MAXIMILIAN I (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (1459–1519; ruled 1493–1519)

MAXIMILIAN I (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (1459–1519; ruled 1493–1519), Holy Roman emperor. Maximilian I was a member of the Habsburg Dynasty. Elected king of Romans in 1486, he declared himself elected Holy Roman emperor in 1508. In 1477 Maximilian married Mary, Duchess of Burgundy (1457–1482). In 1490 he married Anne, Duchess of Brittany (1477–1514), by proxy, but that marriage was annulled in 1491. In 1494 he married Bianca Maria Sforza (1472–1510). He had three legitimate children, including Philip the Fair (1478–1506), duke of Burgundy and king of Castile (ruled 1506), and Margaret (1480–1530), regent of the Netherlands. Maximilian also had at least eleven acknowledged illegitimate children.

Possibly named after the third-century martyr Saint Maximilian of Celeia, Maximilian was the son of Holy Roman emperor Frederick III (ruled 1440–1493) of the House of Habsburg and Empress Eleonor (1436–1467) of the Portuguese royal house of Avis, who were married in Rome in 1452 by Pope Nicholas V (reigned 1447–1455). Maximilian was born on 22 March 1459 in his parents' residence city of Wiener Neustadt in Lower Austria, and he and his mother are buried there. His life was tied to building the power and reputation of his family through shrewd marriage alliances for himself, his children, and his grandchildren and through various artistic projects and sponsorships, including an important relationship with the artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). When Maximilian died on 12 January 1519 in the archducal castle located along the walls of the Upper Austrian city of Wels, his family had claims over territories stretching across Europe and overseas into the Americas.

Maximilian is often referred to as "the Last Knight" and has been seen as a transitional figure on the cusp of early modern history. His constant lack of money did not deter him from imagining magnificent schemes, many relating to projecting an image of himself and his rule to posterity. The most famous examples of these undertakings are the elaborate funerary monuments he planned for himself in the court chapel at Innsbruck. These monuments reveal a combination of imagined ties among his dynasty, medieval antecedents, and classical Rome (inspired by humanist interests in antiquity). His court has been seen as an important mediator for the spread of Italianate forms and ideas across the Alps into the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, particularly after his marriage in 1494 to one of the richest heiresses of his day, Bianca Maria Sforza, from Milan.

In the history of the Habsburg Dynasty, Maximilian built on his father's acquisition of the imperial crown, which remained in Habsburg hands with one brief exception until they declared the end of the empire in 1806. Maximilian's marriage to the heiress of the great late-medieval Burgundian inheritance, Mary, brought those rich lands under the control of the Habsburgs. While he was unsuccessful in his campaigns against the Swiss towns and cantons that wrested control of parts of the Habsburg patrimony from the dynasty, Maximilian is credited with engineering the marriage in 1496 of his son Philip to the Spanish heiress Joan I (queen of Castile 1504–1555; queen of Aragón 1516–1555). This marriage more than made up for the Swiss losses through the gain of the Iberian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon together with their overseas possessions in Italy, the western Mediterranean, and the Americas.

After the death in 1490 of Matthias I Corvinus (ruled 1458–1490), king of Hungary, who had taken the city of Vienna and made it his residence, Maximilian turned his attentions back from the west of Europe to the Habsburgs' hereditary Danubian holdings and the enticing kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary. He captured Vienna and again employed marriage negotiations, this time with representatives of the important ruling dynasty of those kingdoms, the Jagiellonians (who also controlled Poland). Through a double marriage of Jagiellonians and Habsburgs negotiated in Vienna in 1515, Maximilian set up the situation in which his grandson Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564) claimed the Bohemian and Hungarian thrones after the death of the Jagiellonian king Louis II (ruled 1516–1526) on the battlefield at Mohács, fighting the Ottoman army, in 1526.

In the constitutional history of the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian is known for the role he played in the reorganization of institutions beginning in the 1490s. This reorganization has been interpreted variously by historians of the empire, but it established a more active imperial judiciary and regional governing mechanisms, among other modifications.

When Maximilian died in the castle at Wels, he left to his Burgundian-raised grandson (who as Emperor Charles V ruled 1519–1556), an array of claims, titles, challenges, and opportunities vastly different from those he had inherited. The Habsburgs were well on their way to world significance.

See also Austria ; Charles V (Holy Roman Empire) ; Ferdinand I (Holy Roman Empire) ; Habsburg Dynasty ; Holy Roman Empire Institutions ; Jagiellon Dynasty (Poland-Lithuania) ; Vienna .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Burgkmair, Hans. The Triumph of Maximilian I: 137 Woodcuts by Hans Burgkmair and Others. Edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum. New York, 1964.

Freydal: Des Kaisers Maximilian I: Turniere und Mummereien (Freydal: The tournaments and costumes of Emperor Maximilian I). Edited by Franz, Graf Folliot de Crenneville. 2 vols. Vienna, 1880–1882. Attributed to Maximilian.

Kaiser Maximilians Theuerdank. 2 vols. Facsimile. Plochingen, 1968. Attributed to Maximilian; originally published 1517.

Maximilian I, Holy Roman emperor. Kaiser Maximilians I Weisskunig. Edited by H. T. Musper. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 1956.

Secondary Sources

Benecke, Gerhard. Maximilian I (1459–1519): An Analytical Biography. Boston, 1982.

Scholz-Williams, Gerhild. The Literary World of Maximilian I: An Annotated Bibliography. Sixteenth Century Bibliography, vol. 21. St. Louis, 1982.

Wiesflecker, Hermann. Kaiser Maximilian I: Das Reich, Österreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit (Emperor Maximilian I: The empire, Austria, and Europe on the eve of modernity). 5 vols. Munich, 1971–1986. The standard biography.

Joseph F. Patrouch