Barbara Blomberg

Barbara Blomberg had a son by Charles V, was never told what became of him for years, and was moved from country to country for the rest of her life to keep her quiet. She was the daughter of a Regensburg burgher family, a singer known in the city, and the emperor, in his forties and a widower, met her there around 1546. The child, born in 1547, was taken from her and raised in Spain under the name Jeromin by a court official and his wife, and was acknowledged only in Charles's will; he became Don John of Austria, the commander at Lepanto. Barbara was married off to a commissary official, Jerome Kegel, and given a pension and a house in Brussels. After Kegel died she lived in a style Philip II's officials complained about in writing, and Cardinal Granvelle and later the Duke of Alba were instructed to manage her; Alba's solution was to propose she enter a convent, which she refused flatly. Don John, when he came to the Netherlands as governor, arranged for her to be taken to Spain in 1577, where she was settled first at a convent in Ciudad Rodrigo and then at Colindres and Arceniega in the north. Her son died in 1578 without seeing her again. She was allowed a household and a pension until her death near Bilbao in 1597. Schiller and later German novelists turned her into a romantic figure, and the documentary record is mostly the correspondence of the men assigned to handle her. Philip II paid her expenses without ever meeting her. Her second son by Kegel, Conrad, was given a post in the Spanish service. A house in Regensburg still carries her name, and the city has kept the story as local property since the sixteenth century.

• Lived: 1527 CE – 1597 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: other