History UsefulNotes / TheKingdomOfSpain

''Why were the Spanish and Portuguese the ones to first sail to the New World? Why not France, England, The Ottoman Empire, or even beyond that, Ming China or the Mughals?''

During the next years, he would be one of Spain's foremost representatives in foreign countries, while several Prime Ministers (after Adolfo Suárez came Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (1981-82), Felipe González (1982-1996), José María Aznar (1996-2004), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011), Mariano Rajoy (2011-2018) and Pedro Sánchez (2019-?)) held the reigns of the government. In 2007, during the Hispanoamerican (Spain, Portugal and the parts of America that were colonies of both) Conference, he had a most famous moment. While Zapatero was speaking, UsefulNotes/HugoChavez of Venezuela started to interrupt him, calling the previous Spanish Prime Minister, Aznar, a "fascist" and more. Fed-up, the King shouted at him "''¿Por qué no te callas?''" (''Why won't you shut up?'')[[note]]The fact that he used the informal ''te'' instead of the more formal ''se'' makes it sound like he is reprimanding a misbehaving child.[[/note]], a sentence that gained instant MemeticMutation status.

However, Juan Carlos was shrewd enough to know which side he should pick, and for a long time he had buttered Franco making him believe he would just allow things to keep up while he planned for the restoration of democracy. Finally, in November 1975, Franco died (and, yes, he is [[Series/SaturdayNightLive still dead]]) and he was crowned as Juan Carlos I.

Instead, with the support of newly-picked Prime Minister Adolfo Suárez, Juan Carlos managed to ensure the Francoist parliament would vote itself out of existence, all political parties were legalized (even the Communists, in a tricky moment where the military leadership nearly rose again) and eventually elections (the first in more than forty years) were called for Constitutional Courts. The Constitution was accepted in referendum by a majority of the Spanish people, and a new democratic system was finally implemented.

From his very day, historical opinions of his skill are all over the place. Some consider him a better-disguised ersatz of his father, while others view him as at least a decently competent ruler who just lived in circumstances way beyond his control. His courtiers seem to have considered him a great monarch that lacked self-confidence and got very bad advice.

At war, Felipe was a bit of a LeeroyJenkins and had a rather mixed record, although one thing he had in his favor was the upgrade of their naval resources, including commanders like the mythical UsefulNotes/BlasDeLezo and monumental privateers like Miguel Enríquez and Amaro Pargo, who rose to NGOSuperpower levels each.

Either way, his mind collapsed earlier into his reign, and he went completely insane, in colourful and tragicomical ways. He seemed to recognize this, so in 1724, he abdicated to his seventeen-year-old son Luis. But Luis wound up dying within a few months (see below), and his second son, Fernando, was only ten years old, so a reluctant Felipe was restored to the throne for another twenty-two years of barely functional madness.

Although he has some triumphs in his resumé, he is generally considered a ineffectual, unfit king who was handed a job way over his head and sanity. His 45-year reign remains the longest of any Spanish monarch.

Not very often remembered, if at all. Didn't wage wars, nor alliances, nor anything. His reign was mostly domestic and peaceful, which, apart for being unusual for a European country of the time, doesn't grant many pages in history books.

Duke of Parma turned King of Naples turned King of Spain. Competent and pragmatical, as well as experienced thanks to his successive jobs, he continued his brother Ferdinand's work and revitalized the empire in the style of UsefulNotes/TheEnlightenment. He also followed his policy of defensive neutrality, if less so, and endured a couple of failed war enterprises he was forced to wage, although he managed to bounce back every time.

He conquered Naples easily and made it a small but strong kingdom, and he's still well-regarded in the history of Italy because he respected their independence and didn't try to merge Naples into Spain again when he ascended to the Spanish throne (some Italians back then even called for him to keep conquering all of Italy from their various foreign rulers). As the King of Spain, although few Americans remember him, he was also a vital support of UsefulNotes/TheAmericanRevolution, if begrudgingly so given that he didn't want to set an example for his own viceleroyalties.

One his interests was in urban development, which led to him rebuilding most of UsefulNotes/{{Madrid}} into the neo-Classical style for which it is now known. He built much of current Spain in other ways, including its current flag and anthem.

After Isabella II was deposed, debate about who the king of Spain might be started a controversy which even bled [[UsefulNotes/FrancoPrussianWar into the international sphere with a war between France and Prussia]]. The Parliament eventually decided Amadeo, from the family that successfully had united Italy, would be a nice king. This option was strongly supported by prestigious general Juan Prim.

Sadly, Prim was murdered shortly before Amadeo arrived to Spain, depriving Amadeo from much needed advice, and the new king was received with ''utter'' contempt. They mocked him endlessly, openly and in front of him (what with celebrating a parade for the new king and filling the front rows with the ugliest, oldest prostitutes they could find) when not blatantly ignoring him, belittling him as unmanly or just plain bullying him. This is partly based off the fact that the Bourbons also ruled over the Two Sicilies and Parma, but they were kicked out by the House of Savoy, which unified all Italy and was thus unpopular in South Italy. As a result, Amadeo had often escaped attempted assassinations more than once

Sadly, Prim was murdered shortly before Amadeo arrived to Spain, depriving Amadeo from much needed advice, and the new king was received with ''utter'' contempt. They mocked him endlessly, openly and in front of him (what with celebrating a parade for the new king and filling the front rows with the ugliest, oldest prostitutes they could find) when not blatantly ignoring him, belittling him as unmanly or just plain bullying him.

With all this happening, he (not unreasonably) decided that Spain was ungovernable, and promptly [[ScrewThisImOuttaHere abdicated and fled back to Italy]]. Chaos ensued.

However, in the later years, his popularity started to take hit after hit: his eldest daughter divorced, his younger daughter and her husband got involved in several scandals related to misappropiation of public funds, and, most infamously, he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana with a mistress, which particularly angered Spanish people since they were in the middle of a very tough recession that had left hundreds of thousands of people without a job. With his public image ruined, he came to be seen more through the lens of many negative memes, which often focused on his hedonism, absentmindedness, slurred speech, and a still persistent rumor that [[PlayingBothSides he was actually behind the 1981 coup attempt himself before opting out]].

In the end, due in part to both these scandals and his advancing age, he decided to AbdicateTheThrone and pass the crown to his only son, Felipe.

This behemoth of a state, the originator the nickname "the empire where the sun never sets" for its global reach, was the largest non-continuous empire in the world until its disintegration and remains one of the biggest in history, even without counting a period when the Portuguese Empire was dynastically assimilated to it. Some consider it the first truly global empire for controlling significant amounts of land in all of the populated continents.[[note]]Technically, the Portuguese Empire was the first to control land in Europe, Africa, America, Asia and Oceania, but much of its territorial control was limited to small trade posts or coastal cities.[[/note]]

Even after its disappearance, its cultural influence is still very much alive, with Hispanic culture forming the basis of Latin America (and part of the United States) and UsefulNotes/SpanishLanguage being the second most widely spoken native language in the world. The massive amounts of racial intermarrying happened during the Spanish expansion in America (historically called ''mestizaje''), possibly unique in history for its scale and variety, also resulted in a relative majority of modern Latin Americans carrying at least some fraction of Spanish genetics, and to a lesser degree African and Italian genetics too.

Another common misconception is that of the very adjective of colonial, something that was spoken by the English, Dutch and French about the Spanish Empire in its overseas possessions and became internalized for the next centuries until today. The proper term of colony (which had changed its meaning from a neutral term to the derogative and negative conception of now) was never given to the territory in America, instead they were referred to as viceroyalties and kingdoms, essentially extensions from mainland rather than lands subjected to it, hence the need of Viceroys to administrate the territory. European territories of the empire, like Naples and later Portugal, were ruled by Viceroys the same exact way.

The very term "Spanish Empire" is actually an exonym given by the English and French, which was adopted informally and very late into its history (for most of its tenure, the title of empire was reserved for the UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire, which coincidentally was briefly co-ruled with Spain at one point). Its official term was the Kingdom of Spain, as referred in this article, although in recent times the alternate name of "Hispanic Monarchy" has become fashionable too on account on the role played by its Hispanic-American lands and subjects in its history.

Despite this long history of conflicts, the Spanish Empire was mostly capable to defend its lands and colonies, balancing minimal territorial losses with steady expansions, but a mix of inner and outer troubles shattered it almost completely during the Napoleonic Wars, after which it lost the last remnants of its empire the next century.

!!History

[[foldercontrol]]

Brief as he was, and never getting to reign alone, is just remembered for being a jerk and totally disregarding the queen in his endless affairs. Also, much to the monarchs' dismay, he made a friendly turn to France, their traditional enemies, which made Fernando his ArchEnemy (Isabella died shortly after) and caused much turmoil.

Imposed by his brother, UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte. A relatively well-meaning ruler, he actually tried to liberalize the country in part, and tried to avoid becoming a PuppetKing for his brother. Unfortunately for him, José, or rather, Joseph Bonaparte, was disliked by just about everyone, from Spain's colonies in the western hemisphere (a number of which ''[[UsefulNotes/SpanishAmericanWarsOfIndependence declared independence]]'' so they wouldn't have him as king, mind you) to peninsular society. This widespread discontent exploded into a front of UsefulNotes/TheNapoleonicWars called the Peninsular War.

However, in the later years, his popularity started to take hit after hit: his eldest daughter divorced, his younger daughter and her husband got involved in several scandals related to misappropiation of public funds, and, most infamously, he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana with a mistress, which particularly angered Spanish people since they were in the middle of a very tough recession that had left hundreds of thousands of people without a job. With his public image ruined, he came to be seen more through many negative memes, which often focused on his hedonism, absentmindedness, slurred speech, and a still persistent rumor that [[PlayingBothSides he was actually behind the 1981 coup attempt himself before opting out]].

!The Line of Succession

Once Spain had rendered into utter chaos, he arrived with a high popularity to boot, defeating the Carlist Pretender, the self-proclaimed "Carlos VII," in the Third Carlist War. He wound up taking the name Alfonso XII, with his regnal number alluding to eleven kings of Asturias, Léon, and Castile that had been named Alfonso before Spain was united (and thus not appearing in this list).

Whether or not he's succeeding in his endeavours is a matter of debate. At the beginning of his reign, there were calls from some for a referendum to decide whether Spain should remain a constitutional monarchy or become a republic, but they were a minority and it has not come up since. Being a much more subdued character than his father, almost to the point of coming across as unremarkable, many Spaniards don't know what to think about him yet.

So far, Felipe's reign has been marked by his aforementioned efforts to improve the monarchy's image, his opposition to an independence referendum in Catalonia that was deemed illegal by Spanish authorities, and by the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, in which he tested positive, but recovered.

A series of successional clashes, hard enough to almost break apart Castile and Aragon, changed all of this landscape by subsuming the House of Trastámara into the [[UsefulNotes/TheSoundOfMartialMusic House of Habsburg]], a regal and ambitious Germanic family that ruled the UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire and had acted as northern allies up to the point. The Habsburg dynasty, inaugurated by the emperor king UsefulNotes/CharlesV, took the Catholic Monarchs' aspirations much farther, first desiring to make all of Europe an unified block against Islam, and failing this due to the project's sheer impossibility, trying to secure the rule of Catholicism against both Islam and the quickly spreading [[UsefulNotes/TheProtestantReformation Protestant Reformation]]. Those wars would consume voraciously the resources brought by the Spanish expansion in America, where the great Mesoamerican and Peruvian civilizations were assimilated through diplomacy, strategy and mass intermarrying.

Despite its continuous state of war, the Spanish Empire entered an age of intellectual, literary, scientific and philosophical splendor known as Spanish Golden Age, which went to set much of the foundations over which UsefulNotes/TheEnlightenment would be later built. Highly humanistic laws were issued to bring the Amerindian indigenous and the ever-increasing mestizo population into this political and cultural sphere, achieving advances that would only resonate in the rest of Europe centuries later. Most of this, however, was all but erased from modern western pop culture through the unceasant propaganda work of the empire's antagonists, resulting in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain) Spanish Black Legend]], a layer of historiography that still paints the Spanish Empire as a genocidal, backwards and bloodthirsty predecessor to Nazi Germany.

The Habsburgs' Quixotic enterprises occupied the Spanish Empire for the 16th and 17th centuries, at one point assimilating the Portuguese Empire and finally unifying the Iberian Peninsula, only to lose it again when the excess of war and megalomaniac management caused multiple rebellions, with Portugal breaking away. Eventually, worn by two centuries of neverending war against the whole known world, the Spanish Empire lost his momentum at the same time other European countries caught up, ultimately losing its hegemony and royal house to the France of UsefulNotes/LouisXIV. The new French house of Bourbon arrived in Spain after a new war and started working to keep Spain afloat in the international landscape, although the family's proneness to both figurative and literal insanity brought unique problems.

At war, Felipe was a bit of a LeeroyJenkins and had a rather mixed record, although one thing he had in his favor was the upgrade of their naval resources, including commanders like the mythic UsefulNotes/BlasDeLezo and monumental privateers like Miguel Enríquez and Amaro Pargo, who rose to NGOSuperpower levels each.

His mind steadily collapsed, and he went completely insane, in colourful and tragicomical ways. He seemed to recognize this, so in 1724, he abdicated to his seventeen-year-old son Luis. But Luis wound up dying within a few months (see below), and his second son, Fernando, was only ten years old, so a reluctant Felipe was restored to the throne for another twenty-two years.

Although he has some triumphs in his resumé, he is generally considered a ineffectual, insane king who was handed a job way over his head. His 45-year reign remains the longest of any Spanish monarch.

Despite his prestige, or perhaps ''[[AccentuateTheNegative because]]'' of it, he doesn't have much presence in media. Spaniards from TheEighties might know him better due to a certain song of folk rock band Suburbano.

Despite his efforts, Joseph himself had little say in the Peninsular War – while the French commanders fighting it were technically under his command, they really answered to Napoleon. Fending off the Spanish insurgents wound up siphoning French resources, which put France at a disadvantage by the time Napoleon's Russian campaign kicked off, which in turn led to the downfall of the first French Empire. Hence the Peninsular War also being called "the Spanish Ulcer."

Which he did. After that, followed ten years known as the [[NamesToRunAwayFromVeryFast "Ominous Decade"]].

By the end of Fernando's reign, the remnants of Spain's empire were falling apart, its prestige was in tatters, a civil war was brewing, and Spain (and arguably the Hispanosphere as a whole) never quite recovered. Not surprisingly, most consider Fernando VII to be Spain's worst king, if not the worst in western history.

His new regime was engineered by Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, who was a well known Anglophile and designed a parliamentary system akin to that of the United Kingdom, with the exception that Cánovas expected little from the Spanish population and was doubtful they would be civilized enough to implement a full democracy without civil unrest arising. So he arranged with local hicks known as ''caciques'' for the falsification of election results so "elected governments" could be stable and predictable. The result was a manufactured two-party system, with Cánovas's Conservative Party and Práxedes Mateo Sagasta's Liberal Party taking turns in power every four years, while keeping undesirable factions (namely, PSOE, the Socialist Party) out of the system.

Sadly for him, the two-party system was steadily falling apart once their masterminds had passed on and their successors lacked both charisma and political skills to keep it. The impact the defeat against the United States had on the population further eroded the establishment. There was also a bizarre plan to invade and annex Portugal, hoping to capitalize on Iberist movements that had emerged out of the sorry state of both countries, but it also fell through (the liberals only wanted to do it peacefully). [[FromBadToWorse And it only got worse from there]].

Primo de Rivera accomplished most of his stated goals by cutting crime, striking seriously Abd-el-Krim rebels in the Moroccan campaign, and patching social welfare issues, as well as implementing progressive measures that nobody remembers (such as putting women in political charges for the first time). He also tied an improbable EnemyMine with the top of the PSOE (Socialist Party) after those gave his dictatorship the benefit of doubt. However, in the process they made enemies of the CNT (anarcho-syndicalists), the PCE (Communist Party), and the whole of the elites in both Catalonia and the Basque Country, who turned to nationalism. And then, in 1929, TheGreatDepression finished him.

The Second Spanish Republic was established, but [[UsefulNotes/TheFrancoRegime it didn't last]].

In 1947, Franco had declared Spain was a kingdom again, but being as he didn't like any of the claimants (particularly Juan, the heir to Alfonso XIII's throne after his elder brothers renounced their rights, and whom he considered too liberal even though he tried to fight on the Nationalist side during the war) he held off his decision until he picked Juan's eldest son in 1969, considering him to be the perfect tool to continue his regime after his death.

During the next years, he would be one of Spain's foremost representatives in foreign countries, while several Prime Ministers (after Adolfo Suárez came Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo (1981-82), Felipe González (1982-1996), José María Aznar (1996-2004), José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero (2004-2011), Mariano Rajoy (2011-2018) and Pedro Sánchez (2019-?)) held the reigns of the government. In 2007, during the Hispanoamerican (Spain, Portugal and the parts of America that were colonies of both) Conference: while Zapatero was speaking, UsefulNotes/HugoChavez of Venezuela started to interrupt him, calling the previous Spanish Prime Minister, Aznar, a "fascist" and more. Fed-up, the King shouted at him "''¿Por qué no te callas?''" (''Why won't you shut up?'')[[note]]The fact that he used the informal ''te'' instead of the more formal ''se'' makes it sound like he is reprimanding a misbehaving child.[[/note]], a sentence that gained instant MemeticMutation status.

However, in the later years, his popularity started to take hit after hit: his eldest daughter divorced, his younger daughter and her husband got involved in several scandals related to misappropiation of public funds, and, most infamously, he broke his hip while hunting elephants in Botswana with a mistress, which particularly angered Spanish people since they were in the middle of a very tough recession that had left hundreds of thousands of people without a job.

''And then'', after a scandal involving him receiving kick-backs for aiding in the construction of a high-speed railway in Saudi Arabia, he decided to go into self-imposed exile over there in August 2020.

Whether or not he's succeeding in his endeavours is a matter of debate. At the beginning of his reign, there were calls from some for a referendum to decide whether Spain should remain a constitutional monarchy or become a republic, but they were a minority and it has not come up since.

Just before Leonor was born in 2005, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's PSOE election manifesto called for a constitutional amendment to institute absolute primogeniture for Spanish sucession, with the other mainstream party, the People's Party, voicing its support for the proposal. The idea received more attention in 2006–2007, when then-Princess Letizia had a second pregnancy. But the resulting child, Infanta Sophia, wound up being another daughter, and Felipe and Letizia are now in their fifties, so the question has become less urgent. As of 2023, plans for such a constitutional amendment have advanced no further.

[[folder:The House of Saboya (1870–1873)]]
!The House of Saboya

On his deathbed, he changed his last will so his three-year-old daughter could reign (a very liberal standpoint, for a king that fiercely clung to authoritarian, medieval-like monarchy) instead of his even-more-authoritarian brother, Don Carlos. It's widely assumed that he did this out of pure spite toward his brother for having coveted the throne long before Ferdinand vacated it, which would be in keeping with [[ItsAllAboutMe his general pettiness]]. This gesture would result in supporters of Don Carlos becoming the Carlists and advocating for him and his descendants being placed on the throne (more on that later).

The Catholic Monarchs reformed deeply their twin kingdoms in every possible stat and turned them into the next great Christian power, conquering the last Muslim bulwarks in the peninsula and incidentally making Iberia the horizon of a new world when a certain UsefulNotes/ChristopherColumbus made a big discovery at the west. While the nascent Spanish Empire started expanding through America, so it did in Europe, conquering Sicily, Naples and several African port cities, often at the expense of their largest regional enemy, the knightly nation of France. Through cutting-edge military science and even shrewder political marriages with the rest of Europe, Castile and Aragon rose to hegemony and came to fill the niche left by the Byzantine Empire after the recent conquest of Constantinople to the hands of the Ottoman Empire.

A series of successional clashes, hard enough to almost break apart Castile and Aragon, changed all of this landscape by subsuming the House of Trastámara into the [[UsefulNotes/TheSoundOfMartialMusic House of Habsburg]], a regal and ambitious Germanic family that ruled the UsefulNotes/HolyRomanEmpire and had acted as northern allies up to the point. The Habsburg dynasty, inaugurated by the emperor king UsefulNotes/CharlesV, took the Catholic Monarchs' aspirations much farther, first desiring to make all of Europe an unified block against Islam, and failing this due to the project's sheer impossibility, trying to secure the rule of Catholicism against both Islam and the quickly spreading [[UsefulNotes/TheProtestantReformation Protestant Reformation]]. Those wars would consume the resources brought by the Spanish expansion in America, where the great Mesoamerican and Peruvian civilizations were assimilated through diplomacy, strategy and blurring of the racial barriers through mass intermarrying

Despite its continuous state of war, the Spanish Empire entered an age of intellectual, literary, scientifical and philosophical splendor known as Spanish Golden Age, which went to set much of the foundations over which UsefulNotes/TheEnlightenment would be later built. Highly humanistic laws were issued to bring the Amerindian indigenous and the ever-increasing mestizo population into this political and cultural sphere, achieving advances that would only resonate in the rest of Europe centuries later. Most of this, however, was all but deleted from modern western pop culture through the unceasant propaganda work of the empire's Protestant antagonists, resulting in the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain) Spanish Black Legend]], a layer of historiography that still paints the Spanish Empire as a genocidal, backwards and bloodthirsty predecessor to Nazi Germany.

The Habsburgs' Quixotic enterprises occupied the Spanish Empire for the 16th and 17th centuries, at one point assimilating the Portuguese Empire and finally unifying the Iberian Peninsula, only to lose it again when the excess of war and megalomaniac management caused multiple rebellions, with Portugal breaking away. Eventually, worn by two centuries of neverending war against the whole known world, the Spanish Empire lost his momentum at the same time other European countries caught up, ultimately losing its hegemony and royal house to the France of UsefulNotes/LouisXIV. The new French house of Bourbon arrived in Spain after a new war and started working to keep Spin afloat in the international landscape, although the family's proneness to insanity brought new and unique problems.

Through its vast size, resources and military talent pool, the Spanish Empire managed to remain a top player in Europe by investing in a policy of defensive neutrality in the time where France itself was losing the first place in an increasingly complicated checkboard, having also proved proved to be an unstable ally. This only changed with the arrival of UsefulNotes/NapoleonBonaparte, who promptly submitted half of Europe. Spain picked the strongest side and begrudgingly joined him, but Spain's inner political conflicts convinced Napoleon of the need to military hijack the Spanish Empire to be safer. The resultant revolt was utter ruin for both, as it exploded in Napoleon's face, opening a war theater that accelerated his fall, and at the same time shattered the empire from inside, creating a myriad of American states molded by various loyalties and international interests.

Spain held onto Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and a set of islands until the very end of the 19th century, when they were taken by the United States, much to the depression of Spanish academics of the time (the popularly called Generation of '98). This was the point in which the Spanish Empire was finally buried.

Despite this long history of conflicts, the Spanish Empire was mostly capable to defend its lands and colonies, balancing minimal territorial losses with steady expansions, but a mix of inner and outer troubles shattered it almost completely during the Napoleonic Wars. It held onto Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and a set of islands until the very end of the 19th century, when they were taken by the United States, much to the depression of Spanish academics of the time (the popularly called Generation of '98).

!The House of Trastámara (1469–1555)
!![[UsefulNotes/TheCatholicMonarchs Isabella I of Castile and Fernando II of Aragon]]

![[UsefulNotes/TheSoundOfMartialMusic The House of Habsburg]] (1516–1700)

After becoming king, Philip turned out to be even more of a Catholic zealot than his father, only without his diplomatic abilities. He entangled himself in multiple wars of various levels of avoidability against the Dutch, the English and the French, all while keeping the front against the Ottomans. In the process, he made Habsburg Spain a pariah state among Protestants and Catholics alike, resulting in the stigma of the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend_(Spain) Spanish Black Legend]], and initiated a national decline whose effects similarly lasted centuries.

!The House of Bourbon (1700–1808)

!The House of Bonaparte (1808–1813)

!The First Restoration of the House of Bourbon (1813–1868)

!The House of Saboya (1870–1873)

!The Second Restoration of House Bourbon (1874–1931)

!The Third Restoration of House Bourbon (1975– )

'''Nickname:''' ''the Spirited''

That person was Juana and Felipe's son Charles, Archduke of Austria, and eventually the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by the Pope himself.

An unprecedentedly powerful king in European history, thanks to his Mediterranean, Germanic and Amerindian inheritances, Charles's ambition was to unify Europe against Islam like in the good old times, but failed because he was just about the only European ruler who actually wanted that (even the Popes were comfortable with the status quo). His biggest adversary was Francis I of France, the second most powerful person in Europe, whom Charles defeated many times without ever making him understand the necessity to join forces. At one point he had Francis captured in battle and let him out naively with the promise of teaming up as he wished, but Francis didn't fulfill it; the King of France would rather join the Ottomans.

His death [[SuccessionCrisis caused a fracas]], as after much speculation and vacillation in the last years of his life, he tried to to leave his throne to his sister's grandson, Philippe of Anjou, a grandson of UsefulNotes/LouisXIV of France. However, Archduke Charles of Austria (later Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI), a great-grandson of Felipe III, objected on grounds that Felipe IV's will stipulated that the Spanish throne would always stay in Habsburg hands, and tried to claim the throne as "Carlos III."

So far, Felipe's reign has been marked by his aforementioned efforts to restore the monarchy's popularity, his opposition to an independence referendum in Catalonia that was deemed illegal by Spanish authorities, and by the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, in which he tested positive, but recovered.

The first King of Spain to be married to a commoner (journalist Letizia Ortiz), Felipe has worked hard to make sure he can restore the monarchy's popularity in the eyes of the people, pledging "a renewed monarchy for a new time," as well as cutting royal expenditures and making his assets public. Whether or not he's succeeding in his endeavours is a matter of debate. At the beginning of his reign, there were calls from some for a referendum to decide whether Spain should remain a constitutional monarchy or become a republic, but they were a minority and it has not come up since.

The first King of Spain to be married to a commoner (journalist Letizia Ortiz), Felipe has worked hard to make sure he can restore the monarchy's popularity in the eyes of the people, pledging "a renewed monarchy for a new time;" whether or not he's succeeding is a matter of debate. At the beginning of his reign, there were calls from some for a referendum to decide whether Spain should remain a constitutional monarchy or become a republic, but they were a minority and it has not come up since.

So far, Felipe's reign has been marked by his aforementioned efforts to restore the monarchy's popularity by (among other things) cutting costs and making his assets public, his opposition to an independence referendum in Catalonia that was deemed illegal by Spanish authorities, and by the UsefulNotes/COVID19Pandemic, in which he tested positive, but recovered.