King Of The Romans
There is maybe no figure in Medieval or Renaissance history that looms larger than Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor. A force of nature, Maximilian had to shove his way into grasping power and then fight, in perpetuity, to keep hold of it. Yet for all he ruled his kingdoms with an iron fist, his private life was an open wound, right up until his ignominious end.
1. He Almost Starved
Maximilian was born to Frederick III, the current Holy Roman Emperor, and his wife Eleanor of Portugal, in 1459 in present day Austria. He learned a hard lesson at a young age. As a child, his parents came under siege by Albert of Austria, who attempted to starve the royals out. As a result, one of the earliest accounts of Maximilian recalled how he roamed the castle, begging his parents’ vassals for scraps of food.
That starving boy soon went through a vicious rite of adulthood.
2. He Was In The Middle Of A Power Grab
Maximilian’s parents had never gotten along: His father Frederick was serious and emotionally stingy, while his mother Eleanor was full of vim and vinegar, and they fought for primacy in their children’s lives. Eleanor, for her part, laid her claim on Maximilian as her favorite child, believing he took more after her than his father.
That might have been true, but she never truly found out: When Maximilian was just eight years old, his mother passed, leaving him solely in his father’s care. This extra attention wasn’t necessarily good for him.
3. His Father Thought He Was Stupid
By the time Maximilian was a tween, his father had grave concerns for him. According to one of Maximilian’s teachers, he didn’t even speak until he was nine, and at 12, Frederick III thought that his son was either mute or else stupid. Even when he wasn’t required to speak, Maximilian was a distracted student at best, and wouldn’t stop fidgeting in his lessons.
Still, Maximilian would mature…and make his father even more unhappy.
4. He Was A Strongman
From these shaky beginnings, Maximilian turned into a “vigorously charming extrovert,” according to one historian. Although he was never a scholar—he had a “conventionally superficial interest in knowledge”—he was prodigiously good at physical feats. At his peak, Maximilian could hold a seven-meter lance one-handed, and it wasn’t long before he made a name for himself in war games.
He also made a name for himself in the bedroom.
5. He Was A Heartbreaker
Maximilian grew into a strapping, six-foot-tall man with red-blonde hair, a prominent nose, and a magnetism that drew women to him even when he was a teenager. Maximilian was drawn to them in turn, and before his beard was done filling in he had a reputation as a womanizer.
His straight-laced father was appalled when he heard, but Maximilian only flouted the Emperor further.
6. He Was Too Much
Everything that Maximilian did was extravagant and enthusiastic, from wooing women, to downing drinks, to proving himself in chivalric contests. This not only made his father’s eye twitch, it also made his heart pound. Maximilian was, after all, the Emperor’s only surviving son, and necessarily needed to be kept at a safe distance from this dangerous lifestyle.
Maximilian didn’t feel the same.
7. He Didn’t Know When To Stop
Maximilian wasn’t just a carouser; he took his daring to disturbing heights. At one point, he walked into a lion’s cage in Munich, by himself, to tease the lion. At another, he climbed on top of the precarious Cathedral of Ulm, stood on one foot, and turned around—a feat that, when someone repeated it hundreds of years later, killed the man.
Maximilian’s need to prove his mettle was almost pathological, and it was only a matter of time before it turned violent.
8. He Led Armies
Starting in the 1470s, Frederick began bringing Maximilian along with him on diplomatic trips and giving him more responsibility. In 1476, when Maximilian was just 17, he even allowed him to head his first military campaign. Although Maximilian had spent years trying to duel practically everyone he knew, it was his first real battle experience. It would not be his last.
9. He Made A Scandalous Marriage
In 1477, the biggest event of Maximilian’s young life occurred: he married Mary of Burgundy, the ruler of the contentious Burgundian lands. It was a powerful alliance that nonetheless seemed to please no one: It incensed France, who wanted the Burgundian lands for itself, and Mary’s subjects, who mistrusted Maximilian as a foreigner.
It pleased no one, that is, except for Maximilian and Mary themselves.
10. He Fell Head Over Heels
Maximilian tied the knot with Mary when he was 18 and she 20, and the young royals had instant compatibility. Mary could match Maximilian passion for passion, and they soon did everything together, from hunting and dancing to collecting animals and reading romances side by side. They even slept in the same bed together, a highly unusual choice for the time.
But they were headed into a time of great turmoil.
11. He Was Unpopular
For the next decade, Maximilian struggled mightily to co-rule the Burgundian realm with Mary, who had been losing land to the French hand over fist—when she wasn’t trying to smooth over uprisings in the lands she did still possess. He failed miserably. Maximilian never seemed able to back away from a fight, with the French or otherwise, and made more enemies than friends along the way.
His popularity with Mary’s people, which had never been high in the first place, plummeted; one commenter from the time even sniffed that he had been “brought up very badly”. But Mary knew just how to handle her husband.
12. His Wife Controlled Him
Mary of Burgundy was more than a match for Maximilian, and even as he blundered his way through this period, she found ways to mitigate his errors. At one point when Maximilian wouldn’t relent on a rash attack plan, Mary tricked him into his apartments and then locked him up so she could take over negotiations. She only let him out when he agreed to just go dancing.
They did, however, agree on one monumental thing.
13. He Was A Master Manipulator
Both Maximilian and Mary of Burgundy understood the power of good marketing, and during their marriage they crafted larger-than-life images of themselves, both in the almost mythical portraits they commissioned and in the way they displayed themselves in the real world. In particular, Maximilian liked to wear highly decorative armor that trumpeted his chivalrous yet war-like nature, helping earn him the nickname “the last knight” in the annals of history.
But behind this perfect facade, they suffered personal tragedies.
14. He Had Trouble Keeping Heirs
In between grappling with political vagaries, Mary and Maximilian also had three children in quick succession. Philip “the Handsome” was born just the year after their wedding, and his sister Margaret of Austria two years after that. But tragically, their youngest son Francis, born in 1481, didn’t survive long after his birth.
It was a precarious position already for Maximilian to have just one male heir, and the situation suddenly worsened.
15. His Wife Had A Horrific Accident
In 1482, just a year after the loss of their infant son, immense tragedy hit Maximilian. He and his wife Mary were out falcon hunting in the woods when Mary’s horse ended up tripping on the forest floor. It was a small moment with massive consequence: Mary was thrown into a ditch, and the horse then landed on top of her.
But all was not as it seemed.
16. She Lied To Him
Mary likely knew almost instantly what was wrong: She had broken her back, and the internal injuries were sure to kill her. Even so, she initially kept the scope of her injury hidden from Maximilian, who was already losing his mind with grief. Indeed, he was so beside himself that Mary had to kick him out of her rooms so she could make plans for her legacy.
When the end came, it was brutal.
17. He Lost A Wife And A Baby
Mary held on for weeks of agony, making sure that everything would be in place when she was gone. On March 27, 1482, she finally passed at the tender age of 25. Somehow, it got more gut-wrenching. At the time of her fall, Mary had been pregnant with another potential heir.
Nothing was ever the same for Maximilian again.
18. He Never Let Go
Maximilian would forever after consider Mary of Burgundy his one true love, and he certainly never got over her passing. Neither did his political career, at least in her hereditary lands: At the time, he’d been having particular trouble in the “Low Countries,” and her end undid years of diplomatic work. The effects on Maximilian were stark.
19. He Had A Breakdown
For Maximilian’s mental health, there was a “before Mary” and an “after Mary”. Once brash and fearless in almost everything he did, he now seemed vulnerable to suffering. Though he finally gained back control in the Low Countries, during this time he experienced such emotional damage—including a “near fatal illness”—that once the situation was back to normal, he avoided the area for the rest of his life.
It wasn’t the only way his emotions got the better of him.
20. His Daughter Became A Pawn
When Maximilian’s daughter Margaret was just two years old, she became betrothed to the Dauphin of France, the future King Charles VIII. This, as it happened, was no olive branch from Maximilian toward France, but rather a result of his weakened status after Mary of Burgundy’s passing; France had negotiated it almost entirely without his input.
If Maximilian had played a role in the betrothal, maybe he would have avoided his next colossal blunder.
21. He Hated The French
A deep hatred for the French had been growing in Maximilian’s heart even before Mary’s passing, and it now bloomed into red-hot fury. After all, he had blamed the French for the stresses of the conflicts he had endured during his co-rule with Mary, and he now actively, if irrationally, blamed them for her tragic end.
So, even with his daughter engaged to the French dauphin, he began plotting his revenge. A disastrous revenge.
22. He Had A “Disgraceful” Idea
Maximilian had his eye on Anne of Brittany, an heiress akin to his first wife in that the French very much wanted control of her hereditary lands. For Maximilian, then, marrying Anne was the perfect way to stick it to the French and gain an advantage over them. Still, not everyone shared this opinion: his father called the idea “disgraceful”.
Well, Maximilian should have listened to his father.
23. He Had A Long-Distance Marriage
In December of 1490, Maximilian enacted his plan and married Anne of Brittany. It was a catastrophe from the start. The pair married by proxy, without Maximilian in attendance, because he was too busy trying to help his father run the Holy Roman Empire to make it over to Brittany and seal the deal by consummating the union.
Then it turned from a bad idea into an international incident.
24. He Poked The Bear
Just as Maximilian intended, France took enormous umbrage at the marriage. Charles VIII, now king, summarily rejected his previous betrothal to Maximilian’s daughter Margaret. To be fair, this was to be expected—even desired—and no real skin off Maximilian’s nose. Yet in so doing, Maximilian put his own child in grave danger.
25. His Daughter Became A Ransom
Margaret had been staying in France as an official gesture of her betrothal, and she now turned into a key hostage for the country. King Charles VIII kept Margaret with him for years as collateral to make sure Maximilian didn’t get too reckless, and she was only returned to him in 1493, after a treaty agreement.
But this was the least of King Charles’s retaliation.
26. His Bride Was Stolen Away
While Maximilian was still tied up in his own kingdom, King Charles VIII of France laid a siege on Anne’s lands of Brittany. It got worse. When Charles eventually captured the realm, he repudiated Maximilian’s marriage as void, since the groom had never come over to properly marry his bride, and forced Anne to marry him instead in 1491.
In the blink of an eye, Maximilian’s marriage plot had gone awry. But his father had very little chance to say “I told you so”.
27. He Became Holy Roman Emperor
In 1493, Maximilian’s father Frederick III passed, turning him into the de facto Holy Roman Emperor, a title he would later officially earn in 1508. Maximilian used his promotion as an opportunity for relief: He now gave his son, the 15-year-old Philip, more responsibility for ruling the family lands.
The move was, to be sure, designed to give the boy lessons in statecraft, and mirrored what Maximilian’s father had done with him. But it was also evidence of just how much Maximilian needed help.
28. He Was In An Eternal War
Even besides the various debacles with the French, Maximilian’s power was under serious threat. The Holy Roman Empire was massive and growing, but not all of its acquisitions were happy about being included, particularly Hungary. This all necessitated a near constant state of conflict that took up the vast majority of Maximilian’s time and resources, and he quickly earned an infamous reputation as a single-minded warrior.
When he tried his hand at love again, though, it turned into its own brutal battle.
29. He Found A Rich Wife
Just a handful of years after his “wedding” to Anne of Brittany, Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, an immensely rich Italian noblewoman who brought a massive dowry with her—a dowry Maximilian needed, what with all his war-mongering. Maximilian repaid this gift with bitterness. He simply could not conceive of another wife holding a candle to Mary of Burgundy, and he largely ignored Bianca.
When he wasn’t ignoring her, it was so much worse.
30. He Treated Her With Scorn
Although Bianca was very beautiful, perhaps more so than Mary, Maximilian felt she was nothing more than a “child” with a “mediocre mind,” and he treated her as such. He never brought her into the political fold, despite the fact she was competent enough at diplomacy, and barely wrote to her throughout their union even as he was frequently away. Poor Bianca didn’t take the hint.
31. She Begged For His Attention
For all that her husband treated her like a forgotten doll, Bianca was very much in love with the striking, magnetic Maximilian, and spent years trying to win his affection. She wrote to him frequently, gifted him with jewelry, and all but begged him to take care of her when she was sick. Maximilian remained unmoved.
Besides, there was one more “deficiency” in Bianca he never got over.
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32. His Marriage Was Barren
With only one legitimate son and daughter to his name, Maximilian could have very much used another heir, yet he and Bianca never had any children. Although Maximilian’s frequent and prolonged absences and total disinterest in his wife didn’t help, there’s evidence that, perhaps after an early miscarriage, Bianca was unable to conceive.
This only cemented her secondary place in his court, and the stress began to tell.
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33. He Abandoned Her
By 1500, Maximilian had completely given up on Bianca, and they lived almost separate lives. His wife then displayed destructive behavior. Some historians believe Bianca developed an eating disorder during this period as well as a mental illness, two states that an utterly indifferent husband couldn’t have helped. Yet Maximilian could be crueler still.
34. He Used Her As A Bargaining Chip
Maximilian’s constant waging of war on practically all sides of his empire was expensive business, and he was constantly borrowing money and constantly in need of more loans, especially when he was traveling and campaigning. One of his solutions to this, according to some historians, was to leave Bianca behind as “security” for the rooms he couldn’t pay for.
Then again, Maximilian always found ways to entertain himself without his wife.
35. He Had Scores Of Love Children
There is some evidence that, while married to Mary of Burgundy, Maximilian kept his wandering eye in check, but Bianca experienced no such luxury. Maximilian would go on to father a virtually army of illegitimate children from the late 1400s onward, including no fewer than 10 children by his mistress Anna von Helfenstein alone.
The trouble was, he really should have been paying more attention to making legitimate heirs.
36. He Lost His Son And Heir
In 1506, the next horrific tragedy struck Maximilian. His son Philip the Handsome, who had been one of his most powerful allies after the boy’s marriage to Joanna of Castile, perished at the age of 28. The prince had likely caught a bout of typhoid fever, though some pointed to either poisoning or the plague as the culprit.
Although Philip luckily had a replacement heir in the form of Maximilian’s grandson Charles, it was a sharp reminder of mortality for the Emperor—and he nearly unraveled.
37. They Kept It From Him
Maximilian had always had a fraught relationship with his only son, but underneath this masculine tension lay a well of emotion, as it always was with Maximilian. His entourage was so worried about the black tidings, in fact, that they hid Philip’s passing from Maximilian for over 10 days. Yet no one could keep the Grim Reaper from reappearing at Maximilian’s door.
38. His Wife Passed In Tragedy
Shortly after Philip’s passing, Maximilian’s neglected wife’s health took a turn for the worse. Now utterly emaciated, Bianca refused even the bloodletting that Maximilian ordered for her, and passed on New Year’s Eve, 1510, when she was just 38 years old. Many in Maximilian's court connected her end to Maximilian’s mistreatment, and the Holy Roman Emperor didn’t even attend the funeral.
He did, at least, wear mourning colors—but it might not have been for her.
39. He Was Morbid
By the time of Bianca’s end, Maximilian was a shell of his former self. After Mary of Burgundy’s passing, Maximilian’s mental state worsened by the year, and his physical state soon suffered similar harm. In 1501, in between his father and his son’s passing, Maximilian had a serious fall from a horse, and the persistent injury kept him in pain for decades.
For a man so defined by his physicality, it was an enormous hit to his ego. It finally seemed to break him for good.
40. He Had A Personal Coffin
By 1514, Maximilian was, according to historians, “morbidly depressed”. He had also taken up terrifying habits. Giving in to his most depressive tendencies, he started to cart his own coffin along with him wherever he went. In his bleakest moods, he would also drink so incessantly that his government, which hinged on his decisions, struggled to function.
Then he began to receive unsettling visions.
41. An Eclipse Changed His Life
In 1518, Maximilian witnessed an eclipse, and its sublime nature sent him into paroxysms of fear. To him, the act of nature was actually a divine comment on his own life, and he believed from then on that his end was near. Self-fulfilling prophecy or not, Maximilian wasn’t wrong about this impending doom.
42. His Credit Finally Came To An End
Feeling that he had little time to live, Maximilian traveled to the Austrian town of Innsbruck, a city he adored, in order to wait out his last days in comfort. Instead, he got a rude awakening. His debts were now so large and extensive in Innsbruck that no one would grant his party any more credit to stay there. The results were apocalyptic.
43. He Threw A Horrific Fit
Upon hearing that he essentially wasn’t welcome in his beloved city, Maximilian lapsed into a fit of anger. Tragically, it recoiled back on him. He appears to have suffered a stroke soon after, on December 15, 1518, that left him bedridden and incapable of any more famous feats of physical strength. But he did fight until the very end.
44. He Kept Going
In the last days of his life, Maximilian couldn’t let go of his grasp on his empire, not even for the Grim Reaper. He kept up his diplomatic duties even from his deathbed, receiving foreign diplomats and reading important documents that were sent his way. But ultimately, even Maximilian I was a mere mortal.
45. His Grandson Took Over
On January 12, 1519, Maximilian perished at the age of 59, paving the way for his grandson to become Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. But some parts of his life are still a mystery. Although the stroke he suffered after Innsbruck was certainly a factor, some historians suggest a more disturbing reason for his end.
46. His Body Betrayed Him
Maximilian I would never be so basic as to have just one cause of death. Underneath the stroke, some historians believe he may have suffered from cancer, likely of the stomach or intestine, while others suggest his voracious bedroom appetite may have given him syphilis. The probable truth is that, extravagant as he was, Maximilian’s end was a combination of serious medical issues.
There were also some “issues” with his burial.
47. His Last Wishes Were Shameful
When it came to stating his last wishes for his remains, Maximilian turned downright disturbing. Morbid as he was, he seemed to view his passing as a way for him to atone for all his sins, and insisted that his burial attendants cut off his hair and knock out his teeth to debase the body his spirit once held. He didn’t stop there, either.
48. He Wanted To Destroy Himself
In addition to shaving his head and plucking the teeth from his mouth, Maximilian also requested that attendants whip his lifeless body, cover it in lime and ash before wrapping it in linen, and then have it "publicly displayed to show the perishableness of all earthly glory”.
It was a gruesome last testament for one of the most charismatic rulers Europe had ever seen—but it didn’t come to fruition.
49. His Priest Saved Him
Even for Maximilian’s most loyal subjects, these instructions were a step too far. Maximilian’s confessor Gregor Reisch vetoed the grim preparations and instead placed a simple rosary and other religious objects with Maximilian's remains.
For all that, there was still heartbreak in Maximilian’s end.
50. He Made One Final Gesture
To his dying day, all Maximilian wanted was to be back with his first wife Mary of Burgundy. As such, he requested—and this time that request was honored—to have his heart buried in Mary’s sarcophagus in Bruges. In the end, history’s “Last Knight” reunited with his damsel after all.
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