Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor*

Albrecht Dürer drew the emperor Maximilian in Augsburg in the year 1518:

On the drawing’s margin, he noted: “Is the emperor Maximilian that I Albrecht Dürer portrayed in Augsburg, up in the high palace, in his small room, Monday 28 June 1518”.

We continue our study of the Holy Roman Empire, and come to a prominent figure, who looms through the centuries. What was Maximilian like to encounter? Who saw him firsthand and wrote it down? Who spoke with him and left a record of it?

I spent a day’s worth of Fable tokens having the latest LLM model find and translate firsthand accounts of him:

Maximilian either wrote or commissioned some semi-autobiographical works about how terrific he was.

Durer’s painting of Innsbruck.

Maximilian was King of the Romans, the equivalent of Holy Roman Emperor, though he was never crowned by the Pope. He was a Habsburg, the son of Frederick III, the first Habsburg to become emperor. After him the family would produce almost all the holders of that office until the Empire was disbanded.

During Maximilian’s reign there were some wins for the family, but they lost Switzerland forever.

We’re concerned here though with Maximilian’s death:

In 1501, Maximilian fell from his horse and badly injured his leg, causing him pain for the rest of his life. Some historians have suggested that Maximilian was “morbidly” depressed: from 1514, he travelled everywhere with his coffin. In 1518, feeling his death near after seeing an eclipse, he returned to his beloved Innsbruck, but the city’s innskeepers and purveyors did not grant the emperor’s entourage further credit. The resulting fit led to a stroke that left him bedridden on 15 December 1518. However, he continued to read documents and received foreign envoys right until the end. Maximilian died in Wels, Upper Austria, at three o’clock in the morning on 12 January 1519. Different historians have listed different diseases as the main cause of death, including cancer (likely stomach cancer or intestinal cancer), pneumonia, syphilis, gall stones, stroke (he did have a combination of dangerous medical problems) etc.

Maximilian was succeeded as Emperor by his grandson Charles V, his son Philip the Handsome having died in 1506. For penitential reasons, Maximilian gave very specific instructions for the treatment of his body after death. He wanted his hair to be cut off and his teeth knocked out, and the body was to be whipped and covered with lime and ash, wrapped in linen, and “publicly displayed to show the perishableness of all earthly glory”. Gregor Reisch, the emperor’s friend and confessor who closed his eyes, did not obey the instruction though. He placed a rosary in Maximilian’s hand and other sacred objects near the corpse. He was buried in the Castle Chapel at Wiener Neustadt on borrowed money. The casket was opened during renovation under Maria Theresa. After that, the body was reinterred in a Baroque sarcophagus, that later was found unscathed amidst the wreckage of the chapel (due to the Second World War) on 6 August 1946. The emperor was ceremoniously buried again in 1950.

His death portrait.