Margaret of Austria (1480-1530)

Transcript

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 230: The League of Cambrai

Another Thursday and another episode dealing with another epic fail of our hero, Maximilian I. But despite a military campaign that once again failed for all the usual reasons, no money, no strategy, no luck, this time he is rescued not by a marriage or imperial princes suddenly inflicted with an unlikely case of backbone, but by his daughter, Margaret, archduchess of Austria, dowager duchess of Savoy and governor of the Netherlands.

In an age that featured a number of impressive women, from Caterina Sforza to Elisabeth I, Margaret may be lesser known, but could easily hold her own amongst such illustrious company. She brought together an alliance that rescued her father’s lands, re-established imperial power in Northern Italy and brought the mighty republic of Venice almost to collapse. And then did it again, again and once more.

Meanwhile her father first made himself emperor in the least impressive ceremony ever, before throwing his hat in the ring to become – tat, tat, taa – the pope.

On that bombshell we should probably wind back to the year 1506.

On September 25, 1506 Maximilian’s only son and great hope for the future, Philip the Handsome died. This was a massive blow to the house of Habsburg. Instantly the most valuable assets of the family, the Low Countries and Spain were at risk of being lost. Hence the number one priority had to be to shore up power in Flanders and Castile.

One would expect Maximilian to saddle his horse and ride hard for Ghent, whilst focusing his foreign policy on constraining or placating Ferdinand of Aragon. But hey, there was a much more valuable target out here for the man who had been king of the Romans for 15 years already, and that was the imperial crown. Yes, in the midst of the deepest crisis of his reign, and there were many of those, Maximilian put all his energy into organizing a coronation journey to Rome.

He let Ferdinand take over Castile and sent his daughter Margaret to sort out the Netherlands. Days after hearing about Philip’s death, he summoned the Reichstag for Candlemas 1507 in Constance. The agenda he set for the gathering was the Coronation Journey that was to be preceded by a crusade attacking the Ottomans after a detour through Castile, Genoa and Rome.

This Reichstag was particularly well attended. After his victory in the war of the Landshut Succession and a campaign in Hungary in 1506 we will talk more about next week, he was riding high. Never before did he have that much influence in the empire.

In his opening speech that was distributed widely as a pamphlet, he let rip. 10 million gulden of his own money he had already spent on the affairs of the empire, whilst the estates had barely mustered a single million. No emperor since Barbarossa had committed himself so relentlessly to the good of the realm. And still one man, the archchancellor and archbishop of Mainz, Berthold of Henneberg had prevented him from cutting his way down to Rome, from protecting Milan and from gaining the imperial crown. And now the French had poisoned his son. It is the empire’s duty to push back the French attacks and he himself will once again give his all to the honor of the empire and the German nation.

Cue, wild applause, in particular from the younger princes. All this bombast and saber rattling conjured up images of conquests, estates and plunder from the riches of Italy. The more sober amongst the Prince electors were offered yet more privileges under a revised Golden Bull. The city representatives were not excited about the prospect of yet more involvement in the Italian troubles. They were concerned about the impact on their trade with the Venice and the other great cities.  But they were overruled by the superrich banking families, including Jakob Fugger, who saw vast opportunities in financing the armies, artillery and armor required for such an undertaking.

The Reichstag was, as so often, not just a domestic gathering but also an opportunity for international diplomacy. Maximilian had chosen Constance in part as it was a convenient place for the Swiss who were no longer members of the Reichstag,  to come in for discussions. As you may remember, the Swiss were receiving an annual subsidy of 20,000 francs from king Louis XII of France in exchange for the exclusive right to hire the famous Swiss mercenaries. But that alliance had begun to crack. A decade of war had cut deep into even the very deep pockets of the king of France, and soldier’s pay was occasionally delayed. To save money, the French bribed the canton officials so that they would offer their warriors at reduced wages. Seriously, corrupt Swiss civil servants – these were bad times indeed.

But there was more. The Swiss were embarking on their own foreign policy initiatives. The Confederacy had always been expansionist, mostly by admitting new members, but also through conquest. This had traditionally been directed northwards, but after the Swabian/Swiss war of 1499, there was so much bad blood, the border remained fixed for good. Hence their interest turned south, to Bellinzona, Locarno and Lugano, what is now the canton of Ticino, places then held by the dukes of Milan. As pay became a problem, Louis XII compensated the Swiss with these territories. That in turn got the Swiss to wonder why they only got a few towns at the outer edge of the duchy, when in fact they were doing all the fighting. Shouldn’t they get a bigger share, or maybe the whole of the duchy? And what about the rest of Italy?

Maximilian hoped he could tap into this sentiment when he asked them to meet him at his Reichstag in Constance in 1507. It did not happen, but as people in the markets often say, he was not wrong, just early.

As for other elements of his diplomatic strategy, they went even worse. Venice outright refused to let him cross their territory on his way south. The French had just walked away from the mega marriage between Maximilian’s grandson, the future emperor Charles V and Claude, the only child of Louis XII and thereby ended the first rapprochement between the Habsburgs and the Valois. That meant he could not travel through Milanese territory either. And when French agents tried to disrupt the Reichstag, he had them arrested.

All in, the event fell short of expectations, though at least the Reichstag was awarding him a subsidy of 120,000 to muster troops for his coronation journey to Rome. Maximilian began recruiting mercenaries, in the main, Landsknechte.

And – surprise, surprise – by the time he was ready to set off south, barely 40,000 of the 120,000 gulden had been collected. Once again, Maximilian had to ask Jakob Fugger for a loan, which he received against handing over even more mining assets. Maximilian’s treasurer moaned that quote “we have absolutely no money at all, we are poorer than poor”. When Maximilian asked the Tyrolian estates for cash, they responded saying that he should pay off his wife’s debts with innkeepers and grocers before he starts a new war. Not paying Bianca Maria Sforza’s debt with her suppliers was a recurring theme in this strained relationship, and the poor woman found herself more often than not unable to leave places due to unpaid bills.

In February 1508 Maximilian had mustered his forces and was ready to set off for Rome. The only problem was that his forces were not quite what he hoped for or needed. He had organized three attack columns, the largest of which had gathered at Trento, at the bottom of the Brenner pass. That force of 7,000 men in total was meant to break through the narrow gap at the Veroneser Klause or Chiusa di Verona. This was the exit point of the Brenner pass, barely a few hundred meters wide with sheer cliffs on both sides. It was here that Otto von Wittelsbach saved Barbarossa and his army in 1155 earning him eternal gratitude and ultimately a duchy.

In 1508, getting through the Veroneser Klause was still as difficult as it had been in 1155. And the Venetians who held Verona and its approaches had refused to let Maximilian through. And no Wittelsbach had come along to save the day. Maximilian was simply stuck in Trento with his 7,000 men with no way to get down to Rome. And even if he had been able to fight his way through the gate, what would he have done then. By this time the average size of an army in the Italian wars was 50,000. His small force would have been crushed by either the French or the Venetians.

But Maximilian had made such a big deal out of his desire to go to Rome and receive the imperial crown, he could not just simply turn around and call it a day. He asked pope Julius II whether he would allow him to be crowned in Trento, something the pope had previously offered. But this time Julius II refused. So Maximilian did something he might have thought of as nothing more than a placeholder. He declared himself to be Erwählter Römischer Kaiser, or Elected Roman Emperor. That was something the medieval emperors had traditionally done upon entering Italy and announcing their imminent arrival to the Pope.  But this time everybody knew he would not make it to Rome any time soon and at the time, Trento was not in Italy.

Still they gathered some relics from neighboring churches and a 1,000 riders waved their flags. Matthaeus Lang, the bishop of Gurk and one of Maximilian’s closest advisors declared that Maximilian was intent to go to Rome and that he was therefore from now on to be regarded as Emperor. But ultimately it was a bit miserable. Hardly any imperial princes had accompanied him, not a single Prince elector was present. The cardinal legate to the empire refused to attend, not even the bishop of Trento was willing to officiate.

Nevertheless, this declaration of Trento became imperial law. From that point forward those elected as king of the Romans used the title Emperor Elect, and no one was ever again crowned in Rome. Charles V did undergo a coronation ceremony in Bologna in 1530, but had been using the title for a decade already. And after that, no emperor was crowned by the pope. The coronations were performed by the three spiritual electors in Frankfurt.

That was not the outcome Maximilian had envisaged. For him the imperial title still mattered. He fundamentally believed that as emperor he could claim the lead in the defense against the Ottomans, bringing even kings under his command. And for that to work, the dismal procedure in Trento was not the tool to achieve it. Only a real coronation by the pope could. He would pursue this idea for the rest of his life, but never achieved it. So – contrary to what you can still read occasionally, Maximilian did not intend to shake off the papal yoke, or rid the empire of Rome. That was a 19^th century idea fueled by the nationalist ideal. 

This performance was however not the only glorious achievement of the now emperor Maximilian in 1508. Whilst he could not break through on the Brenner pass, he turned around and tried to get into Italy using two other routes, one through the Cadore valley in the Dolomites and another via Görz or Gorizia into Friuli. What he tried to achieve with this is – to be polite – unclear. His forces were still minuscule compared to the armies the Venetians could easily raise and pay. Hence, even if he had made any territorial gains, he would have been forced to give them back immediately.

As it happened he did not even do that. His forces in the Dolomites, about 4 to 6,000 men were encircled and literally massacred. The Stratioti, Albanian mercenaries had been promised one gulden for each head of an enemy. No quarter was given and 2,000 men lay dead on the field.

His attempt to make gains in Friuli fared even worse. His forces immediately got stuck on unexpected resilience and the Venetian counterattack crashed through his lines into Austrian lands, taking the important port of Trieste in the process. Maximilian sued for peace, which he was miraculously granted in July 1508.

Once again, Maximilian had been defeated and humiliated. As he had said in Constance the year before, he had four devils to fight: the French and the Venetians who never deliver on their promises, the Turks, honest men who stick to their treaties and the Swiss, who smash up whatever he builds. But if you ask him who was foremost responsible for all the misery, it was the German princes.

But right about now, when he seemed to be truly on his knees, his armies defeated, his imperial crown a bit of a joke and his homeland invaded, enter stage left, the brains of the Habsburg outfit, archduchess Margaret, Maximilian’s daughter. You may remember that at the top of the episode I mentioned that Maximilian did not go north to shore up Habsburg power in the Netherlands, but sent his daughter to deal with it. And that turned out to be one of the smartest things he could have done.

Margaret of Austria had walk-on roles in this podcast since episode 217. And even though this is by no means the last time she will feature prominently on the show, it is now time to give her the space she deserves.

Let’s first recap her life up until 1507 before we get to the first of her masterstrokes, the League of Cambrai.

She was born in 1480 as the second child and only daughter of Maximilian and Marie of Burgundy. Her mother died when she was two years old and the year after the estates of Flanders forced her father to sign the Treaty of Arras with king Louis XI of France. Under this treaty Margaret was to marry the dauphin of France, the future Charles VIII, and as her dowry would bring along several cities and counties including the Artois. As was not uncommon, Margaret was sent to be brought up at the French court. There she received an excellent education and made friendships that came in useful later, including to Louis Duke of Orleans, the future king Louis XII and Louise of Savoy, the mother of the next king Francois I.

But first and foremost she was trained to marry Charles VIII and become queen of France. It is fair to assume that she had bought into this life plan and was hence shocked and dismayed when her intended Charles VIII cancelled the engagement to marry Anne, the heiress of the duchy of Brittanny. This irritation to the Habsburg family was compounded by the fact that Anne of Brittanny had already been married by proxy to Maximilian. As usual, Maximilian did not have the money to do much about this humiliation.

Margaret was first relegated in her circumstances, and once the pope had annulled Charles’ marriage vows, she was somewhat unceremoniously packed up and sent “home”. She arrived in Flanders in 1493, a place she had not seen since she was a toddler and that she had no connection to any more. She never forgot that mistreatment and she remained extremely suspicious of the Valois throughout her life.

When she returned she quickly developed a close relationship with her father, who she had probably no real memory of. They shared the experience of the humiliation by Charles VIII and developed similar strong anti-French sentiment, very much in contrast to her brother Philip who was profoundly pro-French and had no real connection with his father.

The rejection of Margaret by Charles VIII freed her up for new marriages and that is how the idea of the Spanish double marriage came about. All this we discussed last week. So, when Juan of Spain, Margaret’s first or second husband, depending on how you count, died in 1497, she was pregnant. However, the child, a daughter, was stillborn. She again returned to Flanders in 1499, only to be put up in the marriage market once again. In 1501 she married Philibert II, duke of Savoy. The duchy of Savoy then extended from North of Lyon to Piedmont  and was hence an important piece in the plan to encircle the French kingdom.

Margaret and Philibert were by all accounts very happy together, though Philibert seemed to have been another case of handsome waste of space. He preferred hunting and feasting to the hard work of governing his lands, lands under threat from France and the Swiss. The effective management of the duchy lay in the hands of his half-brother Rene, the grand bastard of Savoy. Philibert had actually legitimized Rene, giving him a position in the line of succession.

Margaret was very unhappy about that. Unlike her brother Philip the Handsome, Margaret was a natural when it came to politics. In this period of political instability where ambitious brothers and uncles kept shunting the formal heirs out of the way, leaving the reins of power in the hands of a legitimized half-brother was an unacceptable risk. Margaret pursued a patient campaign to oust Rene. She had her father revoke the patent of legitimization and then had him prosecuted for bribery and expropriation. In 1503 Rene fled to his half-sister, Louise of Savoy, the mother of the future king Francois I of France.

But Margaret’s marriage to Philibert did not last. He died in 1504 from an infection of the lungs. Margaret was so distraught, she threw herself out of a window, but survived. For the next two years she dedicated herself to building a mausoleum for the love of her life, the Église de Brou in Bourg-en-Bresse. This is without doubt one of the masterpieces of the Burgundian style that mixed Medieval and Renaissance into its own unique form. It took 26 years to complete and inside you can find the magnificent tombs of Philibert and Margaret herself. If you happen to go down the autoroute de soleil this summer and you look for a way to avoid Lyon and make a pleasant stop, I can only thoroughly recommend it.

As for Margaret, that was by no means the end of the line. She was still only 24 and hence back on the marriage market. Her brother tried to pass her on to Henry VII of England when he was stranded there on his way to Spain – as we discussed last week. However, she resolutely refused to go through the marriage process for a fourth time. She maintained that position all throughout the rest of her life. And though she had no children of her own, she brought up four of her five nieces and nephews: the future emperor Charles V and his sisters Eleanor, Isabella and Marie.

When Philip the Handsome died in September 1506, someone needed to secure the rights of his son Charles in the Netherlands. There were a number of reasons why Margaret was a good choice as regent.

For one, she was the daughter of Marie of Burgundy, the true heir to the Netherlands. That brought her the loyalty of the Burgundian nobles, namely the members of the Order of the Golden Fleece. She was also much more popular in the cities than Maximilian. The emperor had been seen, almost from the beginning, as a rapacious foreigner who had caused endless wars and misery. His children were believed to want to keep the Netherlands away from conflicts. And other than her brother Margaret was an eminently capable politician, as she had already shown in her handling of the affairs of Savoy.

Hence she started with a reasonable degree of goodwill. She strengthened her position by making sure she was present. Again and again she celebrated Joyeuse entrees, these ceremonial entries where she received the keys of the city and in exchange swore to upheld their ancient rights. Like her father, she was good with people, plus she enjoyed sympathy as a beautiful and tragic widow. Her palace at Mechelen was one of the first purely Renaissance buildings north of Alps and in it she put together one of the greatest art collections of the age. Amongst her possessions was the Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, today one of the highlights of the National Gallery in London. Her library held some of the greatest illuminated manuscripts ever produced and her halls were clad in the greatest of Flemish tapestries. All these were pieces deliberately chosen to remind visitors of the heydays of the Burgundian courts of Philipp the Good and Charles the Bold.

If successfully maneuvering the notoriously difficult politics of the low countries wasn’t enough of an achievement, where she really excelled was in international diplomacy.

Her first masterpiece came in 1508. Let’s just remember. Her father, Maximilian had – once again – made a fool of himself when he announced his coronation journey to Rome that went no further than Trento, his mildly ridiculous elevation to the imperial title and all that followed by two massive defeats and the loss of parts of his own lands to Venice. He should by all accounts now be NFI to any major international alliance.

What Margaret achieved was to not only bring the Habsburgs back to the  table, but give them claims on some of the biggest prizes in one of the most Machiavellian treaties of the already fairly Machiavellian Italian wars.

It all evolved around the endless issue of Guelders. This smallish duchy had been a thorn in the side of the Burgundian state ever since Charles the Bold had claimed it in 1473. Its traditional rulers, the Egmont family could count on support amongst their people and geography made conquering the place difficult. But mostly Guelders was a problem because the French kept subsidizing their resistance as a way to keep first Philip the Handsome and now Margaret from supporting Maximilian’s plans to attack the French. And it was extremely successful as a policy since it frightened Philip the Handsome so much, he stabbed Maximilian in the back more times than one can count.

Margaret was keen on bringing an end to this constant problem, if necessary by making peace with Charles of Egmont, the duke of Guelders. This issue formed the background for the negotiations that kicked off in the city of Cambrai in November 1508. There Margaret sat down with the cardinal d’Amboise, the chief minister of king Louis XII. Margaret as governor of the Netherlands and representative of her father, whilst Amboise had plenipotentiary power from Louis.

Margaret knew not only Louis and many of the members of his court very well from her days as an intended future queen, she had played with Amboise when they were both children. She knew better than anyone in Maximilian’s court what could stir the interests of her counterparty. And creativity was required since there wasn’t much the Habsburgs could offer the French in exchange for them dropping their support for Guelders.

She put aside her personal animosity of the French and sought out their soft spot: greed, excessive greed. Louis, together with his Venetian allies had taken the duchy of Milan. But despite Milan being immensely rich, it was not enough for Louis XII. He had tried to take Naples but had been thrown out by the Spanish. Florence was his ally, and even the other, smaller states like Genoa, Ferrara and Mantua had secured their positions through treaties, making them hard to annex without risking large scale warfare.

Margaret had an audacious solution for Amboise and his boss. Go after Venice. Sure, Venice was France’s long standing ally since the dissolution of the Holy League. But the Venetians had made themselves profoundly unpopular amongst the other Italians. They had pushed into Ferrara, had taken a chunk out of the Papal States, held a number of ports on the Adriatic coast of Naples and occupied several cities that once belonged to Milan. Pope Julius II had already put out feelers to Louis XII to see whether he could rein in his ally Venice. But it was Margaret who pulled all these strings together. She could not only commit her father, who -as we know- was  largely useless- but she was also on excellent terms with Ferdinand of Aragon, her former father in law. Ferdinand was keen to get rid of the Venetians in his kingdom of Naples. If France and Spain got together, all the other powers in Italy had to get into their slipstream. Plus the Serenissima had enough land and gold to satisfy anyone’s greed.

Margaret and Amboise developed a complex system of deception to keep the Venetians in the dark about their imminent destruction. They created three separate treaties.

The first one was an agreement between France, the Habsburgs and the duke of Guelders. The duke of Guelders would accept a peace in which he would hand over several cities and castles in exchange for recognition by the Low Countries. France promised not to fund any further uprisings. And as a further sign of the improved relationship between the former arch enemies, Maximilian was to recognize Louis as duke of Milan and would receive 100,000 gulden for this service.

And then there was another agreement that should have made the Venetian ambassador, who was present in Cambrai suspicious. The parties established a special confederation against the Turks and other infidel enemies of Christendom, and in this confederation were to be included the subjects, vassals, friends, and confederates of the contracting powers, and particularly the Pope and the Kings of England, of Hungary, and of Aragon. The question they should have asked was, why did that not include Venice. But they did not. They wrote back home that all was good and one could look forward to a time of peace and prosperity.

They would not have written that, had they seen the secret treaty concluded at the same time. Therein France, the Habsburgs, Spain, the Pope and the king of England agreed quote  ‘to put a term to the losses, injuries, spoliations, and damage inflicted by the Venetians, not only on the Holy Apostolic See, but also on the Holy Roman Empire, the House of Austria, the Dukes of Milan, the Kings of Naples, and many other Princes, whose goods and chattels, cities and castles, they have nefariously usurped, as though pledged to do injury to all the world. … Therefore have we deemed it, not merely useful and honourable, but imperatively necessary to summon all to a just revenge, that all may unite, as in the presence of a conflagration by which all are threatened, to extinguish the insatiable Venetian cupidity and thirst for dominion.’ End quote.

The plan was nothing less than the partition of the Venetian empire amongst the members of the League.  The Pope was to have Ravenna, Faenza, Rimini, Imola, and Cesena. To the Emperor would go Verona, Padova, Vicenza, Treviso, Friuli, Istria, and all else taken by the Venetians from the Empire or the House of Austria. The King of France was to ‘recover’, as he called it, that which he had ceded voluntarily to Venice as the price of her co-operation in the conquest of Milan, thus obtaining Cremona, Brescia, Crema, and Bergamo. The King of Aragon would be given Brindisi, ‘Trani, Gallipoli, and Otranto; and his complicity was further assured by a stipulation that the Austrian Princes should not during the war take any action in respect of their claim to the government of Castile. The King of Hungary was to be pressed to enter the alliance, and, if he were to consent, was to receive Dalmatia. Cyprus was dangled as a lure before the eyes of the Duke of Savoy; and other spoils were reserved for the rulers of Ferrara and Mantua.

This was on the one hand a genius move by Margaret, who in one fell swoop pulled her father out of the quagmire he had put himself with his stupid attacks on Venice. And even more amazingly, had offered him the wealthy cities of the Veneto, including Verona, on a silver platter. And by the way, the pope now endorsed Maximilian’s imperial title. Not bad for a 28 year old.

Military action started with the battle of Agnadello in May 1509 that ended with a utter defeat of the Venetian army. To ensure the safety of the lagoon, Venice withdrew its entire forces to the defense of their city. The French took one city after another in the Romagna and the Veneto without as much as a cannonball fired. Only Treviso resisted.

As per the league agreement, the pope took his booty, and Maximilian, as usual without any support from the imperial princes showed up late and with insufficient funds or forces. He marched into the cities and lands the French had so kindly conquered for him. What a tremendous victory.

But then the French failed to go the whole hog. They did not attack Venice itself. It seems that Louis realized that wiping out the last meaningful secular Italian power may cause friction amongst his allies. So the Venetians were able to regroup. And other than the states it was fighting, Venice did not rely on the taxes from its mainland possessions. Their wealth came from trade and trade continued. They had enough funds to maintain large armies almost indefinitely. Maximilian did not.

The first of his great acquisitions to be lost was Padova. When Maximilian returned to take it back, the Venetian garrison resisted. Maximilian forces were underpaid as usual and the French who had come to help refused to fight alongside the uncouth Landsknechte. Tensions rose and funds declined. Maximilian had to abandon the siege of Padova.

Meanwhile the League of Cambrai was rapidly falling apart. After all this was an alliance of thieves and there is no honor amongst these kinds of people. Once everyone had their booty, there was no need to stay on. Pope Julius II was the first to take control of his cities, which is why he was also the first to wander off. Ferdinand of Aragon was next. Once he had his places in Puglia, there was no need to keep fighting. Louis XII himself saw no reason to help Maximilian to recover the cities he had already once conquered for him.

One of the reasons Maximilian struggled in the Veneto was the lack of discipline amongst his troops and administrators, which in turn was a function of his lack of funds. He needed to press as much cash out of his acquisitions to pay his soldiers, since these guys would go out raiding and plundering if they remained unpaid. As it happened they raided and plundered anyway and the administrators acted like locusts. Meanwhile the Venetians just waited for the public anger to do their work. Pope Julius told the Italians that Maximilian had brought in 100,000 devils to crucify the country. Spanish observers noted cruelty, greed, lack of funds, order and a collapse of the economy and of course, a complete failure of the imperial princes to lift a finger

By 1510 Maximilian was pushed back to Verona. He launched an attack on Friuli and talked about burning Venice, but nobody believed anything he said any more. The horrors his Landsknechte inflicted went stratospheric. In one incident they burned women and children in a cave near Vicenza. Now the population began to rise up against the Habsburg invaders. Peasant militia joined up with the Venetian armies.

Maximilian’s anger was directed more and more at the pope, Julius II, a man of great taste in art – he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel – but without even a shred of spirituality. The two heads of Christendom were trading insults in public, Maximilian calling Julius a man who deserved to be beaten up for being such a bad example for all of Christendom. Louis XII too had lost patience with Julius II and had come up with a plan to depose him, or at least create a Schism. Why not? Louis called a church council, which was supposed to investigate Julius’ alleged crimes and demanded fundamental reform. Maximilian supported this idea, and once his second wife, Bianca Maria Sforza had died, he took the whole thing to its natural conclusion.

Why not let the schismatic council elect him, emperor Maximilian as pope. This was a serious consideration. Jakob Fugger was already busy calculating the amount of bribes required to pull this off. Maximilian wrote to his daughter that he was prepared to never to see a naked woman again and to walk amongst the saints. According to Maximilian the combination of the two swords in one person would unite Christian europe in the longed for crusade. He always kept going on about crusades and unity, even whilst his troops were committing unspeakable crimes. Most historians had described this plan as lunacy of an overheated mind. The defenders claim that there was some political value to it as it would have weakened the moral authority of the papacy. Yes, such a thing allegedly still existed, even after Alexander Borgia and now Julius II.

Anyway, that did not work. And despite French reluctance to help, Maximilian stuck with Louis XII almost to the bitter end. In 1512 he helped the French in one of the most brutal sackings of the war, that of Brescia. But money had now run out completely.

It was once more Margaret who had to rescue him. She worked tirelessly in keeping a space for him in the next great league, once more a Holy League. Only this time everybody ganged up against the French. And everybody now included the Swiss who had upgraded from supplier of soldiers to power player. Almost as quickly as the French had wiped out the Venetians in 1509, the Holy League now pushed the French out. Milan fell in 1512 and in 1513 a son of Ludovico Sforza, Massimiliano took control of the duchy. The Medici returned to Florence. For a brief moment it looked as if the old Italian power balance from before 1495 was coming back.

In 1513 the Holy League got more aggressive. England, Spain and the Habsburgs lined up for a major attack on the French. Once more Maximilian was dreaming of his grand plan to squash the French and bury Louis XII under the ruins of Blois or Amboise, but again, nothing came of it. Maximilian and Henry VIII, yes the Henry VIII, fought and won a battle at Guinegate against the French, the same place Maximilian had won his very first battle way back in 1479. But the march to Paris was cancelled when the Spanish signed a truce with the French and the Swiss refused to push on.

Louis XII died on January 1, 1515. His successor was his very remote cousin, Francois of Angouleme. Francois was the great, great, great grandson of king Charles V who had died in 1380. In other words, he brought some serious fresh blood. He was tall, almost six feet, broad shouldered, athletic, every inch a renaissance prince. He was cultured and commissioned Chambord, the maddest of French Royal palaces. But above all, he was tremendously ambitious.

That is why he showed up on the borders of the duchy of Milan with an army made up of French cavalry and artillery as well as a large number of Landsknechte, including the Black Band of Guelders. On September 13 and 14, 1515 at a place called Marignano they faced up to the elite of the Swiss mercenaries, 22.000 pikemen with some arquebuses and only a handful artillery pieces. This battle rapidly became a contest between the Swiss and the Landsknechte not just over Milan, but over military reputation. 16 years after the devastating defeats in the Swabian war, this time the Landsknechte triumphed. They had evolved into a force that combined the pressure of the pike squares with firearms and the integration of cavalry and artillery. A shift in military tactics the Swiss had refused to follow. In the end, half  of what had once been Europe’s undisputed elite force lay dead. The next year, Switzerland signed the treaty of Fribourg that established a perpetual peace with France. The Confederacy abandoned its expansionist policies and established their famous neutrality, a stance that had kept them in good stead ever since.

Once more a league formed against France and Maximilian took an army of 14,000 to Milan. Once again, he ran out of money, only that this time it took just two weeks. The exhausted emperor gave up and went home.

His grandson Charles and once again his daughter Margaret negotiated the peace. Francois kept Milan, Venice kept the Veneto, including Verona that Maximilan had lost in 1514. Florence remained under the Medici and the smaller states, Mantua, Ferrara and so forth stabilized. The Papacy gained Parma and Piacenza and assumed effective control of the papal states. But all the Italian states were exhausted, their lands devastated and their political power broken. Even mighty Venice was no longer as strong as it used to be, and was now facing the new, much cheaper competition from Portuguese and Spanish ships trading with the east.

And down south the Spaniards, who were now ruled by Charles V who also held Naples and was going to inherit Austria. The Italian wars weren’t over. They would continue, only now as a fight between just two players, the king of France and the heir to all the Habsburg lands, Charles V.

That is a topic we will return to at a  later stage. Next we will focus on eastern europe and the other consequential marriage that Maximilian organized, that of Charles’ younger siblings, Ferdinand and Mary to the heirs of Hungary and Bohemia. I hope you will join us again.

In the meantime, why don’t you go to my recently revamped website, historyofthegermans.com and join the ranks of the imperial knights, ladies, princes, princesses and electors who, in a 180 degree tilt to actual history have been such generous supporters of your humble podcaster. And that would earn you not only my sincere, heartfelt and eternal gratitude but also a read-out of your name in one of the forthcoming episodes, a right such generous souls as Petra B., Simona H., Herr Muskie, Andreas K., Mads B. Walter H, Ulrich H. and Colin MacD so rightfully deserve