Philip II of Spain and I of Portugal (21 May 1527 – 13 September 1598) from the House of Habsburg, known rather non-indicatively as "Philip the Prudent", was the King of Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, as well as technically England and Ireland for a time (and Duke of Burgundy and Lord of the Netherlands), during the mid-to-late 16th century. As the sovereign of both the Spanish and the Portuguese Empires and a blood ally to the Holy Roman Empire, like his late father Charles V before him, Philip could be considered the most powerful man on the planet at his day, with all of its varied troubles, worries and ambitions to match.
Possibly one of the biggest base-breakers in historiography, thousands of books about him have been written through the centuries from all possible perspectives and agendas. Historian Helmut Koenigsberger notoriously considered him the most controversial character in all of modern age, more than even Napoleon and Stalin, given that from his own day writers seem unable to agree about just anything related to him. Philip himself was so secretive and concerned with not cultivating any public image and memory of himself that he left no official biography and had his private correspondence destroyed. Some have called him the original culprit of the Spanish Black Legend not so much by what he did but by what he did not do: in a time in which propaganda was becoming a thing and his many enemies were using it full power against Spain, Philip's stance was a staunch Head-in-the-Sand Management, refusing to defend himself against the wildest accusations, whether because he believed the sword to be mightier than the pen or just because he did not care very much about what people thought... as long as they were Catholic.
For traditional Anglophone, Francophone, and Protestant media, Philip might be the original Big Bad of history: the "Demon of the South", a megalomaniac emperor, former husband to the infamous Bloody Mary, who sought to spread his reign of terror to the entire world to bind it to the mind-numbing authority of the Catholic Church and the always unexpected Spanish Inquisition. Certainly, by our pop culture standards, Philip is one of those historical figures who genuinely resembles a fictional villain, in this case of the Dark Messiah variety: chronicles profile him as a deadly serene man, always dressed in stern black, and adept of religious mysticism to the point of supposedly building his palace over a hellgate, who went to war basically against the entire world, investing the resources of his global empire and his fearsome armies in the uncompromising mission of stamping out any opposition to his doctrine. It is indeed true that Philip, as an unyielding Catholic, would not suffer a Christian world not subjected to the authority of the Pope (whether the Pope himself wanted or not!), and some have attributed him a true Messiah complex, a belief not unlike that of his father Charles of being the champion of God against all sorts of heretics and Muslims. Under his reign, the so-called Iberian Union would simultaneously—and boneheadedly—take on the Dutch, the British, the French, the Ottomans and, practically everybody who fit that description in his eyes.
A recent current of thought has been much more benevolent towards him, considering Philip a beacon of the opposite of all that the Black Legend claims. The Spanish Golden Age blossomed under his patronage, with masses of genius writers, artists, architects, engineers, scientist and thinkers, like Gianello della Torre, Jerónimo de Ayanz, and the School of Salamanca, flowing into the landscape of The Renaissance. He also kickstarted the first true wave of commercial globalization, extending trade routes around the world that connected the old Europe and the new America to each other and to realms as remote as China and Japan, holding together a highly diverse, composite monarchy where he didn't even wield absolute power. Like his father before him, he was a humanist,note an ecologistnote a man of sciencenote and a defender of the indigenous who would rule against conquering for the sake of conquering.note Much of The Enlightenment, globality, and modernity would grow from the ground he helped to cultivate, without counting the number of systems of administration that were innovated in Philip's reign (our current eight-hour day was his own idea, for instance), to the point some have even called him the first modern king.
Regardless of how he is viewed, it cannot be denied Philip was, for good and bad, a man who could not stand idle. A tireless, hard-working bureaucrat of a deeply intellectual nature, he spent most of his time doing paperwork reportedly equivalent to the job of five or six men, obsessed with micromanaging every small corner of his imperial machine through a keen messaging system. This trait would become his very feet of clay, as Philip's mistrust for anything but his own judgement led him to disregard often the advice of the massive pool of political and military talent he had access to, which ended up crashing many of his enterprises. As said above, it's difficult to judge whether Philip deserves scorn for having wasted his humongous power in such silly ways, or credit for having reached so far with such a flawed approach. In any case, he represents well the perpetual state of the Spanish Empire by the number of wars he entangled it in, in this case because he happened to be a fist-pumping Catholic who refused to lose any country to The Protestant Reformation, be they friend or foe. This mix of belligerence and inefficiency effectively dragged him to a whack-a-mole of international conflicts that bankrupted the Iberian Union thrice, only refloating every time thanks to its vast natural resources and control of centers of finances, which eventually caused comparable inflation.
He was more of a bureaucrat than a soldier-king like his father Charles, but never had much necessity of involving himself personally with war either, as he was at the head of a Spanish army probably at its very historical peak, a "jungle of Spanish lances" of multiple origins captained by old veterans like Fernando Álvarez de Toledo and Álvaro de Bazán, younger promises like his own half-brother John of Austria and nephew Alexander Farnese, and talents born in the wild like Julián Romero and Juan del Águila — all of whom he continuously frustrated and eventually squeezed to death with his whimsical and unrealistic orders. He also enjoyed a network of spies laid across Europe, helped by the many nationalities of his subjects and the dense commercial exchanges of the monarchy, which was almost too good for what he actually did with it. Ironically, in contrast to his father's more typically Germanic attitude that War Is Glorious, Philip himself was disgusted at war and considered it a necessary evil. The first time he stepped on a battlefield, after the Battle of St. Quentin, he could not distract his mind from all the blood and corpses, muttering, "Is it even possible that my father liked this?"
This is not to say Charles completely fell off a Broken Pedestal in his mind. Although Philip's thoughts are characteristically obscure, it's believed he saw himself as an unworthy successor to his father, perhaps not realizing or accepting that he simply had a completely different set of skills and circumstances. To a point, he was right — he decisively lacked Charles's diplomacy, pluralism, and political snake-charming abilities, as Philip was too much of a centralist and an introvert, and unlike Charles, he was not the kind of person able to make concessions. While Charles ultimately gave up on his own dreams of a Catholic universality, Philip was convinced he could succeed where his father had failed and never let it go. Much has been debated about whether he had or not a strategic point in his religious zeal, as letting Europe be completely overtaken by Protestantism might have risked creating an anti-Hispanic culture sphere,note but as in a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, this was exactly what he ended up creating with his own actions, causing the Spanish Black Legend and making enemies out of even fellow Catholics.note
What Philip certainly loved was knowledge, both earthly and otherworldly. A massively brainy man, interested not only in arts and sciences but also in mysticism and the occult, he celebrated his victory at St. Quentin by building the palace-monastery-library-whatever of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, erected with the surely modest ambition to show that Spain was the biggest and baddest cultural power in the world. El Escorial was not only the largest Renaissance building ever, it also housed the biggest private library in all of Europe at its timenote (including forbidden books and exotic texts captured from the Turks and the Aztecs), and served as a laboratory, garden, hospital, and everything needed, being designed after Solomon's Temple with all sorts of esoteric symbology. Folklore claims that its placement was chosen to seal a mouth to Hell, whose demonic hounds tormented the construction until it was finished. Philip collected holy relics and patronized several religious mystics, and also went to engage himself in the stuff by researching necromancy and Alchemy, which he considered another way to explore the mysteries of God's work (several volumes in his library would have made the Inquisition to frown had he not been the king). He researched how to produce gold and the elixir of life in order to help his reign a bit, although the fact that we are writing about him in the past tense and in English should inform he failed.
As was custom for the House of Habsburg, Philip's entire life was a game for the control of Europe and the entire world from the very beginning. He was still a young heir apparent, widower of the Infanta María of Portugal (and father to a Royally Screwed Up son that would die young and crazy), when Charles V married him to Mary Tudor of England to hopefully form an English Habsburg dynasty that would unify England and the Netherlands.note This gave Philip a stint as a nominal King of England that he found a supreme sacrifice, given that he did not reciprocate the mad love of the substantially older queen. The plan went nowhere, as Mary died without producing an heir and Philip failed at convincing her sister Elizabeth to become her replacement, after which England would only add to the list of enemies of Spain - and for extra irony, they would employ an English navy he had worked himself to improve and develop back when he was their king. Elizabeth herself owed much of her ascension to the throne to Philip before going separate ways, and legend has it that she always kept a picture of him in her chambers.note
Becoming King of Spain in 1556 with Charles's abdication, Philip compensated slightly for the loss of England by putting a temporal end to the threat of France, sealing the Italian Wars with a military victory and a peace treaty that included a marriage between Philip and the teenaged princess of France, Elisabeth of Valois. In spite of the age difference, and unlike the previous case, this turned out to be a Perfectly Arranged Marriage, with Philip falling in love with his French bride to the point that, according to his biographers, her premature death nine years later would be the first, only and last time the stoic Philip cried in his life. She gave birth to his first daughters Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, who, once passed the initial disappointment of the lack of a male heir, became his close confidants and secretaries. Philip would even try to make Isabella the new Queen of France during the French religious turmoil, which would have given the House of Habsburg virtual control of continental Europe, but the usual politics impeded it.note He later married his distant niece Anna of Austria, who finally produced four sons.
Not much after marrying Anna, Philip discovered, just like his late father, that, far from leading a united Europe against the Ottoman Empire, he would have to go to war against Europe and the Ottomans in order to uphold his inflexible Catholic principles. The Habsburg Netherlands, ruled by a Protestant elite, revolted against him at the start of The Eighty Years' War, fueled by mutual political mistrust and outraged by his attempts to control their traditionally plutocratic realms. This eventually expanded to a conflict against the entire Protestant world, due to the swashbuckling intrusion of the Anglo-Spanish War and an untimely upsurge of the French Wars of Religion (and not to mention the Cologne War against minor German Protestants). Meanwhile, the Muslims did not exactly stay calm either, although it could be said that, even with the lesser resources he could dedicate to the Mediterranean, Philip did have solid success there: after solving the Great Siege of Malta and the Rebellion of the Alpujarras, he obtained a gigantic victory at the Battle of Lepanto, and through some strategic truce, this mitigated the Ottoman threat for around forty years. The timely death of King of Portugal Sebastian I against the Moors also allowed Philip, being half-Portuguese himself, to inherit the Portuguese Empire and assimilate it.note
By the end of his reign, troubles started outnumbering the successes, as courtly intrigues with his own secretary Antonio López del Hierro and his possible lover Ana de Mendoza y de Silva, Princess of Éboli, caused much inner turmoil. López, guilty of slandering Philip's half-brother John, took refuge in the Kingdom of Aragon, where not even Philip could maneuver freely, and managed to escape to the Protestant countries and contributed heavily to their propaganda against Spain. Philip and the European branches of his empire were truly overworked at this point, and this still discounts an absolutely insane overseas plan that never came to fruition, the Empresa de China, where Spanish and Portuguese sectors in the Pacific planned to ally with Toyotomi Hideyoshi and initiate a Chinese rebellion against the Ming Dynasty in order to take over China, hoping to someday control all of Asia and corner the Muslims from the back. The lengthening of the wars in Europe (and Philip's own rare common sense) prevented it, not to mention that the plan itself was a bit too unlikely to go neat even in the best case, but the image of a Habsburg-aligned China extending tentacles across all Asia would have given a whole new meaning to the Spanish title of Hugh Thomas's monography of Philip, El Señor del Mundo.
A famously contemplative, stoic character, he endured various health problems throughout his life (he developed gout like his father, and passed his last years using a custom-made wheelchair, possibly the first in history) yet never stopped in his personal crusade. In his last years, even with the wars against the Dutch and English still open, he was supporting Sigismund Báthory of Transylvania and pursuing an alliance with Shah Abbas I of Persia in order to weaken the Ottomans, and before his death he was considering an invasion of the Balkans. He died at the age of 71, reportedly depressed that he failed to finish what he started — although, loyal to himself, he still micromanaged the preparation of his own funeral. Always the philosophic man, he allowed for his sons to see him on his deathbed, surrounded with his beloved holy relics yet emaciated and unable to control his own sphincter, so they could see "what became of the kingdoms and lordships of this world". He was unhappily succeeded by his son Philip III, almost his opposite in personality and ambition, who at least put an end to some of his wars. Ultimately, Philip left behind a global state that was still the empire on which the sun never set, but was now exhausted and exsanguinated in its monumental effort to war against all the other powers in Europe.
A lot of his legacy still lives in Spain. He was the first monarch to make Madrid the Spanish capital, and part of his buildings are still standing, such as El Escorial, although it is not used as a royal palace anymore, and his network of roads, which was superseded by modern highways. The Philippines in Asia was also named in his honor, andwas also during his reign that he sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to establish a settlement in what is now Florida, founding St. Augustine in 1565, the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the United States. Ironically, Philip himself would also sow the seeds of the dynasty that would replace the Habsburg in Spain, the French House of Bourbon. When the Protestant pretender Henry IV of France realized he could not take the throne with the Iberian Union among his enemies, he made the shocking turn of just converting to Catholicism ("Paris is well worth a mass") and let the whole conflict die off, becoming the first Bourbon king.
Tropes associated with him in fiction
- Affluent Ascetic: Depictions vary heavily in this, some portraying him clad in imperial pomp and circumstance while others portray him as relatively sober in his customs. In reality, especially later in his life, he was extremely sober in his customs, to the point of boredom: he always wore simple black clothing, ate the same food everyday and only entertained himself with a bit of hunting between his workaholic streaks.
- Big Bad: Almost every appearance by him in film or TV (including Spanish productions, out of Pop-Cultural Osmosis) has him as the main villain, usually as an evil warmonger who leads The Empire. Some have even claimed that Verdi's Don Carlo, where Philip is the villain, was a partial inspiration for the plot of Star Wars.
- Born Under the Sail: It wouldn't be him without the story of the Spanish Armada, the massive invasion fleet which got wrecked by bad weather, brave Englishmen or both. Philip was indeed very concerned with the topic, and worked to multiply the power of the Spanish navy. He also ended up involved with all the noteworthy navies in the world: he had the Spanish and the Genoese under his command, later inherited the Portuguese, and fought simultaneously the Ottomans, the Dutch and the English, with the occasional help of Venice (which lent half of the forces in Lepanto, but quickly opted out afterwards).
- Control Freak: Some portrayals acknowledge that Philip caused the failure of the Spanish Armada by placing the fantastically inept but certifiably obedient Duke of Medina Sidonia in command. This is fundamentally true, even if is still not the entire story (Medina Sidonia wrote a letter begging him to put a better man for the job, but the royal secretaries intercepted it, so it’s unknown whether Philip would have admitted he had a point or not). He had way worse bouts of this, such as when he blocked the enthroning of John of Austria as a newly created King of Tunis, which might have changed greatly the war against the Ottomans, because he simply didn’t trust him enough.
- The Empire: Depictions often emphasize the dimensions of Philip's empire. They get it right; even if Charles gave the Holy Roman Empire to his own brother, Philip still received the biggest and best piece of his father's cake by inheriting the Hispanic branch, which entailed Spain, the Italian realms, the African strongholds, and the American viceroyalties, all of them highly productive territories without the perpetual political hellscape of the Holy Roman aristocracy. He also received the Netherlands, which, even if in the long run turned out to be an equally complicated affair and a bad match for Philip, were an appetizing center of European trade. And then, Philip reclaimed also the Portuguese Empire, acquiring their lands in Brazil, Africa, India, and the Pacific, basically weaving lines with his name around the whole globe. Had the Empresa de China actually turned out any kind of success for Spain and Portugal, their king would have become the closest to a Planet Baron.
- Evil Cripple: Elizabeth has his actor walking in a strange gait, as if partially disabled, even although real Philip was known to be athletic and physically elegant, and was even into dancing in his youth. He did become a cripple by the end of his life when gout preyed on him, although this is still not the condition portrayed in the film.
- The Evil Prince: If Philip and Charles V are featured in the same work, chances are that Charles will be portrayed as a good, wise ruler, while Philip will be an evil aspirant waiting for him to take the reins to wreak havoc. This shouldn't come as a surprise considering who tends to write the story — Charles never warred significantly against England and was generally tolerant towards the Netherlands' desire to manage themselves, not to mention he was a Netherlander himself.
- Fatal Flaw: Ambition tends to be the one most commonly given to him in portrayals. This definitely holds water in real life, although the real Philip seems to have erred more in hubris, or perhaps mistrust — he would have avoided many of his failures had he just listened more often to what people with knowledge and/or more common sense were trying to tell him.
- Flanderization: He is easily one of the most complex, layered kings in European history, for good or bad, yet he is yet to receive a mainstream characterization that goes far beyond "sinister, bitter Catholic king who wants to rule the world." Interestingly, depictions do put a lot of weight on his religious motivations even whenever they weren't central to the topic in real life. This is particularly relevant in the Eighty Years War, which tends to be painted as a Catholics vs. Protestants kind of conflict, when in real life religion was a minor factor behind the political and economic unrest (other than the elite, Netherlanders were predominantly Catholic at the time, yet many of those still sided against him).
- The Fundamentalist: He was a fanatically devout Catholic even by the standards of his time, especially in light of the Protestant Reformation his father had failed to solve or curb, and actively fought the heresy everywhere, eventually pushing it into a decline in France and modern Belgium until it disappeared over there centuries later. Part of his motivations were practical, as Protestants generally didn’t like Spain very much due to a long list of reasons both related and unrelated to religion.
- Historical Villain Upgrade: Portrayals tend to paint him as a power-hungry despot, who leads a reign of terror on his own people and may openly desire to conquer the entire world. The real Philip was decidedly not a laissez-faire kind of ruler, but few of his subjects considered him a tyrant and his rule was not especially dystopic or personalist compared to other monarchies of the time (one could make an argument that it was much less, even at its worst). Similarly, Philip was absolutely a fan of what we would call today political interventionism, but by all appearances held little desire to actually conquer and assimilate lands he didn't feel belonged to him already in some way, whether in Europe and the rest of the world, even although there were cultural and political think tanks calling for him to do so (he only accepted begrudgingly the Empresa de China, and was quick to replace it with a program of good relations with the Ming as soon as it proved untenable).
- Inadequate Inheritor: No portrayal paints him as a completely worthy successor to Charles, which was admittedly a very high bar. For a change, this is kind of true, as Philip would go to commit several mistakes his father had already committed and learned from, like shooting first and asking questions later, trusting too much in divine providence, and trying to suppress Protestantism the hard way. He was also a much less diplomatic and chameleonic man, which ensured the princes of the Holy Roman Empire would never accept him as a candidate to emperor, and eventually caused the war of the Netherlands. Conversely, he did surpass his father in some matters, like the war against the Ottoman Empire, in which he did several right moves and actually got some of the big victories Charles dreamed with.
- Parental Substitute: Ministry of Time and Carlos, rey emperador portray the Duke of Alba as sort of a mentorly, fatherly figure to Philip, either explicitly or implicitly. In real life, his opinion of the man varied heavily: he first saw him as an imposition of his father, later warmed up to him due to his value, and later got tired of him due to his fiasco in the Netherlands (which ironically was Philip's own fault from beginning to end). Interestingly, Philip seems not to have been very fond of Andrea Doria either, perhaps finding the elderly and wise Doria to be too much of a grandfatherly figure towards both Charles and himself.
- Putting on the Reich: At least two of his depictions in British media make him a transparent stand in for Adolf Hitler, capitalizing on his dislike of Jews for good measure, even if otherwise Philip could have hardly represented anything more distant from Nazi ideology – Hitler would have been displeased to be embodied by someone who admired black poets, had mestizos in his entourage and ruled other non-whites as human beings, especially in an Europe which would take several centuries to share the sentiment.
- "Well Done, Son" Guy: Both Ministry and Carlos play up a feeling of inferiority towards his father, which was almost certainly the case. For someone obsessed with surpassing his father, not inheriting the crown of the Holy Roman Empire due to his little affinity with the German princes was the first disappointment, and letting half of the Netherlands escape the clutches of the Habsburg was the last.
In fiction
- Philip, still Prince of Asturias at the time, appears in the fanfic Handmaid as he's brought to England by his father to discuss a possible marriage treaty between him and Henry VIII's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Cecily. Since Anne is serving as Henry and Katherine's handmaid - a union recognized as valid by the Catholic Church - there is no question of Cecily's legitimacy. Philip, however, looks down on Cecily for her commoner heritage, and Cecily, having inherited some of the Boleyn temperament, will not take the insult lying down, leading to a rather fractious introduction. They seem to get along much better as adults, as by the time of the epilogue, they have three children.
- In Bill, he and a team of "specialists" go to London in order to assassinate Elizabeth I. He’s portrayed by Ben Willbond.
- He's the villain of Fire Over England, played by Raymond Massey.
- The Sea Hawk also has him as the baddie, played by Montagu Love. In a memetic scene, he states his intentions to conquer as far as India and China, and ultimately turn the entire world into Spain.
- He appears as a villain, and an appropriately evil one, in Elizabeth and its sequel. He's played first by George Yiasoumi and later by Jordi Mollà, who for a chance gets to play a Spaniard and not a Latino (although ironically, both things were one and the same by the time the film is set).
- He is naturally featured in Spain, the first globalization.
- Peter Jeffrey plays him in Elizabeth R, where he is, again, the Big Bad.
- He's played by Willem Nijholt in William of Orange.
- A no less flanderized portrayal of him appears in The Ministry of Time (2015), though impressively played by Carlos Hipólito. A younger version of him is played by Jorge Clemente.
- He appears in Carlos, rey emperador, a spinoff to Isabel, where he's played by Pablo Arbués and later by Marcel Borràs.
- Cuarto Milenio dedicated some reportages to his esoteric interests and the founding of El Escorial.
- He is, perhaps, the Big Bad of Giuseppe Verdi's Don Carlo, which is based on a play of the same name by Friedrich Schiller. Whether with or without music, he is shown as a complex and tragic character, mistrustful of his jealous and volatile son, deeply in love with his young wife (his famous aria, "She never loved me" - "Ella giammai m'amo" is one of the most famous Italian basso arias, in which the gray-haired king, who is actually only in his mid-thirties, laments that the sixteen year-old Elisabeth de Valois cannot love him back), and protective of the free-thinking Marquis de Posa (the only completely fictional character of the piece). Strictly speaking, if the play/opera has an actual villain at all - which is questionable - it would probably be the terrifying figure of the ancient, blind, and fanatical Grand Inquisitor, whose ruthless wielding of ecclesiastical authority is enough to frighten even the king. Their duet is a magnificent number for two heavy bass voices, with that of the Inquisitor reaching all the way down into a de profundis level.
- Philip is an option for leader for Spain in both Civilization II and VI.