Rocandolfo al servicio de Carlos V: Wilhelm von Rogendorf, comendador de Otos (1481 -1541)

Abstract

Rogendorf, whose family came from Styria and settled in Lower Austria in the middle of the XVth Century. Serving the Hapsburgs from chilhood, he was page to Phillip the Fair in the Low Countries and filled various offices under Emperors Maximilian I, and Charles V, to whom he was linked by a special relationship, and Ferdinand L Military and diplomatic missions took the Austrian nobleman all over Europe, defending the interests of the Hapsburgs against the Venetians, the French, the Valencian Moriscos and the Turks. Unpublished sources show that he stayed in Spain between 1522 and 1528, which enabled him to get to know the country very well. For this, he travelled to where the Emperor was. His stay at the fortress of Calatrava la Nueva to obtain the habit of the Order, granted by Charles V together with the Commandery of Otos, made him part of the institutions most representative of the mentality of the Crown of Castile. On his return to Central Europe, Wilhelm von Rogendorf formed —under Ferdinand I— the core of a native nobility which found, in the habits of the Spanish Military Orders, the outward expression of an ideological identity in the secular struggle against the Moslems taking place at that time on the Peninsula and against the Turks on the other extreme the Hapsburg empire, as well as in the struggle against the Protestants during the transition from the Mediaeval to the Modern world.