MASSIMILIANO, saint, martyr. — The name of this martyr was preserved in the ancient martyrologies with variations and uncertainties of identification. In 1680 the authentic acts were published for the first time at Oxford (BHL, 5813).
M., son of a soldier named Victor, was martyred at Tebeste in Numidia on 12 March 295, following his refusal to serve in the Roman army when ordered to do so by the proconsul Dion. M. considered military service incompatible with his profession as a Christian. His body, transported to nearby Carthage by a matron named Pompeiana, was buried beside the martyr Cyprian. In the Roman Martyrology he is erroneously listed under the name Mamilianus as a Roman martyr.
MASSIMILIANO I of Wittelsbach, duke and elector of BAVARIA. — Born in Munich on 17 April 1573, died in Ingolstadt on 27 September 1651. He was one of the most prominent figures in the movement of German Catholic reaction during the age of the Counter-Reformation. He succeeded his father William in the Duchy in 1597 and continued his work aimed at restoring Catholicism in Bavaria, with the assistance of the Society of Jesus.
The foundation of schools, colleges, seminaries, and confraternities helped restore Bavaria’s former Catholic character, under a regime of strict ducal supervision. In 1603 the Emperor charged him with intervening in Donauwörth to restore Catholic worship, as demanded by the minority against the Lutheran majority of the population. M. occupied the city and held II. When, in 1608, the Palatine elector Frederick V, in defence of Lutheranism, created the Evangelical Union of princes, M. immediately opposed it with the Catholic League, supported by the Pope and the King of Spain (1609). The conflict between the two organizations did not, however, break out openly, because the Protestants lost the support of Henry IV of France (who died in 1610). In 1619, when the religious rebellion broke out in Bohemia, Frederick was summoned there and proclaimed king by the rebellious Bohemians; M., however, took the field with the forces of the Catholic League in defence of the Emperor and won the victory at White Mountain (8 November 1680). His reward was the grant of the electoral dignity taken from the rebel Frederick V; the imperial expedition into the Palatinate in 1623 confirmed the grant. Throughout the Thirty Years’ War M. remained at the Emperor’s side, although he conducted secret negotiations with Richelieu when Ferdinand II’s absolutist claims appeared dangerous to the independence of his state. In the Peace of Westphalia he succeeded in securing the acquisition of the Palatinate.
BIB.: F. Stieve, Das kirchliche Polizeiregiment in Bayern unter Maximilian I., Munich 1876; id., Die Politik Bayerns (1591-1607), ibid. 1878; id., Kürfürst Maximilian I. von Bayern, ibid. 1882; F. Bezold, Kaiser Rudolf II. und die Heilige Liga, ibid. 1886; H. Stöcklein, Das Papstschwert des Kürfürsten Maximilian I. von Bayern, Gotha 1931; W. Goetz, Die Politik Maximiliani I. von Bayern und seiner Verbündeten 1618-51, 3 vols., Leipzig 1942. Francesco Cognasso
MASSIMILIANO I of Habsburg, King of the Romans and elected EMPEROR. — Born in Vienna on 22 March 1459,
The war between M. and the King culminated in the Battle of Guinegatte (1479), won by M., and was settled by the Peace of Arras (23 December 1482). M., who, after his wife’s sudden death, was now acting as regent for his firstborn son Philip (born in 1478), agreed to give the dauphin Charles his daughter Margaret in marriage (born in 1480), assigning Artois, Franche-Comté, and the Mâconnais as her dowry, while renouncing Picardy and Burgundy, which had already been occupied by the King. The treaty, however, recognized the existence of a conflict between the house of France and that of Habsburg concerning the fate of the inheritance of Charles the Bold.
M. was diverted from the government of his son’s domains in 1486, when his father Frederick III yielded to the insistence of the German princes that his son be proclaimed King of the Romans and assume the government of the Empire, in the hope of reorganizing the German Empire. After Frederick III died in 1493, M., by then head of the Empire, did not show himself favourable to the plans of the leader of the reform movement, the archbishop-elector of Mainz, Berthold of Henneberg. The clash began as early as the Diet of Worms in 1495. The reformers wanted a council appointed by the princes and cities and a president appointed by the Emperor, charged with governing the Empire and assisted by a supreme court of justice. M. rejected this scheme, which would have transformed the Empire into a confederation of states over which he would have possessed no more than fictitious authority. He consented only to a supreme imperial court of justice and to the proclamation of a perpetual territorial peace; the Diet had to grant the Sovereign the establishment of a universal tax for the Empire (the hundredth), to meet political needs.
These decisions were reaffirmed at the Diet of Landau in 1496. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1500, the project of a Reichsregiment, or governing commission composed of the prince-electors, representatives of the great feudal lords, and delegates from six circles into which the Empire was divided, was examined. This government was to reside in Nuremberg. The Augsburg constitution was stillborn, and the disagreement between M. and Berthold of Henneberg worsened as a result of the Sovereign’s hostility to the reforms. After the archbishop’s death in 1503, M. set up other governmental institutions in opposition to the organs of government created at Augsburg, institutions that would express his centralizing aspirations and merge the interests of the Empire with those of the Habsburg states: the Hofrat, the sovereign’s council, accompanying him as a court of justice and council of state; the Hofkammer, a fiscal administration based in Innsbruck, with separate treasuries for the Empire, Austria, and Burgundy; and the Hofkanzlei, an imperial chancery divided into three branches—imperial, Austrian, and Burgundian. At the Diet of Cologne in 1505, M. asserted his absolute authority; in the struggles between the two branches of the Wittelsbach family, he succeeded in intervening as arbitrator, humiliating princes who had supported Berthold of Henneberg’s reform and binding the Empire ever more closely to the fortunes of the house of Habsburg.
European politics, however, required M.’s continual attention. The conflict with France, already apparent in the Burgundian question, intensified over the Italian question, in which he was nevertheless confronted with the problem of his conflict with Venice. In 1490 he had not hesitated to support the plans of the French princes hostile to the monarchy and had married by proxy Anna, heiress to the Duchy of Brittany, desired by the King of France. Charles VIII, however, intervened forcefully and summarily dissolved the marriage between Anna and M., who did not even act when he saw Anna become the consort of the King of France. He resigned himself to the Treaty of Senlis, which returned to him his daughter Margherita, rejected by Charles VIII, together with the territories previously assigned as her dowry. Nor did he act when Charles VIII entered Italy in 1494 and occupied the Kingdom of Naples, perhaps calculating on the possibility of having France as an ally against Venice. In 1495, however, he took part in the League of S. Mark to expel Charles VIII from Naples, and in 1496 he descended into Italy and presented himself as the protector of Pisa, without achieving any result. Since he had married Bianca Maria Sforza, sister of Duke Gian Galeazzo, when Luigi XII moved against Ludovico il Moro in order to seize Milan, M. intervened to aid the Duke and for this purpose organized an expedition into Lorraine with Swiss troops; then, indignant with the Swiss cantons, he sought to weaken them by means of an expedition by the Swabian League, which ended in failure: by the Treaty of Basel (1499), M. had to recognize the de facto autonomy of the cantons. This conflict enabled Luigi XII to occupy Milan; M. intervened and helped Ludovico il Moro to recover the Duchy, but he could not prevent King Luigi from definitively occupying Milan and imprisoning the Duke. M. resigned himself and now sought to exploit the French alliance against Venice, arranging the marriage of his nephew Carlo, son of Filippo il Bello, to Claudia, daughter of Luigi XII (Treaty of Blois). These agreements were not implemented; in 1506 Claudia was given in marriage to the Duke of Angoulême, the future Francesco I. In 1508 M. renewed the agreement against Venice with Luigi XII and with Pope Giulio II (League of Cambrai). The allies intended to divide the Republic’s dominions among themselves: M. was to receive the imperial fief cities of Rovereto, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and Friuli with the patriarchate of Aquileia. Since Venetian hostility prevented him from going to Rome for the imperial coronation, his ally Giulio II granted him permission to assume the title of emperor Electus (Erwählter Kaiser). As early as the beginning of 1508 he had attacked the Venetian territories, but had been repulsed and forced to accept an armistice; only after the battle of Agnadello (14 May 1509) did he descend into the Veneto and occupy, without fighting, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Feltre; the Venetians, however, boldly retook Padua. Giulio II was reconciled with Venice. The Emperor, on the other hand, supported Luigi XII even in his attempt to convene the schismatic Council of Pisa against the Pope: M., having become a widower, briefly considered his own candidacy for the papal throne, thereby uniting the papacy and the Empire. After the battle of Ravenna (11 April 1512), fought to eliminate French hegemony over the peninsula, M. made peace with Venice and drew closer to the Pope and the King of Spain.
The League of 1513 united the Empire, Spain, England, and the papacy in the struggle against France, which was to be invaded within two months. The League brought about various French defeats, at Guinegatte and Novara; the Swiss reached as far as Dijon, and M. again appeared before Padua. The French victory at Marignano (13–14 September 1514) brought about the failure of the anti-French League. In March 1516 M. once again reached the outskirts of Milan, without result. In December of the same year he made peace with Venice (Treaty of Brussels), which ceded Rovereto to him, and at Cambrai he joined the general peace (11 March 1517).
M. died on 12 January 1519 at Wels and was buried at Wiener-Neustadt in the church of S. George, although a grandiose funerary monument was being prepared for him in the Hofkirche at Innsbruck. He was an imaginative man, sensitive to art and curious about every technical innovation.
His political activity, essentially, had led to no positive result; the matrimonial policy begun by Federico III met with greater success: he had married the heiress of the Burgundian state; his son Filippo married Giovanna of Aragon, heiress to the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon; his daughter Margherita, after the failure of her French marriage, married Filiberto II, Duke of Savoy. The political life of the sixteenth century was to be profoundly shaped by the consequences of these marriages.