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.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

See links of interest

  • 2021 business calendar

  • Home THE WORLD TODAY

  • Stage 18: Rovereto-Stradella, live