Free Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder Page A

– the economy revs up, the population grows, technology is overhauled, new forms of artistic and intellectual life flourish. Earlier events that appear murky and disconnected to us must have appeared vivid and curious at the time, but now this is all verifiable and uncontentious, simply because of a single, key invention: printing with movable type. Monarchs such as Henry VI of England or Louis XI of France are remote and, however hard we try, not part of our mental landscape because of the thinness of what they left behind them – a handful of stiff portraits, a few letters and dodgy chronicles. We would love to engage more actively with their reigns, which were obviously but tantalizingly fascinating, but cannot.
    Maximilian I, Emperor from 1493, marks this transition exactly. His father, Frederick III, is a baffling figure: we know what he looked like, which is an improvement, but historians are still obliged to cling to a handful of unreliable stories and these are so partisan that his incompetence or cunning can in the end only be dimly guessed at. Maximilian, however, is universally familiar, with his beaky nose, fur cloak, Order of the Golden Fleece chain and shoulder-length hair (one of those fashions for men which tends to be passed over in stunned silence). He looks out from coins and statues and paintings, but also from woodcuts, an older technology but one now much refined, which circulated around Europe in astonishing quantities. Maximilian was obsessed with new technology, whether this applied to fluted armour (‘Maximilian’ armour) or cannon (his arsenal can still be wandered around in Innsbruck) or – most importantly – typography. The famous ‘Gothic’ typeface, called Fraktur by Germans, was designed specifically for him. This typeface created a semi-separate and alienating (for non-Germans) form of book presentation which endured until Hitler banned it in 1941, aware – in an odd burst of sensitivity – that for effective communication with his new world empire Frakturwas too hard to read.
    Maximilian used the new medium to pour out propaganda, both about his deeds and about himself and his family. As with everything he did, he stopped and started, changed his mind, lost interest, so there were countless unfinished projects at the time of his death – but he planned and dictated material on everything from magic to chivalry and genealogy to politics. He used to be much hated by German nationalist historians because he failed to unite Germany and dabbled and dithered in a way that undercuts any coherent, onward-and-upward narrative – but these are the very failings that now make him seem so appealing. We need no longer feel upset that he didn’t create a powerful and independent German army or crush the French.
    Maximilian is an unusual Habsburg in being both a convincing man of action and an intellectual. He was deeply conscious that when he took over the role of Holy Roman Emperor he would set a precedent – what if it could be permanently attached to the Habsburg family? Enormous effort went into making this feasible, much of it via print, and working with a brilliant array of great artists in all media he set out to build an image of himself that would last for ever. The Habsburgs had the most extensive territories of all German rulers, but there were plenty who claimed a better ancestry or were more securely rooted in the Empire itself. A legitimate complaint about them (one that lasted until they finally stepped down) was that their interests were tangled up in the margins of the Empire – in the Low Countries, northern Italy and in the east – and that they misused Imperial funds for narrow family purposes, merely pretending to have German interests at heart. In fact it was their semi-marginality, as well as their wealth, that made the Habsburgs so desirable to many German princes – they were rich enough not to be a burden on other territories, but they would on the whole be too