History Lesson

A new movie transports us into the future, as if anyone could know what the World will be like 100 years from now.  As for me, I live in my own time warp.  During the routines of daily life, I return to memories of Bruges, Belgium, and how nothing in history turned out the way people planned and expected.  .

In Innsbruck, David and I walked around a big room lined with bronze statues of royalty that the Emperor Maximilian intended to adorn his magnificent tomb.  In a small chapel in Bruges we found Max in a marble sarcophagus (quite regal, but nothing like what he had planned) next to a matching tomb with a life-like effigy of his young wife, Mary of Burgundy.    

Max and Mary were teenagers when their marriage was arranged by their parents, the German Emperor and the Duke of Burgundy.  Mary inherited all of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands, plus the County of Burgundy in France.  She enjoyed being Empress for only a few years before dying in a freak hunting accident while still in her early twenties. 

She left Max with two young children, for whom he craftily arranged double marriages with the eldest son and daughter of Spain’s Ferdinand and Isabella.  When F and I’s only son died, their daughter Joanna (“Juana the Mad”) became heir to the Spanish throne.  She and Max’s son Philip had half a dozen children, who grew up, some in Bruges and some in Spain.  It never was fun growing up royal, especially when Papa Philip died and Mama the Queen of Spain is so crazy she had to be shut up in a tower. 

The unexpected result was that Max’s grandson Charles – or Carlos in Spain and Karl in Austria – became at age 20 the ruler of more territory than any other monarch in the history of the World.  Charles V was Holy Roman Emperor over Austria, a bunch of petty German states, and parts of Italy.  He was also King of Spain, with more of Italy inherited from Grandpa Ferdinand of Aragon.  Then, thanks to Columbus, there was all of the New World. 

So what happened?   First, shortly after this young man became Emperor, a German Monk named Martin Luther began to cause all kinds of trouble.  Charles’s scattered possessions became too much for one man to manage.  In middle age Charles V retired to a monastery, giving his Spanish possessions to his son Philip II and his German territories to his brother Ferdinand.  With all of Europe in turmoil over religion, Bruges, where Charles grew up, became insignificant. 

So it remained for David and I to stroll around and gawk at in 1978.  And since then?  By chance at a party in Albuquerque, I met a young American couple who lived in Bruges.  He was stationed there with NATO.  Belgium is headquarters for the European Union and has major NATO facilities.  The young man told me Bruges has grown into a modern city of over 100,000 people. 

As I said, history shows us that nothing ever turns out the way people plan.