Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 216: The Youth of Emperor Maximilian I, which is also episode 14 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

What is it like to grow up the son of the emperor? For most of the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire we have covered so far, no idea. There are scarce reports about the way the princes grew up, safe for tales like the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian being kidnapped by his pet monkey. But now, as the Late Middle Ages make way for the Renaissance, we can see the boy who would be king at play, being fed by his nursemaid and pretending to be a knight at a tournament.

And even better, this emperor is Maximilian, the last Knight, one of the most iconic rulers of his time. Come along as we descend into the delights and terrors of his epic childhood, complete with mythmaking in drawings and woodcuts.

But before we start a few things. Part 2 of the Barbarossa series I did with the history of Venice and the History of Italy is out and well worth listening to. I have uploaded the full three episodes both on the Patreon feed and on the website membership site for you to listen to advertising free. And as always, if you want to keep the show as is go to historyofthegermans.com/support and become a patron as Ralf M., Wei-Chun L., Stephen M., Frank McC. Edward H., Herr Muskie, Christopher G. and Jonathan G. have already done.

And with that, back to the show.

So far in this podcast we have not talked much about the childhood of the key protagonists. The only case I can remember is that of Karl IV and his relationship with his father, John, the blind king of Bohemia. And most of what we know about his childhood and his relationship with his father came from reading between the lines of his autobiography and the fact that he did consistently 180 degree the opposite of his father.

With Maximilian, things are very different. We hear about his fear as a little boy during the siege of Vienna, him getting stuffed with sweets by his mum and his early memories. There is even a woodcut showing him just playing for fun.

And as we are talking about childhood in the late Middle Ages, it may be worthwhile looking into this question whether premodern people loved their children as much as we do, or at least intend to do.

This debate goes back to a French historian, Philippe Aries, who published “l’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien regime” in 1960, better known by its English title “Centuries of Childhood“. Aries looked at the depiction of children in art before 1500, where they often appear in adult dress and act as miniature adults. The same he thought was the case in literature, where childhood is very rarely a topic, and where it is mentioned, children are disposable, effectively lesser adults. And indeed if you look at the donors on medieval altarpieces, their children tend to wear the same clothes as the adults, just smaller. Even the Christ Child is often shown detached from the virgin with a much older face. It wasn’t before the early renaissance in Italy that Jesus is shown as a human baby clinging to his mother.

From this he concluded, that childhood is a recent idea and that parenting in the Middle Ages was largely detached. Nuclear family bonds of love did not exist in the era, and children died too often to allow parents to get too emotionally attached to them. They weren’t treated as delicate and would spend a lot of time outside family structures, sometimes fostered out as domestic servants or to be brought up by nursemaids.

This book caused a huge amount of controversy and created a whole cottage industry of medieval scholars rebutting the thesis.

I am in no position to make any meaningful contribution to this debate. However, from a purely anthropological and biological perspective a society where parents fail to build true emotional bonds with their children would find it hard to function. And as for children wearing adult clothes in portraits, two things spring to mind. One, do even the adults wear these clothes every day? Of course not. They have themselves painted in their Sunday best. And so are their children. The fact that my kids’ school photos show them wearing jacket and ties, or demure skirt and blouse, sadly does not mean that they called me sir and made sure they were seen but not heard.

And when it comes to the lack of records about childhood in literature, we have to remember that paper only began spreading around europe in 14th century. The first German paper mill opened in Nurnberg in 1390 and in England it took until 1490 for paper to be produced there. Vellum, as we heard in the Gutenberg episode, was extraordinarily expensive. Hence what adults wrote down were the things adults found most important, theology, history, politics, science and chivalric romance. And most of these adults who wrote things down were clerics who lived in religious houses without children.

So, concluding from the absence of reports about childhood games that medieval parents did not love their children is the same as saying, the lack of articles in the Financial times covering the subject of kids playing in the mud, proves that bankers are bad fathers, well they may be, but it is not the journalists fault.

On the balance of probability, I would say that medieval mums and dads loved and cared about their children as much as we do, and that the terrible child mortality left them with a lot more grief to deal with than we have to do.

But there is one thing that I agree with Aries about, which is that the way children and childhood are depicted and recorded changed in the 15th century. And quite profoundly. The childhood of the future emperor Maximilian I lies exactly in this transition period, which is why we have a record of it, a record that may help us understand the man and political actor he became.

He was born on Maundy Thursday of the year 1459, in the east tower of the castle of Wiener Neustadt. When he was in his late thirties he asked the humanist and writer Joseph Grünpeck to effectively ghostwrite his autobiography, the History of Friedrich III and Maximilian. And in this, let’s say mildly embellished account, the newborn Maximilian, when washed in his tiny bathtub, for a very brief moment stood up, which is not quite as impressive as Hercules strangling snakes as a newborn, but still a clear sign of great power and glory ahead.

And so he needed to receive a grand and powerful name. Constantinople had fallen just 6 years earlier and though Friedrich III famously did nothing about it, he – as emperor – was now officially responsible for getting it back. Hence Constantine would be a most suitable name for his eldest son and heir. Several of his siblings would end up with Byzantine names like Helena, John and Christoph. Another option was George, after St. George, the hero of Christian chivalry and patron of the knightly order Friedrich III founded a few years later. But the emperor went for the name of a local Austrian Saint, Maximilian of Lorch, a missionary who was decapitated when he refused to abandon Christianity. As far as saints go, he is about as local and as obscure as you can get. Still he had appeared to Friedrich III in a dream and had saved him in one of his very few battles. And that is why we now have so many Maxes. My grandfather was a Max, and it is a top 50 first name in Germany and even in the UK. Chances are, you have a Max in the family. And now you know where the name comes from, a dream of the Imperial Arch Sleepy Hat.

Even if young Max did not stand up at birth, physical strength and dexterity was a key theme in his childhood and later life. His father, despite being tall and broad shouldered had always been a bit flabby. Not his son. Maximilian came much more after his grandfather, and even more his grandmother. Ernst the Iron had been a legendary warrior, a master in the handling of all weaponry and given his moniker, was never out of his armour. And his wife, Maximilan’s grandmother the legendary Cymburgis of Mazovia, the alluring daughter of a polish duke and famously strong, able to bend horseshoes and push nails into walls with her bare hands.

But long before he could show any physical prowess himself, the future emperor was thoroughly traumatised as Friedrich III’s reign hit its low point. The weeks in the Hofburg in 1463, hiding from the cannonballs down in the cellars left him with a constant fear of being overpowered, a need to be stronger and more aggressive, fending off attacks as hard as he could. He never openly dismissed his father, but master Grünpeck had to marshal all his remarkable faculties to make Friedrich III look powerful and admirable. He declared the old emperor had become all powerful thanks to his cunning and conniving, playing the disloyal princes one against the other, so he could punish his enemies without a single stroke of the sword.

Maximilian writes that his father had again and again allowed traitors who had spread malicious rumours and insults get away with no more than a mild dressing down, saying that the tongues are meant to be free, and should not be constrained by the law. What he called the patience of the emperor compelled his mother, the formidable Eleanore of Portugal to say to her husband, quote: “you are not worth covering your shame with a loincloth as long as you do not punish crimes with all severity, by not doing so you are just opening the floodgates to mischief”. Maximilian writes that this was said in jest, but hey, if I was from the most illustrious family of Portuguese kings and navigators, and my husband got me shot at by some plebs and eat porridge for weeks, I would not be joking about sending him out into the cold without underpants…

And deep down it seems that is what Maximilian thought as well. It is quite evident that Maximilian’s attachment to his mother had been much closer than that to his father. Eleanor was much livelier, sometimes volatile and more exciting than his sedate, considerate father.

As was common for noble families, Maximilian was almost immediately handed over to nursemaids and nannies to be brought up. It was a Habsburg tradition that the small children ate and played with the children of the servants. We even have a small drawing of little Maximilian, complete with archducal hat, being fed alongside the other children in the household of Wiener Neustadt. These relationships seem to have remained beyond childhood and shaped him.

Maximilian turned out to be one of these people who could talk to anyone, be it a bishop, a banker, a baker or a beggar. Sure, he was a Habsburg and he believed his family was predestined to rule the world. He adopted A.E.I.O.U, his father’s weird motto that became Alles Erdreich ist Oesterreich Untertan, he knew for a fact that there had been 95 lords of Austria going back to Noah and that Caesar and Nero had elevated the archduchy to the most venerable province of the roman empire. But at the same time, he was never haughty or condescending. The word that was most often used to describe him was “leutselig”, which is usually translated as affable or amiable, but has an additional component of really enjoying the company of others of die Leut, the people. And that is always and for everyone a hugely valuable thing, but given Maximilian almost always lacked hard power, these soft skills was what built the Habsburg-Burgundian empire.

Once he had come out of the nursery he turned into a wild child, exploring the castle of Wiener Neustadt, its stables, armouries, walls and ditches, large forests and the gardens his father so fastidiously catered for. Coming along on these quests were now the sons of the local nobility, many of whom became friends for life. There was even a Turkish prince, Omar Kalixt, allegedly a half-brother of Mehmet the conqueror amongst his circle. But this is not the court of Louis XIV with levees and courtiers shuffling backwards out of the room. In his daily life, Friedrich III was a modest man, and so was the little court he gave to his son. There was simple food, hearty games and true friendship.

Still a shadow hung over this image of an idyllic, or as my son would say, wholesome childhood. Maximilian barely spoke until he was six years old and even later was closed off with his parents and teachers. Most historians ascribe this to the way his was schooled.

We are now in the early modern period, and an illiterate prince had become inconceivable. As Friedrich III said, an uneducated monarch is nothing but a crowned ass. Children were hence introduced to the key elements of the medieval education, the trivium and then the quadrivium, i.e., first logic, grammar and rhetoric and then arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

The first three were the stumbling block, since what these highfalutin terms, logic, grammar and rhetoric meant was learning Latin and that meant learning the Donatus, that Latin textbook that was amongst the first things Gutenberg ever printed. His mother had approached an eminent humanist to teach her son, using the book on education of the old family friend, Aenea Silvio Piccolomini. But Friedrich did not trust anyone with his son, except for his loyal Styrians. The first of his teachers was o.k., but the second was much harsher. Corporal punishment was common on so many levels, including in schooling. And -with his father’s permission – his praeceptor Peter Engelbrecht beat little Maximilian hard whenever his Latin vocab or grammar fell behind the standards that he expected. Once when lightning struck the castle and Maximilian laughed at his teacher’s startled expression, he was slapped for that as well. The net effect was that he never learned really good Latin, though he became fluent in Slovenian, French, Flemish, English, even Spanish not through books but by talking to lords, ladies, labourers and Landsknechts. And he kept a grudge for his old schoolmaster for the rest of his life.

To escape the horrors of the schoolroom, he fled to his mother’s chambers where he was fed sweets and presumably got the warmth and love his father did not convey to him as easily. In fact the parents had a massive row over Eleanor’s habit of giving the kids candy. The emperor accused her of stuffing them to death. And of their five children, three died. When Maximilian’s sister Kunigunde got sick, Friedrich personally cared for her, limiting her to his modest and presumably healthier diet.

One can only imagine little Maximilian’s pain at his mother’s death when he was just 8 years old. Eleanor barely made it to 30 and succumbed to some sort of stomach ailment, possibly cancer, which suggests Maxmilian witnessed her slow and agonising death. He venerated his mother for the rest of his life. Depictions of her in his commissions made her resemble a saint, even the virgin, rather than a real life person.

As he grew older, he escaped the clutches of Peter Engelbrecht and experienced a more enjoyable form of learning. He had an unknown instructor who taught him drawing and calligraphy. That was far more up his street, and as we will find out, Maximilian became an extremely knowledgeable patron of the graphic arts, and even more astute at utilising imagery for his political aims.

His next set of teachers helped him develop an interest in the subjects of the higher learning, in particular history and politics. It is often said that he never developed much aptitude with numbers, leaving him prey to the economic genius of Jakob Fugger. I have read varied opinions about that and so we should leave this subject until we get to it.

One of the reasons there is debate about what he did or did not learn has to do with the way Maximilian managed his image. As we will see, propaganda and PR were crucial in the way he operated politically. And part of that propaganda were various accounts he commissioned of his early life. We already talked about Grunpeck’s History of Friedrich III and Maximilian, which is a highly flattering but otherwise traditional chronicle. Maximilian also commissioned a rhymed poem called the Theuerdank, a sort of chivalric romance where a young prince has to master various challenges, defeat evil opponents and resist temptations to be worthy to marry the rich princess in the west, where obviously Theuerdank is Maximilian and the princess is Mary of Burgundy. Towards the end of his life he commissioned another book, another way for him to create a mythology about himself. This book is called the Weisskunig, which is witty play with words, as it means both the White king, as well as the Wise king. But that is pretty much the only witty thing about it. In 251 woodcuts the reader is introduced to a fictitious Maximilian who is a mix of Jesus, Aristotle, Archimedes, Hercules, Thomas Aquinus, Michelangelo, Mozart and even Nicholas Flamel. This mega Maximilian is a total genius, disputes with the wise men in a brace of languages, helps painters to find their style, builders to improve the sturdiness of their houses, teaches armourers how to harden the steel, plays music better than the greatest musicians – in short, a totally insufferable know-it-all. This book covers Maximilian’s life well into the Italian wars, or as he described them, the war against the King of Fish, aka the doge of Venice. In a way he was lucky this self magnification set in scene through the much more magnificent woodcuts of Hans Burgkmaier was only published long after his death. All this material makes it harder, rather than simpler, to figure out how he actually grew up, and what he learned.

But even if he did not excel in intellectual pursuits as much as he later in life pretended to have done, it is obvious is that Maximilian was a man who loved, and I mean, really loved physical activity, adventure, and blowing things up. From early on, he and his group of friends spent most of their time riding horses, hunting with dogs and falcons, training for the dozens of different forms people could hurt each other in tournaments, even getting to grips with handguns and cannon. One time Maximilian had horded enough gunpowder that he could have blown up the bombard and himself, but luckily someone found out and stopped him. Aged six he got his first set of armour that he wore with pride around the courtyards of Wiener Neustadt.

As he grew into a teenager, the intellectual education receded more and more into the background and Maximilian focused more and more on practical topics, and that meant for a prince, even in the late 15th century, warfare, both individual fighting skills as well as military strategy, tactics and technology.

This he approached with the mindset of an encyclopaedia, a comprehensive compendium of all the available information about a subject. For example he commissioned the Freydal, another one of these pseudo autobiographies which on the one hand recounts the story of a knight and son of a mighty prince, trying to win the heart of three beautiful ladies. But it is also an exhaustive tableau of two things, tournament techniques and mummery. There are 256 miniature pictures, depicting sixty-four tournaments, which involve all conceivable forms of simulated combat, on horseback and on foot, and a variety of evening entertainments, usually masked balls or wild dances featuring all kinds of costumes and dance moves. There is even one where the men wear women’s clothing – just to prove that there is nothing new under the sun.

But at age 14, if you could have looked into his head, what you would have found above all, were the chivalric romances, the tales of Percival and Lancelot, of Tristan and Siegfried. He was a boy who loved sports, who loved armour, weapons and above all, adventure. In what world would he not have seen himself as the 15th century version of the superhero, the chivalric knight out on his quest to slay dragons and gain the heart of the lady of his dreams.

All this sounds very late medieval. All this talk of chivalry, fighting techniques and damsels in distress may get one to believe Maximilian was as conservative and backward looking as his father. But there is also another side to him. He was fascinated by technology, not just military technology. From his earliest days he visited the workshops of armourers, gunsmiths, printers, painters, any kind of metalworkers, he learned about mining, smelting, minting of coins, architecture, metallurgy of any kind. He is excited about geology in particular precious stones. He shared his father’s interest in what he called the black arts, Alchemy, Astrology, Mysticism, even Necromancy. Though the claims in the Weiss Kunig are hugely exaggerated, there remains the fact that he had more understanding of modern topics, like manufacturing and economics than many of his contemporaries.

That same dichotomy is observable when it comes to religion, his mother had imbued him with a deep personal piety, whilst his father taught him to use the organisation of the church as part of his revenue base. So, Maximilian became a man who could passionately dream of going on crusade or at least do a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as his father and grandfather had done, whilst at the same time diverting the funds collected for the recovery of Constantinople to pay his personal debts.

In 1471 and 1473 Maximilian is for the first time introduced to the wider world of the empire. He travelled with his father from Styria to the imperial diets at Augsburg. There he saw the grand princes of the empire competing in spectacular tournaments. To get an idea what that may have looked like, check out the unbelievable exuberance of the armour, dresses and fancy headgear in the Triumph of Maximilian by Hans Burgkmair and his son. At the same time, the city itself impressed young Maximilian. Augsburg was one of the centres of art and industry in the German lands, a kind of late medieval silicon valley, New York and Hollywood rolled into one, the place where some of the greatest armorers have their workshops, some of the best painters and sculptors produced mindboggling beauty, merchants were trading wares from Venice, Novgorod, Lisbon and London, and bankers were setting up their stalls, ready to compete with the Lombards. Augsburg would become Maximilian’s favourite city, the place he would spend more time in than anywhere else, safe for his capital in Innsbruck. The king of France would later call him “the mayor of Augsburg”.

And then, in 1473, he met the embodiment of this last gasp of chivalric culture, Charles the Bold the grand Duke of the West. If the imperial princes in Augsburg had been impressive already, this guy was next level. The clothes, the armour, the pearls, the precious stones, the tapestries all and everything 10, 15, 20 times bigger, more beautiful, more sophisticated than the modest household in Wiener Neustadt. Sure his father had something he called the hundred thousand gulden coat and an impressive collection of gemstones, but really, could that compete with the grandeur of Burgundy. And Charles had fought in dozens of battles, in the midst of the action, taking daring decisions his advisors had told him not to. What a contrast to his hesitant, slow and miserly father. Maximilian was like an Austrian cart racer meeting Lando Norris or James Hunt for those of an older generation. Of course Maximilian thought Charles the Bold was the business.

Charles invited him to one-on-one meetings, they talked about war and weapons and armies. Charles gave him a beautifully decorated copy of his military manual, a copy that still exists. And Maximilian was to marry the daughter of his hero. It does not get any better than that, or could it?

Maximilian would never again sit down with Charles of Burgundy. He would later write that he had met him and Mary of Burgundy before Neuss in 1475, but that meeting never took place. During that war Maximilian was kept under the protection of the bishop of Augsburg, a long way from the front line.

Meanwhile, as Charles fortunes darkened, the need to settle the marriage contract between Maximilian and Marie of Burgundy became ever more pressing. Charles had few friends left, having disappointed king Edward IV of England and alienated his neighbours. A positive relationship with Friedrich III and the empire was his way to balance out King Louis XI of France. He could no longer insist on a crown for his land of Burgundy as a precondition for the betrothal, and so in 1476 he set a date for the ceremony. We know why he did not make it to the event, but as far as the lawyers were concerned, the Habsburg-Burgundian merger was ready and good to go.

News of the disastrous battles of Grandson, Murten and finally Nancy reached Austria throughout 1476 and 1477. One would expect that Maximilian had set off for Gent as soon as he had heard of Charles’ demise, but he could not.

Friedrich III and Maximilian were back home in Austria. Matthias Hunyadi, the king of Hungary and leader of a standing army even larger than that of Charles of Burgundy, was attacking their homeland.

Matthias, the bulwark of Christendom against the oncoming Turkish flood had actually made peace with the Sultan and was seeking land and wealth in the West. His first target had been Bohemia where Georg of Podiebrad reigned over a fragile alliance of moderate Hussites and Catholics. The continued existence of the Utraquists, whose theological difference to the orthodox Catholicism had narrowed down to the right to take the eucharist in the form of both bread and wine, kept irritating Rome. Pope Paul II excommunicated Georg of Podiebrad in 1468 and tasked Matthias Hunyadi, king of Hungary, to remove the heretic and force Bohemia back into the bosom of mother church. But the shiny army of the Raven King struggled to knock down the Hussite Wagenburgs. He had taken over half the country, Moravia and Silesia, the parts that had traditionally been catholic, and had himself crowned king of Bohemia. But he could not make his way to Prague. Even the death of Georg of Podiebrad in 1471 did not change the situation. The Bohemian barons called in the brother of the king of Poland and the war kept going.

Throughout the 1470s, Friedrich III got sucked into this war. It was obvious that Matthias had his eye on Austria. Whenever the war in Bohemia ended, Matthias forces would go for Vienna. So far Matthias had not attacked, but he had let Turkish raiding parties cross his lands to pillage Austria. But since 1474 he was piling on the pressure, gradually opening hostilities. Matthias formally declared war on Austria in June 1477, a war that would last until 1490.

These issues in Bohemia and Hungary were the reason Friedrich III and Maxmilian were off the scene in the west after the siege of Neuss.

Which also meant that when Charles the bold had his head split open in the snowstorm outside Nancy, Maximilian was hundreds of miles away from his intended bride. And that was bad, because she really, really needed him.

Charles the Bold’s rule of his lands was built on the still smouldering ruins of the cities of Dinant and Liege. The grand centralisation he had forced through, the estates and court at Mechelen was accepted only out of fear. And when Charles the Bold was no more, there was no more fear and no longer did the cities or the territories recognise the central power. King Louis XI of France whose elaborate plan to wipe out this dangerous enemy had come to fruition in ways far beyond his wildest dreams, was moving on the young heiress, Marie of Burgundy. The situation was extremely precarious, Ghent was in open revolt, Marie’s chief minister was beheaded before her very eyes. New suitors were circling the ducal place, including the famously ugly dauphin of France, the future Chares VIII. Maximilian’s bride was in clear and imminent danger. Her knight in shining armour had to saddle his horse and ride out to rescue her, his own lands, the Raven King, his ailing father all be damned.

This is when it can get no better. The knight’s quest is on. Maximilian, slim but strong, clad in the finest armour, trained in warfare to within an inch of his life heads out for his grand adventure, to gain his kingdom.

Which is where we leave him. Next week the two lovers will finally meet and the war to preserve her and her inheritance will kick off, whilst back home in Austria the armoured knights, disciplined infantry and mighty cannon of the Raven King push for Vienna. I hope you are going to join us again.

And if you find yourself touched by this story and wish for you and your fellow listeners to enjoy the first encounter of the great lovers of the 15th century without me having to make deeply inappropriate references to mattresses, you know where to go and you know what to do.