with the highest royal official. Officials were under the jurisdiction of the Council of the Indies. Charles promulgated the New Laws of 1542 to limit the power of the conqueror group to form a hereditary aristocracy that might challenge the power of the crown. Charles, an emperor and a king (1521–1558) Charles's victory at the Battle of Pavia (1525) surprised many Italians and Germans and elicited concerns that Charles would endeavor to gain even greater power. Pope Clement VII switched sides and now joined forces with France and prominent Italian states against the Habsburg Emperor, in the War of the League of Cognac. In 1527, due to Charles' inability to pay them sufficiently, his armies in Northern Italy mutinied and sacked Rome itself for loot, forcing Clement, and succeeding popes, to be considerably more prudent in their dealings with secular authorities: in 1533, Clement's refusal to annul Henry VIII of England's marriage to Catherine of Aragon (Charles' aunt) was a direct consequence of his unwillingness to offend the emperor and perhaps have his capital sacked a second time. The Peace of Barcelona, signed between Charles and the pope in 1529, established a more cordial relationship between the two leaders that effectively named Spain as the protector of the Catholic cause and recognized Charles as king of Lombardy in return for Spanish intervention in overthrowing the rebellious Florentine Republic. The Protestant Reformation had begun in Germany in 1517. Charles, through his position as Holy Roman Emperor, his important holdings along Germany's frontiers, and his close relationship with his Habsburg relatives in Austria, had a vested interest in maintaining the stability of the Holy Roman Empire. The German Peasants' War broke out in Germany in 1524 and ravaged the country until it was brutally put down in 1526; Charles, even as far away from Germany as he was, was committed to keeping order. After the Peasants' War the Protestants organized themselves into a defensive league to protect themselves from Emperor Charles. Under the protection of the Schmalkaldic League, the Protestant states committed a number of outrages in the eyes of the Catholic Church— the confiscation of some ecclesiastical territories, among other things— and defied the authority of the Emperor. In 1543, Francis I, king of France, announced his unprecedented alliance with the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, by occupying the Spanish-controlled city of Nice in cooperation with Turkish forces. Henry VIII of