Largest possible Spanish Empire in Europe?

Deleted member 97083

With a POD no later than 1450, how much land in Europe could Spain have conquered, inherited, vassalized, or otherwise taken control of? The more contiguous the better.

Could the entire Habsburg Empire, including the parts of Hungary it conquered after separating from Spain, have become part of Spain? What about further Mediterranean expansion?

Maps are welcome.

I was thinking something like this. Could this be conquered by Spain, and if so, how?
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Spain and England would have to be on good terms for them not to see each other as a threat. And Protestantism would either have to be crushed or diminished for this scenario happen, especially in the Netherlands.
 
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How big can the empire get before it stops being "the Spanish Empire"? For instance, if Charles V's territories had someone stuck together and formed a cohesive political unit, it'd likely be referred to as the greater Holy Roman Empire or something.
 
Taking French lands is the hardest, not in military terms, as a boosted Habsburg army could win its war against the French, but because of the institutional situation. The French Kingdom was a an unitarian polity, unlike the Spanish monarchy (which is only the union of the Aragon and Castille crowns, themselves the unions of various kingdoms, all keeping their institutions) or the Holy Roman Empire. There is no simply a "duchy of Languedoc" to release from the french personal union and to put into the spanish personal union.

Another difficulty are the Papal States, as a Catholic Empire could not rescind the Pope's temporal authority without mining its own legitimacy.

Third, of course, is the difficulty of managing such a large empire with early modern technology. Considerable autonomy must be granted to Hungary, for example, as there is simply no time for an exchange of information with Madrid/Toledo in the case of a Turkish attack.
 
This honestly just feels more like a Latin Empire, or Catholic Empire. Which, in itself, if say based in Barcelona (naval access), could legitimately work. However, any other interpretation of Christ and the system's one uniting factor might fail.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
This honestly just feels more like a Latin Empire, or Catholic Empire. Which, in itself, if say based in Barcelona (naval access), could legitimately work. However, any other interpretation of Christ and the system's one uniting factor might fail.

If you are going to move the capital to a more central location, why not Rome? The "Roman Empire" has a nice ring to it.

I share the reservations of others about including the land from Perpignan to Antibes. I don't see how that can be done and there still be a France to the North. By all means balkanise France and include it all under the the Empire, or get some dynastic shenanigan that has a joint Spanish/French monarchy, but I can't see independent France working with those borders. It has to be bigger or non-existant, if it were in such a bad state as to lose a third of its territory, why not all of it?

As a language geek, the beautiful thing about those borders is that the imperial language will be Latin, and the informal language of empire will be a form of Mediterranean Lingua Franca. This means we have two strong unifying forces on the Romance languages, patois and dialects of the area. Might we see a Pan-Latin ideology, similar to that of China?
 
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