Why didn't the Spanish Empire conquer or annex France?

Maoistic

Banned
What the title says. Why didn't the Spanish Empire, starting with Charles V, conquer or annex France when the Spanish were militarily superior and snatched Italy out of the French during the Italian Wars?
 
What the title says. Why didn't the Spanish Empire, starting with Charles V, conquer or annex France when the Spanish were militarily superior and snatched Italy out of the French during the Italian Wars?
Could they achieve that to begin with?
 
What the title says. Why didn't the Spanish Empire, starting with Charles V, conquer or annex France when the Spanish were militarily superior and snatched Italy out of the French during the Italian Wars?

Why would they want to do it though? Sure the French king was usually a pain in the neck (or the eye as in Henri II's case) but what would Spain gain from it. Even after the Valois boys all kicked, Felipe II was cognisant that it was only the ultras (Guises and Catholic League) who would support him.

As to the Habsburgs conquering France, they'd prefer that it lose parts (Burgundy to themselves, and Aquitaine or Normandy to their English allies) and be weaker rather than wiping it entirely from the map.

That said, your best chance of a Habsburg France would be Felipe II's daughter winning out over Henri de Bourbon (and there being no other Capetian/Lorrainer male for her to marry so she marries her Austrian cousin). Its not "conquer" per se, but it gets France into the Habsburg sphere.
 

Maoistic

Banned
Why would they want to do it though? Sure the French king was usually a pain in the neck (or the eye as in Henri II's case) but what would Spain gain from it. Even after the Valois boys all kicked, Felipe II was cognisant that it was only the ultras (Guises and Catholic League) who would support him.

Not having a powerful rival in its immediate border. The French and Spanish had been fighting over Italy for 300 years by the time of the Cateau-Cambresis treaty in which France finally agreed to stop its claims over Naples and Sicily and other parts of Italy that the Spanish and Habsburg annexed or conquered, and they would continue to have wars with each other until Napoleon conquered Spain, after which Spain effectively stopped having any major wars against France, at least that I know.

As to the Habsburgs conquering France, they'd prefer that it lose parts (Burgundy to themselves, and Aquitaine or Normandy to their English allies) and be weaker rather than wiping it entirely from the map.

Why would they prefer it? The Habsburg remained almost permanently at war with the French pretty much during their entirety of their existence. There isn't a single century when they don't have at least one war. So why wouldn't they just invade France and try to conquer it, instead of just carving a few territories?
 
They couldn't. France had about the same population as the whole Habsburg empire combined. It is one thing to defeat a country on neutral territory and another to actually conquer it. At most the Spanish could control parts of France, like the Franche-Comté.
 

Maoistic

Banned
France had about the same population as the whole Habsburg empire combined. It is one thing to defeat a country on neutral territory and another to actually conquer it.
The Manchu, whose polity had only about 10 to maybe 15 million people, conquered the whole Ming realm. I think that Spain with Charles V could have conquered France or at least force it into a kind of union, whether dynastic or otherwise, like Spain did with Portugal and England (with Mary the Catholic). But my question is why the Spanish/Habsburg didn't do it, or even try it for that matter, since it seems they didn't even try it in the first place.
 
The Manchu, whose polity had only about 10 to maybe 15 million people, conquered the whole Ming realm. I think that Spain with Charles V could have conquered France or at least force it into a kind of union, whether dynastic or otherwise, like Spain did with Portugal and England (with Mary the Catholic). But my question is why the Spanish/Habsburg didn't do it, or even try it for that matter, since it seems they didn't even try it in the first place.

Charles V couldn't even stamp out the spread of Protestantism in his own empire or bring the German rulers to heel. even if he was ambitious enough to try, he would face not only war with France, but a good chance the ottoman empire and probably German and Italian rulers worried about their own power. hell! even England would probably join in.
 
They didn't have the resources. They were overstretched in the Low Countries, Italy, Germany and the Mediterranean as it is.

It's very had to conquer and hold onto a country. Look at the hard time they had (unsuccessfully) holding onto Portugal - which is a lot smaller and less populous than France.

Best they could have done was eat around the edges and see France divided/weakened (exploit the Religious Wars for example). But Spain and the Hasburgs had so many issues to contend with (from revolts in Catalonia to the Turks) that they could never fully bring their weight to bear in one theatre for long - this was the great weakness of the Habsburg bloc in this period. When they were able to devote their resources to one campaign (Wallenstein during the 30YW) their success only prompted other powers to intervene against them.

If at any point it looked like France would fall completely under Spanish rule expect a mass response from other European powers (almost a reverse Spanish Succession War).
 
Spain was never in a good position to act out on this idea, even though it makes a lot of sense for them to want to do so. For one, there's too many polities, even ones that they're nominally aligned with, that'd balk at an outright Spanish conquest of France. IMO you a few factors to align; a) An Anglo-Spanish alliance, B) An incompetent French king to make Spanish sovereignty look good, and C) A stable Spain that's going to be able to dedicate almost all of its resources into such a conquest.

I'm not well-versed in that period's geopolitics but I imagine that the easiest way to make it happen would be for a smooth Anglo-Spanish dynastic union to occur. It doesn't even need to be a personal union per se as that'd seriously tie down Spain's attention for at least a generation; having Spain and England with brothers on their respective thrones that have a good working relationship would be the ideal solution. Next, you need an incompetent French king. Maybe one that botches the handling of the Wars of Religion and alienates most of the landholding nobility, to the point that they're fraternizing with the idea of a Spanish monarch that grants them considerable autonomy. Next you need a pragmatic/competent Spanish monarch, one that'll appeal to the French nobility and be able to swing Frenchmen to his side. Unless you have the French suffer a serious, serious case of military incompetency to the point that most French armies are routed, I don't see the Spanish being able to conquer all the way to Paris and be able to hold all of France afterwards in an outright conquest. The most likely scenario is that the Spanish king becomes the French king to very autonomous vassals and establishes a court in Paris for the remainder of his reign to stabilize the realm. France is conquered in the middle of a civil war that sees the defection of a sizable number of the nobility to the Spanish cause and subjugate the rest of France with English and Hapsburg/Austrian aid.

Unless you can get the Hapsburgs to land the throne of France outright, conquest during France's civil wars seems like the easiest solution.
 
Could they achieve that to begin with?

No, they could not. Years of fighting resulted in kicking the French out of Italy and that was pretty much extent of Charles' military abilities: Western armies of the time simply were not big enough for the fundamental tasks like conquest of the whole France. Besides purely military aspect, Charles could not do it financially: he was routinely running out of money before Francis.

As for the peaceful means, idea of putting Phillip's daughter to the throne of France had been rejected even by the French Catholics (no woman and no foreigner on the throne of France) who opted for Henry of Navarre (on condition of his conversion: male and French).
 
No.

The Habsburgs under Charles V were horribly overstretched, almost constantly short of money and generally running from one crisis to another trying to put out the latest domestic fire.
 
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Not having a powerful rival in its immediate border. The French and Aragonese had been fighting over Italy for 300 years by the time of the Cateau-Cambresis treaty in which France finally agreed to stop its claims over Naples and Sicily and other parts of Italy that the Aragonese and Habsburg annexed or conquered, and they would continue to have wars with each other until Napoleon conquered Spain, after which Spain effectively stopped having any major wars against France, at least that I know.

The Castilians would be very offended by you saying that they, usually a French ally before 1474 IIRC, had anything to do with what was going on in Italy.

That said. The last war where France and Spain actively fought each other (aside from the Peninsular War since that's always been more of a Spanish Civil War where Britain and France were simply supporting opposing sides IMO) was the War of the Quadruple Alliance.

As to why balkanize it instead of conquer it? How about because if they did, the Habsburgs would be even more alienated in Europe than they were OTL (during the reign of Karl V it was basically the Habsburgs vs everybody else. Sometimes they had England onside, but that depended on who Henry VIII was married to this week). By conquering France the Habsburgs who are already stretching themselves thin are stretching themselves even thinner. So, get France to give back the Burgundian inheritancr and lose a fair deal of its Channel Coast and we're good. Rump France - particularly one prone to squabblings among its princes (Valois, Bourbon, Navarre, Lorraine etc) - is better than no France. Since anybody who MIGHT'VE supported the Habsburgs is now gonna be afraid that they're gonna be next.
 

Maoistic

Banned
The Castilians would be very offended by you saying that they, usually a French ally before 1474 IIRC, had anything to do with what was going on in Italy.

That said. The last war where France and Spain actively fought each other (aside from the Peninsular War since that's always been more of a Spanish Civil War where Britain and France were simply supporting opposing sides IMO) was the War of the Quadruple Alliance.

As to why balkanize it instead of conquer it? How about because if they did, the Habsburgs would be even more alienated in Europe than they were OTL (during the reign of Karl V it was basically the Habsburgs vs everybody else. Sometimes they had England onside, but that depended on who Henry VIII was married to this week). By conquering France the Habsburgs who are already stretching themselves thin are stretching themselves even thinner. So, get France to give back the Burgundian inheritancr and lose a fair deal of its Channel Coast and we're good. Rump France - particularly one prone to squabblings among its princes (Valois, Bourbon, Navarre, Lorraine etc) - is better than no France. Since anybody who MIGHT'VE supported the Habsburgs is now gonna be afraid that they're gonna be next.

Now that I think about it, didn't the French Wars of Religion in essence balkanise France?
 
As soon as Spain attacks France, France allies with England and English forces now press Spain on 2 fronts (Britanny and the Netherlands)

Spain only has a finite number of highly-trained effective first class troops.

It also fails to secure command of the sea.
 

RousseauX

Donor
The Manchu, whose polity had only about 10 to maybe 15 million people, conquered the whole Ming realm. I think that Spain with Charles V could have conquered France or at least force it into a kind of union, whether dynastic or otherwise, like Spain did with Portugal and England (with Mary the Catholic). But my question is why the Spanish/Habsburg didn't do it, or even try it for that matter, since it seems they didn't even try it in the first place.
The Manchu did it when the Chinese state collapsed and when peasant rebels did most of the work for them

The French state was never in a state of collapse from 1500s onwards

if you assume somehow France goes through a Ming level collapse then yeah maybe you could have seen Hapsburg snatching up territories
 

Maoistic

Banned
The Manchu did it when the Chinese state collapsed and when peasant rebels did most of the work for them

The French state was never in a state of collapse from 1500s onwards

if you assume somehow France goes through a Ming level collapse then yeah maybe you could have seen Hapsburg snatching up territories
I was thinking of two starting points, the Battle of Pavia in 1525 where Francis I was captured, and the French Wars of Religion, two instances where the French main government was collapsing.
 
Now that I think about it, didn't the French Wars of Religion in essence balkanise France?

Not at all. Of course, any civic war means that certain regions are fighting each other but there was always an understanding that France is a single kingdom and that when the fight is over it will remain such. Edict of Nantes, while giving the Huguenots certain rights, was not splitting France and was not something unusual: after all rights of the individuals to keep their own fortified cities and private armies had been dealt with only by defeat of the Fronde, well after the Huguenots lost most of their privileges.
 
I was thinking of two starting points, the Battle of Pavia in 1525 where Francis I was captured, and the French Wars of Religion, two instances where the French main government was collapsing.

After Pavia Francis agreed to make big territorial concessions but as soon as he was released he passed through the Parliament a decision saying that he did not have a right to alienate the French territories. "Oops, sorry, I can't break the law...." Charles was unhappy and so was Henry VIII (who was expecting his share of France and to whom Charles recommended to take a hike) and Connetable Bourbon (who expected but did not get his own little kingdom and who was treated by the Spanish aristocrats as a treacherous scumbag).

As for the Wars of Religion, a weak government is not the same as country's disintegration. Henry de Guise was promising Phillip II to keep France in a state of turmoil if the subsidies were provided but if at any point he openly expressed desire to break France to pieces, he would be domed as a popular leader. The Huguenot leaders could and did invite the foreign (German) troops but strictly as a military help.
 
The Manchu, whose polity had only about 10 to maybe 15 million people, conquered the whole Ming realm.

And the Mongols with population of 1 - 2 millions conquered China and many other places. But to do things of the kind you need either an opponent who is already falling apart or an overwhelming military advantage or, preferably, both. Charles had none of the above.
 
A total conquest of France by the habsburgs would still mean an endless train of long sieges with no local support. That makes it a near impossibility. The English 150 years before didn't succeed either.

So that leaves the to me more interesting question: "How did the Manchus do it?" I don't know enough of chinese history.
 
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