1 Tracy follows in these footsteps but takes a refreshing new angle by focusing less on diplomatic or narrative sources than on a fine-grained empirical investigation of the financial "sinews" of Charles' wartime activity. Tracy follows Parker, whose work on Philip II applied the concept of a grand strategy of warfare and statecraft developed by military historians.2 He argues that the emperor systematically mobilized the resources of his noncontiguous states for military enterprises (empresas) against the countless enemies who surrounded his domains. With such a decentralized set of possessions—Charles ruled under seventy-two separate titles—support for military efforts proved no easy task, involving tireless negotiations with his key domains where cities were strong, commercial life robust, and parliamentary bodies stubborn. Fighting a Christian rival like Francis I, the Ottoman Kahir-ad-Din Barbarossa, and even lesser adversaries required putting together men and resources, made all the more expensive when the emperor himself took to the field to display his honor. Urban parliamentary bodies and major banking houses became essential players in facilitating Charles' martial efforts by offering subsidies and short term, high interest loans.

Tracy plumbs Charles' personal correspondence, ledgers of councils of finance, and parliamentary records, among other sources, to explore the nine military expeditions that Charles himself commanded between 1529 and 1552, including the famous Tunis and Algeria campaigns and the two Schmalkaldic wars. Although Tracy offers valuable thumbnail sketches of the campaigns, his central interest is the financial and political mechanisms that the realms of Castile, Naples, and the provinces of the Low Countries deployed to fund them. These territories had representative assemblies with which the prince bargained to secure subsidies, but also bankers who issued short-term loans with assignations based on future revenue. Tracy delves into the fiscal minutiae of these subsidies and loans not merely for their rich empirical detail but more for what the analysis reveals about the intersection of statecraft, warfare, politics, and finance in early modern Europe. As such, Tracy's hard-nosed look at the financial and political underpinnings of Charles' martial ethos should be of wide interest to scholars of the early modern state and of early modern political and economic life in general.

The portrait that emerges from Tracy's labors is of a prince whose grand strategy was rooted in his sense of martial, imperial grandeur but whose appetite for warfare forced real concessions—and occasioned [End Page 649] considerable discord—in the centrally important regions of Naples, Castile, and the Low Countries. Each of...

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