Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

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  Maximilian I was born at Wiener Neustadt on the 22nd of March 1459, the son of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III and Eleanor of Portugal. He would go on to hold the title of Holy Roman Emperor from 1508 until his death on the 12th of January 1519 , yet he was never once crowned by a Pope. That absence of papal ceremony was not an oversight. It was a deliberate break with centuries of tradition, and it raises a question that historians still wrestle with: was Maximilian the last knight of a vanishing medieval world, or the first Renaissance prince of a ruthless new age? Historian Thomas A. Brady Jr. called him the first Holy Roman Emperor in 250 years who ruled as well as reigned, and the ablest royal warlord of his generation. The French nicknamed him the Mayor of Augsburg, partly for his dependence on the banking families of that city. His Burgundian herald Olivier de la Marche called him Coeur d'acier , Heart of Steel , though whether this was praise for courage or a rebuke for ruthlessness depended on who was speaking. By the end of his reign, Maximilian had waged 27 wars, arranged marriages that would eventually hand his grandson Charles V the thrones of both Castile and Aragon, and accumulated a debt of six million to six and a half million gulden. The legend of the last knight and the reality of an amoral dynastic architect would keep scholars arguing across the centuries he left behind.

• 2. The Boy Behind the Knight

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  Frederick III named his son after Maximilian of Tebessa, a figure he believed had once warned him of imminent peril in a dream. The choice of name hinted at the mystical streak in the family, though the child who grew up would prove far more physical than spiritual. In infancy, Maximilian and his parents were besieged in Vienna by Albert of Austria. One account describes the young boy wandering through the castle garrison during the siege's worst days, begging servants and men-at-arms for bread. His mother, Eleanor, reportedly told him that had she known he would grow up to resemble his father, she would have regretted bearing him for the throne. Her early death drove him further into the world of men and warriors rather than courtiers and books.

  Peter Engelbrecht served as his tutor, yet Maximilian held him in contempt. Despite the best efforts of both Frederick and Engelbrecht, the boy became an indifferent and belligerent student who preferred physical activity over study. Frederick was horrified by his son's excessive zeal for chivalric contests, his extravagance, and his heavy taste for wine, feasts, and young women, tendencies that were already visible during their trips together in 1473 and 1474. Frederick had forbidden other princes of the Empire from fighting Maximilian in tournaments, but at the first opportunity Maximilian simply gave himself the permission his father had refused to grant. In 1476, at the age of 17, Maximilian commanded a military campaign against Hungary , the first actual battlefield experience of his life, though the real responsibility was likely shared with more seasoned generals. The stage was set for a man who would never quite separate his personal charisma from his political blunders.

• 3. Mary of Burgundy and the Netherlands

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  Charles the Bold, the powerful Duke of Burgundy, died at the Battle of Nancy on the 5th of January 1477, and his daughter Mary inherited all of his domains. King Louis XI of France immediately moved to seize territories he claimed under Salic law, which favoured male succession. Facing this pressure, Mary agreed to marry Maximilian, and their wedding took place on the 19th of August 1477. Without any support from the Empire and with an empty treasury, Maximilian launched a campaign against the French in 1478-1479 and reconquered Le Quesnoy, Condé-sur-l'Escaut, and Antoing. He then defeated the French at the Battle of Guinegate on the 7th of August 1479, a clash whose Burgundian pikemen would later be recognised as precursors of the Landsknechte.

  Mary died in a riding accident on the 27th of March 1482 near Wijnendale Castle, and the political landscape collapsed. The marriage contract had stipulated that Maximilian could not inherit her Burgundian lands if they had children, so his aim shifted to securing the inheritance for his and Mary's son, Philip the Handsome. That proved extraordinarily difficult. Belgian historian Eugène Duchesne described those years as among the saddest and most turbulent in the history of the country. Flemish rebels captured Maximilian himself at one point, releasing him only after Frederick III intervened. Two waves of rebellion swept the Low Countries between 1482 and 1492. When Maximilian finally left the region in 1489, placing it under Albert III of Saxony, he did so as a man emotionally scarred by the experience. The Estates sent a delegation to offer him the regency after Philip's death in 1506, but he evaded them for months.

  The harsh suppression of the rebellions had one unintended effect: it stopped provinces from behaving like separate entities each supporting a different lord. Maximilian's use of Germanic mercenaries, combined with the financial support of cities such as Antwerp, Amsterdam, Mechelen, and Brussels, proved decisive in the Burgundian-Habsburg regime's final triumph. In early 1486, he retook Mortaigne, l'Ecluse, Honnecourt, and even Thérouanne, though the same problem as in 1479 recurred: he lacked the financial resources to hold his gains. Only with the stable internal situation of 1492 could he reconquer the territories designated as his daughter Margaret's dowry, and in 1493 he and Charles VIII of France signed the Treaty of Senlis, which returned the County of Artois and the Free County of Burgundy to Habsburg rule.

• 4. Wars, Debts, and the Italian Trap

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  Maximilian was elected King of the Romans on the 16th of February 1486 in Frankfurt-am-Main and crowned on the 9th of April 1486 in Aachen, but vast swathes of his Austrian territories and Vienna itself were under the rule of King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. When Matthias died in Vienna in 1490, civil war broke out between the supporters of John Corvinus and Vladislaus II of Hungary, opening new possibilities. Maximilian began a series of short sieges in July 1490 and entered Vienna, already evacuated by the Hungarians, in August of the same year. He was injured attacking a citadel held by 400 Hungarian troops who repelled him twice before surrendering. Using a massive grant of funds from the Tyrolean Estates, he then invaded Hungary with an army of around 17,000 men, but his mercenaries mutinied when he prohibited looting, and faced with a severe winter, his troops demanded double pay he could not afford. The revolt turned the situation in favour of the Jagiellonians and forced Maximilian to withdraw. In 1491, the Peace of Pressburg recognised Vladislaus as King of Hungary but secured the Habsburg right to inherit the throne if Vladislaus's male line died out, along with 100,000 golden florins in war reparations.

  In Italy, the pattern of expensive campaigns that yielded diminishing returns repeated itself. On the 16th of March 1494, Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, daughter of Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan. When Louis XII of France conquered Milan in 1499 and 1500, Maximilian was unable to prevent it. In Italy, he acquired the nickname Massimiliano di pochi denari , Maximilian the Moneyless. A particularly humiliating episode came in 1508, when a force under Sixt Trautson was routed by Bartolomeo d'Alviano, while Maximilian's own advance was blocked by Niccolò di Pitigliano and a French army under Alessandro Trivulzio. Bartolomeo d'Alviano then pushed into Imperial territory, seizing Gorizia and Trieste and forcing Maximilian to sign an unfavourable truce. He formed the League of Cambrai with Spain, France, and Pope Julius II and eventually recovered some ground, but atrocities and war expenses devastated Austria and Carniola.

  Around 70% of Maximilian's income went to wars. At the end of his reign, the Habsburgs' debt totalled six million to six and a half million gulden. During his entire reign, he spent around 25 million gulden, much of it contributed by the Tyroleans. Thomas Brady described his financial practices memorably: he borrowed democratically from rich and poor alike and defaulted with the same even-handedness. The fine silver production at Schwaz gives a sense of the underlying resource base: it grew from 2,800 kg in 1470 to 14,000 kg in 1516. Yet even that boom was mortgaged to the Fugger family, whose connection to Maximilian was so notorious that Francis I of France mocked him as the Mayor of Augsburg.

• 5. Dynastic Architecture

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  Maximilian's marriage to Mary of Burgundy in 1477 was arranged by his father Frederick to block the expansionist House of Valois-Burgundy. Their son Philip the Handsome married Joanna of Castile in 1496, a union that eventually allowed Maximilian's grandson Charles V to hold the thrones of both Castile and Aragon. These were not accidents of fortune but the products of systematic strategy, and Maximilian himself framed the Latin epigram that captured his method: Bella gerant aliī, tū fēlix Austria nūbe , Let others wage war, but thou, O happy Austria, marry; for those kingdoms which Mars gives to others, Venus gives to thee. The couplet was reportedly spoken by Matthias Corvinus, though Maximilian waged 27 wars in four decades and could hardly be accused of avoiding conflict himself.

  At the First Congress of Vienna in 1515, Maximilian met Jagiellonian kings Vladislaus II of Hungary and Sigismund I the Old. There, they arranged for his granddaughter Mary of Habsburg to marry Louis II of Hungary, and for Anna of Bohemia and Hungary to marry his grandson Ferdinand I. These marriages brought Habsburg kingship over Hungary and Bohemia in 1526. Because Ferdinand only agreed to the marriage in 1516, Maximilian himself had to serve as proxy groom to Anna in the betrothal ceremony. Fortune also played a role: Vladislaus's male line became extinct, and the frail John, Prince of Asturias, died without offspring, so Maximilian's male line could claim the thrones unopposed.

  In the East, Maximilian also used diplomatic overtures to Russia to pressure Bohemia, Hungary, and Poland into acquiescing in Habsburg expansionist plans. Late in life, only the military situation in the East worked well: the Magyars were said to fear him more than the Turks or the Devil. After Philip's death in Burgos in 1506 , which Maximilian's entourage apparently concealed from him for more than ten days , the emperor focused increasingly on securing the imperial succession for Charles. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1518, he made substantial political and financial efforts to have Charles elected King of the Romans. Those efforts failed, partly because Pope Leo X was unwilling to see Charles, who had been King of Sicily, Naples, and Sardinia since 1516, also become heir to the imperial throne.

• 6. Reform and Its Limits

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  At the 1495 Reichstag at Worms, Maximilian oversaw a cluster of reforms that reshaped the Holy Roman Empire. A new court, the Reichskammergericht, was established largely independent of the emperor. A common tax, the Gemeine Pfennig, was levied for the first time between 1495 and 1499, raising 136,000 florins, though it was only partially approved and implemented even at the later 1512 Reichstag in Trier. To balance the Reichskammergericht, Maximilian established the Reichshofrat with its seat in Vienna; unlike its counterpart, it handled criminal matters and could allow the emperor to depose rulers who failed their obligations. Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger notes that throughout the early modern period, the Reichshofrat proved the faster and more efficient of the two courts.

  In his hereditary lands, Maximilian's achievements were more concrete. In 1499, he introduced the Maximilianische Halsgerichtsordnung, the first codified penal law in the German-speaking world. This code would form part of the basis for the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina established under Charles V in 1530. In 1508, using an ordinance issued by his father Frederick III as a template, he devised the first military code containing 23 articles. Article 14 forbade violence against civilians in explicit terms: you shall swear that you will not harm any pregnant women, widows and orphans, priests, honest maidens and mothers, under the fear of punishment for perjury and death. This code would underpin further ordinances by Charles V and the Maximilian II articles that served as the universal military code for the whole Holy Roman Empire until 1642.

  In 1496, Maximilian created a general treasury, the Hofkammer, in Innsbruck, which became responsible for all his hereditary lands. The two imperial chanceries , one at Innsbruck, one at the imperial level , were merged in 1502, and Jan-Dirk Müller judges the combined institution the decisive governmental body from that point forward. His fiscal reform in his hereditary lands provided a model that other German princes followed. Austria contributed 500,000 to 1 million gulden per year to his campaigns, compared to the 50,000 gulden per year offered by the Estates of the German lands. Leipzig began its rise to become one of the largest European trade fair cities after Maximilian granted it wide-ranging privileges in 1497 and raised its three markets to the status of Imperial Fair in 1507.

• 7. Jews, Roma, and the Humanist Circle

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  Jewish policy under Maximilian was, as historian David Price notes, sharply divided by the year 1510. Between 1494 and 1510, he authorised thirteen expulsions of Jews in exchange for fiscal compensation from local governments, and in 1496 he issued a decree expelling all Jews from Styria and Wiener Neustadt. After 1510, this kind of expulsion happened only once, and he showed active resistance when pressed to expel Jews from Regensburg. The shift seems connected to his recognition that stable Jewish communities could generate ongoing tax revenues rather than the one-time payments he received from local governments for authorising expulsions.

  In 1509, relying on the influence of his pious sister Kunigunde and the Cologne Dominicans, Maximilian authorised the anti-Jewish agitator Johannes Pfefferkorn to confiscate Jewish books in Frankfurt, Bingen, Mainz, and other German cities. The archbishop of Mainz, the city council of Frankfurt, and several German princes protested, and Maximilian ordered the books returned. The humanist Johann Reuchlin defended the Jewish books, especially the Talmud, and his arguments evidently made an impression: the emperor gradually developed an intellectual interest in the Talmud and other Jewish texts. In 1514, Maximilian appointed Paolo Riccio, a Jewish convert to Christianity, as his personal physician , though he was more interested in Riccio's Hebrew skills than his medical abilities. In 1515, he reminded his treasurer Jakob Villinger that Riccio had been admitted to translate the Talmud into Latin. Riccio managed to translate only two of the sixty-three Mishna tractates before the emperor died, though he did publish a translation of Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla's Kabbalistic work The Gates of Light, dedicated to Maximilian.

  For the Romani, Maximilian's reign brought harsher conditions. In 1500, a notice was issued requiring the Romani to leave Germany by the following Easter or be declared outlaws. The change in policy was linked to fears of Ottoman espionage, as the Romani were accused of being spies for the Turks. Leading Renaissance humanists in the Netherlands, including Erasmus and Adrianus Barlandus, distrusted Maximilian personally, viewing him as a warlike and greedy prince. After the brutal 1517 campaign of Charles of Egmont in Friesland and Holland, these humanists spread accounts claiming the emperor and other princes deliberately fomented wars to expand Habsburg territory and extract money. Their distrust of Maximilian would outlast his reign.

• 8. The Last Knight's Legend

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  From 1514, Maximilian travelled everywhere with his coffin. The gesture captured something essential about the man: theatrical self-consciousness combined with a genuine awareness of mortality. In 1501, he had fallen from his horse and badly injured his leg, a wound that caused him pain for the rest of his life. Yet despite these physical troubles, he had constructed through an unprecedented image-building program what scholars describe as a virtual royal self of a quality they call unmatched and hitherto unimagined. He worked with scholars and artists as what one account describes as the promoter, coordinator, and prime mover, an artistic impresario and entrepreneur with seemingly limitless energy and an unfailing eye for detail.

  The nickname der letzte Ritter, the last knight, entered the public consciousness of the German-speaking world partly through a poem by Anastasius Grün, though the designation likely circulated even during Maximilian's lifetime. Scholarly debate continues over whether it fits. Was he a medieval ruler leading people on horseback? A Don Quixote-type dreamer? Or an amoral Machiavellian politician who carried his family to what historians describe as the European pinnacle of dynastic power largely on the back of loans? Nineteenth-century historians like Leopold von Ranke criticised him for placing dynastic interests above those of Germany and thus impeding national unification. Hermann Wiesflecker's six-volume biography published between 1971 and 1986 established a more positive image, presenting Maximilian as a modern and innovative ruler whose reforms and cultural achievements outweighed the financial burdens he placed on Austria.

  After his death, the layers added by later artists built what scholar Elaine Tennant calls the Maximilian industry. He met Martin Luther once, at the Diet of Augsburg in 1518 , described by Brady as a rehearsal for Worms in 1521. As Luther was about to be arrested by the papal legate, Maximilian granted him a letter of safe passage. He agreed with Luther on some points regarding ecclesiastical grievances, but as the religious question was to him ultimately a matter of money and power, he had no interest in stopping the indulgences. He died on the 12th of January 1519, before the question became unavoidable, leaving Charles V to face what his grandfather had only glimpsed.