Maximilian I became emperor without a pope because Venice blocked his road
Holy Roman Emperors traditionally travelled to Rome to be crowned by the pope. When Venetian forces barred Maximilian's way in 1508, he simply proclaimed himself emperor at Trento, and Pope Julius II accepted it afterwards. The man remembered in German lore as the last knight was also a tireless architect of his own public image.
Born at Wiener Neustadt in 1459, Maximilian was the only surviving son of Emperor Frederick III, who named him after a saint he believed had warned him of danger in a dream. As a small child he lived through a siege of Vienna, reportedly going round the garrison asking soldiers for bread. He was a poor, restless student who scorned his tutor, preferred tournaments to books, and alarmed his father with his appetite for wine, feasting and extravagance. When Frederick forbade imperial princes from jousting against him, the prince granted himself permission.
Marriage made his fortune. To contain the ambitious Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy, Frederick arranged for Maximilian to wed the duke's daughter Mary, and the ceremony took place in August 1477, months after Charles died in battle. Louis XI of France had already seized Burgundian lands, so the eighteen-year-old husband, with an empty treasury and no help from the Empire, defended his wife's inheritance and beat the French at Guinegate in 1479. Mary died after a riding accident in 1482, and years of revolt in the Low Countries followed. Flemish rebels even held Maximilian captive until his father intervened.
He proved far better at dynastic strategy than at governing the Netherlands. The 1496 marriage of his son Philip to Joanna of Castile planted the Habsburgs in Spain, eventually allowing his grandson Charles V to rule both Castile and Aragon. He also lost the family's Swiss territories to the Swiss Confederacy. Olivier de la Marche called him Heart of Steel, a label that could praise his courage or condemn his ruthlessness.
Historians remain split on him. Leopold von Ranke and other nineteenth-century critics faulted him for putting the Habsburgs ahead of Germany, while Hermann Wiesflecker's multi-volume study, published between 1971 and 1986, recast him as an innovative reformer and patron of culture. Much of what later generations believed about him came from the elaborate programme of books, art and scholarship he commissioned during his lifetime. He died in January 1519.
Source: Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor
