MAXIMILIAN, Saint, Martyr. — The name of this martyr was preserved in the ancient martyrologies with various readings and uncertainties of identification. In 1680, the authentic acts were first published in Oxford (BHL, 5813).
M., son of a soldier named Victor, was martyred at Tebeste in Numidia on 12 March 295, after refusing the proconsul Dion to serve in the Roman army. M. considered military service incompatible with his profession as a Christian. His body, transported to nearby Carthage by a matron named Pompeiana, was buried near the martyr Cyprian. The Roman Martyrology erroneously lists him as Mamilianus, a Roman martyr.
MAXIMILIAN I of Wittelsbach, Duke and Elector of Bavaria. — B. at Munich on 17 April 1573, d. at Ingolstadt on 27 September 1651. He is one of the most prominent figures in the German Catholic reaction during the age of the Counter-Reformation. He succeeded his father William in the duchy in 1597 and continued his father’s work aimed at the restoration of Catholicism in Bavaria, with the assistance of the Society of Jesus.
The founding of schools, colleges, seminaries, and confraternities contributed to restoring Bavaria’s old Catholic appearance under a regime of strict ducal oversight. In 1603, the Emperor entrusted him with intervening at Donauwörth to re-establish Catholic worship desired by the minority against the Lutheran majority of the population. M. occupied the city and held II. When in 1608 the Elector Palatine Frederick V, in defense of Lutheranism, created the Evangelical Union of princes, M. immediately countered with the Catholic League, with the support of the Pope and the King of Spain (1609). The conflict between the two organizations did not break out openly, however, because the Protestants lost the support of Henry IV of France (d. 1610). But in 1619, with the outbreak of the religious rebellion in Bohemia, Frederick was called there and proclaimed king by the Bohemian rebels; in turn, M. appeared with the arms of the Catholic League in defense of the Emperor and won the victory of the White Mountain (8 November 1620). The 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. M. remained throughout the Thirty Years’ War at the side of the Emperor, though secretly negotiating with Richelieu when the absolutist assertions of Ferdinand II seemed dangerous to the independence of his state. In the Peace of Westphalia, he secured the acquisition of the Palatinate.
MAXIMILIAN I of Habsburg, King of the Romans and Elected Emperor. — B. at Vienna on 22 March 1459, son of Frederick III of Habsburg and Eleanor of Portugal. Following negotiations already underway between the Emperor and Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in August 1477 he married the Duke’s daughter, Mary, thereby saving the Burgundian state from the annexationist ambitions of King Louis XI of France.
The war between M. and the King culminated in the Battle of Guinegate (1479), won by M., and was settled by the Peace of Arras (23 December 1482). Now a widower after the sudden death of his wife, M. held the regency for his eldest son Philip (b. 1478) and agreed to give his daughter Margaret (b. 1480) in marriage to the Dauphin Charles, assigning as her dowry Artois, Franche-Comté, and the Mâconnais, while renouncing Picardy and Burgundy already occupied by the King. The treaty, however, acknowledged the existence of a conflict between the houses of France and Habsburg over the fate of Charles the Bold’s inheritance.
M. was diverted from governing 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 governance of the Empire in the hope of reorganizing the German Empire. After the death of Frederick III in 1493, M., now head of the Empire, proved unsympathetic to the plans of the leader of the reform movement, the Elector-Archbishop of Mainz Berthold of Henneberg. The clash came already at the Diet of Worms in 1495. The reformers sought the establishment of a council appointed by the princes and cities and a president appointed by the Emperor, charged with governing the Empire, supported by a supreme court of justice. M. rejected such a scheme, which would have transformed the Empire into a confederation of states over which he would have had only a nominal authority: he consented only to an Imperial Supreme Court of Justice and to the ban of a perpetual territorial peace; the Diet had to grant the Sovereign the institution of a universal tax for the Empire (the hundredth), for political necessities. These decisions were reaffirmed at the Diet of Landau in 1496; at that of Augsburg in 1500, the project of a Reichsregiment or governing commission formed by the prince-electors, representatives of the great feudatories, and delegates of the six Circles into which the Empire was divided was examined. This government was to be seated at Nuremberg. The Augsburg ordinance came to nothing, and the disagreement between M. and Berthold of Henneberg worsened following the Sovereign’s hostility to the reforms. After the archbishop’s death in 1503, M. opposed to the organs of government created at Augsburg other institutions representing his centralizing aspirations and merging the interests of the Empire with those of the Habsburg lands: the Hofrat, an aulic council following the sovereign, a court of justice and council of state; the Hofkammer, a fiscal administration seated at Innsbruck with separate treasuries for the Empire, Austria, and Burgundy; 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 of the two branches of the Wittelsbachs, he succeeded in intervening as arbiter, 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 policy demanded Maximilian’s constant attention. The conflict with France, already evident in the Burgundian question, intensified over the Italian question, where he faced the additional problem of his conflict with Venice. In 1490, he had not hesitated to align himself with the plans of French princes hostile to the monarchy and had even married by proxy Anne, heiress to the Duchy of Brittany, who was desired by the King of France. However, Charles VIII intervened forcefully, unilaterally dissolving Maximilian’s marriage to Anne, though Maximilian did not react even when Anne became the consort of the King of France. He resigned himself to the Treaty of Senlis, which restored to him his daughter Margaret—rejected by Charles VIII—and the territories previously assigned as her dowry. Nor did he act when Charles VIII invaded Italy in 1494 and occupied the Kingdom of Naples, perhaps calculating that France would be pitted against Venice. In 1495, however, he joined the League of St. Mark to expel Charles VIII from Naples, and in 1496 he marched into Italy, positioning himself as protector of Pisa, though without achieving any result.
Since he had married Bianca Maria Sforza, sister of Duke Gian Galeazzo, when Louis XII moved against Ludovico Sforza (Il Moro) to seize Milan, Maximilian intervened to aid the Duke. To this end, he organized an expedition into Lorraine with Swiss mercenaries, but later, displeased with the Swiss cantons, he sought to weaken them with an expedition of the Swabian League, which ended in failure. By the Treaty of Basel (1499), Maximilian was forced to recognize the de facto autonomy of the Swiss cantons. This conflict allowed Louis XII to occupy Milan; Maximilian intervened and helped Ludovico il Moro recover the Duchy, but could not prevent King Louis from definitively occupying Milan and imprisoning the Duke. Maximilian resigned himself and now sought to exploit the French alliance against Venice, arranging the marriage of his nephew Charles, son of Philip the Fair, to Claudia, daughter of Louis XII (Treaty of Blois). These agreements were never implemented; in 1506, Claudia was instead married to the Duke of Angoulême, the future Francis I.
In 1508, Maximilian renewed his understanding against Venice with Louis XII and Pope Julius II (League of Cambrai). The allies intended to partition the Republic’s domains: Maximilian was to receive the imperial fiefdoms of Rovereto, Verona, Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, and the Friuli with the Patriarchate of Aquileia. Since his enmity with Venice prevented him from traveling to Rome for his imperial coronation, his ally Julius II granted him the title of *Imperator Electus* (Erwählter Kaiser). From early 1508, he had already attacked Venetian territories but was repelled and forced to accept an armistice; only after the Battle of Agnadello (14 May 1509) did he descend into the Veneto to occupy Verona, Vicenza, Padua, and Feltre without resistance. However, the bold Venetians soon recaptured Padua. Julius II reconciled with Venice, while the Emperor continued to support Louis XII even in the attempt to convene the schismatic Council of Pisa against the Pope. Maximilian, now widowed, even briefly considered a candidacy for the papal throne, uniting papacy and empire.
After the Battle of Ravenna (11 April 1512), to eliminate French hegemony on the peninsula, Maximilian 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 a campaign against France, which was to be invaded within two months. The League achieved several French defeats, at Guinegatte and Novara; the Swiss advanced as far as Dijon, and Maximilian reappeared before Padua. The French victory at Marignano (13–14 September 1515) doomed the anti-French League. In March 1516, Maximilian again advanced as far as Milan, but without result. In December of the same year, he made peace with Venice (Treaty of Brussels), which ceded Rovereto, and adhered to the general peace of Cambrai (11 March 1517).
Maximilian died on 12 January 1519 in Wels and was buried in Wiener-Neustadt in the church of St. George, though a grand funerary monument was prepared for him in the Hofkirche of Innsbruck. He was a man of imagination, sensitive to art, and curious about every technical innovation.
His political activity had essentially yielded no positive results; more successful was the matrimonial policy initiated by Frederick III: Maximilian himself had married the heiress of the Burgundian state; his son Philip married Joanna of Aragon, heiress to the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon; his daughter Margaret, after the failed French marriage, wed Filibert II, Duke of Savoy. The political life of the 16th century was to be profoundly shaped by the consequences of these marriages.