Birthday Greetings #25

Happy birthday to Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor. Max2, as he was never known, was the father of Rudolf who got the previous birthday shoutout. Compared with Rudolf he was a raging success. Maximilian was the son of Ferdinand I but was educated largely in Spain at the court of his uncle emperor, Charles V. When Charles abdicated the imperial title his brother Ferdinand took over thus cementing the imperial crown within the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family. Charles' son Phillip would inherit the kingdom of Spanish thus forming the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs. For a while there things looked iffy because Charles wanted Phillip to get the lot despite the fact that he had promised the imperial title to Ferdinand. Family warfare was something the Habsburgs had a lot of practice in (Maximilian's sons would gain even more experience) but eventually wiser counsels prevailed. Possibly Phillip's reluctance to leave the pleasant climate (and vast income) of Spain to go to a damp, chilly, Ottoman imperilled city on the edge of western Europe may have had something to do with it. Ferdinand got the empire and in due course Maximilian got it from him.

Whether he was pleased or not is another matter. It was not a good time to be Holy Roman Emperor. The Turks occupied most of Hungary and due to the activities of a meddling priest (I think his name was Luther) the religious uniformity of the empire had been shattered. A number of states had adopted Protestantism (a couple of the really weird ones had gone straight on to Calvinism which is like Protestantism but less fun) apparently for no better reason than because the existing Catholic church was corrupt, indolent, depraved and incompetent. Talk about picky. Where Maximilian stood in all this is somewhat ambivalent. The pope suspected he was a protestant but it seems more likely that he just wanted to clean up the church. He presented a list of ideas on church reform to the pope who said "thank you very much" and locked them in a drawer. Maximilian's father had presided over the Diet of Augsburg where Catholics and Protestants agreed to stop killing each other for a while and he did his best to maintain this position. Since the Diet of Augsburg had worked by fudging some issues and not satisfying either side completely in the long term it was doomed but at least for a few decades the emperors managed to keep a delicate balancing act in play.

Apart from preventing his subjects from ripping each others throats out Maximilian really doesn't have too many achievements to his credit. Like all Holy Roman Emperors his power was significantly limited and he had difficulty getting his "subordinate" princes and nobles to agree on so much as a breakfast menu. Apparently desiring to add to his collection of recalcitrant territories he persuaded some of the nobility of Poland to elect him as their king. Since Poland wasn't so much a kingdom as an argument he could have looked forward to whole new vistas of high ranking impotence if he hadn't died while raising an army to assert his claim. He was buried in Prague and apparently refused the last sacraments as he lay dying. Perhaps he was a closet Protestant after all.