Birthday Greetings #48

Happy birthday to Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.  Possibly one of the few successful acts of his father's gloom filled reign was to persuade the electors of the empire that his son would do better.  Maximilian did do better if only because he was coming off a low benchmark.

Opinion is divided on Maximilian.  Some people have seen him as a political genius whose manipulation of marriage politics set the House of Habsburg on the path to true greatness.  Other people regard him as an overambitious clot who failed in pretty much every important initiative in his life.  Strangely both sides can find a fair bit of evidence to support their assertions.  For the former, well his manipulation of marriage politics did set the House of Habsburg on the path to true greatness.  For the latter, well the fact that he couldn't even die in the city he wanted to because they pointblank refused to let him in until he paid the bill from his last visit doesn't leave an impression of spectacular competence.

The first thing Maximilian did was marry well.  This wasn't really his doing, it was arranged by his father Frederick III about whom virtually no one has a good word to say.  Despite this the deeply unimpressive Frederick managed to persuade the psychopathic Duke of Burgundy to let Maximilian marry his daughter.  This was important because a) the Duke of Burgundy had no male heirs, b) Burgundy was incredibly rich and c) it would really piss off the King of France.

Maximilian married Mary of Burgundy and when her father got himself killed in a particularly pointless bit of state sanctioned violence against the Swiss (with whom Maximilian would have his own troubles) Mary inherited the lot.  Which meant that their son would inherit both Burgundy and the traditional Habsburg domains plus have a decent shot at the imperial title as well.  The French didn't take this lying down of course, technically Burgundy was a vassal state of France (or at least bits of it were) and invaded the territory.  Further trouble came from the wealthy region of Flanders which was used to doing its own thing (the Dukes hadn't really minded as long as the tax revenues kept flowing) and they rose in revolt.  Maximilian more or less won (although he did have to hand over the Duchy of Burgundy but kept the County, Flanders and the Netherlands) and by the time Frederick died things were looking up.

The first order of business was to recapture those aforementioned traditional lands which Frederick had managed to lose to the Hungarians, this too was accomplished.  Other issues were less successful.  Maximilian attempted to reform the empire which was a worthy goal but one akin to sculpting gravy.  Everybody agreed that reform was necessary but nobody actually wanted an efficient well run empire that might, you know, tell them what to do.  Some oversight bodies were set up and noble aims stated and then everybody politely forgot about it.  Maximilian also attempted reform of his personal Austrian territories which was somewhat more successful, ie it failed but not as badly.

His wife Mary having died (although fortunately not before providing him with a son) Maximilian wound up married to a member of the Sforza family who ruled Milan.  This seemed like an excellent excuse to meddle in Italian politics.  There were wars, changes of side and aim but the final upshot was that Maximilian left a lot quicker than he arrived and with much fewer troops due to the fact that mercenaries have this uncomfortable insistence on being paid.  Eventually he was chased out by the Venetians which must have been embarrassing.  Adding to his embarrassment were the Swiss  When they weren't hiring their army out for the use of others they used it to beat the snot out of Maximilian's army and gain their independence from the empire.
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While a large number of his projects wound up in tatters (generally for the twin reasons of not enough time and not enough money) Maximilian did have good luck with his marriage arrangements.  He married his son to the daughter of the rulers of Spain (an anachronistic term, there was no such thing as Spain at that time) who also had no son.  This wasn't really anything except a means of keeping the King of France on his toes but what it did mean was that a son of that marriage (and two were actually forthcoming) would inherit Austria, the Low Countries, the County of Burgundy and the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon.  Not a bad lot to be going on with.  The elder son inherited all of the above in time and got the imperial title as well but there was more.  Maximilian's second grandson, Ferdinand was betrothed to the daughter of the King of Hungary and Bohemia.  Maximilian's granddaughter was betrothed to the son of the King of Hungary and Bohemia.  What this meant was that one piece of dynastic exhaustion and the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary would fall into the Habsburg lap as well.  Said dynastic exhaustion happened and the population of Europe woke up one day to find that Habsburgs were suddenly ruling a lot of them.

All this was in the future though.  As he reached his end Maximilian must have felt like a failure.  His most recent wars had been disastrous, the Swiss had told the empire where to go, his reforms were patchy at best and he had just borrowed a million gulden from an Austrian banking family to bribe the imperial electors into appointing his grandson (his son had already died) as emperor.  Broke and depressed he died in the small town of Wels in 1519.  A few months later his grandson succeeded him as emperor Charles V and the Habsburgs cemented themselves in the centre of European politics until 1918.