Germany
Maximilian
Our course ends with Maximilian, a curious figure. We want to sympathize with him, for he seems to have large ambitions and admirable goals, but he's too capricious, too vacillating and in the end too ineffective to be considered an important emperor. Maximilian was similar to other princes of his day in that he was filled with chivalric ideals and took them quite seriously. This makes some of his actions seem arbitrary and even foolish, but that's to judge him by modern standards. To contemporaries, he was a great prince, worthy of admiration and praise.
His greatest accomplishment in modern terms was marriage. Not only did Maximilian marry well, he married his children so well that by the time of his death, the Hapsburgs were the most powerful family in Europe. At least in terms of titles. The trouble was, the titles were scattered across multiple family members, and there was no practical way to unify all that power into a single political entity.
Marriages
Maximilian married Mary, the daughter and only heir of Duke Charles of Burgundy. That marriage brought not only portions of Alsace and Lorraine but also the rich cities of the Low Countries into the Hapsburg family. [unfinished as of Spring 2006]