Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor

Portrait by Albrecht Dürer, 1519 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Maximilian holds his personal emblem, the pomegranate.

Maximilian I of Habsburg (March 22, 1459 – January 12, 1519) was Holy Roman Emperor.

Life and reign in the Habsburg hereditary lands

Maximilian was born in Wiener Neustadt as the son of the Emperor Frederick III and Eleanore of Portugal. He married (1477) the heiress of Burgundy, Mary, the only daughter of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Through this marriage, Maximilian obtained the Burgundian Netherlands and the Free County of Burgundy, though France took Burgundy proper.

In 1490, he bought Tyrol and Further Austria from his cousin Sigismund, the last member of the Elder Tyrolean Line of the House of Habsburg. Upon the death of his father in 1493, he inherited the remaining Habsburg possessions and thus reunified all Habsburg territories. That same year Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza (d. 1510), the daughter of the Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza of Milan as he had been a widower since the death of his first wife in 1482.

Maximilian was a keen supporter of the arts and sciences, and he surrounded himself with scholars such as Joachim Vadian and Andreas Stoberl (Stiborius), promoting them to important court posts.

Reign in the Holy Roman Empire

Elected King of the Romans in 1486 at the initiative of his father, he also stood at the head of the Holy Roman Empire upon his father's death in 1493. The following year brought French intervention in Italy, inaugurating the prolonged Italian Wars. He joined the Holy League to counter the French. The war only ended with a success of the Empire after his death.

Maximilian is possibly best known for leading the 1495 Reichstag at Worms which concluded on the Reichsreform (Imperial Reform), reshaping much of the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. In the 1499 Treaty of Basel, Maximilian was forced to acknowledge the de-facto independence of the Swiss confederacy from the Empire as a result of the Battle of Dornach.

In 1508, Maximilian, with the assent of Pope, took the title of Elected Roman Emperor (Erwählter Römischer Kaiser), and thus ended the century-old custom that the Holy Roman Emperor had to be crowned by the pope.

Tu felix Austria nube

Emperor Maximilian I and his family

In order to reduce the growing pressures on the Empire brought about by treaties between the rulers of France, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and Russia, as well as to secure Bohemia and Hungary for the Habsburgs, Maximilian I met with the Jagiellonian kings Ladislaus II of Hungary and Bohemia and Sigismund I of Poland at Vienna in 1515. There they arranged for Maximilian's grand-daughter Mary to marry Louis, the son of Ladislaus, and for Anne (the sister of Louis) to marry Maximilian's grandson Ferdinand (both grandchildren being the children of Philip the Handsome, Maximilian's son, and Juana la Loca of Castile). The marriages arranged there brought Habsburg kingship over Hungary and Bohemia in 1526. Both Anne and Louis were adopted by Maximilian following the death of Ladislaus.

Death and legacy

Maximilian died in Wels, Upper Austria, and was succeeded as Emperor by his grandson Charles V, his son Philip the Handsome having died in 1506. Maximilian had appointed his daughter Margaret of Austria as the educator of his grandsons Charles and Ferdinand, and she fulfilled this task well. Although Maximilian is buried in the Castle Chapel at Wiener Neustadt, a cenotaph tomb for Maximilian is located in the Innsbruck Hofkirche[1].

Marriages

* Mary of Burgundy (1457-1482) - married in Ghent on August 18, 1477
* Bianca Maria Sforza (1472-1510)- married 1493

Children

* Philip the Handsome (1478-1506) - married to Joanna of Castile
* Margaret of Austria, (1480-1533) - married to Crown Prince of Castile and Aragon John, Prince of Asturias, and secondly Philibert II of Savoy