Calle Batalla de Mulgberg

On April 24, 1547, on the banks of the Elbe, the imperial troops of Charles V forded the river at dawn and fell upon the army of the Schmalkaldic League, the alliance of German Protestant princes. The victory sealed Charles V’s hold over the Holy Roman Empire and gives its name to this tiny street in Ríos Rosas. Mühlberg weighs on European memory above all because of a painting. Titian portrayed the emperor on horseback, lance couched, silhouetted against a stormy sky, his face worn with the fatigue of a man near fifty. The canvas hangs today in the Prado, a few kilometers from this street named after its setting. The spelling wavered for years: old maps wrote Mulgberg where the German place name is Mühlberg. Barely twenty meters of pavement for one of the great Spanish victories of the sixteenth century.