The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty
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The most important Reichstag meeting was held in the city of Worms in 1495. This diet did inject some new life into the Empire’s institutions. A new imperial high court called the Reichskammergericht was created, capable of hearing appeals from the many lower princely courts that continued to exist. Unfortunately for Maximilian, the estates sought successfully to limit the crown’s power over this court in several ways, including restricting his right to appoint its judges. More positively from Maximilian’s point of view, the Worms diet did agree upon a new, regular tax called the “common penny” to raise revenues partly for imperial defense. Resistance to this tax was so widespread that after four years it was not collected again. Demonstrating a schizophrenia as both centralizing German king and territorial prince resistant to that centralization, Maximilian himself balked at introducing this tax in Austria.
At the diet of Augsburg in 1500 there was an attempt to create the Reichsregiment, an executive organ for the whole Empire that would have been controlled by the princes and decisively curbed the crown’s power. This innovation also never really got off the ground. Another reform advanced in 1500 and 1512 was to establish regional “circles” (Reichskreise) for administrative reorganization. What lasted from these two decades of reform initiatives was that while the king-emperor retained a primus inter pares position, the Empire now had a consolidating set of common institutions in which he had to share governance with the estates. Maximilian was not satisfied with these outcomes, and he excoriated the German princes (calling them “those German beasts”) for foiling his imperial ambitions.7
For 20 years beginning in 1495, Maximilian was mired in a series of destructive wars from which he gained very little. Most of these conflicts involved competition with the French Valois kings over influence in Italy. Maximilian was intent on asserting his rights over the old imperial territories in northern Italy, and thereby shutting the French kings Charles VIII and Louis XII out of the region. One of his gambits was to ally with Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan, and to marry his niece, Bianca Maria Sforza, whose dowry he coveted. There was never love, or even affection, in this marriage. Though Bianca Maria was admittedly a shallow, selfish woman, Maximilian treated her poorly; in his chronic financial straits, he forced her to downsize her household. She had to let go of many servants, several ladies in waiting, as well as two organists and some dwarfs. At one point she had so little money that she was even forced to pawn her underwear to creditors. Maximilian himself fought in a few campaigns in Italy against the French, but was repeatedly humiliated. He could not prevent Ludovico Sforza from being captured by his French opponents in 1500, for example, which gave the Valois control of Milan. The imperial estates refused to send money and troops for these expeditions, and Maximilian almost simultaneously had to fight a new war against the Swiss. He considered these defeats around 1500 the low point of his entire life.
With his characteristic, quixotic vainglory, however, he did not give up his aims. He instead began making shrewder use of diplomacy than arms. He managed to break the alliance between his two main opponents in Italy, France and Venice. Coveting Venetian territory, he helped arrange the League of Cambrai in 1508 that joined him with France, Spain, and the papacy against Venice. The ensuing war was brutally destructive and prolonged because the alliances kept shifting. Eventually even the truce with France broke down, and Maximilian then looked to England to support a joint attack on Paris. Bloodied and exhausted, Maximilian and Louis XII signed a truce in 1514, but this proved only a temporary respite in the Habsburg-Valois wars over Italy. He kept fighting Venice until 1516 when he finally gave up, having amassed crushing debts because he had relied on just the income from his Austrian territories to pay for these wars. Also in the last decade of his life, Maximilian took a step that erased the old king-emperor distinction in the Empire. Because he could never make it to Rome to be crowned by the pope, Maximilian simply declared himself “emperor elect.” He even briefly entertained the idea of getting himself elected pope. Maximilian’s last big project before he died in 1518 was to ensure that his grandson Charles V would be elected to the German throne. He initiated the campaign of bribing the electors that Charles then completed.
Dynastic strategies
From the dynastic point of view, whatever mistakes they made as rulers were more than recompensed by Friedrich’s and Maximilian’s remarkable success in securing marital alliances and reuniting the patrimony. Neither man was fortunate in the most basic reproduction of the dynasty: each had only two children who lived to adulthood. Maximilian, as Friedrich’s sole heir, had the future of the dynasty on his shoulders. Of Maximilian’s two children, Philippe lived just long enough to propagate productively, while Marguerite became a vital ruler and advisor to Maximilian and later her nephew Charles. Where the Burgundian marriage gave the Habsburgs rich if unruly lands at the very heart of western Europe, it was the marriages that Maximilian arranged that catapulted the family into European preeminence. The Burgundian possessions put the Habsburgs into direct conflict with France, and it was a quest to counter French power that joined the houses of Austria and Castile-Aragon.
With Fernando [Ferdinand] of Aragon, Maximilian arranged a double marriage whereby his son Philippe married Fernando’s daughter Juana [Joanna], and Maximilian’s daughter Marguerite married Fernando’s son Juan [John], in 1496. Because Fernando could not produce a male heir, this marital alliance poised the Habsburgs for takeover of the Spanish kingdoms. Once Philippe died in 1506, Maximilian took responsibility for the marriage arrangements for several of Philippe’s children. In 1515 he concluded a mutual succession pact with Vladislav II, the king of Bohemia and Hungary. This led to another double arrangement by which he married his granddaughter Maria to Lajos, son of Vladislav, and his grandson Ferdinand to Anna Jagelló, Lajos’s sister. Maximilian lived to see his descendants take over Spain, but not Bohemia and Hungary. Many of these people are depicted in Bernhard Strigel’s famous portrait of circa 1515, reproduced on this book’s cover: Maximilian and his first wife Marie, their son Philippe, their grandchildren Charles and Ferdinand, as well as Lajos Jagelló.
Dynastic solidarity in Friedrich’s time hit a nadir, with his brother and cousin both working against him. But thanks to stubborn strategy and also luck (such as Ladislaus Postumus’s early death) Friedrich, then Maximilian, managed to gather the various Austrian duchies along with Tyrol back into their hands. They deserve major credit for reassembling the patrimony and for laying the groundwork for binding the Austrian provinces more closely together with some shared institutions. Friedrich and Maximilian’s relationship is instructive in another way concerning dynastic solidarity. The two were not particularly close, and yet they worked together quite earnestly. They were motivated by a deep, overarching loyalty to the interests of the dynasty itself. Maximilian and his own son Philippe did not get along well, and when he met his grandson Charles their interaction was cold. In all these cases, the corporate enterprise of the dynasty trumped individual personalities and allayed temporary spats. After settling the intra-family feuds of the fifteenth century, this usually tight dynastic collaboration became a Habsburg hallmark.
Such success as the dynasty had during this period was not solely due to male heads. How a dynasty uses its daughters or younger sons is an important way of judging its rule. In this regard the family’s interests were particularly well served by Maximilian’s daughter Marguerite. She was instrumental not just as a pawn in marriage—though she was that. At 3 years old she was engaged to the dauphin of France, who later repudiated that arrangement, and Marguerite was married instead to Fernando of Aragon’s son Juan. He died six months after their marriage, so then in 1501 she was married again to Philibert II of Savoy, who also did not last long, dying in 1504. Widowed twice by the age of 21, she refused Maximilian’s attempt to marry her now to Henry VII of England. Instead Maximilian made her regent of the Netherlands in 1507, where she ruled until 1515, and again from 1519 to 1530. She proved one o
f the most sagacious and adept rulers the family ever had in the Low Countries. She somehow managed to keep the peace in the restless territory even as wars were being fought around it. She also served as a major patroness of the arts, oversaw the education of several of her brother’s children (including Charles V), and provided Maximilian with valuable advice—all on top of sewing linen shirts for him. Esteemed even during her own time for her negotiation skills, she worked to smooth things over between the Habsburgs and France in preparation for an attack on Venice around 1508. She additionally handled treaty talks with Henry VIII over several years, and had her hand in the deal for the Hungarian double marriage. Maximilian called his daughter “the wisest woman in the world.”8
Friedrich and Maximilian strengthened the dynasty’s legitimacy claims both legally and symbolically. As emperor, Friedrich formally recognized the Privilegium maius and made it a part of imperial law. Thereby all Rudolf IV’s imagined privileges and prerogatives of the dynasty became reality. Making the Privilegium maius official meant that the Austrian archdukes now had a more solid legal basis to raise new taxes, tolls and fines, to grant titles of nobility, and to name officers such as judges and notaries. Also, though his manipulation of Ladislaus Postumus was distasteful, it helped maintain the Habsburgs’ legal claims to the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. Friedrich’s shoddy rule undermined his legitimacy in both the Empire and Austria (hence the various attempts to depose him), but he seemed to want to compensate for these practical shortcomings with an aggressive insistence on his symbolic legitimacy. Both Friedrich and Maximilian believed very strongly in the divine mission of their family, that it was predestined to rule. That destiny was supposed to legitimize nearly all the family’s political projects, no matter how outlandish or temporarily stymied. Friedrich’s use of the AEIOU motto also plays a role here. This acronym was taken up into the dynasty’s mythology as a bold assertion of Habsburg primacy. It is not clear that the meaning with which it was subsequently freighted was actually in Friedrich’s mind as he began using it, since his interest in it may have been more narrowly rooted in his fascination with magic and numerology.
Friedrich’s court was meager and did relatively little to represent Habsburg power symbolically. His main architectural legacy was his palace in Wiener Neustadt, featuring the AEIOU motto in its decoration. The one outstanding figure in Friedrich’s court was Enea Silvio Piccolomini. Besides serving as a particularly valuable advisor and private secretary to Friedrich, Piccolomini wrote fairly widely, including travel descriptions of the Danubian lands, a didactic work on the proper education of princes, and even some love poetry. He later became Pope Pius II. Piccolomini helped arrange the Concordat of Vienna in 1448, which was important for the Habsburgs’ legitimizing relationship with the Church. According to the Concordat’s terms, Friedrich gained three new bishoprics in Austria whose nominations he would control, including one for Vienna, which had previously been subject to the bishoprics of Passau or Salzburg. This was a coup not only for Vienna’s prestige, but also for Friedrich’s authority over the church officials in his lands. The power Friedrich gained to nominate bishops in his territories was a further step in state control over the Church. Moreover, it benefited the Empire, since similar nomination rights were extended to other German princes. The Vienna Concordat in fact served as a basic imperial law guiding relations with the papacy up through 1803.
It was Maximilian, influenced by Italian Renaissance courts, who truly began the glorious Habsburg tradition of artistic patronage. The function of such patronage, for Maximilian and for the dynasty more broadly, was not mere display. Certainly the art itself was supposed to make the ruler look good; effusive symbolism linking him and his family with divinity as well as with virtues such as wisdom, clemency, piety and valor were blatant propaganda. This was not mass propaganda aimed at the general population, however. Few people ever actually saw the art that such rulers commissioned. Rather, patronage was targeted marketing, configuring the dynasty’s status to other elites. In addition to the symbolism of its imagery, art propagandized in another way, demonstrating the ruler’s wealth and power—but also his cultivation. In Renaissance ideals, the prince was supposed not only to collect and sponsor art, but even to practice it, to develop a taste and facility with painting, music, poetry. Maximilian subscribed to all these ideas, and particularly in his last decade he set about elaborating a cultural legacy that would do him and his family honor. He assembled a circle of regionally important humanists including Johannes Cuspinian, Georg Tannstetter, and Johannes Stabius who authored their own scholarly works and contributed to Maximilian’s projects. The artists he patronized included Hans Holbein the Elder and Albrecht Dürer.
Maximilian employed artists such as Dürer and Hans Burgkmair on an elaborate series of publishing projects designed to extol himself and his dynasty. Like his father, Maximilian’s liquidity problems meant he built very little. His main architectural legacy was some Renaissance structures in Innsbruck. Instead he consigned his grandiose architecture to paper. Most impressive was an enormous woodcut depicting a triumphal arch: evoking Roman models, the design built in a family tree linking the Habsburgs back to Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. There was also a project for a triumphal procession, never finished, whose 147 woodcuts assembled a bevy of luminaries from myth and history who (at least on paper) all paid homage to Maximilian. King Arthur was there, also fancifully included in the Habsburg ancestry, as well as kings from far-off Calicut bringing gifts of elephants to propitiate the great Austrian ruler. He commissioned two heavily illustrated, fantastical narratives known as the Weißkunig and the Theuerdank to tell a fabulist version of his life. These projects show Maximilian engaging in a kind of Renaissance self-fashioning. Though physical structures would have had greater monumental value, that Maximilian published rather than built actually shows his modernity: he harnessed the burgeoning medium of the book to project his power and image.
Friedrich and Maximilian in some ways occupied opposite poles on the spectrum of the ruler’s function and image. Friedrich was reactive; Maximilian was hyper-active. Though certainly Friedrich’s resources and institutions were wanting, he nonetheless often seemed content with the merely ceremonial aspects of rulership. He was perhaps less interested in actually governing than he was in simply holding the title. His approach even aroused anger during his lifetime. Friedrich’s reign came as central regnal power in many European polities was generally expanding and affecting wider populations. A renewed interest in Roman law helped codify the legal powers and obligations of the monarch. There was both resistance to and acceptance of this phenomenon. His many disputes with the Austrian estates came not so much from protests over his rule but over his misrule. With the Ladislaus affair, for example, they believed that their sovereign’s actions were harming the genuine interests of the realm. In a similar fashion, the imperial estates lamented Friedrich’s neglect because they expected their emperor to lead, even despite divergent political interests.
Maximilian’s difficulties in the Empire especially came because he tried to do too much. His idol was his father-in-law Charles the Bold, which helps explain both his desire for martial heroics and his attempts to imitate the brilliance of the Burgundian court. He took seriously the emperor’s role as the defender of Christendom. His life-long dream to lead a crusade against the Turks was continually undercut by a shortage of funds, but he did mount a rather paltry campaign in 1493. Maximilian, with his ceaseless warring and schemes, may come across as a man of the deed, but he did spend considerable time behind a desk dealing with paperwork. This is another way that he was not just the last knight, leading from horseback in some idealized medieval fashion. His masses of letters—communicating with the papacy, local officials in his realms, or his allies, for instance—point to a more bureaucratic style of kingship. Because of institutional changes in those realms, Maximilian also had more levers of government than any Habsburg before him.
One of Max
imilian’s long-standing projects was more solidly to institutionalize his rule in his various territories, including the Empire. His goal was to build up the territorial basis of his own authority, but beyond that to strengthen his dynasty’s hold and to make government more responsive over the lands it ruled. Though he intended to strengthen central government, his reforms were not part of a meticulous plan. Rather, they were generally temporizing, like much of his rule. Fundamentally, Maximilian hoped to improve his tax base and create a standing army, modeled in part on what Charles the Bold had done in Burgundy. Maximilian was not fully able to unify the government of his lands, typically because of estates’ resistance. But he did manage to consolidate key administrative functions for all the Austrian provinces in Innsbruck and Vienna. He created central offices to deal with political, judicial, and financial matters. He tried for a time to establish institutions that would oversee all his realms and serve him, combining his government in the Austrian lands with that in the Empire. The Hofkammer, from 1498, was supposed to handle finances for both the Empire and the Hereditary Lands, though the imperial estates rebuffed Maximilian’s plans. He established a court council and chancellery that did coordinate political affairs across his lands, however. The idea to fuse imperial and patrimonial government evinces Maximilian’s typical contemporaneous conception that government was inseparable from the ruler. It did not matter that his Hereditary Lands and the Holy Roman Empire were distinct polities in all sorts of ways; they were unified through his person, and should be governed through joint institutions controlled by him. While his control over the coalescing institutions of the Empire was weak, his innovations in Austria provided an enduring, formative basis for the dynasty’s government. In the broadest perspective, they were a step in the transformation of states from feudal personal relationships, in which government is carried out by the sovereign’s vassals, to a more modern, bureaucratic form in which government is carried out by professionalized officials.