The Siege of the Hofburg in 1462

It is November 1462 and the emperor Friedrich III and his young family are huddling together in the cellars of the Hofburg. The citizens of Vienna are shooting cannonballs into the 13^th century castle, the walls are crumbling and any moment now the angry crowds may break in. Outside, supporting the insurrection stood his own brother, calling on him to give up.

Two crowns he has already lost and a third is about to be knocked off his head as the imperial princes had ganged up on him. Friedrich III was a man who firmly believed in ancient laws and traditions and was profoundly ill suited for a world where, as Picciolomini wrote in the last sentence of his history of the emperor Friedrich III quote: “We are of the opinion that empires are won by weapons, not by legal means!”  

Friedrich III and with him the Habsburgs hit rock bottom, but how and why exactly he ended up there, and what that tells us about the profound changes during this period of history is what we are going to explore in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 211 – Hitting Rock Bottom, also episode 10 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

It is November 1462 and the emperor Friedrich III and his young family are huddling together in the cellars of the Hofburg. The citizens of Vienna are shooting cannonballs into the 13^th century castle, the walls are crumbling and any moment now the angry crowds may break in. Outside, supporting the insurrection stood his own brother, calling on him to give up.

Two crowns he has already lost and a third is about to be knocked off his head as the imperial princes had ganged up on him. Friedrich III was a man who firmly believed in ancient laws and traditions and was profoundly ill suited for a world where, as Picciolomini wrote in the last sentence of his history of the emperor Friedrich III quote: “We are of the opinion that empires are won by weapons, not by legal means!”  

Friedrich III and with him the Habsburgs hit rock bottom, but how and why exactly he ended up there, and what that tells us about the profound changes during this period of history is what we are going to explore in this episode.

But before we start I would like to touch on something completely different. I recently came across a Facebook post from someone claiming to have discovered a foolproof path to YouTube success. His method? Find the five most popular videos, transcribe them, and ask ChatGPT to create a new script from the results.

Apart from the obvious copyright issues, it made me wonder why anyone would want to do that. This is clearly not a creative endeavor of any kind. Whoever does that does not want to convey any thoughts or ideas, nor achieve a deeper understanding of anything; it’s purely about money. But who would pay for such drivel? Audiences care about quality and authenticity and are pretty good at smelling a rat. So it must be the advertising dollars they are after.

And yes, this scheme might yield a small profit, given the minimal effort required to churn out this AI-generated sludge. But for the rest of us, it is a nightmare. We end up wading through a morass of nonsense to find the nuggets we are looking for.

I am no luddite. I can see a lot of benefit from using AI tools to make this podcast better or better known. It is not the technology that is the problem, it is the advertising driven business model of social media. Without it, nobody would be pumping out utter dross. Which once more convinces me that running this podcast advertising free was the right choice, something I can only do thanks to the extreme generosity of our patrons who have already signed up at historyofthegermans.com/support. If you join them, your name will be immortalized here, just like Anne T., Ged M., TOXDOC, David W.H., Norman J., and Arvid M. are today.

And with that, back to the show.

TheAftermath of the death of Ladislaus Postumus

Last week we ended on the sudden death of the boy king Ladislaus Postumus. Ladislaus had been at least nominally king of Hungary, King of Bohemia and duke of Austria. However, power in these territories had largely shifted to local leaders, in Hungary to the great general John Hunyadi, in Bohemia to the Hussite baron Georg of Podiebrad and in Austria to the populist firebrand Ulrich von Eyczing.

The election of Matthias Corvinus

Let’s first have a look at what happened in Hungary. The local leader there, John Hunyadi had died following his heroic defence of Belgrade against the sultan Mehmet. His eldest son, Lazlo had been executed by king Ladislaus for the murder of Ulrich of Celje, a relative of the king and rival of the Hunyadis. The younger son, Matthias had been brought to Prague as a prisoner when king Ladislaus had to flee Hungary from the rage of the Hunyadi party.

When King Ladislaus died, the imprisoned Matthias Hunyadi was freed. On his return to Buda, the Hungarian nobles gathered and, in an unprecedented act of political boldness, proclaimed him king.

It is difficult to overemphasise how significant this was. Hungary had been a Christian kingdom since the year 1000, its rulers chosen on lineage and merit. After the extinction of the original  Árpád dynasty in 1301, a series of foreign monarchs had ruled, each claiming descent or marital ties to justify their crowns. Matthias Hunyadi had no blood relation to the Arpads or any previous Hungarian ruler nor did he belong to one of the 60 magnate families. And pure merit could not justify it either, since at 15 years of age, he simply had not yet had the time to prove himself.

Still the magnates set aside the heirs of their erstwhile king, and instead elevated the son of the man who had defended Christendom against the Ottoman threat at the siege of Belgrade. Matthias became king of Hungary in January 1458 and ruled for 32 years. He became known by his latinised name, Matthias Corvinus, Matthias the Raven, and we will hear a lot more about him, just not today.

The rise of Georg of Podiebrad to king of Bohemia

And something similar was happening in Bohemia. There were various options for the succession of Ladislaus, first and foremost the Habsburgs, specifically the emperor Friedrich III, then the husbands of Ladislaus’ sisters, Kasimir of Poland and Wilhem of Saxony, or the true ruler of Bohemia, Georg of Podiebrad. And, like in Hungary, the estates set aside the claims of the princely houses, and chose a simple baron with not an ounce of royal blood.

One of the reasons the estates of Hungary and Bohemia were prepared to risk such a move was the inertia of Friedrich III. They looked at Friedrich’s track record and they knew for a fact that he would not come down to Buda or Prague with an army of mercenaries demanding his inheritance. Nor would Kasimir of Poland who was still fighting the Teutonic Order in Prussia nor Wilhelm of Saxony, well the latter because, because he did not have the cards.

The social, military and economic changes in the 15th century

But it was also a result of broader social, military and economic changes. When we did our series on the 15^th century we came across men of modest backgrounds taking charge. Some made their career in the church, like Nicholas Cusanus and Andreas Silvio Piccolomini, something that had always been possible. But now we have bankers like the Welser, Fugger, Imhof and Hochstetter that are richer than any prince and determine the outcome of wars and imperial elections. We have inventors and entrepreneurs that change the world, like Gutenberg and his fellow printers, the armourers Kolman, Lorenz and Helmschmied, the cartographers, mathematicians, clockmakers; and there are the university professors training lawyers in how to take over the administration of the state. The military became a professional force, led by mercenary commanders who had risen through the ranks and some end up ruling cities as counts and marquesses and, in the case of Francesco Sforza, rise to the title of a duke of Milan.

Western Europe, for the first time in centuries experienced social mobility, social mobility that went as far as raising simple noblemen to the royal thrones in Hungary and Bohemia.

So one could argue that it wasn’t all Friedrich III’s fault that Hungary and Bohemia were lost to the Habsburgs for the time being. But then we have seen Sigismund gaining the St. Stephen’s crown from a much less promising position and we will see other Habsburgs turning tenuous titles into tangible territories.

The division fo Austria

That gets us to the last of Ladislaus’ possessions, the duchy of Austria. There the estates had appointed Ulrich von Eyczing as Landverweser, i.e., temporary regent whilst they debated who should be the new duke. Here are the runners and riders: Friedrich III, emperor and most senior of the Habsburg archdukes. Then there is his brother, Albrecht VI, at this point archduke in control of further Austria, i.e., the ancestral lands on the upper Rhine. And, in the outside lane, is Sigismund, the archduke and count of Tyrol.

On the face of it, neither Sigismund nor Albrecht should have a particular claim or interest in the duchy of Austria. Sigismund was the youngest and preoccupied with his innumerable and rapacious mistresses and his even more ruinous wars against Milan. And Albrecht’s main powerbase was a long way from Vienna.

On that basis Sigismund was given some vague promises and quickly dispatched back to Innsbruck, but Albrecht insisted on his pound of flesh. Much depended on the position Ulrich von Eyczing, the actual leader of the duchy. Eyczing in one of these 180 degree shifts we see a lot in this period, opted for the emperor he had previously dismissed as sluggish and miserly. Which was not very clever, since Albrecht simply snatched him and put him in jail. At which point even the sloth-like Friedrich felt he needed to come to Vienna and see what he could do to become duke. He freed von Eyczying and had a serious ding dong with his brother, which ended in an agreement to divide the duchy in two along the river Enns. Albrecht was to receive Austria above the Enns, which is modern day Upper Austria, where he established his headquarters in Linz. Friedrich got Austria proper, including Vienna.

We will get back to the situation in Vienna by the end of this episode, but before we do that, we need to talk about the other crown in play, that of the Holy Roman empire.

Friedrich III’s scorecard in 1458

Sorry, why is that crown in pay? Friedrich III has been elected in 1440 and crowned emperor in 1452. Who needs a new one. The simple answer was – everyone.

When the electors chose Friedrich III  in 1440 they expected him, the tall, broad shouldered promised mythical last emperor in control of all the Habsburg lands and crowns, to solve three major problems: Defence of Europe against the Ottomans, reform of the church and reform of the Empire.

By 1458 the scorecard for Friedrich III looked as follows:

Defence aganst the Ottoman threat

Defence of Europe against the Turks, to say it in the words of the Eurovision song contest: Saint Empire Romaine – Nul Points. Friedrich III had not mobilised any forces in the crusades against the Ottomans in 1444, 1448 and 1456. Constantinople had fallen under his watch and he had not lifted a finger helping John Hunyadi and Giovanni Capistrano defending Belgrade. The utter failure of the imperial diets in 1454, 1455 and 1456 that were supposed to organise the defence against the Turks was laid at his door, with some justification. He had called the gatherings but could not be bothered to go there himself, which meant very few other princes showed up and the whole thing went nowhere.

Church reform

Item 2 on the list, church reform scored no better. Yes, by going over to the side of the pope and ditching the council of Basel he did help ending the conciliar and papal schism. But at what price? The church in the empire remained subject to far reaching interference by Rome, church revenues went down to the papacy in much higher proportions then elsewhere and actual reform of the church, aka, proper training of priests, the end of benefice farming and generally better behaviour, none of that was happening. Some historians who defend Friedrich III argue that there was never a chance that the emperor could enforce church reform. Well, maybe, but at least he could have tried. Sigismund did try, and he achieved the end of the schism.

Reform of the Empire

That leaves item 3 – reform of the empire. Reform of the empire had been on the agenda ever since Ludwig the Bavarian and then Karl IV shed papal influence over the management of the empire. It was now down to the emperor and the German princes to define the laws, processes and institutions of the state.

Karl IV had taken a first stab at it in two ways. On the positive side he passed the Golden Bull of 1356 that set out the roles of the Prince Electors and confirmed the absence of papal interference. On the not so positive side, his extreme bribery in the run-up to first his own election and then the election of his son Wenceslaus, had wiped out the financial basis of the royal office.

That meant from the middle of the 14^th century onwards, being emperor was a pleasure entirely funded out of the officeholders private purse. Which explains why Karl IV’s successors, who all had serious money problems, were so remarkably ineffective.

In the hundred years since the Golden Bull, the empire had failed to set up an effective system of law and order, there was no formal political decision making process, no common rules on coinage, road building and commerce, nor was there a taxation system that could sustain any such institutions.

The empire was falling behind fast. In England, France, Spain, Poland institutions like parliaments, unified court system and tax collection infrastructure were being rolled out, despite, or because of the ongoing military pressure. The same was true for the territories within the empire, where princes were consolidating their power, hired lawyers to run their bureaucracy, negotiated taxation rates with the estates and enforced court judgements.

If the empire wanted to defend itself against the Ottomans and the encroachment by France, Burgundy, Poland, Sweden and Hungary, it urgently needed at least some of these kinds of institutions.

 That was the bit most people agreed on. The other thing that everybody agreed on was that making that happen, was extremely difficult.

Why? Let’s think this through. Say you were to introduce an imperial government tasked with defending the borders and preventing the endless feuding between the princes. Good plan. Now you need the money to fund this government, i.e., money to pay the bureaucrats, judges and if necessary armies to fight the Turks or keep the princes from killing each other. Well, that money should come out of taxes, which were to be paid by the territorial princes and the cities. To go with a concept that is now almost forgotten: “no taxation without representation”, meant the territorial princes and cities would demand a seat on that imperial government. At which point the emperor goes, hang on a minute. I am God’s anointed and I am not going to have my government be hemmed in by these other princes.

O.k., what is the emperor’s proposal? Well, Friedrich said: we can do as we do it back home in Styria and Carinthia, i.e., I call up the estates when I need money and will make concessions as and when that happens. But otherwise I can do what I want, in particular my judges are where you have to take your cases or appeals and if I ask for help fighting the Turks you come and fight for free like in the good old days of Frederick Barbarossa. At which point the territorial princes say, no, no, no. If we do it like that, then you have actual influence on the ground in my lands and my family had just spent a hundred years getting control of my own people, so thanks, but no thanks. And your idea I would fight for you for free, you are not serious, right

It is one of those almost irresolvable problems that require someone willing to dedicate time and effort resolving it, with the power to bang heads together and the willingness to compromise when needed.

The situation was effectively untenable. The empire was deteriorating at quite a rate of knots, and all the inhabitants heard from Wiener Neustadt was “Njet”.

Martin Mair’s attempts to reform the empire

One man was particularly keen to do something about this gridlock, Martin Mair. We already mentioned him in episode 197, but just a quick rundown again. Of unknown social background, he had studied in Heidelberg and began his career in 1448 in Schwäbisch Hall before going to Nürnberg. He quickly established himself as one of the most gifted political minds of his time, so that he was lent out by his employer, the city of Nürnberg to various lords, including in 1449 to the emperor himself. There he struck up a friendship with the emperor’s chief councillor, Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini who tried to keep him in the service of the imperial chancery.

But Martin Mair had seen enough. He did not believe there was any chance that Friedrich III would bring law and order, let alone a set of institutions and processes that would strengthen the empire against its enemies. So he began working on an alternative.

The reform proposal of 1454

In 1454 he proposed a wide reaching reform of the empire, namely a permanent imperial government made up of the emperor and the Prince Electors or their representatives. A court that acted as the final court of appeal and was made up of lords, counts and princes, overseen by the imperial government, and all that funded by a tax system the details of which remained a secret.

That proposal was brought to the imperial diet of the same year and then again in 1455. These diets had been set up to discuss the defence against an Ottoman invasion, not to discuss imperial reform. But since Friedrich said Njet to imperial reform, the princes said Njet to funding an army against the Turks, and nothing happened on either front.

Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate as candidate

In 1456 things became a bit more dicey for our Friedrich III.

Having failed with his reforms, Martin Mair, decided to play the man as well as the ball. He collected electoral votes to put someone else on the throne. Someone he thought had the energy, military might and political clout to pull it off. And that someone was none other than Friedrich der Siegreiche, Friedrich the Victorous, Count Palatine on the Rhine, our friend from episode 189.

The way Mair and his supporters thought this could be made acceptable to Friedrich, was to present the Count Palatine as a junior king, below the emperor, doing the drudgework, whilst the emperor could remain in Wiener Neustadt growing radishes or whatever it was he was doing down there.

That did not cut the mustard though. The emperor already had beef with Friedrich the Victorious over the way the latter had shunted his nephew out of the line of succession. So Friedrich III objected to the person, but even more to the whole concept. He was emperor, there was no need for a separate king of the Romans and that was that. At which point Friedrich the Victorious said, well in that case we do it against your will.

The only reason Friedrich III did not get deposed in 1457  was that Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg got cold feet and withdrew his support to Martin Mair and his friends. The conspirators did not have a quorum amongst the Prince Electors and so they had to give up. And half a year later the main supporter of the plan, the archbishop of Trier was dead and was replaced with a relative of the Habsburgs.

Proposing Georg of Podiebrad as King of the Romans

Martin Mair still did not give up. In 1461 he presented another candidate, Georg of Podiebrad, recently crowned king of Bohemia.

Let’s take a step back. In 1273 the imperial princes balked at the idea of making a Bohemian king of the Romans, even one of impeccable lineage going back to Saint Wenceslaus and an unblemished track record as a military leader and a reputation as a faithful son of the Holy Catholic church. Barely 200 years later they are seriously considering a simple baron who had usurped the crown from one of the most eminent princely houses, namely the Habsburgs, and much more concerning, was a man who had risen to power as the leader of the Utraquists, a Hussite sect that had fought the catholic church for decades.

Why did they chose him? There were a number of reasons. First up, he was a successful military leader and a charismatic individual. Then – despite all that had happened – he had a very good relationship with the emperor Friedrich III. And then Podiebrad played his cards right. He never provided any detail of the institutional changes he would implement once he was king. Instead he talked about peace and unity. And then he emphasised the fight against the Ottomans, one subject everyone could agree on and that covered up the smell of heresy that surrounded him.

In February 1461 the princes gathered in Eger to discuss imperial reform. Georg of Podiebrad had high hopes that this would be his great breakthrough. Support for the emperor had been crumbling for a long time now. Friedrich III’s main allies were his brother-in-law the elector Frederick of Saxony and Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg. Whilst Saxony remained broadly supportive, Albrecht Achilles’ enthusiasm for the Habsburg cause had faded a lot.

Meanwhile the party hostile to the emperor had grown substantially. There was Ludwig the Rich of Bayern-Landshut, his cousin Friedrich the Victorious, the elected archbishop of Mainz Diether von Isenburg, even count Ulrich of Württemberg, the landgrave of Hessen and the bishops of Bamberg and Würzburg joined the chorus of the discontent.

They called Friedrich III idle and pointed out that he had not shown his face in the empire for a solid 15 years, had failed to organise defence against the Turks and had sold the imperial church down the swanny. Martin Mair proposed another simple three point program: King Georg of Podiebrad should lead an imperial army against the Turks, second, that Georg of Podiebrad should guarantee an all-encompassing peace in the empire and three, that the church taxes should only be collected with the consent of the Prince Electors. Huzzah! What a great plan. Everybody was nodding. Let’s do all that.

And then Podiebrad added one more thing, he suggested they should meet again in a formal imperial diet and elect a new head of the empire to facilitate this most excellent program. And that is when they all went quiet. There was a lot of shuffling of feet until margrave Friedrich of Brandenburg, the brother of Albrecht Achilles pointed out that they were in Eger, on Bohemian soil, and that no emperor could be elected on Bohemian soil. They agreed to meet again in Nürnberg in four weeks time.

The emperor fights back

This was now serious. Though the election did not happen in Eger, it could happen at the next gathering, just a month hence. Friedrich III contacted his only true supporters, the dukes of Saxony and urged them to protect his interests. And there may have been some other diplomacy efforts under way, since the gathering at Nürnberg showed some major cracks in the united front Martin Mair had tried to engineer. Duke Ludwig the Rich of Bavaria had a long running disagreement with Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg that came back to the fore. Friedrich the victorious and the archbishop of Mainz withdrew their support for Georg of Podiebrad for reasons I have not yet fully understood.

All they could agree on was to write a harsh letter to the emperor asking him to show up at an imperial diet on May 30^th in Frankfurt and do his job for once. Friedrich dithered as usual. The situation has become so contentious that the pope now got involved. And that pope was Pius II, previously known to us as Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, chief advisor of emperor Friedrich III. He had been elevated to the throne of Saint Peter on the back of the concordat he had negotiated on behalf of the empire (no conflict of interest here at all), his relentless efforts to organise a crusade against the Turks and his conservative position on any form of deviation from papal doctrine, theological and otherwise. He had come a long way from the man who had embraced the council of Basel and written erotic novels. Now he was a hardline defender of papal supremacy and propriety, and a very smart one at that.

In concert with Friedrich’s aides, he prevented the diet in Frankfurt from taking place at all. And we see the disagreements between the imperial princes breaking up their unified front. In August 1461 he set the cat amongst the pigeons when he deposed Diether von Isenburg as archbishop of Mainz and replaced him with Adolf of Nassau which kicked off the Mainzer Stiftsfehde, binding Ulrich of Wuerttemberg, the margrave of Baden and his brothers as well as Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate. And the attempted reconciliation between Albrecht Achilles and Ludwig the Rich fails. Friedrich and Albrecht Achilles renew their alliance. The two sides are now set for war, on one side we have the Palatinate, Bayern-Landshut and  Diether of Isenburg, the deposed archbishop of Mainz, On the other side we have Brandenburg, Wurttemberg and Baden as well as Trier and Metz. Since we have discussed the two wars that make up this conflict in episodes 191 and 197, I will not repeat it all here. But what we had not discussed was the third front that extended this conflict to the entire south of the empire and was about to spell doom for the Habsburg emperor.

The War of the Brothers

And that was the conflict between emperor Friedrich III and his brother archduke Albrecht VI.

Two very different men

These two had been quarrelling off and on since they were teenagers. When the emperor was slow, occasionally timid and stubborn, the archduke was the true son of Ernst the Iron, seizing opportunities, easily swapping sides and quick to draw a sword. Friedrich had hoped he could appease his brother by giving him further Austria, a territory large enough to keep him occupied but not so large as to threaten him. When the brothers divided the duchy of Austria and Albrecht got the part above the Enns river, the balance had shifted. They were now almost equals. Watching Friedrich letting Bohemia and Hungary go and getting under intense pressure from inside the empire, he saw the opportunity to take the other half of the duchy of Austria from his brother.

Friedrich never cared much about Austria and he particularly disliked Vienna. Even when he was ruling Austria in his own right, he rarely showed himself in the city. Nor did he make an effort to keep law and order in the duchy. When things got very bad in 1460, he did mount another expedition against the robber barons, but brought only a meagre band of 13 evildoers to justice. That contrasted with Albrecht’s haul of 600 thieves in 1458.

In June 1462, when the empire was set alight by the Mainzer Stiftsfehde and the War of the Princes, Albrecht VI set out to take Vienna. He had joined the anti-imperial coalition and made a deal with Ludwig the Rich of Bavaria. Meanwhile inside the city of Vienna, the supporters of Albrecht had taken control. They elected Wolfgang Holzer as their new mayor.

Friedrich III comes to Vienna

Friedrich, somewhat unaware of these events came to Vienna in person to assert his claim to the duchy. He should have realised that the situation was dangerous when the city refused to open its gates to him and his small band of mercenaries. They let him in after 2 days of negotiations. Friedrich took up residence in the Hofburg and called the citizens together. He told them to replace Wolfgang Holzer, their recently elected mayor, with someone of the emperor’ choosing. They did, but then things rapidly went out of control.

As per usual, Friedrich did not have the money to pay his soldiers, so he demanded money from the city. The city refused. The soldiers began stealing stuff and found themselves being beaten up by the populace. Friedrich had to drop his candidate for mayor and Wolfgang Holzer returned to City Hall.

Holzer recommended that Friedrich left the city, as clashes could easily escalate. Friedrich refused and the clashes escalated. Friedrich and his soldiers barricaded themselves into the Hofburg.

The siege of the Hofburg

On October 5^th, 1462 the citizens of Vienna rose up against their lord, the emperor Friedrich III. And on October 17^th, they began the siege of the Hofburg. They wheeled their cannon onto the square before the castle and systematically brought down walls and towers.

At this point the Hofburg was still a 13^th century fortress, in no conceivable way able to withstand 15^th century artillery. Day by day more of the defences came down. Two weeks later Friedrich’s brother, archduke Albrecht arrives in Vienna with further reinforcements. He is quickly recognised as duke and overlord of Vienna. Albrecht offers Friedrich safe conduct for his return to Wiener Neustadt, but Friedrich refused.

For four weeks the cannon kept pounding the ancient castle where Friedrich III and his family are holding out. The situation is dire and the imperial family is starving. By now Friedrich and Eleanor had been married for 9 years. She had given birth to three children so far, the eldest, Christoph had died after a few month, but a second boy had lived. He was 2 ½ years old and his name was Maximilian, a name that had never been used in the Habsburg family or in the family of Eleanor of Portugal before. And there was another baby, Helene, who would not live much longer.

I have been married for 26 years now, so I can say with some authority, that if I had brought my wife and our two small children into a castle that is being pounded by cannon, that is surrounded by hostile locals and we were running out of food, I would come in for some criticism. And if I had got us into this situation through my stubbornness and lack of political acumen, that criticism could have become intense. There is no recording of the marital conversation between Eleanor and Friedrich, but if chroniclers write down that she had called him incompetent, you can imagine what was said in the privacy of the imperial bedchamber.

Maximilian who should have been much too young to remember these events still recounts in his autobiography that quote “he was so little and unsteady in his feet, that he had to hold someone’s hand as he descended down into the cellars. There he still heard the din of arms and the roaring of the cannon, but his mother protected him day and night with the help of the guards.” End quote.

This was even worse than the siege of Wiener Neustadt in 1452. This time their life was truly in danger, even the whole dynasty was. Neither Archduke Albrecht, nor their cousin Sigismund of Tyrol had any legitimate children, one misguided cannonball and the Habsburgs would be no more than a footnote of history.

And rightly so. Friedrich III had managed to lose two crowns for the family, Hungary and Bohemia, and a third one, the imperial one, was hanging by a thread. He had failed as emperor on all three counts. The Habsburg family unity was broken to the point that his brother had joined his enemies and was now shelling him. The few lands he actually ruled were down in the dumps and under threat from the Hungarians and the Turks.

If little Maximilian had succumbed to the horrors of the siege, history would have forgotten the Habsburgs quicker than you can say “who’s that emperor anyway”. This period, November and December 1462 is, as far as I can see, the low point of the House of Habsburg. There will be more and even more severe setbacks – Friedrich III will lose even his beloved Styria and spend his time as an itinerant emperor dependent upon the charity of his hosts. But difficult as these times were, they never again reached this level of despair.

Outlook To next week

So from next week, we will get to the second part of this season, the rise of the House of Habsburg. But if you still think that their success was only a matter of being in the right marital bed at the right time, you will find things are a bit more complicated. I hope you will join us again.

And if you want to make sure this show makes it out of this valley of tears and into the sunny uplands of Habsburg world domination, go to historyofthegermans.com/support, where you can find various options to keep us on the road and advertising free.