Is
Philip II
one of the great kings of the Spanish monarchy and one of the greatest statesmen of the modern age to which, however, much of the world
pursues him that black legend
that so effectively began to spread against Spain during their reigned in much of Europe. One
more
biography
of this exciting monarch,
Philip II - The heyday of the Spanish Golden Age
(Philippe II - L'apogée du Siècle d'or espagnol), by Francis Dupau,
has just been published in France
, which focuses on that
1568, authentic annus horribilis
for the so-called wise king.
Everything happened to the son of Carlos I of Spain and V of Germany, and nothing good:
his only son,
Carlos of Austria, prince of Asturias, died;
His third wife,
Isabel de Valois (the only one for whom he apparently shed tears) died; there was the
rise of the Moors
in the Alpujarras, which would cost the Crown so many headaches; and
the revolt would
break out
in Flanders
that would lead to the Eighty Years' War, a nightmare for the Spanish empire that would progressively decompose.
The loss of the beautiful Isabel de Valois left
the monarch
heartbroken
for a time
, historians argue. Daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici, she was married to the Spaniard when
she was barely 13 years old
and Philip II had already blown 33 candles and was twice widowed. The French woman would be nicknamed Isabel de la Paz, because that State marriage served to seal
an important peace between France and Spain
of which both Cortes were so in need. Isabel de Valois was a
very flirtatious
queen
, a follower of the fashions of her time, a
great lover of perfumes, jewelry and clothes ... and, apparently, very little motivated by sex. Felipe II, although he did not consider doing without his lovers, came to feel
adoration for her young consort,
who became obsessed with giving birth to a male ... who never showed his face.
Isabel de Valois, the young wife of the king who died that year.
Isabel de Valois died in the Royal Palace of Aranjuez on October 3, 1568,
when she was just 23 years old.
The king, according to the chronicles,
mourned her inconsolably
during the funeral. The health of the queen had been weakening, among other reasons, due to the
successive pregnancies and births
that left her with foxes. In fact, on the very day of her death, she gave birth to a very premature girl, Juana, who
barely survived an hour and a half.
The queen suffered from a deep internal infection that the Court doctors did not know how to diagnose or treat and that led to her life being extinguished in a few hours. In previous years, she had suffered an
abortion of two twin girls
and she had been the mother of the infantas Isabel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela.
The last months of Isabel de Valois kept her
almost bedridden,
with all kinds of ailments and symptoms such as swelling of the head, heavy breathing, severe headaches, urine laden with sand, vomiting, and so on.
Felipe II could not wait long to
replace her with Ana de Austria.
Especially because, before losing his wife, the king had seen how he
lost his successor,
Charles of Austria, on July 24 of that same annus horribilis of 1568.
We are facing one of those curious cases in which History is used as a throwing weapon. Because this Prince of Asturias was
a sadist in the face, a tormented character with ill health
that the black legend ended up sanctifying in order to spread the rumor that
his own father, Felipe II, had killed him by
poisoning him.
Don Carlos, who suffered from severe physical and psychological problems, was
imprisoned by his father a
few months before his death as
punishment
for his participation in a
conspiracy
.
The prince threatened to commit suicide from the beginning, so the sovereign gave instructions not to dispense him with knives, forks or other sharp instruments.
The heir had been seized by royal soldiers in January 1568, accused of
conspiring against his father.
It seems that Felipe II found out about his son's goings-on from his stepbrother Don Juan de Austria.
The last confinement
The Prince of Asturias was first held
in his rooms in the Alcázar Real,
in Madrid, and then taken to the tower that had previously served as a place of captivity for other such illustrious guests as Francisco I of France. In the end, Don Carlos was taken to the castle of Arévalo, where he remained
locked up for the last six months of his life.
He did everything to get it off. From going on a hunger strike, to attempting suicide by swallowing a large diamond ring. Apparently he drank exorbitant amounts of ice water, lay naked on the cold tile floor, demanded that the servants throw shovels of snow on his bed ...
until one day he no longer woke up.
Felipe II, born in Valladolid in 1527, assumed the throne after the abdication of his father, Carlos I, in 1556. And until 1598 he
ruled a vast empire
that was made up of Castile, Aragon, Catalonia, Navarra, Valencia, Roussillon, the Franche-Comté, the Netherlands, Sicily, Sardinia, Milan, Naples, Oran, Tunisia, Portugal and its Afro-Asian empire, all discovered America and the Philippines.
Beyond the
family misfortunes,
as we have pointed out in the annus horribilis of 1568, he had to face
two
particularly convulsive
episodes of a political nature
.
On the one hand, the Moorish rebellion in the Alpujarras. The
Pope Pius V
had long been
complaining that the Diocese of Granada was the least Christian Europe. Tired of the warnings that came to him from Rome, in 1567 the king promulgated a pragmatic that forced the
Moors
concentrated in Granada
to abandon their language, their typical costumes
and other elements of their culture. The unrest spread like wildfire, especially when the authorities went even further and decided to force the population of Muslim origin to
justify the ownership of their lands,
warning those who could not present supporting documents that they would be stripped of them. On Christmas Eve 1568 there was
The uprising in the Alpujarras
and it would take the Crown three years to put it down, a period in which there were
real massacres
on both sides.
Greater geostrategic importance, in the end, had
the Flemish revolt
after the execution of the Counts of Egmont and Horn, which gave way to the so-called
Eighty Years War
that would end in 1648 with the recognition of the independence of the seven United Provinces. known today as the Netherlands.
It is clear that there are years that one would like to be able to tear them off the calendar and, in the case of Felipe II, from History.
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