Episode 225 – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495

by History of the Germans Podcast on 12th February 202612th February 2026

Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 225 – Der Ewige Landfrieden (the Public Peace) of 1495.

Let me start today’s episode with some outrageous national stereotypes. If an Englishman is disappointed with the way the affairs of state are conducted, he writes a letter to his member of Parliament. A Frenchman in that same situation rents a tractor and dumps manure outside the Palais d’Elysee. A German threatens to file a lawsuit with the constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht.

Where did the Germans pick up the belief that courts and the law will protect them against government overreach? Sure, 19^th and early 20^th century judges had on occasion stood up to the Kaiser’s administration and the Grundgesetz, the liberal constitution of 1949, had become a cornerstone of our national identity following the comprehensive loss of moral standing.

But there is also a long strain that goes back to the Holy Roman Empire and the two imperial courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat. These courts have a bad reputation, not only because Johan Wolfgang von Goethe saw it fit to ridicule his former place of work. However, not everyone shared this negative perspective. Many social groups down to mere commoners relied on these independent judges to protect their life and property against rapacious princes.

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And with that, back to the show.

I guess you are sitting in your car or on the train listening to this and thinking, how can there be a connection between what you have heard these last 224 episodes about lawlessness and chaos in the Holy Roman Empire and the high status court judgements enjoy in Germany today? I do admit, it is a long shot, but bear with me.

Let’s go back first to the early and high Middle Ages, the Ottonians, Salians and early Hohenstaufen. The emperors of this period saw law and justice as their primary tasks, alongside the protection of the church and the defense of the honor of the empire.

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

But what did they mean by law and justice? There was of course no codified law in existence. The closest thing to a law code was the Sachsenspiegel and its variations. But this was a collection of legal customs compiled by a scholar, Eike von Repgow, not a compilation of binding laws. There were other, competing sources of law, the ancient Frankish law codes, specific local traditions, Canon law, aka the law of the church, precedents in the form of previous imperial judgements and charters, some real, some fake.

Roman Law, specifically the Codex Juris of Justinian was added to this mélange in the mid-12^th century when scholars in Bologna recovered the original text and Barbarossa re-issued it as the laws of Roncaglia (episode 55).

There was obviously no coherence between these various sources of law, not even a widely accepted hierarchy. Attempts were made both on the territorial and imperial level to reconcile all these into one coherent “law of the land”, but it took until 1794 before Prussia passed the first comprehensive law code, the Preußische Allgemeine Landrecht. Austria followed in 1802 and France with the much more modern Code Napoleon in 1804 that was adopted by several German principalities. I.e., for 98% of the time the empire existed, there was no coherent law, not even on a territorial level.

The purpose of Judgements

So, without a coherent set of laws, how did the courts arrive at their judgements, and why did so many people think these courts were a place to get actual justice?

If you read about legal disputes in the papers, the headline is usually X won or Y had lost, framing the lawcourts as a place of epic battles where victory or defeat are determined by the rhetoric flourish of the advocates and the stern application of the law.

But most people who go to court do not give a jot about the law. They want something and all other routes to compel the other side to concede have been exhausted. Going to court is expensive and the outcome uncertain, or as my law professors used to say, in court and on the High seas, you are in the hand of the gods. Which is why about 70% of cases that go to court end in a settlement. If you take into account that most lawyers advise clients to settle out of court, the percentage of disputes resolved without an actual court decision may well be north of 90%. In other words, a legal system that promotes viable settlements gets you 90% the way to law and order.

And that is what the imperial courts of the medieval emperors were aiming for, viable settlement. Only rarely would they lay down the law. And where they did so, these judgements were underwritten not just by the king, but by all the powerful individuals who had been involved in finding this solution, committing them to uphold the judgement.

The objective was not to discover the accurate legal solution, but to find a compromise that allowed both parties to leave the court with their honor intact. Disagreements could be framed as misunderstandings and the abandoning of position could be described as magnanimity. In the early Middle Ages, no other form of dispute resolution was possible. This was a society built on personal reputation. The political system consisted of personal bonds between vassals and lords, not institutions. A vassal followed a lord because the lord had promised to protect his rights and status. That expectation would be damaged irrevocably, if the lord was subjected to a humiliating defeat in court. His followers would then wonder whether this lord was still able to protect their land and possessions? At which point the lord’s only remaining option was to rebel against the “bad king”, resulting in civil war. That is what happened way back in episode 3, when Otto the definitely not yet great, convicted duke Eberhard of Franconia to the humiliation of having to carry dogs. Eberhard rebelled, causing a civil war that nearly wiped out Otto.

Bottom line, a medieval imperial court was a forum to negotiate a compromise, not a place to determine guilt or ascertain property rights.

The territorial courts

That should have got us 80% of the way, was it not for some major logistical challenges. There was usually only one emperor and he could not be everywhere. As it happened, from the 12^th century he was barely anywhere. Moreover, from the 12^th century onwards, the operating radius of the emperors had shrunk to the southern parts of the German lands. Large parts of the duchy of Saxony never saw an emperor again for centuries. So, who was supposed to do all that mediating.

Itinerary of kings and emperors 919-1519

In the Carolingian empire, the counts were given the task of adjudicating as representatives of the emperor. But as the role of count had become hereditary, emperors no longer wanted to be held responsible for the decisions of these counts.

This left a vacuum that was gradually filled by the dukes and then the territorial lords. This situation was formally recognized by Frederick II’s privileges for the bishops and princes in the 1230s. Therin the emperor granted the imperial princes the jurisdiction over all the people in their territories, not just their personal servants and vassals.

Based on this privilege the territorial princes established a system of courts, usually split into the lower jurisdiction that focused on civic disputes and minor crimes and misdemeanors and the Blutgerichtsbarkeit, literally the jurisdiction over the blood, which had the right to condemn people to death and use torture to force confessions.

Court procedural for Lower and Higher Bavaria 1520

Lower jurisdiction was exercised by the mayor of the village or town, usually in conjunction with jurors chosen amongst the senior members of the community. As the territorial principalities became more vertically integrated, they were divided up into districts, called Ӓmter, where a judge and court would be established either hearing cases directly or to hear appeals against the lower level justice. And there could be a further appeal to the princely court or a senior law court.

The higher criminal jurisdiction, the Blutgerichtsbarkeit was usually exercised by the prince, either as a Hofgericht, a princely court where the lord would preside, or as a Landgericht, staffed with professional judges and jurors.

Though the territorial courts often had the means to implement their judgements by force, they did maintain the older tradition of preferring settlements over judgements. That was in part down to the complexity and contradictory nature of the law, but also because such compromises were better at calming down tensions. Rebellions and uprisings were common throughout the 15^th and 16^th centuries and could attract the support of jealous neighbours. So princes preferred calm to the strict application of the law.

Similar structures were established in the cities with a lower magistrates court dealing with civil cases and minor misdemeanours and a higher court meeting out more severe punishments.

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

These territorial and city courts brought about a major improvement in law and justice in particular when staffed with professional judges, who kept records and tried to maintain coherence in the application of the law.

But they did have some weaknesses. Territorial laws and customs varied considerably from one place to the other. Behaviours and business practices that were perfectly acceptable in one place could be severely sanctioned in the next. People who stumbled into these idiosyncrasies might refuse to accept the proposed settlements, leaving the case open or potentially escalating.

That was a particular issue for the cities that traded with each other over long distances. Material differences in laws and customs could hamper this trade. That is why many cities, in particular those newly founded in the east, copied existing city laws, Stadtrechte, from so called mother cities. The laws of Magdeburg, Soest and of course Lubeck were wide spread. And to ensure the practical application of these laws remained in synch, complex cases could be brought to the mother city, making for instance City Council of Lubeck the appellate court for many Hanse cities.

From the Stadtrecht (city law) of Hamburg

Territories increasingly shifted to the use of Roman law and asked universities to opine on complex legal questions. That brought their practices into some at least broad alignment, though differences remained.

Leagues were another co-ordination mechanism acting as a bridge between different status groups. For instance the Swabian Leage maintained its own court system to adjudicate conflict between members which comprised princes, cities and imperial knights. The court could even overturn local magistrates decisions, thereby deepening the integration of their legal frameworks.

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Therefore the empire wasn’t a lawless free for all before 1495, as has often been claimed. The inhabitants of cities and territories were bound by rules, adhered to commercial law practices and were subject to criminal justice, all administered by increasingly professional lawcourts.

But there was a massive gap in this system of the territorial courts. By definition they had no jurisdiction to adjudicate in conflicts between territories, cities or imperial knights. The framework under which these conflicts were supposed to be resolved was the so-called Landfrieden, the public peace.

When the first Landfrieden was promulgated by Henry IV in 1103, it was already a step backwards. His father, Henry III had forced a great pacification of the empire in 1043, that referred all conflicts to resolution by him and a prohibition of violence. But that has in large parts gone down the swanny during the regency of Agnes of Poitou and the conflict between pope and emperor known as the Investiture Controversy that followed.

The concept of a Landfrieden after 1103 was that all the powerful princes come together and promise to resolve their conflicts through mediation. But crucially, it did not and as we have discussed before actually could not ban feuds altogether. Feuds remained allowed, provided the party declared the feud in the proper manner, sought reconciliation first and did not breach specific rules, like for instance, not to attack royal highways.

After this first Landfrieden of 1103, several more were declared, including ones in 1152, 1158,1179,1186,1235, 1287, 1323, 1383, 1389, 1442, 1467. Having to say the same thing again and again is not a good sign.

The success of these declarations of a public peace depended heavily on the ability of the imperial courts to actually mitigate the conflicts before they descended into feuds. You needed a court that was able to come up with sensible settlement proposals and within a reasonable time frame.

And that was not always the case – hence the regular renewals. During the interregnum and then the long period when the imperial title moved between the Habsburgs, Luxemburgs and Wittelsbachs, emperors simply did not have the time to build up the court infrastructure needed. That meant mediation either did not happen, was ill thought out or came too late. Any of those and blood was be spilled. And once they were going at each other hammer and tongs, it was three times harder to get them back to the negotiation table.

In the 15^th century things went properly downhill. Wenceslaus the Lazy, Sigismund and Friedrich III spent most of their time on the eastern edge of the empire dealing with existential threats from Bohemia and Hungary. Adjudication often stalled completely.

As the 15^th century continued this gaping hole in the legal system gave room to veritable chaos. Princely warfare became more intense with the development of artillery and the growing size of the armies. Imperial knights whose income from tenants had shrunk following the Black Death, made up for it by conducting feuds on behalf of paying patrons. Even villages resorted to feuds in order to protect their hard won freedoms.

With no mediation process in place, let alone any kind of sanction for breaking the rules of feuding, things went seriously out of control, so seriously that even the imperial princes demanded an end to the madness.

On the positive side, the idea that violence needed to be a legitimate part of the negotiation process had lost credibility.

The right to feud against a “bad” overlord or an unjustified claim from a neighbour was rooted in the concept of vassalage. As mentioned before, a Lord had to keep face if he wanted to hold on to the support of his vassals. And that meant he had the right to rebel if disrespected. If you check out Otto von Northeim’s speech in episode 31 and 100, you can see the line or arguments that justified rebellion. But by the 15^th century, feuding was no longer necessary. The power of the territorial princes no longer rested on the oaths of their vassals, but on the institutions, administration and military forces they had established. They could now sustain a negative judgement without losing their status.

That is why in 1467 Friedrich III could issue his Landfrieden that banned all feuding outright as lèse-majesté. That was a major step forward, though this arrangement still remained time limited to 10 years. And it lacked an enforcement mechanism, since the Reichskammergericht he had tasked with providing mediation and – if necessary – order the execution of its judgements, ceased to operate after 1475.

The 1495 Landfrieden brought this sorry saga to an end. It declared that (quote):

“..from this moment on, no person of whatever rank, status, or condition shall make war on others, or rob, declare feud with, invade, or besiege them, or help anyone else to do so in person or through servitors; or violently occupy any castle, town, market, fortress, village, farmstead, or hamlet, or seize them illegally against another’s will, or damage them with fire or in any other way, or assist by word or deed or in any other way support or supply any perpetrators of such deeds, or knowingly harbor, house, feed, or give drink, aid, and comfort to such persons.” (end quote).

The Ewige Landfrieden banned private warfare under all and any circumstances and for ever. It established the state’s monopoly of violence. This, once enforced became another nail in the coffin of the Middle Ages.

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

But as Friedrich III could tell you, the operative word here is “once enforced”. Even if everybody would have been happy to outlaw feuds for ever, and not everybody did, that would not have yielded results. Conflicts between the holders of imperial immediacy did not vanish overnight. The dukes still wanted the cities, the landgraves the bishops’ lands, princes still debased currencies and imperial knights kidnapped merchants.

What made the difference was the establishment of two courts, the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat and another coordination mechanism, the Kreise, the imperial circles.

The Reichskammergericht in its latest incarnation was established at the diet of Worms in August 1495, its judges were appointed on October 31^st and it heard its first cases four days later, a sign that at least occasionally, the empire could move swiftly.

The reason it did work, and worked for so long, came down to a number of institutional choices.

As I do not have to explain to our American friends, the composition of the court is almost as important as its remit and procedures.

In case of the Reichskammergericht, the presiding judge, the Kammerrichter, was appointed by the emperor, whilst the judges who shared the decision making, were proposed by the imperial estates. The imperial estates submitted a list from which the incumbent judges chose the new member of the court. The judges, including the presiding judge, swore allegiance to the court, not to the emperor and not to the imperial estates.

Though these appointments did have some influence, in practice, the Reichskammergericht acted independently from the emperor and the imperial princes. It had its own budget, its own administration and chancellery.

The Reichskammergericht was also based away from the Habsburg’s capital, first as an itinerant court, then from 1527 until 1689 in Speyer and after that in Wetzlar.

The Reichskammergericht Building in Wetzlar

This degree of independence set it apart from the territorial court that aligned much closer to the increasingly absolutist territorial princes.

Its remit was to adjudicate disputes between the imperial estates and other holders of imperial immediacy and banning anyone who broke the public peace for any reason. And, beyond this role as protector of the public peace, it also acted as the final appellate court above the territorial courts. This latter role was however unevenly distributed across the empire, since the Prince Electors, all the Habsburg lands and several other senior lords had the “ius de non appellando”, a privilege that protected their judgments from being reviewed by the Reichskammergericht. Over time the court was able to chip away at these exemptions, before it gained a much wider remit in 1526, which we will discuss in a minute.

Two years after the Reichstag established the new Reichskammergericht, Maximilian established another court, the Reichshofrat. The Reichhofrat was very much the court of the emperor, as opposed to the Reichskammergericht that was the court of the empire. Its judges were appointed by the emperor and it was based wherever the emperor resided. Its remit was conflicts over the rights and obligations of vassals. In practice this involved mostly matters of inheritance. Typical issues were the succession to fiefs where the incumbent family had died out or the permission to split a fief between multiple heirs.

The two courts did have quite a bit of overlap, since inheritance conflicts could easily tip over into breaches of the public peace. To limit forum shopping, the courts agreed a rule that no case could be brought if it was already pending in front of the other court.

The other Achilles heel of previous Landfrieden arrangements, beyond courts simply shutting down, had been the lack of viable enforcement mechanisms. The way the 1495 reforms addressed that, was by allowing the Reichskammergericht to demand the Reichstag to issue an imperial ban to coerce a reluctant party to adhere to its rulings. That was deemed too slow and complicated and from 1559 the emperor was tasked with issuing the ban on behalf of the Reichskammergericht. The Reichshofrat, as the court of the emperor could issue the imperial ban directly, though there were some limitation to prevent abuse.

Imperial ban was however very sparsely used as a tool. The sanctions associated with it were often going too far. It allowed anyone to kill the banned person without repercussions and his property and fiefs could be confiscated without compensation. The execution of an imperial ban threatened to unsettle the social order, creating a high bar to its application.

The Reichskammergericht – like the medieval imperial courts before – preferred finding viable compromises, rather than bringing down the full force of the law. Where they needed execution, they relied more on the imperial circles. These circles had been instituted in 1512 as a means to co-ordinate on a regional basis. There were initially six circles and later 10, comprising the entire empire except for Bohemia and Switzerland. The Kreise became the closest thing the empire developed in terms of administration. They organised the military forces of the empire, collected the taxes based on the Matrikel system, executed imperial and court orders and maintained the peace in their region. They were headed by a Kreistag, an assembly of the Kreis members. It is here in the Kreistag, where the smaller estates of the empire, the cities, counts and minor princes were engaged. That is where they passed legislation, co-ordinated infrastructure projects and settled their differences. Thanks to the imperial circles, the empire was a lot more coherent in its actions and laws than these maps with 350 tiny statelets suggest. They were so successful that older leagues, like the Swabian league, were ultimately replaced by these imperial circles.

One would assume that the Reichskammergericht would be more popular for claimants than the Reichshofrat. The ofrmer was independent, whilst the other was under the direct control of the emperor. However, the Reichskammergericht found itself often overwhelmed with cases, making its proceedings slow and protracted. Some of the numbers, in particular Goethe’s claim of 10s of thousands of open cases were clearly exaggerated. Sure, there were cases that had been ongoing for a century. But these were often inheritance cases where the purpose was to settle the matter in an amicable way to prevent open hostilities, a scenario where delay can be the prudent choice. The Reichskammergericht regularly cleared its backlog suggesting it could not have been all that bad.

And, if necessary the Reichskammergericht could act very quickly. For instance Commissioners could be sent with injunctions to mobilise the military forces of the Kreise to prevent breaches of the peace.

Nevertheless, the Reichshofrat had a reputation to be quicker and sometimes more effective since its enforcement could rely on the full force of the Habsburg emperor. Moreover, despite its institutional attachment, the Reichshofrat gained a reputation as a defender of smaller imperial vassals against expanding territorial princes.

The court procedures and the witch craze

Both Reichskammergericht and Reichshofrat conducted their cases mainly in writing. Lawyers submitted writs and memoranda summarising their arguments. Before 1495 the courts operated in the fashion of an Anglo-Saxon court, basing its decision only on evidence brought forward by the parties. The Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat procedure allowed the courts to task officials with the collection of evidence, including taking witness statements.

This more inquisitive process spread across the legal system of the empire to the territorial courts, which had some painful unintended consequences.

The imperial criminal code of 1532 shifted the responsibility to prove guilt from the accuser to a public prosecutor. Previously an accuser had to bring the evidence for the alleged crime and if he failed to prove his allegation could face severe financial and even criminal recriminations. Once this task has been taken over by a public prosecutor it became a lot less risky and less expensive to report crimes. So far so sensible. The more crimes get reported, the more likely it is that they get prosecuted.

What turned it into a toxic cocktail was the rise in allegations of witchcraft. Witchcraft was a crime and prosecutors were compelled to investigate them. Torture was a broadly acceptable tool in the investigative process. Plus the criminal codes of the time contained scarce protection against arbitrary arrest. One can imagine what then happened. Investigators torture alleged witches who bring up names who in turn get tortured as well, leading to even more arrests until the whole empire is in the grip of a veritable witch craze. Over the course of the 16^th and early 17^th century territorial courts had 22,500 alleged witches executed.

Map of Convictions of Witches in Bavaria

Neither the Reichskammergericht nor the Reichshofrat had tools to intervene, since criminal law, the “jurisdiction of the blood” had become the exclusive prerogative of the territorial princes. The only grounds for intervention was a breach of procedural rules, which curbed some excesses, but failed to prevent the ultimate outcome. A very sad topic we will probably have to get back to at some stage.

The broader remit after 1526

Against this darkness stands a more positive and more lasting impact of the system of imperial justice. In 1526 the remit of the Reichskammergericht was expanded. It allowed ordinary citizens to challenge their prince if he or she overstepped his legitimate powers, for instance unlawful exactions, arbitrary violence or the violation of traditional rights and protections.

This is a fairly rare institutional set-up in continental europe before the 19^th century. By submitting themselves to the court’s verdicts, the princes gave up a big chunk of their autonomy. For instance the duke of Hohenzollern-Hechingen had to return the hunting guns he had taken off his peasants and reverse enclosures. A count found himself imprisoned for 10 years for having forged his subjects signatures on loan agreements. Duke Karl Leopold of Mecklenburg was deposed for putting excessive taxes on his subjects and trying to suppress his ducal assembly.

Why did German princes accept that? The decision came in the immediate aftermath of the peasant’s revolt of 1525, the largest uprising in Europe before the French revolution. It had become clear to the imperial estates, in particular the smaller ones, that they needed a way to ease social tensions. Populations who know that there is a way to seek legal redress for perceived infringements are less likely to risk life, limb and property on the barricades. It did not work perfectly and there were several rebellions and uprisings in the 17^th and 18^th century. But they were limited in sale and severity, compared to similar occurrences in Bohemia and Hungary where there was no room for redress.

Here is what Peter Wilson said about the consequences: quote: This process had been labelled ‘juridification’ and involved a fundamental change in behaviour at all social levels. Lords had previously used violence to assert authority and status. Feuding had been criminalised in 1495 and now repression was likely to be condemned in the courts”. The courts provided a platform for princes, burghers, peasants even the Jewish minority to hash out their differences based on the understanding that each side could call on certain rights and protections.

Other than in France, common people in the empire did not feel utterly powerless before the institutions of their princes or the emperors. Sure, a court case was hard to mount and ruinously expensive, but it was possible and it had a chance of success.

That in part explains the lack of enthusiasm for the French revolution amongst the broader population in Germany. Like in Britain, Germans were quickly turned off by the excesses of Jacobin rule and they simply did not see themselves being as oppressed by their governments as the French. That did change once the empire and its legal safeguards against princely overreach had gone, but it was there in 1789.

The other lasting impact was that calling a court for help became the Germans’ reflexive reaction to injustice. Germans, or at least Germans of my generation, see their country first and foremost as a Rechtsstaat, a state under the law.

Let me end with a quote I found in Peter Wilson, by a Habsburg Official, Joseph Haas bemoaning the dissolution of the Reichskammergericht and the Reichshofrat in 1806 (quote):

“The judicial power [which] was until now the shining jewel of our constitution. Two Imperial Courts, whose councillors were appointed with great care and were free of external influence, competed with each other in the impartial administration of justice, and gave even the lowest subject right against the most powerful prince”. Now that these are dissolved, he goes on to say: “there is no doubt that canals will be dug, roads laid, avenues and parks, theatres and pools created, cities illuminated, and we will shine and starve. The only robbers threatening the subjects’ property will be the tax collector and the French and German Soldiers” (end quote).

And this brings our mini series about the Imperial reform of 1495 to its conclusion. Next week I will be away in Naples because I cannot bear the incessant rain here in London any longer. But I leave you a particular present. I did an interview with professor Duncan Hardy who I have mentioned several times before and who is a true expert in the empire of the 15^th and 16^th century. I am sure you will find that as enlightening as I did.

And in the meantime, spare a thought for your hard toiling podcaster, who has no Reichskammergericht to call upon for fair wages, but lives in hope of the generosity of his fellow history nerds. If you want to be part of the exclusive club that luxuriates in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and click on any one of the options.

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Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire

by History of the Germans Podcast on 5th February 202611th February 2026

Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 224 – The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire

I am afraid today’s episode is not your usual swordplay and skullduggery. What we are looking at today is the Reichstag as it operated throughout the Holy Roman Empire from 1495 to 1803. Sounds a bit like dour constitutional law, but bear with me.

We will look at a couple of classic tropes, like, whether the empire consisted of more than 300 sovereign states who could do whatever they wanted, whether the Reichstag was a talking shop hat never did anything except stopping the emperor from becoming a proper monarch. And, as usual, we will talk about money and printing, and why German politician speeches are invariably long on fact and short on rhetoric.

So, let’s start at the beginning. When was the first Reichstag?

The shift from Royal Assembly (Hoftag) to Imperial diet (Reichstag)

Oh – and that is already the first booby trap. Because if you go to the historyofthegermans.com website, not just to support the show, but also to consult the transcript, you can find me mentioning a Reichstag in Worms in 1069. And if you go to the internet, you can find another Diet of Worms in 770, that was so long ago, it was called by Charlemagne’s father, Pippin the Short.

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But these aren’t real Reichstage. Why? Is it because the chroniclers in the 11^th century called them something different? No, there were several gatherings that were referred to as Diata Imperialii, which is Latin for Reichstag. What happened is that in the 1980s some German historians met up and decided that all Imperial assemblies that took place before 1495 were Hoftage, “Royal Assemblies”, and that those that came after Maximilian’s Imperial Reforms were to be called Reichstage, “Imperial Diets”.

Was that just down to the uncontrollable urge to categorize everything from the size of sheets of paper to the 20+ categories of delays on the Deutsche Bahn trains. Or does it mean something?

The key difference between a Hoftag and a Reichstag is the role of the king or emperor in the proceedings.

A Hoftag in the Middle Ages was all about the emperor. He called the meeting, he presided over the proceedings. If there were decisions to be made, like for instance the resolution of a dispute or the conviction of a criminal, it was the emperor who chaired the panel of judges. Princes who were dissatisfied with how things went made their views known by leaving the Hoftag. Speaking out against the emperor was not really an option.

Moritz von Schwind: Der Hoftag Ottos des Großen in Quedlinburg 973, um 1850

At the diet of Worms in 1495, things were dramatically different. As we heard last week Maximilian wasn’t allowed to take part in any of the debates. His role was limited to opening the assembly, setting the agenda and – once the imperial estates had concluded their debates – either approve or reject the proposals. So, during the weeks and months the debates were going on within the three colleges, of the electors, the princes and the cities, he was basically hopping up and down outside the locked doors shouting, give me the money, the French king is about to slip back out of Italy and it will take fifty years of war to get rid of him again.

But he could not be heard, because he was – outside. All he could really do was gently massage the minds of participants in 1 on 1 private meetings.

In short, both the Hoftag and the Reichstag are gatherings of the most powerful people of the realm, but the Hoftag is presided over by the king, whilst the Reichstag largely excludes the king form the deliberations. This idea of banning the king except for special occasions still exists in the UK. By constitutional convention king Charles III is not allowed to enter the Commons debating chamber. The last king to set foot in there had been Charles I in 1642. And that is why the State Opening of Parliament takes place in the House of Lords, where the king is allowed to enter.

The diet in Worms was however not the first time the imperial estates got together without their king. Sometimes that was due to natural causes, as in when the king or emperor had died and the estates came together to elect a new one. But there had also been assemblies like the one in Trebur in 1076, where the excommunicated emperor Henry IV was banned from taking part (episode 33 if I am not mistaken). And then there are the assemblies where antikings were elected, like the one in March 1077, where for obvious reasons the reigning king wasn’t present.

During the 15^th century, when the emperors Sigismund and Friedrich III were often far too busy to come to the assemblies they had called, the imperial estates had become accustomed to discussing their issues by themselves, so accustomed indeed that they no longer wanted him to be in the room when he finally showed up.

I did try to pin down the exact date when they threw the emperor out, but have not got to the bottom of it. What we do know is that in 1495, the rule was “No kings, no emperors indoors”.

And this obviously changed the nature of these gatherings. Earlier assemblies were grounded in the medieval understanding that vassals owed their lord not just military aid, but also advice and good counsel. Hence they were meant to improve the ruler’s decision making in war and justice by providing information or suggestions, not by forcing him in one way or another.

As we move into the 14^th and 15^th century, these assemblies take a more antagonistic stance, demanding that the emperor resolves key issues, like the schism, the endless feuding, marauding mercenaries or foreign incursions. As we have seen, these antagonistic stances culminated in the blow-up of 1495, where the imperial estates tried to put a gun to Maximilian’s head.

So, there really is a change in the late 15^th century that justifies the distinction between Hoftag and Reichstag, but I will not go and correct every episode where I used the term Reichstag before. If this was a book, I would probably do it, but it isn’t and I won’t.

The peculiar composition of the Reichstag

In 1495 the Reichstag was by no means the only assembly that took part in the governance of kingdoms and principalities. The English parliament had already been around for 200plus years, the Polish Sejm and the Cortes of Spain and Portugal claim to be even older. There were assemblies in Hungary, Estates general in the duchy of Burgundy and France, royal councils in Denmark and Sweden. And on the level below, the imperial principalities, there were assemblies, Landstände, where representatives of the local nobility, clergy, cities and commoners agreed their position vis-a-vis their lord. The Landtag of Württemberg was one of the most prominent and lasting of these, but we encountered them as well in Austria and Tyrol in recent episodes. Almost every political entity in the 15^th and 16^th century had some sort of representative body alongside its ruler. They all different in terms of member selection, organisation, procedure etc, but even then, the Reichstag was very much an outlier.

Blick auf die württembergischen Landtagsgebäude in der Stuttgarter Kronprinzstraße im 19. Jahrhundert. Links an der Ecke zur Kienestraße stand das Gebäude der Ersten Kammer (Kammer der Standesherren), ganz rechts das Gebäude der Zweiten Kammer (Kammer der Abgeordneten) mit dem Halbmondsaal.

Let’s start with the composition – who is a member of the Reichstag and why?

In England parliament had the lords and the commoners, the Cortes in Spain were organized into clergy, nobles and procurators of the cities. In France, the Estates General comprised the three orders of clergy, nobility and commoners. All of these were meant to represent their social group in their dealings with the king.

In 1521, when membership of the Reichstag was initially fixed, there were 402 estates invited to participate , divided into three colleges. The most senior college was that of the 7 electors. The College of the princes comprised 51 ecclesiastical princes, 32 secular princes, 83 prelates and 143 counts. And lastly the 86 free imperial cities formed the third college.

Reichstag in Worms 1521 (the one with Martin Luther)

But, not every count, duke or prince was admitted to the Reichstag. Only if your great,great,great,great,great and some more greats grandfather had been enfeoffed with a county or duchy directly by the emperor, then you had a seat or share of a seat in the Reichstag. However, if you were a wealthy count, even if you were three times richer and three times more powerful than the wealthiest count in the Reichstag, but you were a vassal of a territorial prince, no dice. Equally only free imperial cities were admitted, even though many were smaller than say Stralsund or Rostock. The key difference to England, France and almost everywhere else is that the Reichstag was not based on social orders, like noble, churchman or commoner, but based on whether or not there was a direct vassalage connection to the emperor – the famous immediacy.

Basically the Reichstag reflected and continued the feudal status hierarchy which was already ancient history by 1495. The idea was that the obligation of the imperial vassals to provide advice and council to the king, was flipped into a right to take part in the decision making. And this right was not based on being a member of a particular social group like noble, clergy or commoner, but on the ancient bond of vassalage, established hundreds of years ago and renewed dozens of times since. That explains the presence of the free imperial cities. They too had become vassals of the emperor when he had granted them their charter. They were there not to represent the interests of the urban population of the empire, but to safeguard the interest and liberties of their hometowns.

The Quaternion Eagle, hand-coloured woodcut (c. 1510) by Hans Burgkmair.

If one were to take this logic to its conclusion the imperial knights who were direct vassals of the emperor should have been invited to vote in the Reichstag. But logic is apparently only for those who can afford it.

The historian Peter Wilson describes this unusual structure of the empire as a “mixed Monarchy”. If you really want to understand how the Holy Roman Empire worked, get his brilliant book alternatively called “The Heart of Europe” or “The Holy Roman Empire”. This is where most of what I am taking about today comes from.

What was the Reichstag and all these other assemblies for?

Now, having discussed the intellectual Uberbau of the Reichstag as a continuation of the feudal structure in a modernized form, let’s talk about the practical purpose of these assemblies and the Reichstag in particular.

These early modern assemblies were not meant as a representation of the will of the people or some such newfangled stuff. They served two basic purposes, one was to grant a special status to the important constituents of the realm, usually the bishops, dukes, counts, nobles etc. That was supposed to keep them engaged and aligned with the king or prince. The assembly was a place to find consensus amongst the people who really mattered.

Secondly, assemblies and parliaments were there to facilitate tax collection. Most kings and princes did not have their own tax collection infrastructure. That meant they were to a large extent dependent on the willingness of their subjects to cough up the cash. Such willingness is typically correlated to the amount of influence the payer has over the use of the funds, or for our American friends, no taxation without representation. Hence most of the early modern estates included some form of representation of those who ended up paying. And in many cases the estates established and maintained the tax collection infrastructure, thereby ensuring the fairness or sometimes unfairness of the process.

That is why most of these assemblies had a separate chamber or order for the commoners who bore the lion’s share of the tax burden created by the lord’s decision to support the king’s wars, palace building or mistresses.

If you look at the parliament In England and the estates general in France you can see a fairly clean picture – the nobles and clergy debate the grand politics and then the funding is put t the Commons or Tiers Etat. And you can see how this pattern then developed further, either organically as in England or as a rupture in France. The taxpaying Commons and Tiers Etat demanded more and more say in the big decisions and then power shifts to these precursors of modern parliaments.

Why the Reichstag could not become the nucleus of a democratic parliament

The Reichstag did not experience such a trajectory. It started in 1495, ran until 1803 and was revived in a fundamentally different form in 1866/1871.

The stability of the membership

Part of why the Reichstag never became a true representative structure was the fixed membership. In England the king can and always could appoint literally anyone to the house of Lords, like for instance a 29-year old parliamentary aide with no publicly known skills or achievements.

In the empire, that was not that easy. For example the Liechtensteins, who had for centuries been amongst the largest landowners in Bohemia, Moravia and Austria were elevated to imperial princes during the 30-years war. But it took them almost another century before they could purchase the tiny fiefs of Vaduz and Schellenberg that gave them access to the Reichstag and are today the country of Liechtenstein.

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor receives the Augsburg Confession at the Diet of Augsburg on 25 June 1530

Effectively the membership of the Reichstag shrunk throughout most its history. In 1521, the initial tally was 402 imperial estates and by 1792 that had gone down to 204 imperial estates. If you forget about the back and forth with the Palatine vote, only one Elector was added before 1803, the Elector of Hannover. The secular princes went from 51 to 84, in part through the elevation of counts to princes. 21 of the 51 ecclesiastical principalities disappeared during the reformation. Imperial cities shrank from 86 to 51 and the number of counts fell from 143 to 48 through expiry of the family, sale or elevation to princely rank. Only about fifty new members were created throughout that period.

Stability in the upper house is neither unusual nor an impediment to a transition to a modern parliament. In England the House of Lords was slowly sidelined and in France the Assemblée Nationale did away with the colleges of the nobles and their heads. It is the representation of the commoners that tended to be the nucleus of democracy.

The lopsided structure of the taxation model

As we said, the reason that commoners are invited to assemblies is because they pay the lion’s share of the taxes. And matters of burden sharing and taxation gave parliament and the Assemblee Nationale their role in the English and the French Revolution.

The Reichstag could never play such a role, because the Reichstag did not decide on individual taxation. In 1495 the Reichstag approved the “common penny” a tax levied on every household in the empire. That system failed, mainly because the empire could not collect the tax. The princes had refused to let the emperor use their infrastructure to the extent they had one in the first place. Collection was then given to the parish priests. And parish priests had no interest in chasing their flock for some imperial tax they would not see any benefit from.

After this failure the empire reverted back to the system of the Imperial register or Imperial Matrikel that existed since 1420. This register contained a fixed quota of soldiers each imperial estate had to provide if called. So for instance the duke of Cleves owed 60 horse and 540 men on foot, whilst the abbot of St. Maximian owed 6 horse and 44 men on foot. Such small contingents had become ineffective by the 1500s, so the obligation was converted into a cash contribution.

Soldiers on horse (Ross) and on foot (xu Fuss) in the Reichsmatrikel of 1532.

This system had a number of advantages. First, it allowed to break down the overall commitment made to the imperial estates. So if the Reichstag awarded 100,000 florins for a campaign against the Turk, it was clear to the last penny how much of that the duke of Cleves or the abbot of St. Maximian owed. It also allowed the wealthiest estates, namely the great cities to hide how wealthy they really were. If taxes had been collected directly, for one it would be hard to predict how much would actually be collected, and it would show how many taxable households there were in say Nürnberg. And if the neighboring princes had known how much wealth there was, the cities feared, they would be gobbled up.

On the downside, the Matrikel system was a) very imbalanced, with some places paying high dues relative to economic capacity and others low ones and b) only very rarely reset. So the matrikel became a sort of unit of measure. For instance during the long Turkish war 1663 to 1742, the Reichstag would regularly express their commitment as x times the matrikel, i.e., x times their commitment in the imperial register.

All this meant was that the level of taxation agreed in the Reichstag had limited impact on the man on the street. Sure, if the empire demanded very high contributions, their local lord would raise local taxes to pay for it. However, when the emperor asked for lower or no taxes, the local lord was unlikely to reduce the tax burden. He would simply keep it for him or herself. Moreover, maximum 10% of the empire’s population lived in the free imperial cities represented in the Reichstag. Even if these estates had an interest in keeping taxes low for the common man, they did not care for the other 90% of the empire’s population. And because the composition of the Reichstag was extremely static, that never changed.

The Reichstag as part of the “Status Hierarchy”

So, if the Reichstag was not about representing the interests of social groups, not even in the rather rudimentary early modern/medieval way, what was it about?

In the main, it was a about status. The empire was held together by the status hierarchy it conveyed to its members. Say you were a Prince Elector, the highest princely rank in the empire with the right to elect the emperor. This status can only exist as long as there is an empire and an emperor to elect. Therefore, even once the elections had become non-contentious acclamation of whichever Habsburg’s turn it was, there were still elections, so that the electors could feel valued and important. You may think how backward, but I find this a lot less ridiculous than the French aristocrats believing their self-worth was dependent on which part of the royal underwear they could pass to his majesty during their morning levee.

The election of Matthias as Roman-German Emperor by the prince electors in 1612 depicted on a contemporary engraving

This status model was extremely successful, arguably more successful than anything the emperors had tried in the centuries before.

You may painfully remember that we split the History of the Germans some two years ago and discussed the North, namely the Eastern Expansion into the formerly Slavic lands east of the Elbe, the Hanseatic League and the Teutonic Knights. The reason for that was that the empire had broken into two parts, the lands near to the king and the lands far from the king.

The former were mainly southern Germany, Austria, Bohemia and the Rhine Valley, lands where the kings and emperors had their base, where they would often pass through on their way to coronations, elections and imperial diets. Meanwhile the lands north of the Main River and East of the Rhine had drifted further and further away from the imperial orbit. Martin Rady commented that the very first time an emperor came to Pomerania was in 1712, and that was the emperor of all the Russians.

Basically the dukes of Mecklenburg, Holstein, Oldenburg, Brunswick, Calenberg etc. barely featured in the imperial history since the 11^th century and even the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg put in only brief appearances. Basically they did not see much value in what the empire had to offer and they got busy with the Scandinavian Kingdoms, England and Poland.

The imperial reforms of 1495 changed that. Being an imperial prince with a full vote in the college of Princes provided them with a sense of importance and status that suddenly made it worth while getting involved with imperial politics again. Status was not the only thing, the other institutions, like the courts, the eternal peace etc., played a role as well.

But this was a time where status was exceedingly important. Princes were constantly stretching themselves and their states to keep up with the Joneses’. If your neighbor built a theatre, you needed one too. Your collection of Chinese porcelain had to be on par with the other princes. At weddings and hunts, you had to scrub up not just nicely but real nice. The obsession filled the country with literally thousands of baroque palaces, gardens, follies, hunting lodges, opera houses and whatever a discerning prince could need. Each one trying to be a mini or sometimes maxi Versailles and always, always, bigger and better than the one next door.

Apart from self-aggrandization, the status component did also have tangible benefits for those who had it. Basically once an entity had become an imperial estate, it had become unlikely that they would fall under the control of a territorial prince. For instance, not a single free imperial city lost their status after 1607. And that mattered.

Take the city of Trier is an example. Trier had sent its archbishop off to live out his life in Koblenz and had become a free city. As a free city, they were invited to come to the Reichstag in 1495 and several occasions thereafter. They even hosted a Reichstag in 1512. But most of the time, Trier did not show up and, crucially, refused to commit to the imperial taxation system. So the city was unceremoniously dropped from the 1521 register. When they realized what they had done, they desperately wanted to get back in and crucially, be again recognized as a free, imperial city. But the Imperial court, the Reichskammergericht decided in 1580 that, if you did not pay, you had no right to play. And now it was too late to come back in. The Archbishop took back control of the city and the dream of freedom and independence was over, sacrificed by a stingy accountant.

That explains why the much wiser burghers of Lübeck, who had had only scant interaction with the empire until then, decided to pay 4x what they used to in order to be a member of the Reichstag. Lübeck remained a free imperial city and and later a city state within Germany until 1937. Money well spent I would say.

The Decision making process in the Reichstag

Decision making in the Reichstag was famously laborious and slow. Jakb Wimpfeling said already in 1500 that “The Reichstag is a body where the Emperor proposes, the colleges deliberate in secret, vote separately, then quarrel endlessly until nothing is decided—or everything is diluted to meaninglessness.” Regensburg, where the Reichstag would sit permanently after 1663 was better known for the quality of its taverns than of its debates.

As we discussed last week, there were three separate colleges, one for the electors, one for the imperial princes as well as the counts and prelates and one for the imperial cities. Voting happened first within the colleges followed by an arbitration process between the colleges. That arbitration process began with aligning electors and princes before the cities were brought in. Only once all three colleges had reached unanimity did the Reichstag decision go to the emperor who had only the choice between accepting or sending it back to be debated for another month or two.

That sounds complex already, and when you take into account that there were 402 imperial estates with a seat in the Reichstag, it sounds almost impossible to manage.

But here is the good news, only 281 of the 402 imperial estates ever participated in a Reichstag. Usually no more that half of the invitees showed up. Even at the crucial Reichstag of 1495 only 147 estates were present.

And there is the other important point. Because the seat was linked to the territory, not to individuals, one single individual could represent more than one vote. So, if a bishop held several bishoprics, he had multiple votes. Or if a count sold his county, or passed it on via inheritance, this vote could now be exercised by someone else. After the reformation, several bishoprics became principalities and integrated into other territorial lordships. And occasionally fiefs moved across as a consequence of war.

So, after all this two and fro in 1792 Austria held 1 electoral vote, 3 princely votes and 2 comital votes. Prussia, though smaller in territory, had 1 electoral, but 8 princely and 1 comital vote. Of the remaining 84 princely votes, 30 were held by bishops and abbots, the rest by 35 secular princes and electors plus Denmark and Sweden with one vote each.

The smaller entities did not really matter. The 48 counts and 40 prelates shared just 6 votes of the 90 votes in the College of Princes. The 51 remaining cities were so disadvantaged by the voting process, their influence was also usually marginal.

If you then take into account that many of the ecclesiastical princes were second sons of the princely or electoral houses, the Reichstag really required only about 40 to 50 individuals to agree. And since rarely more than half of them showed up, we are looking at more like 20-30 guys taking the decisions. That sounds a lot more viable than 402.

Were there really over 300 sovereign states in the empire?

Basically these hundreds tiny statelets did not carry much weight in the Reichstag. And the idea that they were like independent sovereigns is also not true. Sure, the very largest ones, Austria, Prussia, Saxony, Hannover would forge their own foreign policy and sent envoys to foreign courts, occasionally courts where they were themselves the king, as for example in England, Poland, Denmark, Russia and Sweden.

But for someone like the counts of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim with their six villages and oversized Schloss, there was no way they would send an envoy abroad. At a stretch they may appoint a representatives to the Reichstag, but usually only as a joint effort together with their cousins in Neuenstein and Öhringen and still their representative was not be working exclusively for them. If they had to take a stance in major conflicts, they usually aligned with one of their bigger neighbors.

Such micro-principalities were much more involved in the 10 imperial circles which we will discuss in more detail next week.

What powers did the Reichstag have?

The English parliament and many other assemblies had the power to decide on war and peace, since they controlled the money needed to conduct such wars.

On paper that was the same in the Reichstag. If the emperor wanted to take the empire to war against for example France, he could only do that with the consent of the Reichstag. However, every imperial estate, even a tiny one, was allowed to go to war against foreign enemies, provided it did not harm neither the emperor nor the empire. For example in 1698 the elector of Saxony joined Russia in a war against Sweden without asking the Reichstag. And that logic applied to the emperor as well. He could go to war against France in his capacity as Lord of the Low Countries and archduke of Austria.

The emperor only required the Reichstag consent for his war with France, if he wanted access to imperial resources, either in the form of taxes or military forces. As we have seen with Maximilian I in 1495, that can occasionally be decisive, but not always. And if they could conduct the war using just their own resources, the Habsburg occasionally did go without Reichstag approval. I guess in about 2 years, when we have worked our way through the incessant wars of the 16^th, 17^th and 18h century, we will have a much better perspective on whether the Reichstag and its support mattered to the outcome.

Reichstag matters beyond war and peace

War and taxes was however not the only topic of debate in the Reichstag. Its other tacit objective as to improve co-ordination and coherence across the empire.

The Reichstag for instance ensured that people could move freely between the imperial estates. The problem then was not so much people trying to come in, rather than people trying to get away, for example from the draft into the Prussian army, religious prosecution or just general economic malaise. Quite often the states competed for immigrants, like the French Huguenots in order to refill the population depleted by war and disease. The Reichstag ensured that most people in the empire could take advantage of these sometimes generous offers.

Another issue that came up regularly was coinage. For centuries the emperors had been forced to pass the imperial regalia to the princes, which included the right to mint their own coins. So that by 1495 there were 456 places with the right to produce currency. Minting was a short term money spinner for many cash strapped princes, because they could call in the existing coins in their lands and reissue coin with lower gold or silver content. Or they would simply create vast amounts of debased coins to pay their soldiers, resulting in immediate inflation and occasionally a financial crash.

The Reichstag passed rules limiting the number of mints to no more than 40, set standards for the two most common coins, the Florin and the Thaler and intervened again and again in cases of debasement. They did not succeed completely and there were always wildly different coins in circulation, but they curbed the worst excesses. And maybe one central currency in the hand of an absolutist king would not have been such a great idea – just ask the French about the Mississippi bubble.

Similar efforts were made to reduce the number of toll stations that seriously hampered trade. For instance transporting salt from Frankfurt to Cologne added 60% in tolls. As a consequence merchants would unload wine south of Mainz and transport them over land via Frankfurt and Kassel and then on the Weser down to the North Sea. An absurd detour. Here the Reichstag was less successful, but note that in 1766 France still employed 20,000 revenue officers collecting tolls on domestic traffic and treated Lorraine as a foreign country.

Another – unintended – benefit of the Reichstag was that it provided a sort of permanent international conference. The Habsburgs had of course a permanent presence, as did the kings of Denmark and Sweden. Envoys from France and Italy could easily come to the Reichstag and use it as a platform for informal discussions.

The Bureaucracy

Something else that is quite specific to the Reichstag was the amount of paper it produced. For one, most Reichstag decisions were published in print, the first one in 1486. The Corpus Recessum Imperii that recorded all the Reichstag decisions was first published in 1501, a solid 270 years before Hansard recorded the debates in the English parliament. The proceedings at the Reichstag became part of a broad political information exchange that got turbo boosted when the Thurn and Taxis family opened the imperial postal service to private users in 1516. Germany had the first daily newspaper in Europe, 67 years before England. Apparently in the 16^th and 17^th centuries this country of poets and thinkers was full of news junkies.

In general, the Reichstag was mainly driven by written memoranda and weighty policy papers, not by rousing speeches. That had a lot to do with the habit of sending representatives to the Reichstag. The gatherings were scheduled for 2 months and often went on much longer. Most princes found it impossible or inopportune to leave their comfy palaces for such a long time. Moreover, the Reichstag was initially gathering in different imperial cities, before it finally settled in Regensburg. If the empire had had a capital, the important princes would have established a town palace there, as was the case in Paris, Madrid or London. And in that case they would have attended in person more often. But with an itinerant Reichstag, a large proportion of participants had sent their councilors or envoys. And they would rarely have the authority to commit their prince on matters not previously discussed.

That rendered stirring speeches rather useless. The audience could not really decide matters on their own. So they would ask for a written copy of the speech they could send to their boss with a suggestion on how to vote. They would receive a letter back, which they would read out to their fellow deputies, who would in turn ask for a copy of this letter to send to their bosses and then receive a letter back, that would be read out and copied so forth, and so forth and so forth. This made the process very slow and, I think the polite word is, lifeless.

Handbook of German Laws (1787), 814 pages (for just just parts 6,7 and 8)

However, it had a couple of advantages. The public could follow the debates almost in real time even if they were hundreds of miles away. And given that waving arms and rhetoric flourishes were effectively pointless, the debate became more focused on facts and the thorough review of competing arguments.

I do not have a source for this, but I believe this tradition of written debate aimed at the rational weighing of arguments has been embedded into German political discourse. Debates in the Bundestag are shockingly dry and dour, in particular when compared to the intellectual sparring at Prime Minister’s question time or at Senate Hearings.

That can of course be because Germans have come out of the 20^th century with a strong suspicion of stirring speeches. But even before 1933, Germany did not have debating societies like the Oxford Union that rates rhetoric over content. The Lesegesellschaften or reading societies of the 18^th and 19^th century tried to find a deeper understanding of politics, poetry and philosophy, not to crown a winner.

So maybe 300 years of swapping written memoranda had left an imprint on the German political culture that we now refuse to shake.

Summary

If we pull it all this together, the Reichstag was verbose, slow, unexciting, all about status, not representation and not as effective as one would have wanted. And it slowed down the consolidation of the German lands by effectively guaranteeing the continued existence of its smaller members. All this is true. But one could look at it in another way, even though it was more bureaucratic than the EU, less able to prevent war than the UN and had more freeriders than Nato, it ensured the empire remained together as an entity for another 300 years. If we look to the southern part of what had once been the medieval empire, Italy. They did not have a co-ordination mechanism like the Reichstag. They consolidated into five large and maybe a dozen smaller states. But throughout these 300 years plus another 50 or so, Itay’s states were vassals of Spain and Austria, unable to determine their own destiny.

I expect we will spend quite a lot more time with the Reichstag as the Podcast winds its way through the 16^th, 17^th and 18^th century. It is hence far too early to come to a conclusion on whether the Reichstag of the holy Roman Empire was good or a bad, or just the best possible solution to a complex situation. I hope you will stick around until we get to 1806 and can really take stock.

And if you want to make sure we get to the end of the empire without advertising and undue haste, you can do so by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and make a contribution, just like Matt B., Hilary R., Michael P., Chris, Henrietta B. Shawn S. and Alexander D. have already done.

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Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 29th January 20265th February 2026

Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 223 – A Diet of Worms (1495 Edition)

We are now 7 episodes into the action-packed life of emperor Maximilian and he is only 35 years old. We still have another 24 years to go and they will be again full of wars, outlandish schemes, including one where he wants to make himself pope and of course marriages that create an empire. But if you look into German history schoolbooks, the thing that Maximilian is most famous for is what we will discuss today, the Imperial reforms that start in earnest in 1495 and will go through some iterations, before being largely completed in 1555.

Of the 1495 reforms, the Ewige Landfrieden is the most impactful. And it begins as follows quote:

That sounds great. Who could possibly disagree with that? Why did it take months and months of negotiations to agree this?

Let’s find out.

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First up, why was reform suddenly needed?

It is hard to nail down the point in time when things went wrong for the Holy Roman Empire. It might have been as long ago as 1077 when emperor Heinrich IV had to kneel before the pope in Canossa, or was it in 1166 when the last great army of imperial vassals dies in mud and shit outside the walls of Rome. Or was it the sword that murdered Philipp of Swabia in 1208 that was the last of the thousand cuts.

But whatever event you choose, by 1495 the empire has been in dire straits for centuries. As friend of the podcast Silvio Aeneas Piccolomini said to the imperial princes “you acknowledge the emperor for your king and master, nevertheless he possesses but a precarious sovereignty; he has no powers; you only obey him when you choose and you are seldom inclined to obey. You are all desirous to be free: neither the princes nor estates render to him what is due; he has no revenues, no treasure. Hence you are involved in endless contests, and daily wars; hence you suffer rapine, murder and conflagrations, and a thousand evils which arise from divided authority.”

…because the endless feuding destroyed the country

When there are no powerful central institutions, law and order collapses. As one chronicler said, when the cat is away, the mice govern as they will. And what these mice liked even more than cheese was other people’s cheese.

Feuding was endemic. There weren’t just the major conflicts like the Mainzer Stiftsfehde or the Princes’ War, there were lots and lots of little fights, in particular in the south, where political power was particularly fragmented. It is the scale of it that is so shocking. Peter Wilson counted that between 1440 and 1570 there were 278 noble feuds – in Franconia alone. In the first half of the 15^th century, feuding destroyed 1,200 villages and the Hussite Revolt a further 1,500. And remember these villages are those that had survived the utter devastation in the wake of the Black Death.

Looting and pludering from the Housebook of Wolfegg

Now nobody can claim that in the 14^th and 15^th century the rest of europe was an island of peace where everybody was holding hands and singing Cumbaya. The Hundred years war, the War of the Roses, the battles between the Teutonic Knights and the Polish king, the Reconquista were epic struggles that ruined the countryside in very much the same way as it did in the empire. But all these conflicts were about the consolidation of central power, the king of France against his major vassals, which included the king of England, the king of England against the dukes, the Polish king against an independent state in his midst etc. You get my drift. These wars ended with a victory of the kings, who established strong institutions that did in the end made the roads safe and stopped peasants being assaulted by the local lords. The problem in the empire was that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. One day the Margrave of Brandenburg or the Count Palatine would win some territory, next time duke of Bavaria or the duke of Wurttemberg would take it away from them. There could never be a decisive victory that could bring all this mess to an end.

Feuding and the ensuing misery for the peasant population had been a scourge of the empire for centuries. So, what was it about the 15^th century that made the call for reform so deafening that it could no longer be ignored?

…because the empire is under threat from enemies for the first time

Arguably, there were two, or depending how you want to count, three things that changed during the 15^th century.

Firstly, up until the middle of the 15^th century, the empire had no natural predators. It may be a mess internally and the emperors were already very weak. But the gap to its neighbouring kingdoms, France, Poland, Denmark, Hungary wasn’t that huge. All these places, as discussed before, were going through a whole lot upheaval themselves. But as they consolidated, the fringes of the empire came under threat. Provence, Dauphine, Franche Comte, Prussia, Holland, the Venetian mainland, and even Austria were gradually swallowed up by these newly consolidated kingdoms.

And the empire is still shellshocked by the outcome of the Hussite wars where crusade after crusade is defeated in ever more humiliating fashion by the Bohemian peasant armies. If the flower of the German knighthood cannot even defeat these unwashed hillbilly’s, what if someone even better organised and even more powerful shows up on the border?

And there was exactly such a new kid on the block, a sort of bodybuilder kid, the Turkish Sultan who was rolling up the Balkans.

For the first time since the Magyar’s had been defeated on the Lechfeld in 955 was there a genuine threat to the very existence of the empire.

…because the cost of defence of the realm had exploded

These new threats emerged at a time when the cost of warfare exploded. Infantry tactics using pikes could now defeat cavalry and artillery had become a necessity. The best infantry troops were mercenaries, Bohemians, Swiss and German Landsknechte who expected to be paid handsomely. Founding canon was a highly specialised skill, and even a simple field gun cost a multiple of the typical knight’s equipment of warhorse, sword and working armour.

The defence of the empire could no longer be ensured by an occasional raising of the feudal levy. France and Hungary had created standing armies, and so had the Ottoman sultan. The Janissaries counted to about 8,000 to 10,000 men plus the permanent cavalry roughly the same size. And in case of war, the sultan could call on a multiples of that from the various regional governors, arguably as many as 200,000 men, though logistics meant they could not all be deployed at the same time in one place.

So the empire had to keep pace. In the 12^th and 13^th century the emperors would take 5 to 10,000 men south, Charles VIII took 30,000 men to Italy and as the Italian wars intensified, armies of 50,000 became the norm.

By the early 16^th century one year of campaigning against the Ottomans cost between 1.8m and 3.6m florins and another two decades later, the annual cost of the wars with France ran at 5.4m florins annually. The regular income from the imperial treasury was 25,000 florins though occasional one-off subsidies could be materially higher. An emperor, even if he was a major territorial prince in his own right simply could no longer protect the borders.

Though the full scale of the urgency was not clear to everybody in 1495, it was understood that the current political structure of the empire had run out of road.

..and the Council of Constance had shown a way out

But there were rays of sunshine here too. Feuding and threats to the territorial integrity of the empire had not been the biggest concerns of the people in the beginning of the 15^th century. The #1 issue was the great western schism, the fact that there were three popes who had all excommunicated each other and anyone who had followed their rivals, meaning everyone in europe had been excommunicated by at least 2 popes, giving them a 2 in 3 chance of hellfire.

Antonio Baldana: *De magno schismate* (On the Great Schism)

This massive problem had been resolved by the Council of Constance that sat between 1414 and 1418. This gave people not only hope that even the most intractable of problems could be resolved, it also gave them the tool to do it with. A church council, as we laid out way back in episodes 171 to 174 was the congregation of the faithful whose authority superseded even that of the pope. In other words ideas that had circulated since at least Marsilius of Padua, namely that authority is based on the consent of the ruled, had found manifest expression and prove more effective in resolving the schism than the hapless attempts of kings, cardinals and emperors that went on before.

The debate over Imperial Reform begins

It is no surprise that the serious debate over imperial reform kicked off for good during the later stages of the Council of Basel, i.e. in the 1430s.

This debate is I think extremely unusual, since it wasn’t conducted in the context of gatherings, like imperial assemblies or parliament, as it would have happened in the more centralised kingdoms of France or England. Because Germany was already fragmented into dozens of important centres, some princely residences, some free imperial cities, the debate was conducted in writing. Initially by copying manuscripts by hand, but soon after Gutenberg had invented the printing press, many of these documents were printed and distributed widely.

Most of these documents begin with an analysis of the dire state of the empire. Here is one commissioned by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 (quote): “… we perceive that there is neither peace nor justice nor prosecution of the law anywhere in the Empire’s affairs. There are many wanton conflicts, disobediences of subjects towards their lords, robberies, arsons, murders, thefts on the roads, feuds and enmities, without any justice or integrity. Neither freedom nor peace is anywhere to be found. Any given prince must defend himself with his own might. When he pursues peace or war in one place, new disputes instantly begin elsewhere. It is constantly necessary for princes, counts, lords, nobles and other good people to prepare for battle, or to pay money to avoid being attacked. It follows from this that the principalities are decayed and ruined through pledging, destruction, base and sinful usury and other day-to-day futile, pernicious, great and severe costs. In the same way, counties, lordships, monasteries and collegiate churches are also reduced to extreme poverty and ruin, and the more prestige and temporal goods they have, the greater the damage they suffer.

From this it also follows that the Roman Empire, the emperor, the princes and all the German nation is now considered the least by all other nations… It therefore seems to me to be necessary to consider a means to raise up the Empire and to put in order the matters of the Empire.”

The analysis was the part that everyone agreed on, it was the solution that was contentious. There are a dozen or so “major” documents that are considered part of this debate and that have influenced the Imperial reform process, though I would assume there were loads more that did not cut as deep.

In a very broad way, they fall into three camps.

Solution 1 – MEGA – Make the Emperor Great Again

In 1437 a paper appears that proclaims to be the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund”, though it it is very unlikely he actually wrote it. For that the language is a little bit too fruity. The author does not hold back when he lays into the corruption and selfishness of the imperial princes. He is also interestingly very much against the imperial free cities, who he blames for not paying enough taxes. He says that when the heads of the church and the empire are confronted with their injustices, they quote: “turn their arses to us”. Not quite the tone of the imperial chancery.

His solution was to go back to the great and powerful emperors of the early Middle Ages. The princes, both the temporal and the spiritual ones should return all the lands, tolls, mints, mining rights that had once belonged to the empire. Then the emperor would again have the resources to deliver peace and justice and protect the realm.

This was of course never going to happen. But the “Reforms of Emperor Sigismund” remained in print throughout the 15th and 16^th century and enjoyed a lot of support amongst the lower classes, largely because it declared the following – quote:

“It is an unheard-of outrage – a great, ongoing injustice which ought to be publicized to all of Christendom – that some are so spiritually impoverished before God that they speak thus to their fellow human, whom God has powerfully redeemed and freed: ‘You are my property!’ This is a heathen way of behaving. God has redeemed us from all bonds, and henceforth nobody should haughtily exalt themselves into any position of ownership over another.” End quote

This idea of a renewed imperial power that could right all the wrongs done to the serfs and peasants was an important factor in the various uprisings and finally the Peasant War.

When these proposals were going a bit too fa, there were other, more moderate suggestions to create an effective imperial executive that enjoyed support.

Solution 2 – Let a Dozen Oligarchs Bloom

This position was first articulated in the policy paper, issued by the archbishop of Trier in 1452 that I have already quoted from before.

He proposed that every year the emperor and the electors come together in a city in the centre of the Reich and establish a court. Here all decisions about war, peace and justice were to be taken. As for the inner workings of this court he says quote: “each and every thing required for this establishment of justice and organization of the emperor’s court should be properly ordained by us, the electors, and the councillors whom we appoint for this purpose”.

The idea here is to set up a sort of oligarchy that runs the empire, keeps the peace, establish a system of courts to resolve disputes, bans feuding and raises armies for the defence of the realm as and when needed. The name for this structure was the Reichsregiment, best translated as the Imperial Government.

In this scenario the emperor was just a senior member of the Imperial Government with some ceremonial duties and maybe the nominal command of the army in case of war.

There are variations to this theme differing around the question of who is going to be a member of the Imperial Government. There were after all a number of very powerful imperial princes who were not electors like the dukes of Bavaria, Wurttemberg, Brunswick, Holstein and the Landgraves of Hesse to name just a few. And these princes were as disinclined to be ruled by the seven electors as they resented imperial interference in their affairs.

Solution 3 – Be More Pope

This proposal originated with Nicolas von Cues, one of the most influential theologians and thinkers of the age. Cues took inspiration from the church councils of Constance and Basel, the events that had given people hope that the difficulties of the empire could be resolved in the first place.

For him, the Reichstag, much like a church council, should represent the constituent parts of the empire, decide the laws and has the ultimate say in how the empire is to be run. The Reichstag should convene annually and a committee formed by the Reichstag should exercise its rights during the time the Reichstag wasn’t sitting.

But Cusanus did not want to replace the emperor with an imperial government, in the same way the church council did not replace the pope. He believed the empire needed a strong executive power to deliver peace and justice. The emperor should command a standing imperial army funded by an imperial tax. He would also direct four imperial vicars based in Brabant, Austria, Milan and Savoy who would administrate four regions or circles of the empire. Next, an eternal peace that banned feuding would be passed by the Reichstag and a system of courts established. Decision of the courts would be enforced by the imperial vicars or the emperor himself.

These are the three options, return to the good old days of Otto the Great, create an Imperial government made up of electors and maybe princes and third, a sort of middle way where we end up with the Reichstag and the emperor working together, one focusing on passing the rules and the other on enforcing the decisions, in particular the ban on feuding and the defence of the empire.

Attempts so far by Trier & Martin Mayr

Fascinating as this debate amongst clerics and intellectuals may be, this does not solve the problem unless somebody does something.

As you may remember from the previous seasons, efforts have been made to bring about imperial reform.

The electors deposed Wenceslaus the Lazy for incompetence and replaced him with Ruprecht of the Palatinate in the hope he would resolve the issue. When neither he nor Sigismund moved things on, they planned to depose Sigismund as well, but failed to agree on a candidate for his succession. Still first attempts at establishing a general imperial tax were made, but petered out rapidly (episode 179).

There was a lot of enthusiasm when Friedrich III come in and established the Kammergericht as an imperial court staffed with professional judges but that had evaporated rapidly. In the 1450s and 1460s several princes, guided by Martin Mayr, attempted to reform the empire by replacing Friedrich III with a more suitable, or malleable candidate. Various names were floated, including Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and Georg von Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia.

But neither of these schemes came to fruition. In the 30 years before the diet of Worms of 1495, the debate had gradually turned into a standoff. The princes demanded action, and in 1467 Friedrich III passed a time limited Landfrieden, or general peace and re- established the Kammergericht. However this did not materially reduced feuding, mainly because the Kammergericht judges often went without pay and Friedrich III lacked the resources to enforce their judgements.

After that things then ground to a complete halt. Every time the estates demanded more significant change, Friedrich III refused to even debate it, at which point the princes refused any help in the various wars and conflicts, except for the most obvious cases at Neuss and when Maximilian was imprisoned in Bruges.

The 19^th century came down hard on Friedrich III, blamed the continued delay in German statehood on his intransigence. However, since the princely proposals were usually along the lines of the archbishop of Trier, aka asking for a complete emasculation of the emperor and the establishment of a princely Imperial Government, I can understand why he kept going Njet, or in Austria “na”

Maximilian on the other hand was more inclined to discuss imperial reform. He could see that his father’s strategy had run out of road. He had fought the French on the Western border for a decade and his dream was to go up against the Turks. There was no way he could do that without the support of the imperial estates. And the only way to ensure consistent support from the estates was by establishing new institutions and taxation model.

Therefore, when he was elected in 1486 he gave some subtle or not so subtle hints that he was ready to negotiate. But he could never really act on this since his father stepped in every time Maximilian was about to make concessions.

That is why nothing happened until 1495. But in 1495 Friedrich III, minus one half leg, was safely three feet under and the real discussion could begin.

Convocation of the Diet of Worms

Maximilian called on the imperial estates to assemble in Worms on February 2, 1495. When he did that, he had not intended to make this a debate about imperial reform. All he wanted was a two week get together, at the end of which the estates would grant him two things, an immediate subsidy to raise an army to go after king Charles VIII of France who had invaded the empire in Italy, and ideally a longer term say 10 to 12 year commitment to fund a standing army for the defense against the Turks.

Worms – Haus zur Munze where the Diet met

As usual, Maximilian was late. When he got to Worms on March 18^th, there was hardly anyone there. It took another 10 days before enough princes were assembled to form a quorum. Maximilian made a speech, said, give me the money now, it is urgent, the French are already in Naples.

This went down like a lead balloon. The still rather small audience was taken aback by the speech. Maximilian had not mentioned the imperial reform at all. Not a single word, not even a gentle nod in the general direction. Why, this was the first gathering after Friedrich III’s death. Of course we should discuss the Imperial reform now. They stalled and said we should wait until more princes are here.

April 1495 – The debate begins for real.

It took until April 7^th for the 147 participants to make their way to Worms. There were 5 of the 7 electors, 29 temporal princes and 10 spiritual lords had come in person and a further 12 had sent their representatives. Then there were 67 counts and imperial knights and 24 imperial cities present.

By now Maximilian was getting seriously twitchy. He was not prepared for some longish constitutional debate. Literally a week ago his envoys had signed up for the Holy League and his new Italian and Spanish allies expected him to come down to Italy with an army and help trap the king of France in Naples. He also had another couple of irons in the fire. Perkin Warbeck, the Yorkist pretender was recruiting an army for his landing in England. This army was paid for by Maximilian and his mother in law, Margaret of York and was sailing in July of that same year. And there was still a rest of the Burgundian war going on in Gelders, where the French supported a claimant to the duchy.

Maximilian really needed to get this done and quick.

But that was not easy. The princes, bishops, counts, knights and cities who had gathered in Worms believed that it was now or never. Maximilian’s father was dead and the new king should now engage on the long overdue reforms, and moreover, they had him by the short and curly’s. Plus, if they would give him the money now and he defeated the French, went to Rome, got crowned emperor and returned as the victorious hero, it would take decades before they could nail him down again.

So they stalled. They took the imperial funding proposals and pretended they were debating them. But in reality, they discussed what imperial reforms they would demand of Maximilian. After a few weeks of no progress, Maximilian realised that his schedule was no longer achievable. He called the estates, asked them what they wanted and they presented him with a document outlining a range of reforms they wanted to discuss. These looked aspirational, but not excessive and Maximilian reluctantly agreed that the Reichstag would now debate imperial reform.

The decision making process

To understand what happened next, we have to take a quick look at the way the Reichstag makes its decisions.

The Reichstag is not a parliament where everybody is in one room and debates the issues of the day. The Reichstag is actually three separate colleges, one for the Electors, one for the imperial princes and the counts and a third one for the cities.

The process starts with an imperial proposal that sets the agenda. The proposal goes into each of the colleges, where the members discuss it behind closed doors and vote on their response.

Then the three colleges compare their respective opinions and debate and revise them, until they arrive at a unanimous opinion of all three colleges which is then presented to the emperor. The emperor can then either agree or reject it. If he rejected it, it went back to the colleges and the whole process starts again.

This process took ages!

The process was heavily tilted in favour of the electors and major territorial princes. These two colleges would coordinate their opinions before they would show them to the college of the cities who could then only get smaller adjustments through. Secondly, the smaller entities, the counts, abbots, abbesses and imperial knights had to pool their votes, weighing no more than the vote of one of the princes, and peasants were of course not represented at all.

And the emperor was not allowed to be present at any of these. He was literally hopping mad outside the closed doors as the king of France slipped through his fingers.

And because it was complex and involved a lot of chats in corridors and meetups in side rooms, it required someone to manage the process. Enter stage left, Berthold von Henneberg, archbishop of Mainz.

Berthold has been painted as Maximilian’s great adversary who fought for the rights of the estates against a recalcitrant ruler, unwilling to pass any reforms. But that is probably inaccurate. Berthold was, like many other bishops and abbots, very keen on a permanent peace and an effective ban on feuding. As we have seen in the example of Mainz, the largely defenceless church territories were under constant attack from rapacious princes. And he also believed that an Imperial Government would be much better able to achieve law and order than the emperor. But he wasn’t a revolutionary flying the flag of the liberty in the face of tyranny. He was more the guy who brokered the compromise the estates could bring to the emperor.

With all the preliminaries out of the way, we can look at the actual debates. I think the whole process breaks down into three separate phases.

Phase 1 lasted from March 18^th to April 27^th 1495. In that phase Maximilian pushed for his initial proposal to just give him the money and maybe discuss imperial reform later. That proposal was stalled by the estates. Instead they presented him with a counterproposal, to first discuss a permanent peace, the establishment or revival of the courts, the Kammergericht and the Reichsregiment, the Imperial government. Once that has been agreed they would be happy to discuss the funding of the army and taxation. Maximilian resented the idea of an Imperial government where the electors had a huge amount of power, but given his position, he agreed to proceed on this basis.

Phase 2 lasted from April 27^th to June 22^nd. As described above, the Reichstag set-up and process is heavily skewed to the electors and Imperial princes. And the electors and imperial princes know that Maximilian is under massive pressure. So they ransack the sweetshop. What the Reichstag presents on May 18^th 1495 was a princely fever dream.

They propose an Imperial Government made up of 17 representatives that would be given full control of the state. They would handle Finance, domestic and foreign policy, defence, law and order, justice and even legislation. In this Imperial government the emperor would have only 3 of the 17 votes. In a particularly misjudged slight, the Habsburg duchies did not have a permanent seat in this government. What enraged Maximilian even more, if that is at all possible, was that the conduct of external wars was taken away from him completely. The Imperial government was to appoint an Imperial Captain who would raise troops, appoint officers, manage logistics and lead in battle.

That would have turned the emperor into a completely powerless figurehead, wheeled out on special occasions looking fancy in his crown and gown.

It also did not help that the proposal came with a whole host of accusations that Maximilian and his predecessors had presided over a century of decay and loss of territory. And since the emperors had let so many lands go, the burden on these who had remained was now exorbitant. So before he asked for more money, he should go and collect the outstanding dues in Provence, the Rhone Valley and the Low Countries.

Obviously there is no way in the world or outside it that Maximilian would sign on to this. They tried to sweeten the deal by granting him 100,000 florins to raise an army but that was less than the 150,000 he had asked for, and as we will see is only paid when it was too late.

When he receive the proposals on May 25^th, he called it for what it was, blackmail. He was so angry, he did not respond for almost a month. Instead he acted as if there was no Reichstag going on. He invested Ludovico il Moro as duke of Milan without asking the electors, he negotiated with the Swiss about hiring mercenaries for a war against the French and the Turks.

Having spent weeks jumping up and down outside the council chambers of the Reichstag, now he let the princes walk by his chamber wondering what the king would do next.

It must have been a true feat of self-discipline to not go and beg for money. With every day that passed the chances to meet his international commitments and to catch the king of France were dwindling away. But there was no way he could hand over the crown of the empire to the princes. There is more of his old man in Maximilian that it appears at first sight.

But Maximilian wasn’t idle. He seeded discontent amongst the estates. Not everyone was keen on an all-powerful Imperial government dominated by the Prince-electors. All the smaller entities, the counts, the abbots, the cities, the imperial knights feared quite rightly that they would be swallowed up by the larger territorial princes. But even some of the most powerful dukes, of Bavaria and Saxony were unhappy with the limitations to what was right now almost complete autonomy. Slowly but surely the consensus over a princely oligarchy was falling apart.

The first indication that the princes were about to cave came when they revised their proposals for the permanent peace and the process for the professional court, the Kammergericht. These were all topics where the two sides had a lot of common ground. These proposals then became the basis on which productive negotiations continued for the rest of the Reichstag.

But on the Imperial government, not a peep until, almost a month later, on June 22 he sent a revised version of the Reichstag proposals back to the colleges. He had taken their text and just simply flipped words, so that for instance the Imperial Government was to be staffed not by the princes, but by people the emperor chose. It would be based, not in Frankfurt, but at the imperial court. Whole sections he did not approve off, like the section on the Imperial Captain, he simply dropped.

All that went back to Reichstag for further debate, which kicks off Phase 3.

We are now at the end of June. The battle of Fornuovo took place on July 8^th. Charles VIII was home and dry. Perkin Warbeck’s landing in England had ended in a total disaster. The guy did not even get ashore before his small army was decimated. Gelders could wait another year.

Basically, the power of blackmail the estates had over Maximilian was gone. The ball is now in the King’s court. Now he can use time to force concessions.

On June 28^th, the electors and princes give up their idea of an Imperial Government that replaces the emperor. Instead they agree to something called the “Handhabung” that laid down some rules about a governing council and the Reichstag procedure that would soon be revised.

And whilst all this back and forth over power in the empire went on, a few unsung heroes managed to forge an agreement between all the parties involved that would actually stand the test of time. The “Ewige Landfrieden”, the eternal peace which at least formally ended feuding in the empire, the Kammergerichtsordnung, the procedural for the professional imperial court and the Common Penny, the tax that was meant to fund these institutions.

Some of these were real breakthroughs that stayed on the statute book until 1806, others were less successful, but 1495 marked a huge step towards the curious constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire that we will discuss in more detail next week. I hope you will join us again.

And as always, if you feel this show serves a purpose that you feel is worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you find all sorts of exciting ways to keep me in my seat chatting about long forgotten empires.

And a big thankyou to Duncan Hardy whose translations of key documents I used extensively in this episode. You can find a link to his excellent book in the travel, maps and books section of my website

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Episode 222 –Italian Wars and Spanish Marriages

by History of the Germans Podcast on 22nd January 20265th February 2026

The End of the Unversal Empire

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 222 – Italian Wars and Spanish Marriages

The world is a-changing. Maximilian I may still dream of the medieval universal empire where he will lead Christendom in an epic crusade to expel the Turks from the European mainland, even reconquering Jerusalem. Meanwhile his main adversary, king Charles VIII of France unleashed the fury of war in Italy, kicking off a struggle that would last for 50 years and replaced the medieval world of popes and emperors with a system based on the balance of powers.

In the near term, this expedition to conquer the kingdom of Naples triggered not only the outbreak of Syphilis, but also the double marriage between Habsburg and Spain that Maximilian did not want, but ended up being the second of the three marriages that created an empire.

Lots to get through, none of it boring..

But before we start it is once more time for me to go to Augsburg and beg for some more funds to raise and equip my modest podcast set-up. I know that you know that I can never pay it back, other than with my sincere, heartfelt and eternal gratitude. And if you too hanker after such deep felt sentiment, go to historyofthegermans.com/support and join the most generous Mary J H., Barry T., Aleksandar A., Tudor C., Matthew J, Carnicelli and Brett C.

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And with that, back to the show.

Last week we saw Maximilian of Habsburg reconquering and consolidating the lands of his family. For the first time in XXXX years, there was only one member of the family who held Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Tyrol and Further Austria. Maximilian had also added Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Hainault, Seeland, Luxemburg and the Franche Comte to the family fortune, most of what is today Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. Friesland and Gelders would take a bit longer, but came on to the roster eventually.

And then, in August 1493 Maximilian’s father, the emperor Friedrich III expires at the tender age of 77 and after 53 years of keeping the throne of the Holy Roman Empire warm. His health had been deteriorating for a while now and in June his doctors had amputated his sclerotic left leg. This widely documented medical procedure was hailed as hugely successful, though the patient died three months later, allegedly from excessive consumption of melons.

Friedrich III has been a steady companion of this show for 12 episodes, often in the background, and when in the spotlight it was mainly because he had once more lost a city, a battle, a duchy or a kingdom. He had his highpoint at the siege of Neuss and he could get his son elected King of the Romans, a feat not many emperors had achieved before him. But the low points and disappointments prevailed. Being besieged inside the Hofburg in Vienna by his brother and the burghers of the city was the moment where the dynasty could have failed for good, and his last years as a wandering homeless emperor in name only did little to strengthen the esteem the office was held in.

Over the previous decades the reception of Friedrich III has improved significantly. The 19^th century had dubbed him the imperial arch sleepy hat and blamed him for the continued erosion of imperial power. Modern historians see him more as man who tried to maintain as much of the institution as he could, given his limited resources. He was persistent in retaining the imperial prerogatives, even if he was unable to exercise them. He had steadfastly resisted the calls to reform the empire into a loose confederation led by the imperial princes, even when he stood literally with the back against the wall.

This makes a lot of sense to me, in as much as the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia were indeed not enough to sustain a forceful imperial administration. Even more so considering their geographical location on the eastern edge of the empire.

On the other hand, the 15^th century was a time where ambitious and smart men were able to forge kingdoms. Charles VII of France had been disinherited by his mother and father, most of his kingdom had been occupied by English and Burgundian forces and still by the time his son Louis XI died, France was the largest and most coherent power on the continent. Henry VII, the first Tudor king had spent 14 years in exile and carried only a thimble of royal blood and still brought an end to civil war and created a platform on which his descendant could build one of the most successful political entities the world had ever seen. Matthias Corvinus was the son of a hero, but came to the throne as a puppet of the magnates, and turned Hungary into a modern, militarised country. Jogaila, the pagan grand duke of Lithuania, created a dynasty that in 1493 ruled Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia and Hungary.

Friedrich III was simply not like these aggressive, daring men. He was a high aristocrat of the old school who believed that all this power was owed to him because of his lineage or because it had been foretold in the tale of the 95 rulers of Austria, or because Caesar and Nero had singled Austria out for world domination. A.E.I.O.U.

Meanwhile his son Maximilian was one of these aggressive Renaissance gamblers who put everything on red in order to win an empire. He had himself emerged victorious from the war of the Burgundian inheritance having received barely any support from his father or the empire until the very last moment. And as we will see in the upcoming episodes, he would again and again make high stakes bets that just happen to come good.

But at the same time, he was the son of his father. He deeply believed in the sanctity and superiority of the imperial office and the Habsburgs predestination to hold this title until the end of times. He saw his purpose in leading Christendom in its war against the Turks and constantly called crusades aimed at freeing first Constantinople and then Jerusalem. These other kings, the French, English, Polish, Spanish and so forth, they should be subordinate to him once he was crowned emperor.

Just to be clear, he was wasn’t mad thinking these much more powerful rulers would be at his back and call. He saw them more like the Imperial princes, largely autonomous, but in crucial matters of the continent, obliged to follow his lead. His political philosophy was deeply routed in this idea of the universal roman empire.

One incident that shows the state of this universal empire was when he established diplomatic relationships with the principality of Muscovy. At this point Ivan III, the grandfather of Ivan the Terrible went by the title of Grand Prince of Moscow, but occasionally use the term Tsar, as in Caesar or emperor of all the Russians. Maximilian offered him the elevation to king, something he could do in his function as emperor, even emperor in waiting. But Ivan III refused, saying that he was the successor of the emperors of Constantinople and did not recognise the Habsburg as his emperor. Only a small blow to this idea of a universal imperial authority, but too small to be noticed. However, not the last.

As emperor, Maximilian believed that Northern, if not all of Italy was part of his realm. Sure, no emperor had exercised any tangible power in Italy since the days of Henry VII, but formally, Italy was still part of the empire. When the Gonzagas in Mantua, the Este in Ferrara or the Sforza in Milan wanted to take on ducal titles, they looked to the emperor for a patent that made them so. The emperor was also occasionally called on to arbitrate conflicts or to acknowledge lines of succession.

Maximilian, fresh from gaining Burgundy and Tirol, from reconquering Austria and becoming the sole ruler of the empire after his father’s death, now took a closer look at Italy, specifically at Milan.

By 1493 Milan had become one of the most important states in Italy, alongside Venice, Naples, Florence and the Papacy. It had incorporated several of the old city republics that had featured so prominently in the story of Barbarossa and Fredrick II, namely Piacenza, Pavia, Parma, Cremona, Lodi, Novara, Tortona and Alessandria. Its de facto ruler was Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro, the son of the great condottiere Francesco Sforza who had taken the duchy over from the Visconti family.

Ludovico ruled on behalf of his nephew Gian Galeazzo Maria, but was very keen to become duke in his own right. The only person who could do that legally and formally, was now Maximilian. In exchange for recognising his position Ludovico offered Maximilian two things he needed desperately at this point, money, and a wife. Money is something Maximilian always needed, in particular if the sum offered was 400,000 gulden, roughly twice his annual income at the time. And Maximilian needed a wife. This whole affair of the heiress of Brittany, little Anne, had left a bad aftertaste.

Maximilian had shouted from the rooftops that his bride had been abducted by the perfidious French king Charles VIII, but in 1493 had made peace and was now busy brushing the whole affair under the carpet. The best way to achieve that was another high profile marriage that makes him look as if he had rejected Anne, not the other way around.

So, on March 16, 1494 Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, the niece of Ludovico il Moro. Despite her beautiful name and vast riches, Maximilian lost interest in her very quickly. She turned out to be a little bit thick, a bit too fond of sweats and jewels and just generally not great company. So, this time, Maximilian does not fall in love with his spouse. What he had instead was a regular supply of mistresses, some of whom bore him children, though it is unclear how many. Wikipedia counts 15, contemporary sources say 8. Several in any case, though he did not have any children with Bianca Maria Sforza.

Profilbildnis Kaiserin Bianca Maria di Galeazzo Maria Sforza (1472-1510)

The year 1494 did hence start off not too bad. He got married, he got money from his new ally in Milan, he is now sole ruler of the empire and his lands are gradually recovering from the endless warfare and strife. He even undertakes the traditional Umritt, the journey across the empire where he received grand welcomes, renewal of feudal vows and general acclamation.

But all that joy and celebration turns to panic and despair when news arrive that king Charles VIII of France had set off on a military expedition to take the kingdom of Naples. That went to the heart of Maximilian’s political vision. He wanted France encircled by hostile nations, the English in the North, the Spaniards in the south and him in the West. If France gained powerful positions in Italy, that grand plan was dust. Moreover, Charles VIII had dubbed his invasion a crusade hinting at a long term plan to attack the Ottomans from Naples. That too was not on, because in Maximilian’s world, a crusade would attack in the Balkans and was to be led by him, and nobody else. Moreover, if Charles VIII was successful in a crusade, what would stop him from asking the pope to crown him emperor. As Matthew Paris had declared already way back in the 1250s: “Where is it written that the Germans should make the roman emperor”. This is the same concern that had convinced Henry VII that it was paramount for him to get involved in Italian affairs. Moreover, the pope in 1494 was Alexander VI, Roderigo Borgia, a man whose reputation for corruption and ambition reverberates through history books and tv series.

Portrait of King Charles VIII of France (1470–1498), wearing the Collar of the Order of Saint Michael

What Maximilian and europe will learn in the coming decades is that his ideas about crusades, empire and the unity of Christendom are completely and utterly outdated. The Europe of 1500 is fundamentally different to the Europe of 1400 and unrecognisable from the Europe of 1200.

The great wars of the 14^th and 15^th century were in the main domestic conflicts over leadership and internal consolidation. The Reconquista was about unifying the Iberian peninsula, the Hundred years war was about the role of the king of France vis-à-vis his vassals, which included the duke of Burgundy and the king of England, Poland’s war against the Teutonic Knights was about submission of an independent state within their territory. The wars in the Holy Roman Empire and Italy were over the relative power of individual entities in the absence of a powerful king.

By the end of the 15^th century many of these wars have come to their conclusion. The Spanish completed the Reconquista with the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1469 and the conquest of Grenada in 1492. The Hundred Years War and the marriage of Charles VIII to Anne of Bretagne consolidated almost the entirety of France under control of the crown. Equally the Tudor kings Henry VII and Henry VIII held direct sovereignty over England and Wales without intermediation by the dukes. In other words we are now having multiple political entities in europe that have the ability to raise extraordinary amounts of money in direct taxes from their subjects. And these taxes are converted into permanent armed forces or the hiring of trained mercenaries. And once you have those, the scale and scope of war changed.

We are now having kingdoms fighting against each other for supremacy, preferably on third party soil. Victory no longer means the defeated prince swears allegiance to the victor and returns to his or her palace. Now victory results in the annexation of territory and the removal of the previous management. There is no longer an emperor as a central authority tasked with maintaining peace between the parties, not even in theory. In 1414 Europe accepted that the emperor Sigismund had a responsibility to bring an end to the Great Western Schism. By 1500, that would no longer be the case.

The Italian war will change all that. In this war we will find French heavy cavalry, Spanish infantry, Swiss mercenaries, German Landsknechte, even English and Scottish soldiers fighting against and alongside Italians on Italian soil but not mainly for Italians, but for foreigners.

When previously the emperors came down to Italy, they travelled through what most people believed was their empire. They did fight, not as foreigners against “the Italians”, but as the overlord against their insurgent cities and the pope. Barbarossa did not come to conquer Italy, he came to reassert his authority in Italy as emperor. Where he found resistance it was from cities who did oppose, not his overlordship as such, but his level of interference.

What is happening now is that foreign armies come to Italy to conquer it and incorporate it into their realm. And that is why the invasion of Italy by Charles VIII is the moment when the political landscape of europe flips from the medieval to the early modern.

But I am jumping ahead. Let’s first look at why Charles VIII set out for Italy with an army of 1,900 Lances, 1,200 mounted archers and 19,000 mostly Swiss infantry in August 1494.

As a I mentioned before, the Italian communes were no more. Italy had become a patchwork of larger and smaller states. Some were nominally republics like Florence, Siena and Venice, but most were under control of a single ruler, some of them had been graced with imperial titles like the marquess of Mantua or the dukes of Urbino, Ferrara and Milan, others remained just Signore.

The five biggest states were Venice, Milan, Naples, the Papacy and Florence.

Let me go through them one by one.

The city of Venice had done exceedingly well, since, well since its founding. By the late 15^th century the Venetians controlled the Adriatic as well as multiple trading posts along the eastern mediterranean giving them access to the luxury goods coming down the silk roads into Constantinople, Alexandria and lots of smaller ports. Its power rested on its navy that at its peak comprised 3,000 ships manned by 36,000 sailors. In its famous dockyards, the Arsenale,16,000 workers produced one galley a day using standardised parts for construction and fit out, a process that looked a lot like modern industrial manufacturing.

And Venice had also begun to acquire more and more of its hinterland. The first acquisition on the mainland was Mestre in 1337 and within about a hundred years, Venice had pushed through to Padova, Treviso, Vicenza, Verona, Friuli, and then Bergamo, Brescia, Crema, Cremona and Lodi. These latter acquisitions brought Venice into conflict with neighbouring Milan.

Venice had an interest in Naples too, in as much as the straights of Otranto were the narrow access point into their Adriatic.

Milan, as I mentioned had gone from the Visconti to the Sforza. In this process the duchy had shrunk, in particular by conceding cities to Venice. But it was still a formidable power, controlled, albeit precariously by Ludovico Sforza, called il Moro.

Traditionally Milan had allied with Florence against Venice and Venice had found support in Naples. This opposition to Naples continued into the late 15^th century. Ludovice Sforza was specifically concerned that the Neapolitans were trying to undermine his position by supporting his nephew Gian Galeazzo Maria, who was after all the true heir to the duchy of Milan.

Which gets us to Naples. Unlike the other states, Naples was originally a kingdom, the kingdom of Sicily. Sicily had changed hands a few times since its foundation by Roger II. You may remember that Charles of Anjou from a junior branch of the French royal house, had wrestled the kingdom of Sicily from the Hohenstaufen. He did however lose the island of Sicily to the kings of Aragon in the Sicilian Vespers (episode 92). The Aragonese and the Anjou spent about a hundred and fifty years staring at each other across the straits of Messina, until Alfonso V of Aragon made a move on the mainland, which by then had become known as the kingdom of Naples. The ins and outs of this exceedingly complex process is impossible to recount here. For this and all the other stories, I recommend a History of Italy where Mike Corradi takes you through all these shenanigans in his inimitable style. And the History of Venice will in time cover the Venetian leg of the story.

Bottom line is, the Aragonese conquered the kingdom of Naples and sent the Anjou packing. The last of them, Rene, passed his time in Provence where he became known as the Good king Rene.

Meanwhile the new king, Alfonso of Aragon decided to give this kingdom of Naples to his illegitimate son, Ferdinand, or as the Italians called him, Ferrante. Ferrante was an exceptionally capable, cruel and ruthless ruler who made himself into one of the most powerful and influential figures in Renaissance Italy.

Naples main interest lay due north of them, in the papal states. For one, the popes were his direct neighbours, but the pope was also the overlord of Sicily with the right to determine who was the king. Given Ferrante’s birth out of wedlock, that was an important issue. Naples tended to ally with Venice, whose fleet could put pressure on the popes, and who needed to get its ships through the narrow straits of Otranto.

Please bear with me, we are nearly done with this epic simplification.

The papacy was still in an awful state. The council of Constance had ended the schism in 1418 and pope Martin V was again the sole pope ruling from the eternal city. But during the schism and then in the struggle between the church councils and the popes, many monarchies had agreed concordats with the popes that granted the national churches autonomy from Rome. France, England, Spain and the Habsburg lands had national churches where the pope had scarce influence over the appointment of bishops and had limited call on church taxes. Thanks to Friedrich III’s poor negotiations, the empire became the largest source of external revenues for the papacy, an issue we already touched upon in episode 209 are going to encounter again I am sure.

Given there was not enough money coming in from abroad, the Renaissance church had one major objective, which was to reconsolidate the papal states. During the papal absence from Rome, many of the cities in the papal states have come under the control of ambitious lords, the Bentivoglio in Bologna, the Malatesta in Rimini, the Este in Ferrara, the Montefeltro in Urbino and so forth. Moreover, the two grand families of Rome, the Orsini and the Colonna held large sways of the countryside, owned their own mercenary armies and had huge influence in the city of Rome.

That is why the cardinals elected the famous renaissance popes, Pius II, Sixtus IV, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II, Leo X and Paul III whose skills lay more in the cut and thrust of Italian politics than in the spiritual guidance of their flock. If they had one redeeming feature, it was great taste in art.

In this game of recovery the popes used whichever alliance came in handy. The constant switching back and forth was made even more bewildering by the fact that popes and cardinals were often either members or allies of the leading families or states. There were Venetian cardinals and popes, the Medici brought in two popes in quick succession, the French had one of their allies in the form of Julius II and Alexander VI was born a subject to the king of Aragon.

Last but not least we have the republic of Florence. Though still formally a republic with a council and everything, the true power in the city lay with the Medici. They had established a complex web of patronage funded by the proceeds of the banking business. Florence was motivated by business rather than territorial expansion per se. Nevertheless, they had acquired Pisa and kept Siena at arm’s length.

Despite all these brooding conflicts, Italy had experienced a long period of comparative peace.

In the wake of a particularly ferocious war between Milan and Venice, the big five states and several smaller ones came together in the Italian League of 1455. It confirmed the territorial status quo and included an obligation to come to each other’s defence should any of them get attacked.

This agreement was a masterstroke that reduced violence dramatically and allowed Italy to slowly recover from the Black Death, war and insurrections that had marred the previous hundred years. The Italian cities prospered and many of the wonders of Renaissance Art were created.

The Pazzi conspiracy of 1478 almost unravelled this peace when pope Sixtus IV encouraged a rival Florentine banking family to murder the Medici and take over the state of Florence. Naples was about to attack Florence in an alliance with the pope and a broad war might have ensued. It was Lorenzo the Magnificent, pitifully bad banker but gifted politician, who managed to calm things down, giving the league another lease of life.

So far so excellent. All the Italians were holding hands and were happy making money, until…

Well, until the main architects of this peace agreement, Ferrante of Naples and Lorenzo the Magnificent were no more. Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492 and Ferrante of Naples in February 1494.

The league had held for much longer than anyone could expect, but never resolved the underlying issues, the rivalry between Milan and Venice, the ambitions of the papacy and the inherent fragility of the regime in Naples.

At the same time the fabulous wealth of the Italian cities had always been a huge attraction for its neighbours. In the past these had been the emperors and princes from north of the Alps, but now it was the newly consolidated and well-armed kingdom of France that put its hat in the ring.

If you want to conquer a country, what you need is a pretext, at least that was still the custom in the late 15^th century. And the pretext in 1494 was that the title of a king of Naples had gone to Charles VIII of France when Rene, the last of the old Anjou kings had died. The French argued that the current occupant, Ferrante’s son Alfonso, was an illegitimate ruler on two counts, one because his grandfather had expelled the Anjou in 1442 without legal justification and two, because his father was a bastard.

That was the argument, but what was the trigger. The trigger was Ludovico il Moro, the ruler of Milan. He was only in charge as the guardian of his nephew who was no longer that young. And the king of Naples had been trying to unseat Ludovico by supporting the claim of the nephew to not just the title but also actual rule of the duchy. In response Ludovico had been leaning on the king of France to go after Naples and thereby remove the threat to his rule. It would later be said that it was Ludovico il Moro who had called the French to Italy.

Then there was Florence, where the Medici family took the side of the Aragones king of Naples against Milan and France. Problem was that the family no longer had the money to buy their popularity and the population was leaning towards the French since much of Florence’ exports went to France. In 1494 the citizens of what was still nominally a republic made their views very clear and when Lorenzo’s son Piero refused to shift towards the French side, they unceremoniously threw him and all his supporters out. Into that power vacuum stepped a monk, Girolamo Savanarola, who whipped up the crowds with promises of doom and the end of days that turned Florence briefly into a religious fundamentalist dictatorship. Florence opened its gates to Charles VIII whose troops paraded in under their crusading banners.

At which point the only meaningful obstacle between France and Naples were the papal states. And the pope was still Alexander VI, father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and renaissance villain pope par excellence. Alexander VI was initially opposed to let the French pass, but when they marched into Rome and promised him vast riches for his children, he changed his mind.

Bottom line, Charles VIII campaign to conquer Naples was as simple as cutting through butter. There was barely any resistance. King Alfonso of Naples fled and by the autumn of 1494 Charles VIII was sitting in the royal palace of Naples, his army mopping up the last few castles that had not yet surrendered.

This rapid success shocked not just the Italians, but everybody else. The first to get scared was Ludovico il Moro, the ruler of Milan, the man who had called on Charles to come to Italy. He got a visit from Louis of Orleans, the cousin of Charles VIII and his crown prince, who informed him that his grandmother was a Visconti and hence Milan should be his.

Venice too got itchy about the straits of Otranto and Charles’ idea to start a war against the Ottomans. The pope did not like the French that much after all, in particular he feared they would stop him getting his beloved Cesare his own principality inside the papal states.

But two even more consequential rulers were upset. First, our friend Maximilian, who – as we know – thinks that Italy is his, because he is the future emperor. But there are also some more rational issues in play. A permanent French presence in Italy would break the intended encirclement, and if they, god behold, were taking Milan, then they would be right on his doorstep in Tirol.

The other person really upset was of course, Ferdinand of Aragon, husband of Isabella and part of the power couple that had taken Granada and was now running all of Spain. They also had just dispatched a Genoese seafarer, a certain C. Columbus who had promised to find a new route to India and the spice islands by going west. O.K. he is of course never going to come back since every half decent navigator in the late 15^th century knows, the distance across the globe on the western route to India is far, far too long for a Caravelle.

Ferdinand, as king of Aragon was also the ruler of Sicily and the protector of his cousin, Alfonso of Naples. Neither was he keen on having the king of France across the straits of Messina, nor did he look kindly on the expropriation of his family.

Bottom line, something needed to be done.

All the parties involved, Milan, Venice, the Pope, the Spanish monarchs and Maximilian sent their negotiators to talks in Venice. On March 31^st, 1495 they all signed an agreement that would become known as the Holy League. The parties agreed once again a peace for 25 years and a commitment to mutual defence of Italy where each party pledged a fixed contingent of soldiers and guns.

When Maximilian’s envoys signed on the dotted line they are unlikely to have known that they had signed the death warrant of the idea of the universal empire and that they have brought in a new political model for Europe, a model that lasted until the 20^th century and that became known as the balance of powers.

The Holy League was not the first league ever established, nor was it the first treaty am emperor had signed. It was in fact in that same city, in Venice, that emperor Barbarossa had signed one of the most famous of medieval peace treaties, the treaty of Venice in 1177.

But this is the very first time that the emperor joined a league as an equal member. Despite the military and economic near irrelevance of the imperial title, there was still some of the reverence for the Caesars of antiquity left. When emperor Karl IV came to Paris to negotiate with King Charles V in 1377, the king recognised the seniority of the emperor, even though the power balance had long shifted in favour of the French.

But right on that day, the 31^st of March 1495, this reverence fell away. From now on the empire is no longer the shadow of the ancient roman Empire, but the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, an odd name for a state no different in standing to any other monarchy in Europe. Whatever Maximilian may believe to the contrary.

Military action began immediately. The Spanish crossed the straits of Messina and engaged the French forces in Naples. Venice took cities and harbours on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy. Venice and Milan gathered their forces to block Charles’ progress.

Suddenly holding Naples and finding new ingenious ways of bullying the Italians was no longer the question for Charles VIII, the question was, how am I going to get home? The king of France was trapped at the bottom of the boot of Italy. The Western mediterranean was teeming with enemy ships. The only route was on land. Charles VIII scrambled his forces and set off for home. He left behind just a small army, mainly Swiss mercenaries, which withdrew back home within a few months.

Charles VIII’ way up involved a lot less of parading with flying banners and grand receptions than his way down. Towns and castles that had welcomed him a year earlier now closed its gates. He faced an army made up of Milanese, Mantovan and Venetian troops when he crossed the Apennines. The battle at Fornovo in July 1495 was a draw in purely tactical terms, but in strategic terms a French victory, since Charles could continue on his way home. Ludovico il Moro changed sides once more and allowed the French to pass and by the end of August Charles was safely back home. His daring dash for Naples had been a complete failure. His conquests were lost as quickly as he had gained them and all of Italy had united against him. Charles VIII died in 1498 without making another attempt on the riches of Italy. But this is not going to be the last time the French would descend down the peninsula..

That is all well and good, but what about our man Maximilian. He was a member of the Holy League, he had promised to send an army. Where was he in all that.

Well, the reason he had not come down was once more the issue of money and soldiers. Maximilian’s pockets were empty as always. But this time, he was confident the Imperial princes would rally to his side and pay for the army he needed. After all, the campaign of Charles VIII was so obviously a foreign invasion of the empire, they could not stand aside.

On November 24, 1494 Maximilian had called an imperial diet in Worms to take place on the 2^nd of February 1495. This was ample enough time for Maximilian to negotiate with the princes in advance so that the diet only had only to rubber stamp the raising of an imperial army. Note that the Holy League was only concluded on March 31^st that’s two months later and Charles arrived in Fornovo in July. In other words, if all had gone to plan, Maximilian could have brought down an army well in time that, combined with Venetian and Milanese forces would have outnumbered the fleeing and demoralised French 2 to 1. The king of France, as the diplomat Philippe de Commines noted, would have never seen Paris again….and oh mei, would the Renaissance have taken a different turn.

But the diet of Worms did not develop necessarily to Maximilian’s advantage. He got stuck in negotiations with the princes for 14 weeks, leaving it far too late to raise an army and capture the French king. What exactly they debated so ferociously in Worms is what we will discuss next week. But for today, we will discuss the other event triggered by the Italian war of Charles VIII that shaped European history.

Whilst Maximilian was ranting and raging about Charles’ infringement of largely theoretical imperial rights in Italy, the major European monarch who was most affected by the invasion was Ferdinand of Aragon and by extension his wife Isabella and their children and heirs. The target of Charles’ ambitions, Naples, was part of the Aragonese empire. A French takeover of Naples, combined with a close alliance with Pisa and Genoa would have pushed the traders of Barcelona, Valencia, Palermo and Palma de Mallorca out of the lucrative trade across the western Mediterranean.

Hence Ferdinand was one of the people pushing hardest for the establishment of the Holy League. But he had no illusions about the longevity of such an arrangement. What he was looking for was a more permanent support in his conflict with France.

The pope, Alexander VI, aka Roderigo Borgia, had been born his subject and saw the Spanish as a great way to counterbalance the French. He had granted the title of most Catholic Monarchs to the rulers of Spain and appeared generally supportive. But how long would that last in the maelstrom of papal politics plus, the next pope may take a different stance..

As for the other Italian states, neither of them had much of a reputation for loyalty either. Ludovico il Moro had changed sides four times in 18 months, Florence had gone mental and Venice was a republic where a new doge or a change in the majority in the Great Council could make the Serenissima alter course.

Against all odds, in the eyes of Ferdinand, the constantly broke Maximilian was the only valuable and reliable ally in his struggle with France. Ferdinand and Maximilian were both weary of potential French hegemony over europe and they both tried to convert the Holy League from a defensive alliance into a tool to extinguish the Valois state.

The two sides, obviously also involving Ferdinand’s wife and co-ruler Isabella of Castile, had been negotiating closer alliances and marriages for years already. The initial idea was for Maximilian to marry a Spanish princess, but when Charles VIII rejected Maximilian’s daughter Margarete a new, even closer connection could be contemplated.

A double wedding between Margarete and Juan, the heir to the Spanish crown and between Philip the Handsome and their daughter Juana was Ferdinand’s proposal. Maximilian was actually quite hesitant about this idea. At this point, and as it ended up being the case, he only had two legitimate children, Philip and Margarete. There were no other Habsburgs left either. Hence if Philip were to die without offspring, the entire Habsburg-Burgundian inheritance would go to Spain. On the other hand, if Juan of Spain died without offspring, the kingdom would be contested. Juana had an older sister, Isabella, who had been promised to Portugal since she had been 10 years old and, after some complex back and forth, married king Manuel of Portugal. Manuel nicknamed “the Fortunate” was Portugal’s most fortunate king. During his rule the Portuguese sailors rounded the cape of Good hope and opened up a direct route to the spice markets of India and Indonesia and even further to China and Japan. Manuel was immensely wealthy, competent, close by and the husband of the older sister. No question, if Isabella’s son with Manuel had survived, the Spanish crown would have gone to him, not the handsome Burgundian duke.

And there was also a younger sister, catherine, married to prince Arthur of England and upon the young man’s death, became the wife of, yes, our most gracious king Henry VIII. And again, England was closer to Spain than Austria.

In other words, it was a lopsided deal. From Maximilian’s perspective, there were other marriage options in the east, specifically with Wladislaw of Bohemia and Hungary that had much better odds.

But when Charles VIII entered Italy, the calculation shifted. Even though Maximilian would have liked to head east and gain eternal glory as the slayer of the Turks, he also really, really hated and feared the French. And if he wanted the French contained, the Spanish wedding was a way to tie the two powers, Habsburg and Spain closer together.

Hence Maximilian I most reluctantly consented to the second of the three marriages that catapulted Habsburg form a senior member of the Holy Roman Empire with a vastly inflated ego into a European hegemonial power. Imagine Maximilian had said no, and Ferdinand had married Juana to his second best option, the son of Henry VII. The cathedrals of England would still be pregnant with the smell of popery…

On this bombshell we will end. Next week we will dive deep into the Council of Worms in 1495 and the debate about imperial reform. I hope you will join us again.

And if you feel that what you heard has added to your store of snippets to liven up dinner party conversations, remember that this show is run on the goodwill of patrons who kindly support the show. And if you want to do that too, go to historyofthegermans.com/support where you will be overwhelmed with offers to earn the gratitude of your fellow listeners.

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Episode 221 –Taking Back Control

by History of the Germans Podcast on 15th January 20265th February 2026

The Recovery of Tyrol and Austria

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 221 – Taking Back Control

After 13 years of fighting in the Low Countries, Maximilian, the newly elected king of the Roman, returns home to a rammed full inbox. There is his cousin, the dissolute count Sigismund of Tyrol who is about to sell out the family fortune to the dukes of Bavaria. The king of Hungary is still occupying Vienna – and there is a new heiress out on the market, Anne of Brittanny.

Some of the issues he tackles together with his now seriously elderly father, the emperor Friedrich III, others are very much his own tasks. In the process Friedrich creates a structurally new political entity, the Swabian League, Maximilian builds a relationship with Jakob Fugger, the money man who will grease the cogs of the Habsburg empire, and once again they fight, one battle after another.

And despite tremendous success, this period from 1489 to 1493, ends with some epic humiliation, not in war, but in love. “No man on earth has ever been disgraced as I have been at the hands of the French” is how he summarised it.

Come along and watch as the plot thickens.

But before we start, let me just mention that once again one of us is taking part in University challenge, the UK version of Quiz Bowl. Being selected to represent your school in this tournament is the highest honor a true nerd can aspire to. So congratulations to fellow listener Kai Madgewick who skillfully captained the Manchester team into the quarter finals. If you want to watch them, you can do that on the BBC iPlayer.

And if you feel like supporting other great nerdy talents by ensuring the continued availability of the “gold standard in German history podcasts” as Google’s Gemini dubs his show, you can do that by signing up as a patron on historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks a lot to Michael W (D), Sergio R-P, Carlo B., Paul V. and Fiona S. who have who have already done so.

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And with that, back to the show…

Recap

Last week we brought the epic story of the war over the Burgundian succession to its end. 15 years of strife left the Low Countries a burnt husk of their former splendor. Maximilian may have won the war on points, but did not leave unscathed.

When he returned to the empire for good, in 1489, he had just turned 31. He had fought the French and unruly cities for most of his formative years and had concluded that his dynasty was in a war for its survival with the French crown and its allies. This was not a medieval war over honor, faith or territory, but a more modern phenomena where either side tried to wipe the other from the face of the earth. And he had learned that such a war could not be fought with a levy of sworn vassals, but required a modern army with disciplined infantry and artillery. At the time such armies were only available as mercenary forces offered and operated by war entrepreneurs whose only loyalty was to their purse. Money was at the heart of war now and money was also Maximilian’s Achilles heel.

At the time Maximilian got engaged to Marie of Burgundy, Dr. Georg Hessler the Austrian negotiator of the marriage contract, wrote back to Wiener Neustadt that the Low Countries alone could throw up 1.2 million gulden per year. After a decade and a half of war, that number had dropped to maybe 200,000, most of which went on debt repayments.

The duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia were almost entirely occupied by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, hence there was no revenue to be collected there. The empire itself produced barely 20,000 gulden.

Compare that to Maximilian’s arch enemy, the King of France who collected 4 to 6 million gulden per year in taxes and other revenues.

The Tirolean Inheritance

That being said, the house of Habsburg was not entirely without resources. There was one member who literally sat on a silver mine, good old uncle Sigismund of Tirol.

He is a man who needs no introduction, having made his first appearance 27 episodes ago in #194 The Fuggers of Augsburg. This prince as morally bankrupt as he was intellectually impoverished limped along on well and truly his last leg. He was now sixty years old and had run out of possessions he could sell off or mortgage. For forty years he had focused on creating an equal number of illegitimate children, frantically building luxurious castles and pleasure palaces and fighting pointless wars. The last of these was a totally avoidable clash with the Republic of Venice, which comprehensively ruined him even though he had actually won.

To fund his debauched pastimes, he had relied heavily on his friend, duke Albrecht IV of Bayern-Munich. Albrecht had bribed senior members of Sigismund’s entourage and gained an almost complete hold over the increasingly doddery count of Tirol. If you remember episode 197, duke Albrecht’s grand plan was to reconsolidate the territory his ancestor the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian had brought together, and that included the Tirol. And being an excellent steward of his own lands, he had the coin to bankroll whatever madcap idea Sigismund came up with.

As security for these loans, Sigismund mortgaged his lands, first the county of Burgau, a number of courts and then for the risible sum of 50,000 gulden, the whole of Further Austria. When finally all the peripheral lands were pledged away, Albrecht offered the breathtaking sum of 1 million gulden for the whole of Sigismund’s lands, with a clause requiring Sigismund’s heirs to pay off the whole sum in one go before they could take posession.

What all that boiled down to was a full takeover of the Habsburg territory outside Austria itself. If Albrecht had been successful, the Wittelsbachs would have become as powerful, or even more powerful than the Habsburgs. The Tirol was not only immensely rich due to the often mentioned silver mines and the Brenner pass, but it was also strategically crucial. The Tyrol provided the essential land connection between Astria in the east and the ancestral lands on the upper Rhine and Burgundy. If the Wittelsbach could drive a wedge between the two Habsburg territories, the power balance would tilt permanently in their favor. Munich, not Vienna would have become the imperial capital.

This process of gradual encroachment into the Tyrol and further Austria had begun in the 1470s. Albrecht was a patient and prudent player of the game. But still he made a bad mistake. In 1486, around the same time the freshly crowned king of the Romans, Maximilian was showing off the magnificence of the Low Countries to his father, Albrecht bailed out the bankrupt free city of Regensburg and incorporated it into his duchy. He may have thought this was the least offensive thing he had done to the Habsburgs, but Regensburg would become the sweet mustard his enemies will drown him in.

Talking about offending the emperor, Albrecht really knocked it out of the park in 1487. As a frequent visitor to Sigismund’s court in Innsbruck, he was introduced to Maximilian’s sister Kunigunde. Somehow the Bavarian accountant Albrecht burned up in passion for the smart and independent Kunigunde. When he asked her father for her hand in marriage, the emperor Friedrich III had initially been positive. Kunigunde was the Apple of his eye, but on the other hand an alliance with this ambitious and well regarded prince may come in handy one day.

That changed when Friedrich heard about the incorporation of Regensburg into Bavaria. Friedrich had a thing about the rights of the emperor, and removing a free and imperial city from his control was not on. He sent a letter to cousin Sigismund telling him to cancel all negotiations with Albrecht. Albrecht was undeterred and bribed Sigismund’s chancellors to forge this letter into one where Friedrich was gracefully consenting to the marriage. Kunigunde, already smitten by the Bavarian’s charm, was delighted by her father’s consent, and on January 13, 1487 uttered an enthusiastic “yes” in the court chapel of Innsbruck.

Now that was the end of the line. Friedrich III issued an imperial order to unwind all the various transactions with the Wittelsbachs, return the lands to the family fortune and asked Sigismund to dismiss his corrupt councilors. The estates of Tyrol very much agreed with Friedrich III and called a meeting in Hall in August 1487. The hapless Sigismund was confronted with a hostile crowd that accused him of causing unnecessary strife with the emperor, disrespecting his wife and tyranny. He was graciously permitted to accept a sort of temporary retirement, where he handed over the management of his lands to the estates, who in turn would pay his debts and release his property from the Wittelsbachs. All Sigismund asked for was a generous endowment for his misbegetting of bastards. After that was granted, though never paid, Sigismund the desolate count of Tyrol shuffled off the political stage. He abdicated formally in 1490 and Tyrol passed on to Maximilian who made Innsbruck his capital.

Sigismund died a few years later. His last wish was to bathe his hands one last time in buckets of coins to remind him of his nickname, der Münzreiche, he who is rich in coin. But by then he was so poor, he had to borrow the buckets from a local money man.

But that was not the end of this. All these pledged territories had already been handed over to the Bavarians, as was the custom with such credit arrangements. The two Wittelsbach dukes, Albrecht of Bavaria-Munich and his cousin, Georg of Bavaria-Landshut had no intention to hand back all the territorial gains they had made over the previous decades, and hence give up their political ambitions, not even the city of Regensburg.

If the Bavarian dukes had to be forced, the natural tool in Friedrich’s hand would have been the imperial ban followed by a request to the imperial diet to fund the military force needed to execute the ban. But the imperial diet was not a real option at this point. The coronation of Maximilian had kicked off the process of imperial reform for good, and any support from the imperial princes would have required wide reaching concessions from the emperor, something Friedrich III was not prepared to consider.

If they could not pursue it as an imperial action, what about funding their own army using the tons and tons of silver that came out of the mines of Schwaz?

Well, that wasn’t so easy. The way the mining business worked in the 15^th century was as follows: The princes owned the silver in the ground as part of the regalia. But they usually lacked the money and the expertise to dig it up. So they granted a license to entrepreneurs who would do all the hard work. Under the terms of the licence the entrepreneur would be required to sell the silver at say 5 gulden when the market value was 10 to 12 gulden. The prince could theoretically sell the silver at market, but they rarely did. They were often so far in debt, they needed money right away, so bankers, like the Fuggers or Gossembrot would offer the prince 8 gulden in advance. This delta, between 5 and 8 gulden, or effectively 25% of the total value of the silver came to the prince, the rest, 45% went to the mining entrepreneur and 30% to the banker.

Sigismund managed to get himself so deep into debt, he pledged the bankers not just the right to buy the silver at 8 gulden, but even the 3 gulden he would normally take home.

Friedrich III and Maximilian had two options. They could cancel Sigismund’s agreements with the bankers, default on the old man’s loans and take the silver and sell it on the open market. That should theoretically bring hundreds of thousands of guldens to the princely purse.

But here is the rub. Who would buy the silver ore? The only people who owned smelters to extract the silver from the ore, were other bankers who had close commercial links across the industry. And they knew that if they took the silver ore, it was only a question of time before the Habsburgs would come to them for a loan and then some other banker would play the same trick on them. So they would politely decline. You do not think that is how that works? Well, just read up about Dan Gertler and his dealings in the Congo, and please use a sensible publication, not the bots.

Plus there was a whole rats’ tale of logistical issues, such as where to find the transport for the ore when all the carts are owned by the bankers, who also maintained the roads etc., etc.,,, And you still need the mining entrepreneurs who themselves had borrowed from the bankers and could be cut off from credit.

The biggest banker to Sigismund in 1487 was none other than Jakob Fugger. His consortium had lent 150,000 gulden, secured on silver from Schwaz. When they saw Sigismund’s fate going down, they opened up lines of communication with Maximilian. Maximilian understood that he was in a bind and acknowledged the claims of the Augsburg bankers. But it would still be a while before they started lending at scale to the man who would become their most famous client.

In other words, Maximilian and Friedrich III may now have princely control over two of the richest lands in Europe, the Low Countries and the Tyrol, but they still had no money and a war to fight. How?

The solution to this problem materialised in the form of the Schwäbischer Bund, the Swabian League. We have encountered these leagues and associations already several times before. There was the Rhenish league that tried to clean up the robber barons on the Rhine, theLeague of Constance fighting Charles the Bold and the most famous and most enduring one, which was of course the Hanse. The Hanse by the way never called itself the Hanseatic League, because as you may remember, under the Golden Bull the free cities of the empire were prohibited from forming such leagues. Nevertheless they appeared regularly throughout the 14^th, 15, and 16^th century as pressure from the territorial princes mounted.

Apart from cities clubbing together to fend off rapacious territorial lords, there were also the associations of imperial knights and counts. These members of the lower and middling aristocracy had the same problem with overbearing dukes and electors, who were bringing more and more of their class under their direct vassalage. The most famous of these associations of knights was the society of the Shield of St. George that had been around on and off since 1406.

Both city leagues and knightly associations were usually temporary alliances with modest, if any organisational structure.

This new one, the Swabian League that Friedrich III created in 1488, was quite different. Firstly, it was an imperial top down initiative, not a bottom-up one led by knights or cities. Then it brought together two normally not very aligned groups, the cities and the knights. And, it had actual institutions, the league council and the foremen of the league. The council was the main decision making body and comprised 18 to 21 elected councillors. Day to day management of the league was in the hands of the foremen, the Bundeshauptleute – German words always twice as long and thrice as precise. And finally there was a court of the league to adjudicate disputes between league members.

Another major innovation was that the councillors took decisions by majority and they were binding on all members. If you remember, the Hansetag, itself a very important institution, did not have either majority voting nor was it binding on the member cities, unless the council had instructed its representative explicitly to commit them to a particular course of action.

In the Swabian League, if the councillors decided to go to war, the league went to war. Moreover, the league had gone with the times deployed trained mercenary armies, rather than a motley assortment of diverse contingents sent by individual members. The cost of the professional army was borne by members in proportion to their perceived military and economic strength.

A nod to the old world was that the institutions were split in two and later into three. There was a bench for the 20 Swabian cities, who would send one foreman and 9 councillors and a bench for the 450plus knights, who would again send one foreman and 9 councillors.

And the league had associated members, namely the Counts of Wuerttemberg, the margrave of Baden, the archbishops of Mainz and Trier, the margraves of Ansbach and the count of Tyrol, who was technically still Sigismund, but in reality first the estates and then the Habsburgs. These associated princes were – at least initially – not full members and hence excluded from the decision making process. They were later integrated, but formed just one of the three branches, carrying the same weight as either the cities or the knights.

Which begs the question, why would any of the participants be willing to hand over their freedoms to such a rigid institutional structure. This again was a sign of the changing times. As we pointed out in episode 197, the success of the Bavarian dukes, first Ludwig of Bavaria-Landshut and then Albrecht IV of Bavaria-Munich lay in their ability to provide the basic services of the state, peace and justice. Keeping the roads free of brigands, punishing wrongdoers and building the occasional bridge or road did wonders to the willingness of subjects to pay taxes. And that is what their neighbours in the old stem duchy of Swabia noticed and they wanted a piece of it. In fact Albrecht of Bavaria -Munich was the one who set up the first, much more loosely structured league that maintained peace and justice across most of what is now southern Germany.

But by 1488 that league had broken down, in part because of Albrecht’s cousin Georg’s rudeness, but also because the ambition of the Wittelsbachs to become the new dominant power in the empire had become apparent. When Albrecht took over Regensburg, all the free cities in the region and the counts and imperial knights knew that they had only two choices, club together and retain at least part of your autonomy, or be swallowed up by the House of Wittelsbach. That is why they came.

The Swabian League would last up until 1534 and it was a participant in much of what we will discuss in the upcoming episodes.

When the Swabian league was formed in January 1488, all its members were ready and rearing to have a go at the Wittelsbachs. But the war against Bavaria had to be postponed since – as we know – at that exact point in time Maximilian was made a prisoner by the mob in Bruges and Friedrich III had to go north the free his son.

But by 1489 the two monarchs of the empire were both in Tyrol and got to work. The Swabian league mustered an army to regain the lands that Sigismund had passed on to the Wittelsbachs. His cousin Georg caved almost immediately and handed over what he had gained and paid a fine of 36,000 gulden. Albrecht was more persistent. He refused to hand over Regensburg, even tried to hold on to Further Austria, plus he insisted that his wife Kunigunde, the sister of Maximilian, had a claim on Sigismund’s inheritance.

The league members were keen on a fight, the emperor was insisting on the return of Regensburg, two of Albrecht’s younger brothers rebelled, and even an association of Bavarian knights declared a feud against their duke. The only one who did not want all-out war against his brother-in-law was Maximilian.

Maximilian was more interested in a peaceful resolution so that he could go after king Matthias of Hungary who was still sitting pretty in Vienna. The Bavarian drole de guerre persisted until 1492 when Albrecht under pressure from all sides and in view of a League army of 20,000 finally caved. He kept his duchy, Regensburg remained a free imperial city until 1803, and the Wittelsbach’s grand ambitions were smashed.

And lady fortune smiled once again on Maximilian and Friedrich III. Matthias Corvinus, had died on April 6, 1490. And what was even better, he had died without leaving a legitimate male heir. He had an illegitimate son, John, who he had hoped he could get the emperor Friedrich III to legitimise. But that never happened. John never took the Hungarian throne.

Meaning that when Matthias Hunyadi unexpectedly disappeared, the kingdom of Hungary found itself without a king. And without a king, even the worlds most expensive army is vulnerable. Maximilian realised the opportunity, convinced the estates of Tyrol to fund an army of Landsknechte and by the autumn his forces stood before Vienna. Resistance was only sporadic and he took the capital, then rushed after the retreating Hungarians into Styria, entered Hungary December 1490. He besieged and plundered the coronation city that I am afraid I cannot pronounce and moved on to Buda. But that is where the momentum stalled. As always, the money had run out and he could no longer pay his men. The winter had turned out to be extremely hard, supplies could not come down the frozen Danube and the local population enraged by the plundering hordes of mercenaries had grown hostile.

Maximilian withdrew to Austria to a hero’s welcome. Meanwhile the Hungarian magnates had chosen a new king, Wladislaw Jagiello, the man who was already king of Bohemia and whose father, Kasimir IV was king of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania. Within a century the descendants of Jogaila, the pagan ruler of Lithuania we met in the season on the Teutonic knights, had become a dynasty that ruled a vast landmass from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

Wladislaw, the new king of Hungary and Bohemia was however not the most impressive scion of the family. He was famous for saying well, well to anything his council of senior lords suggested and the Hungarian nobles joke that he was their king, but they were his lord and master.

Wladislaw, or more precisely the Hungarian lords were willing to make peace. Maximilian acknowledged Wladislaw as king of Hungary, but retained the right to call himself king of Hungary. They signed a treaty of friendship and for the nth time, a Habsburg signed a compact of mutual inheritance rights. Should one of them , aka Wladislaw or Maximilian die without male offspring, the other’s descendant would inherit everything. We are nearly there, only one more contract to go before the Habsburgs can take the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns for real.

To sum it up, that was some major achievement. Maximilian had regained and consolidated all the Habsburg possessions in one hand for the first time in centuries and he has added the Low Countries.

All that is true, but still, the winter of 1490 saw our hero seething with anger. Whilst he had been fighting out there in Hungary, the king of France had humiliated him in front of all of Europe. It is these pesky Frenchmen again. You can understand why he really did not like them.

When Maximilian left the Low Countries in 1489, the war against the cities and against France was not over by any measure. The fighting would go on for another three years. The reason we lost track of that is simply that Maximilian had passed on responsibility for that war to Albrecht of Saxony, an imperial prince and war entrepreneur.

The Low countries were however not the only theatre of this war. When he was mustering his army to go into Hungary, he had pondered an attack on the Franche Come and on Burgundy as an alternative. This was part of his grand plan. You see, Albrecht of Bavaria was not the only one with a grand plan, Maximilian had one too, just grander and more ambitious than his brother-in-law in Munich. But, as the great philosopher Mike Tyson so astutely observed, “everyone has a plan, until the get punched in the face”.

Maximilian’s grand plan was to completely encircle the French king and then gradually squeeze him into submission. To do that he had been building alliances for more than a decade now. He had established close links to the Spanish monarchs, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. His relationship with the Tudor king Henry VII of England was wobbly given his clear Yorkist sympathies, but for now the interest of the two kings were sufficiently aligned to work together. The third main player in this game was the duke of Brittanny. Britanny at this point was an independent duchy in the North Western corner of France, quite a lot larger than modern day region of Bretagne. Throughout the Hundred Year’s war, Brittany with its Atlantic ports in St. Malo, Brest, Lorient and Nantes had been an important bridgehead for the English and an on and off ally of Burgundy. Maxmilian had inherited this relationship and duke Francois II of Burgundy had been a major supporter in the war against Louis XI and Charles VIII.

In 1488, just when Maximilian was locked up in Bruges, duke Francois first lost a decisive battle against the French and then fell off a horse and died. He left behind a daughter, Anne of Britanny, 12 years old and now suddenly the most desirable heiress in Europe.

And who was the man who desired her most, if not the master of dynastic marriages, the great heiress whisperer, Maximilian of Habsburg. He was not only after a chunky piece of real estate, he was after this specific piece of real estate, as it opened up the chance to fight France on three fronts.

Little Anne was quite excited about Maximilian’s interest, already seeing herself crowned empress by the pope in front of an admiring crowd in St. Peter. Had she listened to the History of the Germans Podcast, she might have thought about that differently.

Maximilian had one advantage over his many rivals, and specifically Charles VIII of France, he was free and single. Charles was – and I am sure you have forgotten about that, because so did I – but Charles was still, despite all the things that had happened in the meantime, engaged to Maximilian’s only daughter Margaret. Margaret had been dispatched, kidnapped, stolen, whatever you want to call it by the French after the peace of Arras in 1482. Margaret had come with an impressive dowry of cities and territories on the western edge of Burgundy. And she had grown up at the French court as the future queen and allegedly content to spend her life with the by no means attractive Charles VIII. Therefore the French party could not offer a crown to little Anne, only marriage to some cousin of the king.

Hence, when Maximilian sent his embassy to negotiate a potential betrothal, his men were well received. Discussions were as always protracted, but in the end little Anne and the imperial faction at her court made up their mind. She liked the crown, and they believed Maximilian’s promise that the army he was gathering with Tyrolian silver right now was going west to protect her and her lands against French incursions.

All was arranged, and Maximilian’s friend the handsome Polheim married little Anne by proxy. Once again a princess spent the night with a man who was not her husband with the lights on and a sword between them.

When Maximilian received the news that down in Brittany everything was ship shape and Bristol fashion, he concluded that he could now take his army to Vienna and leave little Anne for later.

But then, news travel in both directions. Little Anne, who happened to be very young, but not very thick, realised that she was not her suitor’s #1 priority. And Charles VIII realised that his #1 issue wasn’t the dowry of little Margaret, but the risk of an imperial Brittany armed to the teeth in his back.

Charles mustered his forces and set out for Britanny. He knew that nobody would stop him. The Spaniards, Ferdinand and Isabella were busy conquering Grenada, the English did not trust Maximilian, and Maximilian’s army was fighting in Hungary a thousand miles away.

The French took one castle after another and by the autumn of 1491 they stood before Anne’s capital in Rennes.

Anne, abandoned by everybody and at risk of loosing her land, agreed to meet Charles VIII. The two of them had a long chat, at the end of which they agreed terms. A few days later they met again, this time in the chapel of the castle of Rennes where they announced their engagement. You can only imagine the expression on the face of the handsome Polheim, who had only weeks earlier had spent a night with the duchess and had been convinced that he had gotten his boss married. And that marriage should still be valid, since only a papal dispensation could dissolve such a union.

Dispensation or not, Anen of Britanny married king Charles VIII of France on December 6, 1491, her second king husband, but not her last.

Maximilian was apoplectic. He was humiliated, not only because Charles had married who he believed was already his wife, but also because the Frenchman had discarded his daughter Margaret, his fiancée for almost a decade. Maximilian’s hatred for the French deepened even further, if that was at all possible. He told everyone that “No man on earth has ever been disgraced as he had been at the hands of the French”. For the rest of his life he kept a little red book where he noted all the hideous crimes the Valois had committed against him.

Then Maximilian did what a mighty lord had to do in this situation. He once again declared war on France. To do that, he once again needed an army. This time he tried to garner support by stirring up public opinion against the French. He had flyers printed shouting that the bride of the King of the Romans had been abducted – and that the honour of the empire was at stake. This attempt at propaganda did however not stick. When he asked the imperial princes for help, he received not just the usual, njet, but howls of laughter as they recounted the circumstances of his dishonour.

In the end he gathered mercenaries funded by loans backed by Tyrolian silver and at least conquered the Franche Comte. His forces did however not stretch to a conquest of the duchy of Burgundy, because once again, the money ran out. I guess you see the pattern now..

In 1493 the two sides finally came to agree a peace. Charles gave up the Franche Comte, returned Margaret and most of her dowry and recognised Philip the handsome as the heir of Burgundy. In return Maximilian acknowledged Charles and Anne’s marriage, even procured a papal dispensation.

The whole affair was so embarrassing that all documents relating to the marriage of Maximilian and Anne were destroyed. The only trace that prove it ever happened, was a receipt for 13 gold coins that the handsome Polheim had donated to the cathedral of Rennes on the occasion of the blessing of the union between Anne and Maximilian.

This war with France was finally over, the Habsburg lands were reunited in one hand. It is time for peace and reconstruction…maybe for others, not for Maximilian. For Maximilian war was not a way to reach a solution, war was the solution. So the next set of wars is just round the corner, but not now, next week.

And if you happen to have some silver that has gone up by a cool 150% in 2025, why not put some of it to good use – not hiring mercenaries – rather ensuring this show remains independent and advertising free. You know where to go and you know what to do…

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Episode 220 – The Burgundian Experience(s)

by History of the Germans Podcast on 8th January 20265th February 2026

Maximilian elected King of Romans and emprisoned

Transcript

In this episode the 15-year long war over the Burgundian succession will come to its end. You may have thought it was done last time, but no. The revolutionary spirit of the Flemish cities is not yet broken and their most audacious move is still to come. And this time they are not going up against an archduke and regent, but against a newly elected king of the Romans.

Maximilian of Habsburg’s experience in Burgundy swung between moments of utter delight and happiness and depths of death, destruction and despair. It shaped this young duke who arrived aged 18 full of dreams of chivalry and left, aged 31 an battle hardened general with a clear view of where he wanted to take the empire. Get ready for the ultimate roller coaster.

But before we start just a quick update on the History of the Germans tour. I must say I was completely overwhelmed by the response. Effectively we were overbooked within 24 hours. That left me on the one hand elated that so many of you want to come along, but also with the unpleasant task of having to choose. As I mentioned before, we were giving patrons priority, and as it happened there were so many patrons signing on, that we could not even accommodate all of you. As they say in Jaws, “I think we need a bigger boat”. Since we have no bigger boat, I have decided to do another tour next year, summer 2027, likely on a similar route. I will let you know about it sometime in July. To all of you who we could not take along, let me say that I am really sorry, but hopefully it works out next time.

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And with that, back to the show…

Recap

Our last episode is now 3 weeks old, a couple of things have happened that may have diverted your attention, so I should probably give you a quick reminder of where we are. Maximilian of Austria, the son of the emperor Friedrich III had married Marie of Burgundy, the heiress of the richest state in Europe. These lands that at their largest extent comprised modern day Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg, Picardie, Burgundy, Franche Comte and very briefly Lorraine were a massive thorn in the side of the French monarchy. During the Hundred Years War an alliance between Burgundy and England had almost forced the Valois kings of France into submission. When Maximilian took over the management of Burgundy, the French king Louis XI moved heaven and earth to crush him and break up Burgundy.

By the year 1485, it looked as if Maximilian had largely won this war. His last struggle had been with the two greatest cities of his realm, Bruges and Ghent, where popular uprisings fueled by French money had attempted to separate them from the Burgundian state. Through a combination of smart military tactics, brute force and fostering internal conflict, Maximilian had occupied first Bruges and then Ghent. The French troops sent to support the Ghent rebellion had to leave by the back door.

Meanwhile the smart king Louis XI of France had died and his son, Charles VIII was a minor, which slowed down French aggression. With Burgundy pacified and France contained, Maximilian could, for the first time in a decade turn his attention to the empire and to his ancestral homelands in Austria.

The Fall of Vienna

Things in Austria had gone from bad to worse. Maximilian’s father, the emperor Friedrich III had spent the last years trying to fend off a simultaneous attacks by the Ottoman empire and the king of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus. Matthias and Friedrich had a very ambivalent relationship. On the one hand they both claimed the title of a king of Hungary and had clashed before. But that conflict had ended in a compromise that had left Friedrich with a small part of Hungary and the rights to carry the title, whilst Matthias received the Hungarian crown back and the two men recognized each other as heirs of their respective lands, should either die without male offspring.

But these agreements were not sufficient to contain Matthias’ ambitions. He commanded one of the largest, best equipped and best trained armies in Europe and he was keen to put it to good use. He fought a long war with Bohemia that brought him Silesia and Moravia. When that concluded in a peace agreement in 1478, he turned his eyes on Austria. In 1482 Matthias sent towards Vienna. The always skint Friedrich III fought back but realistically never stood a chance on his own. He begged and pleaded with the princes to fend off this foreign invasion into the empire. He called diet after diet, but no help was forthcoming.

Much like with Maximilian’s Burgundian efforts, the princes did regarded the Habsburg quarrels with their neighbors as a private matter, not one that affected the empire in its composition. They clearly did not see it in the same vein as the siege of Neuss where plucky Rheinlaenders were holding out against Charles of Burgundy who they regarded as a French prince. And since I am mentioning Neuss, let me pass on a recommendation from my old schoolfriend and avid listener of the show, Ulf. It is the History of the siege of Neuss by the city’s scribe, Christianus Wierstraet, one of the earliest print products and much more lively in its descriptions than earlier chroniclers. There is for instance a story about how the defenders of the city threw diluted pig manure on the attackers with devastating effect and lots more. Just check out his comment on the episode 214 webpage.

And another matter was driving the princes and electors, the issue of imperial reform. This topic had been on the table since at least 1410 and we are entering the hot phase of constitutional reform. For now I will only mention this in passing, but do not worry, we will get deep into it when we reach the diet of Worms in 1495.

We are still 10 years away from that, in 1485, and Matthias Hunyadi has just taken Vienna almost to the day when Maximilan marched into Ghent. This shifted the political situation in the empire at least a little bit. The princes were initially only mildly uncomfortable about a Hungarian taking over Austria, but they were actually concerned when Matthias assumed the title of duke of Austria without even asking for any kind of confirmation from the empire. That could be interpreted as a removal of Austria from the commonwealth. Losing Austria would be embarrassing and the world was still sufficiently medieval for embarrassment to be an important factor in politics.

What was even more embarrassing for all concerned was the 70-year old emperor Friedrich III who had suddenly become homeless. Over the next few years he would move from one city or monastery to the next, demanding being housed and fed and left once the imperial credit at the local tailors, butchers and bakers had been exhausted. Friedrich put his worldly possessions into his cousin Sigismund’s garage and left him his beloved daughter Kunigunde to look after. As we have heard in episode 197, the care and attention of the old roue did not extend to preventing her running away with one of Friedrich’s many enemies, duke Albrecht of Bavaria-Munich.

The Election of Maximilian I

To break out of this rather awkward situation, Friedrich III and Maximilian made a move that was at the same time long overdue and audacious.

All throughout the time Friedrich III wore the imperial crown, there had been discussions about electing a King of the Romans. Initially the princely reform faction had proposed Friedrich the Victorious of the Palatinate and then Georg of Podiebrad, the king of Bohemia. And then Charles the Bold had put his golden hat in the ring during the meeting in Trier. In 1486 another slate of potential candidates were discussed, including Albrecht of Saxony, a close ally of the Habsburgs and even more bewildering, Matthias Hunyadi, the Hungarian king and invader of the empire.

This constant debate showed first and foremost that the empire remained dissatisfied with the lack of initiative of Friedrich III and his reluctance to tackle the issue of imperial reform beyond the Landfrieden, the general peace he renewed in regular intervals. The princes and the public opinion had had enough and demanded a more proactive figure at the helm of the empire.

At the same time, electing a king of the Romans whilst the emperor was still alive had happened only once since the days of the Hohenstaufen. In 1376 emperor Karl IV had burned through literally millions to get his feckless son Wenceslaus elected, and that was no good precedent at all.

Still, in 1486 six Prince electors gathered in Frankfurt to elect a new king of the Romans. There were only six of them present because we now have two kings of Bohemia, Wladislaw Jagiello who ruled Bohemia proper and the already mentioned Matthias Hunyadi who had received the title along with Silesia and Moravia in the peace agreement that ended his Bohemian campaign. And neither of these men were fans of Maximilian and Friedrich, so they were NFI.

Which tells you who was the key candidate for the crown here, and that was of course Maximilian, by now 27 years old, a battle hardened general who had been at war continuously for 9 years, who had defeated the mighty king of France and had subdued the haughty cities of Flanders. In massive contrast to his father, he was young, dynamic, full of ideas and hinted that he may be open to a reform of the empire.

Though it had all been set up and arranged by the Habsburgs, the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Some of the Electors, including the now very aged Albrecht Achilles of Brandenburg had their reservations about electing Maximilian, Hungarian and French agents were distributing bribes and spreading discontent, and there was the obvious question, whether the election should be made conditional upon at least a first step towards imperial reform.

Another issue that had often been cited in the past was however a non-issue. Maximilian and Friedrich III had not seen each other since the fresh-faced prince had set off for his Burgundian adventure. And whilst Maximilian’s star was rising rapidly, Friedrich’s already somewhat matt rays had dimmed even further. And Friedrich had made Maximilian swear not to interfere in matters of the empire until the day his father had indeed shuffled off his mortal coil.

Some writers took these circumstances and concluded that Friedrich III had been jealous of his son and opposed Maximilian’s election. It is true that Maximilian had asked for an election long before 1486 and his father had turned him down, but that may not have been down to animosity or jealousy, but more a function of the still unstable situation in Burgundy. Hermann Wiesflecker, whose three volume biography of Maximilian is the benchmark secondary source, argued convincingly and based on detailed analysis, that Friedrich III was very much the engine behind the election of his son as a way to free up resources for a reconquest of Austria.

So, on February 16^th, 1486 the Prince electors gathered in the church of St. Bartholomeu in Frankfurt, the church that is today called the Frankfurt Dom. Unusually the election was presided over by the reigning emperor, Friedrich III who kept things in check. Maximilian I was duly elected king of the Romans.

Coronation of Maximiian – from the Triumphal Arch of Maximilian

At the same time the Landfrieden, the general peace was extended by another 10 years and the Kammergericht, the professional imperial court, was revived to adjudicate disputes. And then there was the main reason the Habsburgs had come to Frankfurt and had spent significant amounts bribing the electors, and that was to get the imperial princes to help pushing the king of Hungary out of Austria. More on that issue in a moment.

Before we get to the business end, we have to talk about the coronation, which at that point still took place in Aachen, complete with seating on the throne of Charlemagne and weird rituals involving oats. But the best bit was the feast. Of course the great princes and bishops were served an innumerable number of dishes, Maximilian and Friedrich on gold plates, not silver, a Burgundian tradition. As for the people, they were provided with some fine dish that leaves even the legendary Turducken in its wake. The court chefs roasted an Ox, stuffed with a pig that was stuffed with a goose that was stuffed with a chicken, which was stiffed with a pheasant. That is what we call stuffing!

Return to the Low Countries

That ox wasn’t the only one who got stuffed right royally that day. The emperor Friedrich III was the other. No help for the eastern lands was forthcoming. Not even his son Maximilian wanted to go with him to Innsbruck to muster an army against Hunyadi. Instead, Maximilian returned to his new home in the Low Countries. For a few days Friedrich wandered aimlessly around the empire before he reluctantly accepted his son’s invitation to join him in the splendor of the Burgundian court.

The father-son dynamic over the next few months was unusually modern. In an aristocratic society built on inheritance, you rarely hear stories of sons or daughters proudly showing off their achievements to their parents. But that is exactly what happened now. Maximilian dragged his aging and homeless father from one astoundingly rich and beautiful city in his realm to the next. Everywhere he ordered the Full Monty of grand entrances, tournaments, dances, visits to the arsenals and cloth halls, introductions to the great artists alive and dead, peeks into the vaults of the Burgundian treasure houses etc., etc. As a proud homeowner I find this exceedingly relatable.

But Maximilian’s decision to leave the ancient positions of the House of Habsburg to the enemy was not just because he craved the recognition of his old man. It was also driven by a fundamental geopolitical view that Maximilian had developed over the previous decade.

As we have followed the house of Habsburg over the last almost 20 episodes, their focus had been the south and east, Bohemia, Hungary, Tirol, Switzerland, further Austria, Dalmatia which put them in conflict with whoever ruled Bohemia and Hungary, Venice, the Swiss and the Wittelsbachs.

Burgundian politics had one primary focus, and that was France. In the same way that Burgundy’s existence was an existential threat to France, a powerful French king was an anathema to the Burgundian rulers. The foreign policy of the grand dukes of the West aimed to isolate and surround France through alliances with England, Brittany, Savoy and the Spanish Kingdoms. If they had any involvement with the eastern end of the empire, it was driven by romantic notions of the crusades, not hard politics.

the Siege of Orleans during the Hundred Years War

Maximilian’s formative years had been spent in his war with the French and he had swallowed the Burgundian worldview hook, line and sinker. In his mind, the victory in the west was a precondition of success in the east – where have we heard that before…

The French coming back to Flanders

And looking at the situation in 1486/87 Maximilian was right. Given the reluctance of the imperial princes to help against Hunyadi, any chance for the Habsburgs to regain Austria depended on a firm hold over the Low Countries and their tax revenues. And in 1486 the Low countries were again unstable – the French were back on the warpath.

The French regent, Anne of Beaujeu, the only one of Louis XI’s children to have inherited his cunning, had taken advantage of a serious mistake Maximilian had made. In the previous year, specifically on August the 22^nd, an English king is said to have uttered the unforgettable words “ A horse, a kingdom for a horse” before being put eight feet under a car park.

King Richard III in the car park as discovered in 2012

The battle of Bosworth Field was a major setback for Maximilian. He had kept a close relationship first with Edward IV and then Richard III of England, in large part because Margaret of York, the sister of these kings, was his mother in law and a major pillar of his regime. When Richard III fell and Henry Tudor took over as Henry VII, Maximilian supported the Yorkist opposition, including the imposter Perkin Warbek. That did not endear him to the new rulers of England who pivoted the usual alliance structure and lined up with France against Burgundy. Maximilian firmed up his friendship with duke Francois of Brittany and the Spanish monarchs to fend off the renewed threat.

Whilst Maximilian was showing off Brussels and Bruges to his dad, the French attacked his southern border. Maximilian had to go to the Estates General once again and ask for money. Reluctantly he was given some cash and he recruited mercenaries, some Swiss but many from southern Germany where a new pool of military forces was getting established – a pool that would become known as the Landsknechte.

Swiss Reislaufer and German Landsknechte have one thing in common, they fight for money. And money as we know by now is what Maximilian keeps running out of all the time. The net result was that Maximilian fought a number of reasonably successful engagements, but could not follow through, because he constantly lacked the cash at the crucial moment. Another issue was that the Swiss were leaning more and more towards the French whose payment discipline was significantly better than the Habsburgs’. So, when Maximilian was trying to drive his forces into French territory, the Swiss refused and went home. This will become a fixed pattern in the forthcoming conflict between France and the Habsburgs.

*Landsknechte*, etching by Daniel Hopfer, c. 1530

And then, in the summer of 1487, things went properly off the rails. A detachment of 1,300 riders and 1,600 infantry, led by some of the most important Burgundian nobles fell into an elaborate trap. The entire division was either cut down or taken prisoner.

Maximilian a Prisoner in Bruges

The defeat set Flanders alight. The horns of rebellion sounded once more. The lower classes in Ghent and Bruges took over the government again. Jan van Coppenhole, the leader of the last rebellion returned to Ghent and established a revolutionary government, complete with a revolutionary guard called the White Squires that kept order through blood and iron. The French, who had harbored and supported Coppenhole for a decade, offered the city of Ghent the status of an independent city republic within the French Kingdom.

Maximilian was once more confronted with an uprising by his richest cities. And as before, means to defeat them had to come from the other parts of his lands, from Brabant, Hainault and Holland. But they too were now exhausted. The constant wars and the marauding mercenaries who made no difference between friends and foes left them destitute and disenchanted with Maximilian’s rule.

*The Judgment of Cambyses* (commissioned in 1488, completed in 1498), Bruges’s symbolic apology to Maximilian

That is when Maximilian came up with a madcap plan. He decided to go straight into the Maw of the Flemish Lion. He took 500 men and entered Bruges. He took up residence in the ducal palace and opened negotiations with the Estates general he had convened there. For about a month things looked as if there was a way to reach a compromise. Maximilian sent some of his men out to reinforce the army he intended to lead against Ghent. But when he tried to join them, things got out of hand.

The city closed its gates and they gathered on the market square, all 52 guilds with banners, weapons and guns. Maximilian, accompanied by his remaining 150 Landknechte appeared on the square and tried to reason with them. The citizens complained about the greedy bureaucrats, the oppressive taxation levels, the marauding mercenaries and the disruption of the trade with France. Maximilian listened and promised to resolve these issues – how, god knows, but that was the kind of thing one says in that situation.

The people went home , but by the next morning they had concluded that Maximilian was not going to do anything they wanted. Once again the grand bell, the Roland rang across Bruges, the shutters went down on the shops and the citizens donned their armor and gathered on the market square. They plundered the houses of Maximilian’s allies and demanded to see him. Once more he appeared on the square, this time he left the Landsknechte at home and brought just 20 local noblemen. The mob demanded he handed over his senior administrators so they could be tried and hanged, which he refused. Rumors spread that he had ordered a great army to come down from Antwerp and that if they let him out, he would order his soldiers to massacre them all. You can imagine the screaming accusations, Maximilian’s increasingly irritated defense and the city leaders trying to calm the situation. This time bloodshed could be avoided and Maximilian returned to his palace.

The next day began as a replay of the previous two. Maximilian once more tried to reason with the increasingly enraged citizenship. The Bruggelinge had by now received a message from the revolutionaries in Ghent telling them not to let the king escape. Maximilian promised not to leave Bruges, but that promise was not enough. The locals pressed forward, took Maximilian and brought him to the house of a spice trader called the Kranenbourg. That is where he would remain for 16 long weeks, a prisoner of the city of Bruges.

That was an event that made all of europe gasp. Maximilian had been crowned king of the Romans, a process that had elevated him to be god’s anointed, almost a different kind of being to mere mortals. The great unwashed laying hands on his royal person and locking him up in the house of a commoner was not just shocking, but close to sacrilege.

It is not clear who had given the order to grab the king, whether there had ever been a plan to imprison their city’s overlord. My guess is that the citizens of Bruges were as stunned by developments as Maximilian himself.

But now that they had committed their unspeakable crime, the only way was forward. They demanded that Maximilian gave up his guardianship of his son Philipp who he had safely sent back to Mechelen before the chaos had broken out, they demanded an account of what happened to the money, they wanted him to hand over the German administrators who they accused of theft and corruption, they wanted him to make peace with France and even give Ghent and Bruges the monopoly of the textile trade.

Maximilian refused. They raided his lodgings, looking for weapons and treasure. Maximilian refused. They took away his last remaining companions, saying that a few heads need to roll to appease the people. Maximilian refused. They put metal rods in front of his windows and set up gallows below them. Maximilian refused. They tortured and then hanged Maximilain’s advisors. Maximilian refused. They plundered the ducal palace and sought out the Landsknechte and killed them. Maximilian still refused.

Like so often in revolutions, the breakdown of one set of rules leads to the next set of institutions to fall, until there are no safeguards left. The executioners of Ghent and Bruges were working overtime. Maximilian was placed into another prison. He now truly feared for his life. He wrote to his father begging him to come, otherwise he will soon be dead by poison or by violence. He would later say that he often saw a man aiming his crossbow directly at him when he passed the window.

Kunz von der Rosen and the escape from Bruges

There is a story about one of Maximilian’s closest associates, a man by the name of Kunz von der Rosen. He was the son of a prosperous merchant from Kaufbeuren, a small free imperial city. He had ascended rapidly in the archducal and now royal service due to quote “the utmost diligence in his work, an open and courageous character, but more than that, the ability to find the cheerful side in all situations in life, and his ever-ready wit.” He would often describe himself as the emperor’s fool and is depicted as such in the Maximilian’s monumental triumphal march. But he was a joker with a poker. He fought in most of Maximilian’s battle and became a hugely influential advisor. There is a story that he gained access to Maximilian in his prison disguised as a Franciscan monk, complete with tonsure and shave, and offered to take Maximilian’s place, letting him leave in his costume. Maximilian refused, unwilling to sacrifice his friend who would undoubtedly be torn to pieces by the mob.

The situation turned into Maximilian’s favour when the empire finally rallied behind him. Though the princes still saw the low countries as a Habsburg private project, the incarceration and threatening of their king was an unbearable attack on their honor and status. By April 1488 a sizeable army gathered and marched towards Bruges.

That caused a re-evaluation of options amongst the citizens. Calmer heads prevailed and they allowed Maximilian more freedom and luxuries. And negotiations over a formal peace began. Maximilian confirmed the rights his wife Marie had granted the estates of the Low Countries in the great privilege of 1477. Effectively giving them almost complete autonomy. He promised to honor the peace of Arras from 1482 that gave France a third of the former Burgundian state, to remove all German and foreign advisors, to send his mercenaries home and renounce the guardianship of his son and the regency. And of course he agreed that what happened in Bruges, stayed in Bruges. There was a weird ceremony in the church of St. Jakob where Maximilian smiled and declared that now finally they would all have peace. There was a lot of singing and jubilation, and Maximilian finally left Bruges. At the gate, he promised once more that he would stick to all of his promises, but ominously added that of course, he could not guarantee that his father would.

Four More Years of war

Well, he wouldn’t, wouldn’t he. Friedrich III put Ghent under siege. The pope issued an interdict against Bruges. Maximilian got around his oaths and promises by simply saying that it was only binding on him, not on the emperor or the imperial princes. Still Maximilian thought it more appropriate to leave the leadership of the campaign against Bruges and Ghent to his father and the imperial princes. He focused on fighting the French and the pirates.

What followed was another four years of atrocious warfare. The imperial army may not have been as successful in open battle or at sieges as Maximilian had been, but they were experts in the art of devastation. The initial model of various electors, archbishops, counts and dukes came to avenge their king of the Romans was quickly replaced by a more modern approach.

Duke Albrecht der Beherzte, „the Couragous“ was a very wealthy imperial prince and founder of the line of dukes of Saxony that ruled in Dresden and rose to royal titles. And he was also a war entrepreneur. We will talk a lot more about the Landsknechte and how they operated in one of the upcoming episodes. For now it is enough to say that we are in a time period where it was more effective to hire an army of well trained and well equipped mercenaries then to bring a feudal levy of knights. Albrecht had the funds to raise and maintain such an army and was an excellent general hardened in dozens of campaigns. He had fought against the most famous war leaders of the time, Charles the Bold and Matthias Hunyadi and he had a very rare quality that Maximilian and Friedrich appreciated even more- he was willing to work on credit.

Though Maximilian’s rule of the Low Countries came again close to collapse, Albrecht’s persistence and ability to pay his soldiers won through in the end. The French king Charles VIII made peace in 1489 and the cities of Flanders finally signed on the dotted line in 1492. The 15 year long war of the Burgundian succession was finally over.

Ernest, Elector of Saxony (1464–1486), Frederick II, Elector of Saxony (1428–1464) and Albert III, Duke of Saxony (1486–1500); from left to right, Fürstenzug, Dresden, Germany

But at what cost. The land was utterly destroyed. The population had shrunk dramatically due to famine and a return of the Plague. When Maximilian’s son Philipp took the reign in 1494, he kept the Low Countries out of his father’s conflicts. This state that once sustained the exuberant splendour of Philipp the Good and the impressive war machine of Charles the Bold no longer had the resources to do any of these things. As for Ghent and Bruges, the major trading houses had enough of war, siege and death and left for Antwerp.

What came out of the Burgundian Experience

Did Burgundy make the Habsburgs rich? Ultimately, no. These were the wealthiest lands in Northern Europe, but even after they had recovered, the debts Maximilian had built up in the wars of succession took until the middle of the next century to be repaid, and raising taxes remained a precarious process as everyone remembered the riots and rebellions. On Maximilian’s P&L the Burgundian state ranked roughly on par with Tirol and Austria and in terms of balance sheet well below the silver mines of Schwaz.

But the legacy of these 15 years was only partially fiscal. Maximilian had lived and fought there between the ages of 18 and 31. This is the time when the frontal lobes fuses, it is the time we today may spend at university and in our first jobs, and I may just be speaking for myself, but that was the time when my view of the world of friendships and values were formed. And in my case, that was a normal experience. But for Maximilian, that was – even by the standards of the time – an exceptional experience.

He arrived coming from the modest, almost austere court of his father to the most luxurious, most sophisticated society in Northern Europe. Literally every piece of clothing, art, armour, every painting and every tapestry was made by one of the greatest artists of the time. The parties, the tournaments, the dances, the music, everything was so much more refined. Court etiquette allowed for openness and interaction between the sexes that was utterly alien to conservative Styria. And then the hunts. Sure there was some great hunting at his father’s castle in Wiener Neustadt, but these Burgundian palaces, they had menageries with lions, leopards, rare birds. The letters he writes home to his friend Prüschek are almost breathless in their descriptions. He goes through the classic trope of country bumpkin in the big city complete with falling in love with a much more sophisticated, beautiful lady. There is a whiff of Crocodile Dundee here.

All this luxury was however not an empty display of epic consumption. The Burgundian court was the final manifestation arguably the high point in chivalric culture. Each one of the grand dukes would dream of going on crusade, on fulfilling their true purpose of protecting Christendom. Their art is suffused with medieval ideas, not with the aesthetic of ancient Rome or Greece. This is in a way a backward looking world and in that respect not far from the world of the 95 lords of Austria Maximilian had grown up in.

But at the same time this was a very modern reality. The painting techniques of a Jan van Eyck or Rogier van der Weyden were in many aspects much more advanced than their Italian contemporaries whose subjects focused on a more secular, individualistic world.

The economy that underpinned the state of Burgundy was equally a modern one. It was trade and industry that had created Burges, Ghent, Ypres, Arras, Brussels, Tournai and these other dozens of cities larger and richer than Vienna. Equally modern and forward looking was the military with its advanced artillery and disciplined infantry.

It is this mixture of idealism and realism that Maximilian fully embraced and made his own. He would be remembered as the “Last Knight” who wanted to resurrect the medieval empire of Barbarossa and Otto the Great and go on crusade to Jerusalem, whilst he was at the same time the father of the Landsknechte who fought with them on foot, the man who helped Antwerp becoming the most significant trading centre North of the Alps and the first ruler to take full advantage of the printing press.

Maximilian’s modern biographer, Hermann Wiesflecker makes the argument that Maximilian picked up much of the sophisticated Burgundian state craft and implemented it in Austria and Tyrol. In particular the concept of a central fiscal infrastructure with annual budgets and tax income forecasts had been imported from the Burgundian state. That view has been challenged by recent historians who point out that in particular the Tyrol had a sophisticated fiscal infrastructure already. I haven’t got the time to dig through all of these arguments, but I am convinced that Maximilian came away from 15 years of war and endless discussions with the Estates General with a clear understanding that such matters, boring as they may look, are what decides the outcome of war.

Against all that brightness, Maximilian also experienced some terrible tragedy . Marie’s sudden death shook him deeply and he kept her memory alive until his death. The loss of his children must have been exceedingly painful, only one of whom he gets back young. His daughter had become a teenager by the time he meets her again.

Durer’s feast of teh rose garlands with Marie of Burgundy as the Madonna and Maximilian kneeling

Being imprisoned by the mob, watching his senior servants being tortured unable to protect them was a shock, that left him with a lifelong hatred for Ghent and any form of city autonomy.

And let’s not forget the endless litany of betrayals and disappointments, the imperial princes that refused to help, his cousin Sigismund stabbing him in the back, the constantly shifting allegiances of the great cities and treachery even of some of the members of his order of the Golden Vlies.

Given all that, Maximilian could have easily ended up like his father, a withdrawn, depressed ruler who trusted no one. Instead he remained a man with many lasting real friendships and his famous Leutseligkeit, his ability to speak to anyone from beggars to barons.

Whilst this did not happen, the Burgundian adventure left him with the conviction that war was always the only solution. The solution to his conflict with France, the solution to the occupation of Vienna, the solution to the French invasion of imperial Italy we will talk about soon.

For Maximilian war was not a means to achieve a near term tangible political objective, it was fought for the complete destruction and defeat of the enemy. This idea was probably the most enduring idea he took away from Burgundy. The struggle between France and Burgundy he inherited and that shaped his formative years, was a war for survival. Both sides were convinced that only the complete defeat and erasure of the other guaranteed their existence.

For Maximilian and many of his successors, the west was where the decision over world domination and survival was going to be made, not in the east. This will leave the Habsburgs with a strangely lopsided strategy that left the Balkans and Hungary to Turkish aggression for a long time, even let them besiege Vienna, whilst throwing so much of their resources into the struggle with the Kings of France.

As you can imagine, though the war of the Burgundian succession is now over, this is not going to be the last clash between Habsburg and Valois. But next week we are going back to the heart of the empire, we will see how Maximilian and Friedrich regain Austria, prevent the Tyrol from getting sold to the Wittelsbach and lay another of the many foundations that will bring them the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary. Soon we will get to the imperial reforms, the Swabian Bund and the last war with the Swiss. And that can only mean one thing, we will finally exit the 15^th century…..and you thought that would never happen.

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Episode 219 – The Fall of Ghent

by History of the Germans Podcast on 21st December 20255th February 2026

Why there are no more City States

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 219 – The Fall of Ghent, or why there no city states no more.

The words High and Late Middle Ages conjures up images of fog rising up over a field where knights in shining armor are trading blows with double handed swords, mighty bishops overseeing the construction of monumental cathedrals and peasants toiling on the land as serfs.

The reason we see it that way goes back to the chivalric literature that celebrated the aristocratic lifestyle where tournaments and poetry mattered more than the humdrum world of business.

But let’s just take a look back at the High Middle Ages, the time of Richard the Lionheart, Saint Louis and Frederick Barbarossa. Who controlled access to the great endeavor of the time, the conquest of the Holy Land? Who re-opened up the connections to the wider world, from Novgorod to India and China? Who were the most ferocious fighters who neither expected nor granted any quarter? Who had all the money?

These were the great cities of Italy, of Flanders, of Picardie and Provence and of the Holy Roman Empire. Verona under the Della Scala in the 14^th century generated tax revenues twice as high as those of England, Venice capacity was sixty percent of what France could generate. And these cities fielded armies that, as we know, defeated the Holy Roman Emperors, even the most capable ones like Barbarossa and Frederick II time and time again. Their absolute dedication to fight to the end was evidenced by their extremely heavy and slow war carts, the Carroccios and by the bravery of the Flemish Militia at the Battle of the Golden Spurs. And the first European since Roman times to make to India and China wasn’t a Knight errant, but a Venetian merchant, nor were the vast lands on the Eastern side of the continent linked up by military force. The crusades, the grand project of the age was as much a venetian mercantile adventure as a religious pilgrimage, culminating in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

I could go on, but the bottom line is that the medieval city states played a much larger military and economic role in the 1200, 1300 and 1400 than the 19^th century novels of Sir Walter Scott and the plays of Friedrich de la Motte Fouquet had made us believe.

At their height there were 65 free and imperial cities, maybe the same number of Italian city states, and probably several hundreds of cities that enjoyed significant autonomy from their sovereign. Today, the UN recognises only two city states, Singapore and Monaco, as well as the Vatican City as an observer, so, amongst us girls, there is only one real city state left.

What happened? Where did all these city states go? And why?

That is what we are going to discuss today, when we look at the showdown between Maximilian of Habsburg, widower of the last duchess of Burgundy and father of Philip, the universally recognised heir of the Low Countries and the Flemish cities, and specifically its largest, the city of Ghent.

But before we start a quick correction. Last week I mistakenly said that Margaret of York was the mother of Marie of Burgundy. That is of course incorrect. Her mother was Isabella of Bourbon, the first wife of Charles the Bold.

And as punishment for my mistakes, I cannot allow myself to wax lyrically about the benefits of supporting the show on historyofthegermans.com/support, but am limited to expressing our gratitude for keeping the show advertising free to Andy K., Patrick R., Sprocket Tinkerwind, Mani R., Vasilisa, Ethan B., Casper H, and John S.

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And with that, back to the show…

Last week, we left Maximilian pushed out of the guardianship and regency of the Low Countries. And worse, he saw his 2-year old daughter taken away to France to be brought up as a future French queen and his 4-year old son and heir Philip put under the tutelage of the Estates General. According to the chronicler Olivier de la Marche, Maximilian complained his life had turned into that of saint Eustace, whose son was taken by a wolf and his daughter by a lion.

Contemporaries as well as historians have regularly pointed out how vastly different the old emperor Friedrich III and his son were. Where Maximilian thrived in tournaments and war, Friedrich was always cautious and hardly ever appeared in person on the battlefield or in Tournament, Friedrich III was always secretive and closed, whilst Maximilian was open and engaged with anyone from barbers to barons, Friedrich’s court was a dour affair, in part as a function of the shortage of money, whilst Maximilian fully embraced the splendor of the Burgundian court and its never-ending sequence of tourneys, dances, musical recitals, solemn masses and grand entrees in stunning cities, the elaborate hunts in the rich forests etc., etc.

But they are still father and son. Both of them were interested in the latest developments in technology, in mining, minting, manufacture of guns and armor etc. They were curious about what they called the dark arts, from alchemy to necromancy, and had a habit of collecting precious stones. And when it came to personality, they both held the unshakeable belief in the destiny of the House of Austria and from that derived a persistence, even stubbornness that kept them going even when anyone else would have concluded that the chips are down and it was time to go home.

And it was this infinite resource and tenacity, that kept Maximilian from giving up after he had been forced to sign the treaty of Arras in spring 1483. This tenacity may be somewhat admirable from the distance of 500 plus years, but if you had been living in the Low Countries during these years, you would have preferred a more malleable duke.

The Estates General had intended for Maximilian to be ousted from his role as guardian and regent in all the lands of the dukes of Burgundy. But the estates themselves were not a balanced body. The number of delegates and their selection process had not been formalized, so that sometimes entire provinces were absent from the debates. And given the meetings were often held in Ghent or Bruges, the representatives of the cities of Flanders were usually over represented. And it was the cities of Flanders that were most adamant in their desire to get rid of Maximilian, whose wasteful wars and rapacious German administrators were destroying their lands, or so they said.

That view was not necessarily shared by everyone. Brabant and Hainault took a more favorable view of Maximilian, whose victory at Guinegate had protected these provinces from French occupation. Which is why Maximilian went straight to Mechelen, Antwerp and Brussels.

What happens next will be shocking to many fans of the Last Knight, the great chivalric hero. But we should not forget what he was fighting for. Not just for some piece of land he had hoped to rule thanks to an advantageous marriage, he was also fighting for the continued existence of his dynasty, whose survival in Austria was threatened by the king of Hungary, and even more importantly, he was fighting to one day see his children again, the boy and the girl who he had promised his dying wife to protect. With that much at stake, he did not take prisoners. The war in the Netherlands is turning even nastier.

His first act was to go to Liege where William de la Marck, the wild Boar of the Ardennes had not only unseated the prince bishop but had also split his head open with an axe. A battle fought outside the walls turned into a brutal massacre where Maximilian’s heavy artillery tore through the city militia. The terrified Liégeois threw the French out and let Maximilian in. The archduke, instead of punishing the murderous partman hired William into his army. William did get his just desert a few years later, not for his crimes but because he had betrayed Maximilian once too often.

Still raging with anger, Maximilian had all city councillors and noblemen in Brabant arrested who at some point had supported the French. They were tried and convicted and five of them were executed, including the mayor of Antwerp. This blood court led to a further hardening of position, not in Brabant, but across the border in Flanders. Led by Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, the estates established a regency council that comprised the city governments and several senior aristocrats, some of them members of the order of the Golden Fleece.

Though before Maximilian could turn his forces against his main opposition in Flanders, he had to deal with another problem, Utrecht. The prince bishopric of Utrecht, like Liege, had been an associate part of the Burgundian state and its bishop was chosen by the dukes. The current officeholder was David, an illegitimate son of Philip the Good, or as they called it at the time, a bastard of Burgundy. David’s position as bishop of Utrecht had been precarious, ever since his father had pushed his nomination against the opposition of the Hooks, and he had not helped things when he forced through a radical centralisation policy. When the death of Marie of Burgundy created a political opening, the Hooks in Utrecht captured their bishop and paraded him around in a cart filled with manure before putting him in jail.

That mistreatment of a member of the ducal family called out for revenge. Maximilian brought his heavy artillery before Utrecht and systematically pulverised the city walls. After 2 months the eminent citizens came out of the gates barefoot and with ropes around their necks, begging for forgiveness. The city was fined 40,000 gulden, ordered to dismiss all their troops, give up their privileges as an independent city and had to permit the construction of a fortress inside its walls.

Over the subsequent months he reestablished his hold over Guelders and Holland, took Arnheim and made peace with the duke of Cleves.

He now held the entirety of the North of the Low Countries and had his back free. It was time to turn on the rebellious cities of Flanders.

And another event strengthened Maximilian’s hand. King Louis XI, the wily adversary whose intrigues had sent Charles the Bold into his frozen death and whose spider’s web of allies and bribery agents had already brought 6 years of war and devastation to the Burgundian state, died on August 30^th, 1483.

The cities of Flanders sent an embassy to Paris to congratulate the new king of France, the 13-year old Charles VIII and renewed the treaty of Arras. Maximilian had the envoys arrested for treason before they could return to Ghent.

Then he declared the regency council dissolved. His agents distributed pamphlets claiming the regency council, including the knights of the Golden Fleece who served on it, had harmed duke Philip, his son and their hereditary lord. The regency council responded, stating that they were loyal subjects of their true lord, archduke Philip, and that Maximilian had been fighting ruinous and useless wars and had allowed the remaining cash to be taken out of the country by his corrupt German advisers. Hence the only way to protect the Netherlanders from eternal subservience to the Germans was if Philip was educated as a Netherlander, here in the Low countries.

Before we get on with this story, it may be worth while to ask the question, what the deep underlying reason for their objection to Maximilian’s rule was. Sure the points they made about corruption and the independence of the Netherlands from foreign control were truly felt. But if we go one abstraction level up, and look into Maximilian’s broader political objectives, we see something that is much more traditionally Burgundian. The young Habsburg wasn’t introducing new and foreign policy instruments, what he was doing was continuing the policies of Philipp the Good and Charles the Bold, who had tried to forge their diverse territories into one coherent and ideally contiguous state, a kingdom even. That would include one central appellate court in Mechelen, a central fiscal and administrative organization and a standing army.

All that sounds fairly modern, so why did the elites in the Flemish cities whose business network spanned the known world and who were more literate and better educated than most, why did they object? The reason we live – more or less happily – in centralized states today is because the state holds a monopoly on violence, protecting me from bandits and baddies, ideally from invasions too. The advantages of safe roads and borders should be evident to a Flemish merchant, but apparently it wasn’t. They were prepared to go all the way to thwart such centralization and modernity. Why?

One part is simply pride, pride in your city, pride in the long list of charters a place like Ghent had wrestled from reluctant princes that granted self determination and freedom. Freedom is always a great rallying cry, though it can mean very different things to different people.

Given my background and world view, I also believe there was a strong commercial motive her. And so it may be a good idea to go to the father of economic understanding, Adam Smith and one of his most famous quotes:

“In all countries where there is a tolerable security, every man of common understanding will endeavour to employ whatever stock he can command, in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit.[..] A man must be perfectly crazy, who, where there is a tolerable security, does not employ all the stock which he commands, [ ] in some one or other of those [..] ways. In those unfortunate countries, indeed, where men are continually afraid of the violence of their superiors, they frequently bury or conceal a great part of their stock, in order to have it always at hand to carry with them to some place of safety, in case of they being threatened with any of those disasters to which they consider themselves at all times exposed.” End quote. Source: Wealth-Nations).

Montesquieu makes this even more explicit:

“Great enterprises in commerce are not found in monarchical, but republican governments….An opinion of greater certainty as to the possession of property in these [republican] states makes [merchants] undertake everything….Thinking themselves sure of what they have already acquired, they boldly expose it in order to acquire more…” end quote

And to bring in a modern instead of an 18^th century source, here are Bradford de Long and Shleifer in their 1991 paper on Princes and Merchants: quote

“As measured by the pace of city growth in western europe between 1000 to 1800, absolutist monarchs stunted the growth of commerce and industry. A region ruled by an absolutist prince saw its urban population shrink by 100,000 people per century relative to a region without absolutist government. This might be explained by higher rates of taxation under revenue maximizing absolutist governments than under non-absolutist governments, which care more about general economic prosperity and less about state revenue.”

Bottom line, what the Gentenaars feared, beyond the impact on their personal freedoms and privileges, was the impact that a centralizing, authoritarian government could have on their business. The history of the Flemish cities is full of counts and duke whose political objectives were fundamentally at odds with the economic interests of the burghers, resulting in a never-ending string of uprisings and wars. This latest revolt against Maximilian was therefore nothing new or unusual.

If one was a betting man, the odds were very much in favor of the cities of Flanders. Ghent, Bruges and Ypres were the by far richest cities in Northern Europe. The networks of their merchants and the reputation of their cloth stretched across the whole of europe. They were home to the branches and counting houses of the bankers of Florence, the traders of Genoa, Venice, Barcelona and Lisbon, the merchants of the Hanseatic league and the wool-sellers of England and Wales.

And beyond the all important coin, they could rely on support from the French. Sure, young king Charles VIII was no match to his father, but his elder sister and the current regent of France, Anne de Beaujeu was. She became known as “Madame la Grande”, on account of her masterful management of France during the troubles following Louis XI’s death. Her father called her “the least foolish woman in France”, which is another black mark against an already thoroughly blackened reputation.

In any event, she was no pushover and French support for the Flemings, and in particular the Gentenaars, the inhabitants of Ghent and Bruggelingen, the citizens of Bruges was firm. I cannot believe I missed out on these most excellent terms over these last episodes. There is also Brugse Zotten, which I understand is very rude and will be reserved for next week’s episode.

There we go, the Gentenaars, Bruggelingen et. al. put together an army and recruit a suitable commander, Jacob of Romont, once a friend and lieutenant of Charles the Bold and – according to some – the true engineer of Maximilian’s victory at Guinegate.

As for Maximilian, his financial resources had never been great, but now, without the tax income from Ghent and Bruges, his tresury in truly dire straits. His debts had already built up to one million florins. But then…

Maximilian had, as we just described, brought Brabant, Hainault, Holland, Seeland, Guelders, Liege and Utrecht under his control. These lands may not be as rich in coin as Flanders, but almost as populous.

And these places followed Maximilian not just out of fear. When the Estates General established the regency council and their guardianship over little Philipp, they had set up a rotational system whereby the young duke was to be passed around the different provinces of his realm, so as to get to know their institutions and customs. But that never happened. The Gentenaars never let little Philipp stray beyond the walls of their city out of the justified concern that Maximilian may capture/free him. But that left the other provinces suspecting a takeover by the Flemish.

And finally, inside Ghent and Bruges, there were different factions. Not everyone was sufficiently concerned about the long term impact on their economy to bear the near term pain of a prolonged war, the burning of the countryside and eventually a siege of the city.

The division also had a social component. In Ghent the pro- French, pro war party relied heavily on the lower classes, led by a sock maker, Jan van Coppenhole and two other men, called Rijm and Ondrede, which in Dutch could be translated as Rhyme and Unreason, whilst the “friends of Austria” tended to be the upper classes of cloth merchants and long distance traders.

Hostilities began with Gent and Bruges arming two fortresses that overlooked the entrance of the Scheldt River, interrupting commercial traffic into Antwerp, right around the time the annual great fair was supposed to take place. Maximilian responded by first destroying the fleet of Flanders’ privateers before taking the two fortresses and hanging all its defenders.

The next target was the small, but strategically important city of Dendermonde. Maximilian disguised his soldiers as monks and pilgrims, even persuaded an abbess to provide additional credibility, and sent them into Denderonde. They got to the gate, and whilst the city guards were debating whether to let the abbess in, the pretend monks jumped off their carts and ran the guards through and secured the gate. Maximilian rode into the city with a large detachment and Dendermonde submitted.

The Gentenaars and Bruggelingen responded with a massive attack on Brabant, including Brussels. That nearly broke Maximilian’s alliance, but through sheer strength of personality he stiffened the resolve of the Brusseleers and raised the militia of Hainault that drove the enemy back.

Now it was Maximilian’s turn. He took the city of Oudenaarde where his supporters opened the gate. Again, Maximilian rode onto the main square, asked the citizens to yield, or he would unleash his mercenaries.

These successes had swelled the ranks of his army, which now counted 20,000, mostly men of foot. And he had some extremely heavy artillery that had allowed him to break the walls of Liege, Utrecht ad so many other places.

That was the plus side, but on the other side of the equation, the French now officially entered the war. M. de Crevecoer, who had risen to Marshall of France despite his extremely poor management of the battle of Guinegate, slipped 4,500 top notch French troops into the city of Ghent, reinforcing the 16,000 solider under Romont.

Maximilian’s senior officers advised against an attack of Ghent. The enemy forces were too strong and the walls reinforced. Still Maximilian was determined to get the greatest city in his land under his control and get his son back.

His solution to overcome the strength of Ghent was to play on the two greatest human motivators, fear and greed. When the wind stood in the right direction, he ordered his soldiers to burn the suburbs, including the extremely expensive and crucial windmills. As the smoke was drifting into the city, the Gentenaars feared for their livelihoods and streamed out of the gates to extinguish the fires. Meanwhile Maximilian’s army had advanced towards Ghent under the cover of the smoke. Once they deemed to be close enough they spurred on their horses and rushed down towards the gates. Some militiamen tried to fend off the attackers, but most of them ran back towards the gate. Everything happened so fast, a number of Maximilian’s riders had overtaken the fleeing Gentenaars and had gone through. The guards on the gate had to make a painful decision, wait for everybody to get back inside, which meant letting Maximilian get through, or let the gate crush down and leave your fellow citizens outside to be captured or hanged. They decided to drop the gate.

Maximilian’s attack had not succeeded, but it had rattled the Gentenaars. He sent messages into the city asking whether he ever had demanded as much in taxation and hardship as their new city government was now exacting. And all that to withhold his son from him? Was that destruction of their lands worth, just to live without a prince?

His supporters in the city begged him to halt the plundering of the countryside for 15 days, enough time they said to change the minds of their fellow citizens.

Maximilian granted them this reprieve and took his army away from Ghent to tackle the other rebellious city, Bruges. This time he opted for an attack by sea. He went to Antwerp and requisitioned a 100 ships, loaded his soldiers on board and went for Sluis, the commercial harbour of the great trading city. He captured a number of ships and threatened to burn and bomb those moored up in the inner harbour. That was enough for the merchants of Bruges. They opened their gates and Maximilian entered under great jubilation. He did punish the leaders of the pro war party harshly, confiscated all French ships in the harbour but confirmed the great city’s rights and privileges.

When news of the fall of Bruges arrived in Ghent, the radicals led by Rijm, Odenrade and Coppenhole prepared for a last stand. They seized what remained of the ducal treasury and sent it down to the mint to hire replacements for the mercenaries that were leaving the city every day. That was the moment the guilds sided with the patricians and overthrew the government. They put them on trial, accusing them of having called in the French and broken the peace. Rijs and Odenrade were beheaded, but Coppenhole managed to escape.

The Gentenaars opened negotiations with Maximilian. They accepted Maximilian as the guardian and regent for their lord, young Philipp, paid reparations of 360,000 Ecus and opened their gates. In return Maximilian promised not to take Philipp out of the Low Countries, grant a general amnesty and not bring more soldiers into Ghent than he had brought into Bruges.

When Maximilian arrived before Ghent, his son Philipp was awaiting him. The chronicler Jean Molinet described the scene as such: And when the son saw his father, he took off his hat, and as they approached each other, they did honours to one another; and when they came together, they embraced and kissed each other, whereupon the hearts of those who saw them were so filled with joy that they wept copious tears.” End quote.It had been more than 3 years since the two had seen each other. After Philip and Maximilian’s reunion, the young Count of Flanders was sent off to live under the guidance of his grandmother, Margaret of York, in her dowager town of Mechelen.

Maximilian entered the city of Ghent with 6,000 men. And this time, the victorious entry was not led by knights on horseback. Instead his army marched on foot, eight abreast, even his generals, most of them noblemen like the count of Nassau, the Lord of Montigny, the Lord of Palmes, and others had dismounted .

A whole string of battles, Crecy, Muhlberg, Morgarten, Sempach, Grandson, Murten, Nancy, Guinegate and so forth had proven the superiority of disciplined infantry over knightly forces. This was the first time the new military order was recognised in a victory parade.

But there were some issues that made the people of Ghent nervous. Maximilian had brought 6,000 of his best soldiers, not 500 as he had promised in the peace treaty. And these men may be disciplined in the field, in a city, particularly in a defeated city, they were not. Here is what jean Molinet tells us happened next:

“The following Monday, the eleventh of July, at about noon, four Germans went to the prison [..] on the grain market to retrieve three or four Germans who had been imprisoned there by the townspeople for attempting to break into their lodgings. The four Germans immediately took the keys from the prison guard, whom they locked up in a room. They opened two doors and approached the prisoners, but were unable to do anything more, for the guard cried out so loudly for help that many people from in front of and behind the prison immediately came to see what was happening, so that the Germans did not dare to leave. The people who had gathered in front of the prison, informed of the situation,[…] went to the town hall, where the court was assembled, and demanded justice […].

At this time, the duke found himself at the town hall, greatly astonished by this gathering and their unusual behaviour, asked the Flemings to go back to their homes; which they refused to do, saying that they were not asking anything of the duke, but wanted punishment for the said Germans. The duke agreed, but that was no longer enough for them; for by around six o’clock in the evening, they brought their banners to the old market, which they closed off with carts and set up their serpentines, bombards, culverins, falconets and other instruments of war.

Seeing this, the duke, wishing to know their intentions, sent the bishop of Cambray to them, who informed them that the duke was very displeased with them and sought to pacify them with gentle and kind words, but they took no heed of his remonstraions. At about ten o’clock at night, they left the Old Market, in battle formation, with all their weapons, and marched towards the ducal palace, reaching the bridge near the Augustinians, the Place Sainte-Vierge and the bridge where heads are cut off. When the duke learned of their departure, he gathered the Germans and his other men at Ten Walle, his fortress, and commanded each of them to carry the banner of St. Andrew’s Cross in front and behind them; and it was decided to attack the said Gantenaars and put everything to fire and sword;

But Monseigneur Philippe of Ravenstain and several good burghers of Ghent fell to their knees before the duke. He relented, and with the duke’s consent, the lord of Ravenstein and the count of Chimay went to appease the aforementioned Flemings. But they were rebuffed and lost many of their hats, coats, slippers and other clothing, which greatly displeased the duke; and worse still, the people of Ghent rang the great Roland, that is to say, the bell of alarm;

Maximilian then sent a small number of Germans and Angles to skirmish with them. They did good work on all sides; and drove people and animals into the river; and some Flemings were killed. {…]; the Gantenaars retreated to the old market. The duke then offered forgiveness, on condition that certain persons be taken from both sides to satisfy them for the injustices they had suffered; so they withdrew their banners to their homes at about six o’clock in the morning on Tuesday.

That same day, the Duke, accompanied by his nobles and a well-ordered group of Germans, came to the town hall at about nine o’clock, where, after much lengthy discussion, he demanded the imprisonment of the leaders who had instigated or were the cause of this armed uprising and mutiny. Five or six men were arrested that same day and taken prisoner.

The duke hastily brought back his men-at-arms who were in the town and castle of L’Escluse,; he also called his garrisons from Ath, Enghien, Tenremonde and Audenarde; and around noon, Monseigneur Philippe de Ravestain, accompanied by four hundred Englishmen, took up positions in the crossbowmen’s fortress located in front of Thostel in the town, where they spent the night in arms, the Germans moved into another quarter near the old market to subdue the said Gentenaars;

The Duke of Austria {…] had the people of Ghent themselves rebuild the five bridges that they had broken during the war, near his fortress in Ten Walle, so that he could leave as he wished.

The people of Ghent had built on their fish market a staircase eighteen to twenty feet high, on which stood four lions, one bearing the arms of the king (of France), another those of Duke Philip, the third those of the county of Flanders, and the fourth those of the city of Ghent. The duke had the king’s arms removed in broad daylight and replaced with his own. The duke had the artillery of Monseigneur des Querdes, as well as that of Ghent, taken to his fortress; and the people of Ghent returned to him his tapestry, his cross, his library and other jewels amounting to a great treasure; and they offered to pay him one hundred and twenty-seven thousand gold escudos within a year.

The mutineers who started this dispute were tortured to the number of forty. On Saturday, seven Gantenaars were executed, two of whom had paid twelve hundred pounds of gros. End quote.

Maximilian had achieved what no other Burgundian duke had been able to do. He had subdued the rebellious city of Ghent by military force. Not even Philipp the Good had achieved that.

Which gets us back to the initial question, why there are so few city states left.

In previous centuries Ghent and most other medieval cities have been able to withstand the power of territorial princes. The Hanseatic League had defeated the king of Denmark, the Lombard league of Italian cities pushed out the emperors Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II, countless German cities shook off the overlordship of their bishops, dukes and counts during the 13^th and 14^th century.

From the middle of the 15^th century, that process went into reverse. Many members of the Hanseatic League came under the control of local princes, some venerable places like Mainz faced financial collapse and had to seek shelter with a territorial ruler, the Italian cities were taken over first by local tyrants in the form of the Signoria and then by the great territorial states of Milan, Venice, Florence, the Papal States, Ferrara, Mantua and a few more.

The still prevailing theory argues that this was the result of changes in methods and scale of warfare. The use of artillery and infantry required early modern armies to be trained to coordinate across the different arms, something that required either a standing army or the use of mercenaries. Either of these were exponentially more expensive than warfare had been in previous centuries. Only larger state entities were able to deploy violence on this scale, making city states obsolete.

If we look at the events of Maximilian’s campaign to regain control of the Low Countries between 1483 and 1486, I am not sure it supports this theory. Maximilian’s resources were limited compared to the combined force of Ghent and France. His success was built more on cunning, personality and the internal divisions amongst his opponents than brute force of his army.

There is a countertheory that says that the formation of modern, territorial states was actually a phenomena on the European periphery, in France, Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia, whilst in the areas that formed and still forms the economic heartland of europe, the famous Blue Banana that is made up of Northern Italy, Western Germany, the Low Countries and England had remained somewhat fragmented exactly because the cities had the resources to fend off the pressure of larger territorial entities, which again allowed them to benefit from the absence of absolutist rule.

This question, whether the scale and structure of the military forced consolidation or whether there were other drivers in play will be a constant companion in the episodes to come.

Either way, for Ghent this affair had long term dire consequences. The 8 years of constant warfare, the destruction of the land and the uprisings unsettled many of the richest merchants and entrepreneurs. Antwerp, not far away in Brabant seemed a much more stable centre of operations, away from the French border. And after all that had happened, Maximilian was now intent to promote his duchy of Brabant over the unreliable Gentenaars and Bruggelingen. A slow exodus to Antwerp and Brussels began. That exodus will accelerate even further, when the Flemish cities attempt for one last time to get rid of Maximilian three years later.

But in-between Maximilian will return to Holy Roman Empire where things have gone seriously wrong. The same day Maximilian entered Ghent in triumph, Matthias Hunyadi, the king of Hungary did the same in Vienna. His father, the emperor Friedrich III had become homeless, the ancestral lands were lost. The Wittelsbachs were stretching their mitts out to gain Tyrol from the feckless Siegmund and the Turks, the Imperial Reform, everything was stalling. The victor of Flanders, the ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands was needed back home.

How he fares there is what we will discuss, well not next week, since next week is when I will drop you some travel advice, but the week after that. And then there is Yuletide, which, in the German tradition, takes place at midnight on the 24^th of December, exactly as it says in St. Luke, not on the 25^th as these godless Anglo-Saxons believe. And with that caveat, Merry Christmas to you all.

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Episode 218 – Of Hedgehogs and Herons

by History of the Germans Podcast on 11th December 20255th February 2026

The Burgundian War, 1477-1483

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Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 218 – Hedgehogs and Herons, The Burgundian War

By 1477 the rules of war that had been enshrined in the laws of chivalry are gone. The contest between the French and the Habsburgs over the inheritance of the Grand Dukes of the West gives us a foretaste of the things to come.

This war isn’t just fought between the opposing armies lining up for the decisive battle, but include wholesale starving out of the population, funding local uprisings and using propaganda and bribery to incite rebellions on the enemy’s homefront.

No one in 15^th century Northern Europe is better at this new game than the industrious spider, king Louis XI of France. But a plucky 18-year old Austrian duke who had arrived in Ghent with not much more than the clothes on his back, abundant energy and a budding military genius gave him a run for his huge amounts of money, until tragedy struck.

Lots of deception, drama and devastation today….

But before we start, let me tell you again about this History of the Germans trip that may or may not happen. The idea is to travel on a barge on the Rhine river from Aschaffenburg to Cologne, or maybe beyond. The boat looks lovely and we could see Frankfurt, Mainz, the castles of the Middle Rhine, Bonn, Cologne and of course, Aachen. Some of you have told me they would be interested, but at this point not enough for me to go ahead with it. So, if that is something you would be interested in and you are free for a week end of June/early July let me know at historyofthegermans@gmail.com. It would help me a lot to decide whether or not I want to go ahead with it.

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And with that, back to the show

Last week ended on the wedding night of Maximilian of Habsburg and Marie of Burgundy, one of the rare occasions where dynastic marriages created a brilliant match. The two of them really got on. Maximilian was writing letters to his friends back home in Styria, waxing lyrically about how gorgeous his new wife was and how much fun the two had together. Marie in turn spoiled her husband with clothes, armor, tournaments, mummeries, and above all hunts, for fox, stag, boar and even bear.

Maximilian was, one can be sure, delighted, but above all, he was relieved. Because this marriage was built on false premises. Marie, her mother the duchess of York and all of Burgundy believed that Maximilian was going to bring with him a great imperial army that would beat back the attacks by the industrious spider, king Louis XI of France.

Distributionof the lands of Charles the Bold after 1477 (purple forFfrench acquisitions)

When he showed up empty handed, things could have turned sour very quickly. This was a time where violence, even against princes and mighty dukes was a common way to express dissatisfaction with someone’s behavior, level of support or simply, existence. Duke John the Fearless of Burgundy had been murdered on orders of the dauphin of France in plain sight. That was revenge for the murder of the duke of Orleans, the uncle of that same dauphin, later king Charles VII. Across the channel in England, Humphrey duke of Gloucester, George duke of Clarence and the princes in the tower disappeared in the Tower under mysterious circumstances. In Italy Giuliano de Medici and Galeazzo Maria Sforza were in the way and then got out of the way in broad daylight. And these were just the successful and obvious attempts on princely lives. Poison was an ubiquitous tool to re-arrange the line of succession or the college of cardinals, and a suitable means to remove a groom whose assets came up short.

When Maximilian rode up to Burgundy, he took his life into his own hands and hoped for the best. And somehow things had worked out really well, at least so far. The notoriously rebellious city of Ghent had received him with grand fanfare, chronicler described his appearance as that of an angel having descended from heaven and some even held up banners saying: “Whatever you tell us to do, we will do it”. Spoiler alert, that banner will not be used ever again.

But still, things had been much better than anyone could have hoped. The day after the marriage celebrations had concluded, the citizens of Ghent swore him allegiance as the new duke, and even more importantly raised 500,000 Ecu for the defence of the realm.

And Maximilian got to work immediately. He sent two of his senior generals out to relieve the cities of St. Omer and Valenciennes, halting king Louis’ advance in Artois and Picardie. As early as September 1477, merely a month after the wedding, king Louis signed a truce and handed back several small towns as well as the imperial city of Cambrai.

The reason for Louis’ hesitancy to continue the war was a letter from the emperor Friedrich III demanding the return of all imperial fiefs accompanied by the threat of imperial war. Louis was a cautious man who avoided major military conflict wherever he could and tried to achieve his objectives through what could benignly be called diplomatic means, though many of his cultural attaches were dual use operators.

Equally, the estates of the low countries were basing their contribution to the war effort on the idea that at least in time, the empire, or at least the Habsburgs would weigh in on the fighting.

Hence during the winter of 1477, Maximilian found himself in some sort of precarious limbo. On the one hand, his father’s letter and the decisive moves on St. Omer and Valenciennes had reduce the military conflict to a trickle of border skirmishes. On the other hand, if he could not mobilise the empire and/or his family to send military aid by the spring, his complete lack of resources would become apparent to everyone. King Louis would redouble its efforts and the estates may well withhold further support for the war.

Maximilian wrote to his father that though he was now a mighty lord and owned many lands and cities, all this could be gone in 10 to 14 days. If he, his father does not send him support soon, they would likely never meet again. He and Marie had already pawned their jewels for 100,000 gulden, even the famous golden coat that Charles the Bold had worn when he entered Trier in 1473, gone. There will not be peace here unless the emperor comes and sends this king of France back beyond Paris. There is no bigger and more cowardly villain in the whole world, wrote Maximilan. He never gives battle, but keeps his troops on the border to wear us out financially.

All this begging was however to no avail. The King of Hungary, Matthias Hunyadii had formally declared war on Friedrich III and invaded Styria; meanwhile the Turks continued to raid the emperors homeland, as they had been doing for years now; a peasant revolt had kicked off in inner Austria and feuds over the archbishopric of Salzburg and the bishopric of Passau were raging. Friedrich was indeed in no position to send help.

His cousin, Sigismund of Tyrol, owner of the richest silver mines in Europe, was equally reluctant to help. He had arguably benefitted most from the demise of Charles the Bold, having first received the purchase price for the Habsburg lands in Alsace from the duke, and then regained those thanks to the league of Constance. But instead of passing on these funds, Siegmund sent Maximilian a bill for 150,000 gulden of reparations for the damages caused by the wars of Charles the Bold. Sigismund’s reluctance was in part caused by the annual subsidy of 50,000 gulden he received from Louis XI. But there was also something else. Sigismund was in the process of selling the Tyrol and further Austria to the House of Wittelsbach, specially Albrecht IV of Bayern-Munchen. We covered these shenanigans in episode 197. The Wittelsbachs, who had managed their lands much, much better than the hapless Sigismund were rich enough to buy him out, and if they had succeeded, the Bavarian-Tyrolian complex would have outearned the remaining Habsburg lands by factor 2 or even 3. Had Maximilian then failed in Burgundy, the Wittelsbachs would have ended up on the imperial throne and Munich, not Vienna would have become the capital, most likely of all of the German speaking lands.

Bottom line, powerful forces prevented the house of Habsburg to come to the aid of their sole remaining male heir. And as for the other princes in the empire, they looked at the conflict, which at this point concentrated on Flanders, Artois and Picardy, aka on French fiefs, and regarded it as a private matter of the house of Habsburg. There was no national awakening here, as had appeared when Charles the Bold besieged Neuss.

There was however one person, Maximilian could rely on to rally power to his side, and that was his mother in law, Margaret of York. The sister of king Edward IV was dragging her brother kicking and screaming into first a commercial and over the years into a military alliance with Burgundy. This return of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance, which included a promise to Edward IV of a coronation in Reims naturally terrified king Louis XI of France, which further entrenched the conflict.

With Edward IV, or indeed even before that alliance was firmed up, came duke Francois of Brittany. Brittany was at this point still independent from France.

And last but not least Margaret and Maximilian established diplomatic ties with a new major power that had emerged in the south, Spain. Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile had married in 1469 and thereby unified Spain – to the degree that Spain is unified. With Castille a traditional ally of France and Aragon a rival, the political leanings of a unified Spain could go either way. Thanks to Maximilian and Margaret’s diplomacy Spain swung behind the empire and against the kingdom of France.

Some historians date the beginnings of the European political landscape that lasted until the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 to these events in 1477. For centuries European politics were dominated by an alliance of Spain, the Habsburgs, the Empire and England pushing against the richest, most populous and most expansionist country in Europe at the time, France. And in a way this lasted into the 20^th century, when France was the “Erbfeind”, the hereditary enemy of the Germans.

The conflict between Habsburg and France at its height

As always in history, the protagonists themselves are at best vaguely aware that their actions may result in fundamental changes to the balance of power on their continent. Maximilian’s concerns were not about some major geopolitical shifts, he was just trying to make it through, and have some fun in the process.

He was only 19 years old, freshly married to the woman of his dreams who had made him not just happy, but also rich beyond his wildest dreams. As Marie introduced him to the treasures of Burgundy, to the 20 cities in her lands that were bigger than Vienna, the grand festivities of their entrees into Brussels, Antwerp, Liege, and of course Bruges. There were the magnificent castles and palaces in the cities, all infinitely larger and more ornate than Wiener Neustadt, 2 dozen moated country seats, so many venerable monasteries, that just one of his counties, Hainault had 20 of them larger than anything in Austria.

Then the court life, the dresses and robes made form silk and the famous Flemish cloth, the precious ornaments worn by both women and men. The rooms decorated with tapestries from Arras, Tournay and Brussels and the jewel-like images of van Eyck, Memling and all the other so disparagingly called primitives. Libraries full of the most accomplished miniatures and armories that took his breath away.

The Ghnt Altarpiece by Hubert & Jan van Eyck, 1425-1432

Art and music were a shared passion for Maximilian and Marie, alongside the hunting, the tournament and the mummeries. And so the winter of 1477/78 was filled with dread about the increasingly precarious situation of the low countries but at the same time resonated with the laughter and thrill of an endless sequence of tournaments, dances and hunts.

Dance after a Tournament, from the Freydal

What is truly impressive is Maximilian’s energy. Despite the constant reveling and the exigencies of young love, he worked his way through the rather dull accounts of the Burgundian state. And he came to the almost inevitable conclusion that Charles the Bold, or to give him the proper translation of his moniker, Charles the Reckless, had indeed been reckless. He may as well have left a note saying “I am afraid, there is no money left, best of luck”.

Charles the Bold had already pushed up taxes to near breaking point leaving very little what the treasury would today call “headroom”. As for the gold and silver treasures that in Trier had impressed the Habsburgs to the point of irritation, all of those, even the silver table service, had already been sent to the mint.

And there were two other headwinds Maximilian faced as went up to the Estates, asking for fresh funds. One was that by now everybody realized that no help would come from the empire, that Maximilian had brought with him no more than the clothes on his back. And the second was that Louis’ agents spread the rumor that all these taxes would end up in the pockets of Germans who were taking the cash out of the country. This unfounded story became so persistent, it hampered Maximilian’s efforts for the entirety of his reign.

The war that began again in the spring of 1478 had to be fought in four separate theatres. One was the official war, which was fought in the Artois and Picardie between the armies of Louis XI and the Burgundian forces. The second theatre was in Holland, where Louis’ money had rekindled the eternal conflict between Cods and Hooks we had hears about in episodes 198 and 199. These factions, like the Guelfs and Ghibellines in Italy no longer reflected any economic or political differences but were built on hatred passed on from one generation to the other, which made them so persistent.

Charles Rochussen – Jacoba of Bavaria, entering the conquered Gorcum, encounters the corpse of Willem van Arkel

Theatre three was the duchy of Guelders. Charles the Bold had occupied Guelders using a conflict within the ducal family. Now that Charles was gone but several of the Guelders claimants were still around or had heirs and successors, the province rose up. What did not help at all was that Guelders was rammed full of strong castles and surrounded by rivers and marshland, leaving it a thorn in Maximilian’s side for decades to come.

There are other conflicts that flare up from time to time, like for instance in Liege and Utrecht, the true fourth theatre of war was public opinion. I keep mentioning it and will continue talking about the fact that the printing press was rapidly changing the world. News and pamphlets, printed in one of the 1,000 printing presses that had sprung up in the five decades after Gutenberg, spread facts and opinions further and faster then ever before. And that was even more the case in the densely populated and broadly literate society of the cities of the low countries, of Ghent, Bruges, Antwerp, Brussels, Ypres, Lille, Amsterdam, Nijmegen, the Hague, Delft, den Bosch and the dozens and dozens I have not mentioned.

And as so often with new technologies the systems and safeguards that ensured the accuracy of the information and the honesty of the opinions were not yet in place, leaving ample room for propaganda, lies and deception. Louis XI was a man of the early modern period and he wasn’t shy of using these new tools, alongside the more traditional methods of bribery and incitement.

That being said, Maximilian had some serious shortcomings in the eyes of his new subjects. He was a foreigner, no doubt, and he brought in some of his and his father’s trusted allies, friends and advisers. And these allies, friends and advisers took over some important and lucrative jobs, fueling fear of a German takeover. Further the presence of three theaters of war, each separated by a distance of several days ride meant Maximilian was constantly moving from one place to the next. And once there, he was under enormous time pressure to resolve conflicts quickly. One way to accelerate things is extreme brutality. Maximilian’s tactics did include execution of his opponents after surrender, the burning of the suburbs as cover for his attacks and the cutting down of fields as a means to starve out the defenders.

But the biggest drawback to his popularity was financial. The hope of the Habsburg marriage was that the cost of defending the Burgundian state would be shared. But that was not going to happen. The entire cost of the he effort had to be borne by the low countries and in particular the big cities. That meant even higher taxes than before and if there is one thing people do not like is higher taxes, combined with no improvement in services.

As we follow the Burgundian war, what we will see is the interconnection between these elements, the increased brutality and destruction feeding more unrest, which in turn requires more taxation, which in turn feeds more unrest and so forth and so forth. If there was a way to get out of this vicious circle it would be a decisive battle that forces the King of France to make real peace. And as we know a powerful state on its eastern border was an existential threat to the kingdom of France, meaning peace with the king of France required a truly decisive battle.

In 1478, that battle did not take place. Maximilian was constantly pacing from the French border to Holland and then to Guelders and back again. That left little room to gather a large force and challenge the French king, a French king who was not keen on the vagaries of an open battle in the first place.

Louis’ idea was to pursue a war of attrition, keeping up the pressure that required Maximilian to keep his hugely expensive army in the field, which meant he had to keep taxes up or even increase them, making him ever more unpopular. So in June 1478, Louis once again offered a truce to last one year, which Maximilian accepted. These truces never brought peace, just reduced the cost for Louis who switched to local raids, whilst Maximilian needed to maintain the full scale border defenses.

On the positive side, In June 1478 Marie gave birth to a boy, a major blow to French ambitions. Louis’ agents had spread the rumor that the child was actually a girl. Margaret of York was so concerned about these lies, she took little Philip – which was his name by the way – to the market square and showed his naked body to the people, who broke out in wild cheers.

The next year, 1479 wasn’t off to a good start. As Louis had intended, Maximilian had to go to the Estates General again and ask for more money. Meanwhile Louis’ policy of destroying the countryside by burning or cutting down fields had led to a shortage of grain in the cities. Attempts to import grain from the Baltic and elsewhere were thwarted by a fleet of French privateers. French merchants were also boycotting the fairs in Antwerp and Bruges. Economic depression and famine was engulfing the richest region in Northern Europe. Needless to say that there was still no help coming, not from Friedrich III who was caught up in wars with the Turks, not from Siegmund of Tyrol bribed by France and Wittelsbach, nor from a Holy Roman Empire that did not care.

Hostilities began as soon as the truce ran out in June 1479. Louis attacked Dole and then Douai. Maximilian, who had been occupied with the ongoing uprising in Guelders returned to his southern border, bringing along his army of 20,000, arguably the best force he had been able to gather so far. These were in part mercenaries, some Swiss, some English longbowmen, but also local men, the city guards, the countryside miitia and the knights of Burgundy, including the members of the order of the Golden Fleece, the Burgundian equivalent of the order of the garter.

They enveloped the city of Thérouanne, which forced Louis to finally accept an open battle. The French cavalry outnumbered the Burgundian horse 2 to 1, and a defeat appeared likely, so Maximilian and his generals decided to send the expensive heavy artillery away, and try their luck with just the light guns and Chutzpah.

On August 7^th1479, a boiling hot day, the two armies came together near the village of Guinegate. Maximilian had placed his infantry, made up of pikemen, arquebusiers and longbowmen in the centre, whilst his two small cavalry detachments were covering his flanks. As the French appeared, Maximilian rose on his horse and addressed his troops, talked about the just cause of the house of Burgundy, the cruel destruction the French had inflicted on their lands, then he dismounted, kissed the earth that may receive his body today and said a prayer. All his men took his example end knelt down in the burning heat, and prayed for victory. When they rose, they shouted Long live Austria and Burgundy, the Lion of Flanders and of course, St. George. Much invigorated by this display of righteousness of their young leader, they waited.

The French kicked off proceedings by running a massive cavalry charge against the Burgundian riders on the left flank. As we heard, the French mounted forces outnumbered the Burgundians 2 to one, maybe even more in terms of heavy cavalry. The charge was a great success, Maximilian’s left flank broke and turned tail. As they rode off into the sunset, the French knights followed them, keen on the rich ransom the great Burgundian lords could surely provide. Even the overall commander of the French forces, Philippe de Crevecoer was dragged along by the excitement and temporarily left the battlefield.

Meanwhile Maximilian’s centre remained under pressure from French artillery and light cavalry forces. The situation was extremely dire. If the main part of the heavy French cavalry returned, they could outflank the remainder of the Burgundian forces and annihilate them. Maximilians advisers suggested to call it a day and run to save his life. The chroniclers do not mention it, but Maximilian may well remember the last time a member of the House of Habsburg was in a similar situation, Leopold III at the battle of Sempach. And like his ancestor, Maximilian refused to leave the men who were prepared to fight and die for his cause. He stayed with them, up on his horse, below his banner, drawing the enemy fire, ready to die, just as Leopold III had done. He asked his noblemen to dismount and fight with the infantry. They were now all equals and would be victorious together or go down together.

Die Schlacht von Therouanne/Guinegate 1479 (Die Ehrenpforte Kaiser Maximilians I., Separatausgabe der Historiendarstellungen, C 2.4). Albrecht Dürer (Werkstatt) Wolf Traut (Künstler_in)

He ordered the carts up from the camp and formed a Wagenburg studded with pikes, which stalled any French attack, may it be by riders of firearms. This giant hedgehog slowly moved forward, engaging the enemy centre, the longbowmen and harquebusiers constantly shooting at the French soldiers. Maximilian was fighting in the front line without regard for his personal safety, an example that encouraged his men. Where have you ever seen a noble lord staying with his foot soldiers after his knights have fled. Encouraged by the progress of their comrades, the Burgundian cavalry regrouped and re-entered the fray.

The battle lasted from Midday to sunset around 08:00, at which point the French withdrew to the city of Hesdin. The French cavalry weighed down by loot passed the battlefield on their return from that fateful chase, but did not even engage.

Maximilian erected his tent on the battlefield, and as per a tradition that went back to Alexande the Great, celebrating his first great victory by spending the night in total control of the field.

The victory of Guinegate was Maximilian’s first major success and though he had some experienced generals around him, displayed many of the traits he would show throughout his career. He was bold, even when outnumbered, able to quickly find creative and clever solutions to challenges and he had this almost magical impact on his troops. His personality, the “leutseiligkeit”, the ability to charm everyone, from peasant to prince, combined with his personal courage to the point of risking his life, inspired the men who followed him through thick and thin.

In the aftermath of his success, his popularity reached a temporary highpoint, in particular in Brabant and Hainault. There were processions and te-Deums all across the Burgundian lands, and given this is the new world of the printing press, he had tales and songs published that spread the news of his great victory, the eternal humiliation of the French.

But despite all the great proclamations and personal bravery, the reality was not quite as rosy. Louis’ army was damaged, but not at all defeated. And Maximilian himself had suffered severe losses. There was no chasing the French all the way to Paris. Instead, Maximilian had to go back to Ghent and once more, ask the Estates General for money. Meanwhile Louis’ forces kept up the pressure on the border, his agents were inciting rebellions in Holland and Guelders and were now stirring things up in the city of Ghent itself.

The brutality of warfare increased, if that was at all possible. When Maximilian took the fortress of Malannoy, he had the French commanders hanged. The French responded by executing fifty Burgundian captives. One of the issues was that the French had no scruples destroying the countryside and starving the Burgundians, whilst Maximilian was reluctant to do the same on territory he hoped would one day return to the Burgundian state.

1479 ended without much progress for either side. The sound of weapons was muffled by the snowfall of the extraordinarily cold winter of 1479/1480. Another reminder that behind all these political events the so-called Little Ice Age was progressing unabated to its climax that gave us Breughel’s delightful pictures of ice skating peasants but also severe food shortages and wide spread deprivation.

The political situation became even more tense when Maximilian introduced a beer tax in the spring of 1480 that resulted in a string of rebellions, even in regions so far loyal. These uprisings and the reluctance of the estates to properly fund the defense of the realm convinced Maximilian and the political party that formed around him, that he had to resume the centralization policy of Charles the Bold. He appointed a new chancellor and took sole charge of matters of war and foreign policy.

As one can imagine, this went down like a ton of bricks in the brick built cities of Ghent and Bruges. The estates demanded that Maximilan and Marie rein in their spending for all the tournaments and mummeries. They responded by celebrating the baptism of their daughter Margaret with all the pomp and circumstances the Burgundian court was still able to muster.

In some ways 1480 and 1481 brought some improvements. The French advance slowed down as they reformed their army. The battle of Guinegate as well as the long string of victories of the Swiss and Hussites prove the usefulness of infantry forces. The French, always reliant on the prowess of their knights faced up to the changing times. Swiss mercenaries became the mainstay of the French army. This restructuring gave Maximilian some breathing space and then, in February 1481, king Louis XI suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered.

The other theatres of war, in Holland and Guelders did not calm down. Again and again did the young duke take his forces North to separate the cods and hooks in Holland or to bring down another one of the seemingly innumerable fortresses in Guelders. The spiral of brutality tightened further, be it mass execution of Hooks or the sacking of Venlo. But progress was made.

Moreover, the alliance with England too was coming along nicely. Margaret of York had travelled to England was working hard on her brother, and getting through despite heavy bribery by the French. The alliance with Brittany was signed and Marie and Maximilian called their third child Francois in honor of their new associate. Though this boy died shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile Louis XI’s health kept deteriorating, his end being imminent. His son, the future Charles VIII was still only 12 years old, meaning France would be too preoccupied with regency and infighting to pester the Burgundians.

Wake of Louis XI. Miniature from the Memoirs of Philippe de Commynes.

Hence, in the spring of 1482 the ducal couple could look forward to at least several years of peace and rebuilding of their shattered lands.

The partying resumed and in March the duchess rode out to a Reiherbeize, a peculiar form of animal cruelty whereby falcons were released to attack and kill herons. Herons were deemed a delicacy and often served at medieval feasts. As she was following her falcon and spurred her horse to jump a ditch, the saddle girth broke and she was thrown off her horse. She landed on a tree trunk and suffered serious damage to her inner organs. It is also likely that she was pregnant. Marie of Burgundy suffered horribly over the following fortnight, before she died on March 27^th, 1482, aged just 26.

*Mary of Burgundy chased by Death*, from the *Book of Hours of Mary and Maximilian* in Berlin.

On her last day she called the knights of the Golden Fleece to her chamber, explained that she has made her two surviving children, Philip and Magarethe the heirs to all her lands, and Maximilian their guardian. She asked the knights to honor this arrangement and swear fealty to her husband. She said goodbye to Maximilian, Philipp and Margarethe, asked for forgiveness for all the injustices she had committed, receive the last rites, and died.

Maximilian was devastated. He really loved his wife, and for the rest of his life he would treasure her, commission artworks in her memory let her appear in his literary works as the virtuous lady he, as the Last Knight, served for ever. A whole iconography emerged that depicted Mary of Burgundy as the Virgin, a style that found its apotheosis in Albrecht Durer’s Death of the Virgin showing Mary’s last moments.

Albrecht Dürer – Feast of Rose Garlands with Mary of Burgundy as the Virgin

Despite the empty coffers of the Burgundian state, he staged one of the grandest funerals in Burgundian and that means European late medieval history. 15,000 people from all ranks of society came to pay their respects and accompany her coffin to the Church of Our Lady in Bruges. 2,000 priests and monks wearing black and holding candles, a 1,000 noblemen in mourning clothes, 16 counts and bannermen acted as pallbearers, followed by the heralds of the Burgundian lands carrying her coats of arms, civil servants and army officers and then Maximilian and the children. Behind them 500 noble ladies, 3,000 wives of the eminent burghers and then the people.

There is a tale that in 1507 Maximilian asked the abbot Johannes Trithemius, a real person with a reputation as a magician and necromancer, to conjure up his first wife, Mary of Burgundy. Trithemius succeeded and Maximilian even recognized a birthmark on her that only he knew about. But the experience shook him so hard, he forbade the abbot to ever to do it again. This story became the source for the story of Dr. Faustus who in both Marlow and Goethe is asked to conjure up Helen of Troy for the emperor’s enjoyment, but desires her himself.

But that only happened in 1507, right now, in 1482, there are much more pressing matters.

King Louis of France, by all accounts on his very last leg, literally jumped up with joy from his deathbed, as the chronicler Philippe de Commines reports. Even though there was still a formal truce in place, he sets his armies in march to throw out the duke of Austria as he had called Maximilian all along. At the same time his agents and supporters in Flanders and Brabant were working overtime.

On April 28^th, Marie was barely dead a month, the Estates general came together in Ghent and demanded a share in the guardianship of the ducal children and immediate peace with France. The merchants, artisans and common people may have continued the fight on behalf of the daughter of Charles the Bold, but not on behalf of Maximilian.

And there had also been a material change in the economics that made a peace with France desirable. In the early stages of the Hundred years war, the great cities of Flanders and Brabant had sided with England against France, since they depended heavily on wool from Wales and Lincolnshire to produce their luxury cloth. But since the 1350s, the English had shifted from exporting wool to manufacturing their own cloth. And their cloth now competed with the Flemish product. Therefore the textile merchants of Ghent, Ypres and Brussels cared more about their end markets in France than their dwindling English supply chain.

Munro, John H. (2003b). “Medieval Woollens: The Western European Woollen Industries and their Struggles for International Markets, c. 1000–1500”. In Jenkins, David (ed.). *The Cambridge History of Western Textiles*. Vol. 1. Cambridge University Press. pp. 228–324.

Almost overnight the will to resist the French evaporated. The cities that Maximilian had designated as border defenses opened their gates to the French without a shot being fired. In May the estates told Maximilian that peace negotiations are unavoidable and that they sought a marriage between the dauphin Charles and his 2-year old daughter Margarethe.

Maximilian objected, but he could not do anything. The estates refused him money to continue the war, his father was now under serious pressure back home in Austria and would have to leave Vienna the year after. The Imperial diet had once again refused to help the Habsburg in their private venture in Burgundy. And his new ally, king Edward IV of England was dying.

Louis then opened another frontier and unleashed William de la Marche, the boar of the Ardennen, on the long suffering city of Liege. This legendarily brutal nobleman, who some called a partman, not quite human, took over the city and by his own hands killed its bishop, Louis of Bourbon a longstanding ally of the Burgundian dukes. As the dead prelate was floating down the Maas, his murderer convinced the cathedral chapter to make his son the new bishop, whilst at the same time French soldiers occupied the key fortresses in the bishopric.

Euegene Delacroix: the Murder of the bishop of Liege

The treaty the estates negotiated with king Louis set forth that the dowry of little Margaret should include the duchy and county of Burgundy, the Artois, Macon, Auxerre, Charolais, Noyers, Salins, Berry and Boulogne, lands that should fall to her husband, the future king Charles VIII, should she die without children. And to make sure Margarete would become a good French princess, she was to leave for Paris immediately.

The County of Flanders was recognized as a fief of France and its highest court, the Parlement in Paris was given jurisdiction over the county. In other words, the richest part of it all, Flanders became a separate entity.

As for 4-year old Philipp, the heir to the now much diminished state of Burgundy, he should remain under the sole guardianship of the Estates General in Ghent.

As for Maximilian, the estates suggested he returned back to Austria to help his father. They, the estates argued, had no need for his military and administrative skills, since peace was now reigning across the lands.

When Maximilian, under much duress signed the treaty in March 1483, Mary of Burgundy’s accident had happened barely a year ago. All he had fought for, the freedom of Burgundy, his family was gone. The town squares and village greens of France were erupting in celebrations, whilst in the streets of Ghent and Bruges people asked openly, what the Austrian was still doing here. Meanwhile Matthias Hunyady’s cannon were breaking the walls of Vienna. A lesser man would have concluded that god had decided the days of the House of Habsburg are over.

But neither father nor son were prone to such thoughts. They were descendants of the 95 lords of Austria that go back to Greek and Jewish Antiquity and they knew that one day A.E.I.O.U. But that day is not today, maybe it will be next week. Listen in and find out.

Last thing, you may know this, but just in case it has slipped your mind, you can support the show by going to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for membership or make a one-time contribution.

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Episode 217 – When Mary Met Maxi

by History of the Germans Podcast on 4th December 20255th February 2026

The Burgundian Wedding, 1477

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 217 – The Lucky Marriage of Maximilian and Marie

How often have you heard this phrase “Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry”. It goes back to a whole string of marriages, first Maximilian of Habsburg married the heiress of the duchy of Burgundy, then his son married the heiress of Spain and finally his grandson married the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia. And bish bash bosh, an empire is created in the horizontal.

That is nice and neat but not at all true. Sure the marriages happened, but not in the way at least I have been told. There was a lot more drama and a lot more agency than you think. For a whole six months Maximilian, the Last Knight in his shining armour, left Marie of Burgundy to fend off invasions, revolutions and conspiracies on her own. She was imprisoned, her ministers were hanged and she was told marriage to a 7-year old hunchback was her only way out. How she managed through that and found herself in the very first truly passionate marriage we have heard about in the History of the Germans Podcast, well, that is what we are talking about today.

But before we start a quick question. I have been given an opportunity to organize a History of the Germans trip down the Main and Rhine at the end of June, beginning of July. Is this something any of you would be interested? If so, let me know. That would help me enormously in making a decision.

And as always, I want to thank our patrons, who have signed up on Historyofthegermans.com/support and whose generosity keeps this show going and going advertising free; they are: Stepan P., Michael McG, Tom T., Lorie C., David L. and Heidi K.

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And with that, back to the show.

Last week we ended on the 21^st of May, 1477 when Maximilian, archduke of Austria, son of emperor Friedrich III, who had just tuned 18, his head full of tales of chivalric romance, of Lancelot and Percival, Tristan and Roland donned his silver breastplate and rode out of Vienna to rescue a damsel in distress, who by pure coincidence also happened to be the richest heiress in Europe.

Every story of valiant knights and virtuous ladies needs a monster, a dragon or some villain who throws obstacles in the way of the great hero that he needs to overcome to prove himself worthy of her love. When Maximilian had his journey to Burgundian power turned into a rhymed novel, these villains were three and their names were Fürwittig, Unfalo and Neidelhart.

Out here in the real world, the villain was only one, King Louis XI of France, and he acted not out of low cunning, but for completely understandable political motives. Nor did he die by the executioner’s hand, as Fürwittig, Unfalo and Neidelhart did in Maximilian’s tale.But in one way the Theuerdank is true to events, the creativity that Louis showed in his schemes to thwart Maximilian was more than a match for his three-headed fictional avatar.

But I am getting ahead of the story.

Maximilian sets out from Vienna on May 21^st, as I said, but Charles the Bold had died on January 5^th, that was more than four months earlier. And it would be the beginning of August before he entered the de facto capital of the Burgundian state in Ghent. What happened in the meantime?

Well, quite a lot actually.

News of the battle of Nancy spread quickly across Europe. But initially the news were contradictory. Participants of the battle had seen Charles ride off on his great charger El Moro, and nobody had seen him fall. It took a few days before his body was identified. And even then, it was impossible to believe that the Great Duke of Burgundy, whose image, if it could have been reproduced by modern means, would have graced the bedrooms of teenage boys and girls from Aragon to Albion, that the chivalric hero of the age, was actually dead.

King Louis XI of France was probably the first of the key protagonists to receive the news. He had established a courier service for government post in 1464, and that service had brought him the news about the battle of Nancy within just 3 days, his riders having covered a distance of 450km.

Therefore just 3 days after the reckless duke had bitten the snow, Louis XI set his plan in motion.

Louis had been expecting the defeat of Charles in his wars with the Swiss for a while now. It was his money and his diplomacy that had encouraged the creation of the League of Constance, the defection of Rene of Lorraine, and paid for the Swiss mercenaries at Nancy. After Grandson and Murten it was clear that Charles was badly mauled, his resources much diminished and hence a window of opportunity had been opening up. Therefore, even before Charles final battle had begun, Louis had already mustered an army in Champagne and Picardy, ready to march into the duchy of Burgundy and into Franche Comte when the time came. And now the time had come.

Officially Louis marched into Burgundy just to keep it safe for his beloved cousin who was so sadly missing. And when the next courier arrived and told him Charles had actually died, the king of France, giddy with excitement, went on to stage two. It was always clear that upon the demise of the last Burgundian duke, his heir would be his daughter Marie. And Marie, Louis declared could not inherit the duchy of Burgundy, which – as per Salian law, could only be passed down in the male line. The fief was vacant and the king of France’s army came to take what was rightfully his. What Louis argued as a reason to occupy Franche Comte, which was still an imperial, not a royal fief, well, whatever. He had guns and men and that should be enough for now.

Louis XI has received a lot of bad press, in particular in the German and English speaking world. Sir Walter Scott summarized him as follows: “That sovereign was of a character so purely selfish—so guiltless of entertaining any purpose unconnected with his ambition, covetousness, and desire of selfish enjoyment—that he almost seems an incarnation of the devil himself, permitted to do his utmost to corrupt our ideas of honour in its very source. Nor is it to be forgotten that Louis possessed to a great extent that caustic wit which can turn into ridicule all that a man does for any other person’s advantage but his own, and was, therefore, peculiarly qualified to play the part of a cold hearted and sneering fiend.” Machiavelli had only one criticism of Louis XI, that he replaced his national infantry with the Swiss mercenaries he regarded as unreliable.

Jacob t=de Litemont: *Portrait Louis XI of France*

A true villain then.

Before we jump on the bandwagon and regard Louis XI as President Snow trying to break up the star-crossed lovers, we should take a step back and look at Louis and his Kingdom of France in the broader political context of the 15^th century.

Louis XI was born in 1423, at a time when his father, the dauphin Charles had been disinherited by his own mother and his crown been promised to an English king. Anglo-Burgundian armies occupied Paris and were inflicting defeat after defeat on the man they called “the king of Bourges” after the rather modest capital of his shrinking territory. When Louis was six, he met Joan of Ark and it was only her divine intervention that made the gradual recovery of the royal house of Valois and the kingdom of France possible. What remained in the personal and institutional memory of the French Kingdom was the notion that the English can be pushed out of the country even if they win all the battles as long as they are alone. An alliance between England and Burgundy however, that could take down the Royal family, even the kingdom itself. And what are the chances God would once again send a 13-year old peasant girl to save the day. Therefore no king of France could sleep soundly as long as there was a powerful state on their eastern border. When Louis XI attacked Burgundy hours after receiving news of his distant cousin’s defeat, it was not just greed for territory and wealth, but an act of preventive self-defense.

And the sneakiness, the double dealing, the paying of agents and hidden allies – well it wasn’t cricket, but then, he was fighting for the survival of his dynasty that had nearly been wiped out 50 years earlier.

O.K. the state of the Grand Dukes of the West had to go, but how could that be done?

Well the first step was to take over the southern part, the duchy of Burgundy and the Franche Comte, which happened within just days. But these were the economically and militarily less significant parts and also disconnected from the main territory. So how to get hold of the rest?

There were a couple of cities in what is today the regions of Picardie, Pas de Calais and Ardennes that had been part of the lands of Charles the Bold, but, like the duchy of Burgundy, were to revert to the crown in case of the absence of a male heir. And so Louis dispatches several of his lords to negotiate with the citizens about a handover, and as always provided them with bags of cash to facilitate the process.

But at some point it was clear that he would run into some form of resistance. The question is, what to do then.

Option one was to simply use brute force and invade Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, Luxemburg and afterwards Holland, Seeland and Guelders.

Option 2 was to compel the heiress, Marie of Burgundy to break the engagement with Maximilian and marry her to his son, the future king Charles VIII.

Both options had their difficulties. Marie was 20 and Charles VIII only 7 years old and rumored to be extremely ugly. Louis acknowledged that problem and would have offered Marie the alternative of marrying a French prince of more suitable age and appearance.

Portrait of King Charles VIII of France (1470–1498)

But even that would not have resolved the other issue, that Marie was engaged to the son of the emperor Friedrich III and that most of her lands were imperial territory. The insult to the empire that would result from the broken engagement and the French expansion deep into the imperial lands could once again galvanize the princes as it had happened during the Siege of Neuss.

So, not as easy a run as some suggested. But definitely an easier run than the brute force approach. Taking all the Burgundian lands from a defenseless princess and without legal justification, that was going to raise even more eyebrows, let alone armies.

Decisions had to be made quickly, since any time now the pesky Habsburg prince could show up in Flanders with a massive imperial army and the game would be up. So Louis did all of it, all at the same time.

He opened negotiation with Marie and her mother, Margaret of York about a potential marriage to his son. At the same time his armies began encircling cities who had not immediately succumbed to French money, flattery or legal arguments.

As for the cities beyond the reach of his guns, he instructed his envoys to bribe city councils, and where that failed, incite revolt. One of these envoys was Olivier le Daim, count of Meulan, a particularly colorful character. Born to humble parents in a village near Ghent, he had sought his fortune in Paris, where he became a barber. By some unclear mechanism, he got into royal service as the valet and then barber of the king. That was quite a responsible job, since the barber was the only man who was allowed to approach the king with an open knife. It was also well paid given the propensity of the age to hire assassins. He makes an appearance in Vicor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame: quote This barber of the king had three names. At court he was politely called Olivier le Daim (the Deer); among the people Olivier the Devil. His real name was Olivier le Mauvais, aka Olivier the bad.

Skimming the main sources about Olivier the Bad I am not sure that he really was that bad. He was extraordinarily loyal to his king, which is not a surprise given his elevation from barber to baron, but I have not seen an allegation that he was doing the king’s dirty work, the poisoning and murdering, so common in the Renaissance. Which suggests his real crime was rising too high, and when Louis died, Olivier was immediately hanged by the nobility for insolence, ending in the same mass grave as Esmeralda.

Anyway. Olivier was given the most important job, which was to go to Ghent and either convince Marie to marry little Charles VIII of France or, should that fail, stir up things in this legendarily rebellious city. As you can imagine Marie did not yield to the charms or arguments of the royal barber, which is why he concentrated on plan B.

Ok, we have Louis XI bribing and fighting his way into the Grand Duchy of the West, but what was the heir to the Burgundian lands up to?

The anonymous chronicle of Flanders said quote: “And his daughter Marie was left, young and without experience, burdened with so heavy an inheritance that no man would have dared bear it.” This is one of those quotations that is both entirely accurate and utterly misleading. Inexperienced is often equated to naïve, amateurish and hence in dire need of a someone who takes decisions on her behalf. But it could also simply mean that so far she had been kept away from the affairs of state and hence had not experienced what it meant to rule. But she might be a fast learner.

I will leave the judgement to you, whilst I will first talk about why Burgundy in 1477 was a “heavy inheritance” and then tell you how she handled it.

The state of Burgundy had not emerged organically as a product of cultural affinity, but was purely a product of the ambitions of a cadet branch of the French royal family. Its lands straddled the border between the kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire. Parts of it, namely the duchy of Burgundy itself, the Artois and most of Flanders were fiefs of the king of France, whilst Brabant, Hainault, Holland, Seeland, Friesland, Limburg, Liege, Utrecht, Guelders, the Franche Comte and Luxemburg were imperial fiefs. Some regions spoke French, other various dialects of low German. There were the great textile manufacturing cities like Ghent, Ypres, Arras, Tournai and the trading hubs of Bruges, Antwerp and Amsterdam, but also large sways of food producing countryside. Some regions were used to tight control by the duke, such as Hainault, others had almost complete independence, like Friesland, in some regions there were long standing feuds like the cods and hooks in Holland, others acted in unison. If you have even just a cursory understanding of Belgian politics, you get the picture.

The grand dukes had been working for a long period trying to forge these diverse components into one coherent and contiguous state, like France and England and Portugal etc. Under Charles the Bold this long held dream was about to become reality. Charles policy had three main components, one was to establish a land bridge between the duchy of Burgundy in the south and the Low countries in the North, that is why Lorraine became one of his key obsessions. The second element was the crown of a kingdom of Burgundy. Like Karl IV had done with the St. Wenceslaus crown in Bohemia, Charles believed by creating a crown as a symbol of his state, he could tie his nobles, cities, even peasants to an idea, a political concept, something that transcended the personal loyalty to him as their duke. And part three of the strategy was to centralise power in his territory. He sidelined the courts on the level of his various duchies and counties and either linked them to or replaced them by a high court in the town of Mechelen. He did the same with the fiscal administration and strengthened central government function, headed by his chancellor.

Session of the Parliament of Mechelen presided over by Charles the Bold. 17th century drawing after a 15th-century original

None of these policies were popular with the proud cities or the estates of his duchies and counties. They pushed back against the ever increasing tax burden that Charles imposed to fund his wars of expansion. They balked at the expense of the court, the splendour of which shifted from a source of pride for the locals to a symbol of extortion. But what they really objected to was the suppression of all their individual rights and privileges, the freedoms they had accumulated over centuries.

These objections had fuelled endless revolts, including those in Dinant and Liege. Charles response had been to burn both cities to the ground and kill its citizens by the hundreds and thousands. At which point Charles needed to build up an ever larger army to both fight abroad and suppress his opponents at home. Which increased the tax burden even more, which in turn accelerated the centralisation policy, which in turn fuelled the anger and resentment against the regime. Which led to more repression, more expense for military forces and so forth and so forth.

When Marie confirmed her father’s death almost a month after the battle of Nancy, all this anger and hatred broke through to the surface. Preachers called the demise of the duke, Gods punishment for his excessive tyranny and it is surprising that the mob did not celebrate it by lighting bonfires and partying through the night.

Almost immediately after the announcement that Charles was definitely dead, the Estates General, aka the assembly of all the powerful people in the Low Countries came together. They did recognise Marie as the legitimate heir to all the lands of her father. But, the centralised state of Charles the Bold was to be dismantled, the court in Mechelen abolished, fiscal authority returned to the estates in the individual duchies and counties, all ancient rights and privileges of the cities to be confirmed and their right of resistance should the ducal government exceed their prerogatives recognised. Marie’s role had become that of a symbol of the state with limited power. But, the good news was, that a least the state continued to exist.

The city of Ghent, the largest agglomeration in the Low Countries, probably even the largest city north of the Alps, became the epicentre of political unrest. The fall of the duke and the broad re-arrangement of responsibilities and powers encouraged the middle classes, the artisans and their guilds to demand more influence in city politics, and in particular protection against the emerging protoindustrial manufacturers of cloth. Young men were now roaming the streets and pulling former Burgundian officials out of their houses and beat them up, sometimes strung them up on lampposts. Well not lampposts since they did not exist, so whatever posts they may find.

Faced with this chaos, Marie gave in to the demands of the Estates General and granted the Grand Privilege which reset the political situation to a fictitious time before the centralisation efforts of the Burgundian dukes. If she had thought this had resolved issues, she was sorely mistaken. Wherever she travelled in the following weeks, she was made to sign similar decrees, handing over her rights as duchess or countess to the estates.

On the positive side, apart from a general recognition of Marie as heir, was that the estates raised troops to defend the borders of Marie’s patrimony. This slowed Louis down, but did not stop him. Cities and fortresses negotiated with the king of France and often times swapped sides as support from Ghent was arriving much slower than the bags of gold from Paris.

Hanging over all of this was now the question who should join Marie and her lands in Holy Matrimony. Louis, as we have already heard, had put forward his son, the hunchbacked dauphin Charles. There were also some other chancers around, one being the duke of Cleves who offered his lands as a neat way to round up the Burgundian territory, then another von Cleves who had no land, but was apparently quite handsome and a childhood friend of Marie’s. Marie’s mother briefly suggested her brother, the duke of Clarence, he who later ended up drowned in a barrel of malmsey wine. And then there was Maximilian.

But it was not entirely Marie’s decision. Now that the Great Privilege had been signed, the Estates General demanded their say in the negotiations. So there were two delegations negotiating with Louis XI, one comprising Marie’s chancellor, Willem Huguonet and one of her courtiers, Guy d’Humbercourt as well as another delegation made up of the representatives of Ghent and the estates. When the city delegation came to Louis, he saw them as rabble, the typical rebellious folk from Ghent. He was not really interested in doing a deal with them. Instead he used the opportunity to blow up Flanders for good. He showed the city delegates a letter from Marie’s hand that said in no uncertain terms, that she would only accept terms negotiated by her chancellor and 3 other named individuals. Any arrangements made with the city were of no import to her. As it happened, that was pretty much the opposite of what she had told the Estates General.

News of that, what the people of Ghent variously called deception, betrayal and treason, set the streets alight. Huguonet, Hambercourt and the two others named in Marie’s letter were dragged to the main square, tried for treason and convicted. Marie immediately pardoned them to save their lives, but the pardon was disregarded. All four were hanged on April 3, 1477.

Execution of William Hugonet, miniature from 1477 by the Master of Mary of Burgundy

Now the whole of the Burgundian state blew up. Whoever had shown sympathies for Charles’ policies in the past was deposed and sometimes tried and hanged. In Holland the ancient civil war between Hooks and Cods resumed. The artisans and sometimes the mob took control of several towns.

Marie became a prisoner in her palace in Ghent. Her mother and closest adviser was sent away. Communication with the outside world became difficult. Marie’s lady in waiting smuggled one letter out to her betrothed, young Maximilian in Vienna, that he should come as quickly as possible, since otherwise quote: “I would have to do things that I would never voluntarily want to do” end quote.

Young Maximilian meanwhile was stuck back in Vienna. As we heard last week, the king of Hungary and his tremendous and tremendously expensive standing army was preparing to attack Austria. Hunyadi may have received some generous support from Louis XI, though this may not even have been necessary. The Raven King wanted Austria for his grand central European empire.

One can imagine Maximilian being torn between his loyalty to help his father defending their homeland against a hugely threatening, powerful invader, whilst at the same time his fiancée, daughter of his childhood hero was in dire straits, held prisoner by ruffians and attacked by a slippery, scheming French king. It was not an easy decision.

He sent a delegation headed by his protonotary, Dr. Georg Hessler to Ghent to discuss the detail of the marriage contract. Hessler had been closely involved in the negotiations since Neuss and was familiar with all the details. He was by the way another commoner playing a crucial role in these events, just like Olivier the Bad, the French royal barber and Willem Hugueonot, the executed Burgundian chancellor. This is a period of history where society is much more permeable than it had been even just a 100 years earlier and equally more permeable than it would be 200 years later. All these men could rise to incredibly powerful positions on merit alone. This did of course not happen on the back of territorial princes diving deep into predecessors of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mills. The reason they promoted these often highly educated and incredibly bright men, was because they were unencumbered by connections to the leading aristocratic families and they were fiercely loyal, two things the nobles never were.

Hence Dr. Georg Hessler led Maximilians embassy to Burgundy. But though ambitious commoners drive events, the external veneer still had to be embellished by great nobles. So with him came the archbishop of Trier, the bishop of Metz, the Count Palatine Ludwig of Veldenz and 300 riders, their armour polished so as to blind the Ghenters with their reflection.

Instead of leaving these men waiting, as would have been quite common, Marie welcomed them warmly on the doorstep. Once indoors, the bishop of Metz begins the formal proceeding announcing Maximilian’s intention to marry the gracious lady of Burgundy. He handed over a letter with a diamond inside as a sign of how serious the Habsburg takes this suit. That would normally kick off a procedure that went on for weeks of hard negotiation over the details of apanage, the dowry, the morning gift, the rights of the groom, yada, yada, yada.

This time, the venerable bishop had barely finished his little speech praising Maximilian’s great qualities as husband, warrior and prince, when Marie interrupted him and went – o.k., let’s do it. Like right here and right now. Everyone looked round confused. No, no, her father had said Max was a sound guy and since he told me to marry him, I will marry him. Can we get on with it now?

And indeed, the next evening Marie of Burgundy and Maximilian of Habsburg were married by proxy. Ludwig Count Palatine stood in for Maximilian and in an attempt to make this as permanent as possible, the couple shared a bed for the night, though obviously separated by an unsheathed sword, and presumably a sentry guarding the lady’s honour.

Meanwhile Hessler wrote back to his master saying, get here asap. Do not think about the cost, this is going to be so worth it. The Low Countries alone could throw up 1.2 million guilders per year. For comparison, the imperial title produced just 20,000 and Austria maybe 200,000. And of course with all the bedding of duchesses business, the honour of Austria and the archducal family was now at stake. Come, come, make haste.

The Austrian delegates were doubly keen on the swift arrival of their lord, since the febrile situation in the low countries could easily turn against them and they could join Mrss. Hugueonot et.al. whose bodies were still swinging on the gallows.

Because something quite unexpected had happened. The arrival of the imperial delegation had created a sudden shift in the public opinion. 3 months of exposure to French aggression had caused doubts amongst the citizens of Ghent and the Estates General as to whether the king of France would be an upgrade to Charles the Bold and would respect their ancient freedoms. A quick scan of what was going on in France itself revealed that Louis XI was no less keen on centralisation than the Burgundian dukes, just did not burn down his own cities that often. And the chaos in the streets, the rebellious artisans and renewed fighting made the leading merchants and landowners distinctly uncomfortable. Then news spread that Louis had brought in 4,000 men with sickles and scythes to cut down the harvest, in an attempt to starve out Ghent, Ypres and Bruges. Rumours of hangings and broken promises inside French occupied cities did the rest. Seeing the 300 armoured riders coming in through the city gates reminded them that French Blue wasn’t the only colour.

As the wedding was announced, the people began shouting Kaiser, Kaiser and Maximilian, Maximilian. The garrisons of St. Omer, Aire, Conde and Valenciennes took heart and stood up to the French tide. The remnants of Charles’ army trickled back from Lorraine and replenished the garrisons. The state of Burgundy was back.

Their hope now rested on Maximilian, and even more so, his father Friedrich III, to bring in the mighty armies of the Empire. They had seen this army before, when it had appeared before Neuss. Its knights, hardened in dozens of feuds, the infantry with their pikes that had fought in the Mainzer Stiftsfehde, the Princes war, the Soester Stiftsfehde, and innumerable now forgotten wars. And let’s not forget that what is now Switzerland was still part of the empire, and these men of Grandson, Murten and Nancy, as the Burgundians had so painfully learned, were invincible.

Swiss praying before the battle of Grandson

All eyes turned south, where any minute now the young prince would appear and throw out the French and bring peace, a peace where the ancient freedoms are preserved, just as they are in the rest of the Holy roman Empire.

Maximilian, hearing of the 1.2 million gulden, the support from the local populace and the physical attribute of his betrothed, set off in May. But it took him 3 months before he entered the great city of Ghent.

What has he been doing in the meantime? Well, the problem was that Maximilian understood full well what Marie and the Burgundians expected him to bring as a morning gift, aka a massive army of German supersoldiers. And he also knew that his father, under attack from Matthias Hunyadi, could not give him a massive army of German supersoldiers, in fact he could not spare a single man. All Friedrich could do was to call in favours, officially bestow the imperial fiefs on Marie and wish his son and soon to be daughter in law the best of luck.

Maximilian now travelled from one court to the next begging for men and money to defend the western border of the empire against the machinations of the French. But success eluded him. Louis had been busy bribing German princes not just to refuse help, but to stake their own claims. The king of Bohemia demanded Luxemburg, the Wittelsbachs Holland, Seeland and Hainault and even cousin Sigismund of Tyrol, Maximilians closest surviving relative said no, whilst counting the 50,000 gulden Louis XI had given him and which he would undoubtably waste on more girls and guns.

Maximilian arrived in Ghent at the beginning of August 1477 with just 1,200 horse, many of those bought with Burgundian money. But many mighty princes and archbishops accompanied him and he himself was the business. Atop his palfrey, clad in white over his silver and gold armour, 18 years old, not really handsome, but physically strong, with a determined face, he appeared, as one chronicler said, like an angel descending from heaven. And Ghent did return the favour. The streets were covered in flowers, triumphal arches had been erected, the burghers hung their hugely valuable tapestries from their balconies and everywhere people shouted You are our duke and prince, defend us or, most unusual for the rebellious Ghent, one banner read, “Whatever you tell us to do, we will do it”.

Straight from the procession, Maximilian headed to Ten Walle, the ducal palace. Having passed through a line of torches he for the very first time encountered his bride. The reception now followed Burgundian court protocol with long speeches, praising each other’s lineage and fecundity. And then we move into something our boy from Styria may not have expected. His intended mother in law told him that Marie had hidden a carnation close to her heart, the symbol of pure love and good luck. To which he may have responded, oh, yeah, cool. But then his mother-in-law insisted that he should go and get it. Question mark, question mark? Maximilian had, had girlfriends before, but he was not used to opening lady’s corsets in public. But that is exactly what the archbishop of Trier now suggested he did….There is a Netherlandish picture of Maximilian in the Kunsthistorische Museum that shows him as a young man, holding a carnation , and frankly, looking utterly bewildered.

They got married the next day in a, by Burgundian standards, modest ceremony. The ongoing war, impending famine and the mourning period for Charles the Bold prevented a full display of the splendour of the greatest of the late medieval courts.

But that was not necessary, because these two, Maximilian and Marie hit it off like we have never seen before in a princely wedding. Maximilian wrote back to his friend, Prüschenk, and forgive me if I do this in German, but it just works that much better, quote: Ich hab ein schöns, froms tugendhafftigs Weib,….und dank Gott. Sie ist ..von leib klein, viel kleiner als die Rosina und schneweiss; ein pruns Haar, ein kleins Nasl, ein kleins heuptel und antlitz, praun undt grabe Augen gemischt, schön und lauter; dann das unter heutel an augen ist herdann gesenkt, gleich als sie geschlaffen hiet, doch es ist nit wohl zumerckhen. Der Mund ist etwas hoch doch rein und rot. Sonst vieler schöner Jungfrauen alls ich all miein tag einer gesehen hab, und frölich“ end quote.

I would like to translate that, but I can’t. Let’s just say that he describes all her little minor imperfections and then says that she is the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. And for all his life he will profess his love to her. She appears in all his pseudoautobiographies as the lady he aspires to be worthy of, he has her depicted as the virgin in his altarpieces, in portraits, forever young, forever beautiful.

But there was none of that detached admiration thing that runs through chivalric literature. She was smart, decisive, and in these first months after her father’s death had shown enormous resilience, so he trusted her judgement. They worked together, and they played together. Both of them were mad about hunting, tournaments, music and dancing. She would ride along chasing boar, stag, fox and cheer him on when he was jousting with an opponent, danced with him at the mummeries he so loved. They were made for each other, and within barely a year she gave birth to a son, Philipp, named after her grandfather and the founder of the Burgundian dynasty.

So, all was great. Tu Felix Austria, Nube. All of Burgundy is now gone to the Habsburgs, the road to an empire where the sun never sets is wide open.

Well, don’t we forget something here? Ah, the army that Maximilian was supposed to bring. Where is that? Well, nowhere to be seen. All he had brought were 1,200 men against Louis XI’s army of 20,000 well trained and well equipped forces. And Louis was not going to give up on Burgundy. He could not. As long as Burgundy exists, every French king is in mortal danger. The war will go on, and next week we will see whether Maximilian can do more than woo an heiress. I hope you will join us again.

And those of you who feel for poor Maximilian who had to bow his head in shame, admitting to his beloved wife that unfortunately, he does not have the money and the power that she had expected, remember, you can put him back in the saddle at least here on this podcast. You know where to go and you know what to do.

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Part Three of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 225: Imperial Reform – The Ewige Landfrieden (Public Peace) of 1495 – History of the Germans

Transcript

The Laws of the Empire – or Absence Thereof

The purpose of Judgements

The territorial courts

Appellate Courts and Private Courts

Landfrieden attempts until 1495

Reichskammergericht, Reichshofgericht and Kreise

The court procedures and the witch craze

The broader remit after 1526

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Part Two of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 224: Imperial Reform– The Reichstag of the Holy Roman Empire – History of the Germans

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Part One of the Imperial Reform (Reichsreform)

Ep. 223: Imperial Reform – The Diet of Worms 1495 – History of the Germans

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The End of the Unversal Empire

Ep. 222: Emperor Maximilian I – Italian Wars and Spanish Marriages – History of the Germans

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The Recovery of Tyrol and Austria

Ep. 221: Emperor Maximilian I – Taking Back Austria and Tyrol – History of the Germans

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Maximilian elected King of Romans and emprisoned

Ep. 220: Emperor Maximilian I – The Burgundian Experience(s) – History of the Germans

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Recap

The Fall of Vienna

The Election of Maximilian I

Return to the Low Countries

The French coming back to Flanders

Maximilian a Prisoner in Bruges

Kunz von der Rosen and the escape from Bruges

Four More Years of war

What came out of the Burgundian Experience

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Why there are no more City States

Ep.219: Emperor Maximilian I – The Fall of Ghent – History of the Germans

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The Burgundian War, 1477-1483

Ep. 218: Emperor Maximilian I – The Death of Mary of Burgundy – History of the Germans

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The Burgundian Wedding, 1477

Ep. 217: Emperor Maximilian I – When Mary Met Maxi – History of the Germans

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