and the year in which the Emperor Charles V was born, this
is what we see. The feudal disorder of the Middle Ages has given way
before the order of a number of highly centralised kingdoms. The most
powerful of all sovereigns is the great Charles, then a baby in a
cradle. He is the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella and of Maximilian
of Habsburg, the last of the mediaeval knights, and of his wife Mary,
the daughter of Charles the Bold, the ambitious Burgundian duke who had
made successful war upon France but had been killed by the independent
Swiss peasants. The child Charles, therefore, has fallen heir to the
greater part of the map, to all the lands of his parents, grandparents,
uncles, cousins and aunts in Germany, in Austria, in Holland, in
Belgium, in Italy, and in Spain, together with all their colonies in
Asia, Africa and America. By a strange irony of fate, he has been born
in Ghent, in that same castle of the counts of Flanders, which the
Germans used as a prison during their recent occupation of Belgium, and
although a Spanish king and a German emperor, he receives the training
of a Fleming.

As his father is dead (poisoned, so people say, but this is never
proved), and his mother has lost her mind (she is travelling through her
domains with the coffin containing the body of her departed husband),
the child is left to the strict discipline of his Aunt Margaret. Forced
to rule Germans and Italians and Spaniards and a hundred strange races,
Charles grows up a Fleming, a faithful son of the Catholic Church, but
quite averse to religious intolerance. He is rather lazy, both as a boy
and as a man. But fate condemns him to rule the world when the world is
in a turmoil of religious fervour. Forever he is speeding from Madrid to
Innsbruck and from Bruges to Vienna. He loves peace and quiet and he is
always at war. At the age of fifty-five, we see him turn his back upon
the human race in utter disgust at so much hate and so much stupidity.
Three years later he dies, a very tired and disappointed man.

So much for Charles the Emperor. How about the Church, the second great
power in the world? The Church has changed greatly since the early days
of the Middle Ages, when it started out to conquer the heathen and show
them the advantages of a pious and righteous life. In the first place,
the Church has grown too rich. The Pope is no longer the shepherd of
a flock of humble Christians. He lives in a vast palace and surrounds