by his daughter’s hostage status. The Brittany affair
gained France a strategic province, earned Maximil-
ian frustration and humiliation, and helped engender a
centuries-long rivalry between the Habsburg and Valois
dynasties. In 1497 Maximilian found another marriage
partner in Bianca Maria Sforza, sister of Ludovico il
Moro Sforza, who had usurped control of Milan. She
brought a dowry of four hundred thousand gulden
(guilders), or about three times what Maximilian could
draw annually from the Habsburg Austrian lands. That
money quickly disappeared also.
Soon after his father’s death in 1493, Maximilian re-
sponded to a call for an imperial reform proposed for the
Reichstag (imperial council) of Worms in 1495. There
the archbishop of Mainz, Berthold von Henneberg, tried
to gain a reform suitable to the princes. At the Reichstag,
Maximilian agreed to the “eternal territorial peace”
(Ewige Landfriede), once and for all, legally forbidding
the many private wars and feuds among nobles that had
disturbed the empire. To keep the peace, the Reichstag
also created the Imperial Chamber Court (Reichskam-
mergericht) and established a general tax, the “common
penny” (gemeine Pfennig). Afterward many princes
wanted further reform and withheld the general tax to
put pressure on Maximilian. After his defeat in a brief
war against the Swiss, the princes temporarily were able
to further restrict Maximilian’s authority, imposing an
imperial regime (Reichsregiment) at Augsburg in 1500.
By 1504, however, he had largely defeated the fractious
princes. The possibility of a unifi ed, effective imperial
government vanished in these quarrels.
Maximilian’s involvement in wars on the empire’s
fringes brought mixed results. He encouraged new
developments in military tactics, like cannon. Or he
increasingly abandoned the cavalry charge of armored
knights in favor of infantry on foot with sword and pike,
his Landsknechte. Maximilian regularly participated in
the shifting diplomatic alliances, and he managed to
maintain a reputation as an able commander. But he lost
many wars, often through lack of funds. He fought fre-
quently in Italy, which had become an open battleground
since the invasion in 1494 by Charles VII of France. In
1508 Pope Julius II, needing Maximilian’s military sup-
port in the League of Cambrai against Venice, offered to
crown him emperor. Yet Maximilian was unable to fi ght
his way to Rome. So he proclaimed himself “elected
emperor of the Romans” on February 4, 1508, in Tri-
ent. Thus, with Julius’s belated acceptance, he became
emperor without a papal coronation.
Maximilian gained lasting importance for both his
dynasty and European history because of two important
double marriages he arranged. First in 1496 he married
his son Philip “the Handsome,” and daughter Margaret
from his marriage with Mary, to the heirs of Spain,
Juana “the Mad” and Juan, the children of Ferdinand
of Aragon and Isabella of Castille. Philip and Juana had
several children. The elder son, Charles V, eventually
inherited both the Spanish and Austrian possessions and
had an empire “on which the sun never set.” The second
double marriage was arranged in 1515, when Maximil-
ian married his grandson Ferdinand and granddaughter
Mary to the children of King Ladislaus of Bohemia and
Hungary. This arrangement provided the legal claims
to reunite Hungary and Bohemia with the Habsburg
lands in 1526.
But Maximilian’s attempts at building stronger
institutions of rule in his own inherited lands led to
increasing opposition, including open rebellion in some
territories. Even the citizens of Innsbruck resented the
burden of debts run up by the often cash-poor Maximil-
ian. At the beginning of 1519 they fi nally refused to ac-
cept his credit, or to fi nd stalls for his horses. In disdain
he left the city for Vienna but sickened along the way and
died on January 12. As a result, his magnifi cent tomb
in Innsbruck lies empty; his body is buried in Wiener
Neustadt, while his heart lies in Bruges, next to the body
of his fi rst wife, Mary.
Maximilian enjoys lasting fame as a well-rounded
Renaissance prince. He was a patron of the arts and new
sciences at the summit of the German Renaissance. His
portrait by Albrecht Dürer is the most famous image of
the monarch. Skilled and literate in several languages,
he himself helped to produce two autobiographical epic
poems (Tbeuerdank and Weisskunig), a hunting manual,
and other works, including the Ambraser Heldenbuch
(Ambray Book of Heroes, a compilation manuscript of
courtly literature named after Castle Ambras). Some-
times called “the last knight,” he was a great promoter
of tournaments, drawing on the chivalric traditions of
the court of Burgundy and continuing the Order of the
Golden Fleece. Maximilian’s idea of the Holy Roman
Empire of the German nation ended the Middle Ages
and looked forward to the attempt at universal empire
by his successor, his grandson Charles V.
See also Frederick III; Hartmann von AueFurther Reading
Benecke, Gerhard. Maximilian I (1459–1519): An Analytical
Biography. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.
Wiesfl ecker, Hermann. Kaiser Maximilian I.: Das Reich, Öster-
reich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit. 5 vols. Vienna:
Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1971–1986.
Brian A. PavlacMECHTHILD VON HACKEBORN
(1241–1298/1299)
A Cistercian sister of the Helfta community, Mechthild
von Hackeborn’s mystical visions were recorded in theMAXIMILIAN