The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
of the Electors, Maximilian ordered them to adjourn to Speyer, where he would meet them in person. But the Electors quitted Frankfort before the King’s messenger could arrive. Before separating, however, they renewed the ancient Union of the Electors, and pledged each other to act as one man in upholding the reforms of 1495 and 1500. It was afterwards believed that the Electors talked of deposing Maximilian, or at least of obtaining still more drastic reforms. This however does not seem to have been the case. It was futile to seek further changes, when the innovations already approved of could not be carried out in practice.
The Electors resolved that, if the King did not summon a Diet, they would themselves meet in November at Gelnhausen, and invite the other Estates to join them. Before this parliamentary convention of the German Estates, they resolved to lay a programme of policy that far surpassed in comprehensiveness any previous plan of reformation. This scheme provided not merely for the maintenance of the Landfriede, the restoration of the Kammergericht, and the strengthening of the Reichs-regiment. It distinguished itself from its predecessors by going beyond the interests of the princes and taking some thought of the welfare of the ordinary poor man, whom it sought to protect from the personal services, taxes, ecclesiastical Courts and other grievances weighing heavily upon him. But a body which could not carry through a simple political programme showed temerity in dealing with schemes of social reformation. Meanwhile the relations between King and princes became more and more embittered. “The King,” said a Venetian ambassador, “speaks ill of the princes, and the princes speak ill of the King.”
Maximilian had grown wiser with experience. He at last saw that to maintain a stiff attitude of resistance and to dwell upon his prerogative only served to unite his vassals against him. About this time he gradually drifted into a more temporising, but also a more dangerous, attitude. He was now content to bide his time and wait on events. In the long run the single will of the King was more likely to prevail than the divided wills of a host of magnates. Maximilian now endeavoured to break up the Electoral Union, and to make a party for himself among the younger princes. He employed all his rare personal talents, all the charm and fascination which belonged to him, in order to attract to himself on personal grounds the devotion of the rising generation. He cleverly sowed dissension between the mass of the immediate nobility and the little knot of reformers, who practically controlled the whole of the opposition. Why should a small ring of elderly princes of the second rank deprive the younger generation of all power at home or prospect of distinction abroad? He appealed to the particularistic interests, which were endangered, like his own, by the unionist policy of the Electors. He invoked the chivalrous and adventurous spirit which might well find a more glorious career in fighting Turks and French under the brilliant ruler than in wrangling about constitutional reform at home. He exerted all his interest at episcopal and abbatial elections, and not seldom succeeded in carrying his candidate. He sought to win over Alexander VI to his side, and with that object did not hesitate to negotiate directly with the papal Curia over the head of the Legate. A few years of hard work in these directions wrought a surprising difference in Maximilian’s position. With increasing prosperity he grew more cheerful and good-tempered. Only against Berthold of Mainz did he show any great bitterness, and he now sought to obtain the Archbishop’s resignation on the ground of ill-health in favour of one of his young followers, the Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg-Kulmbach. The very Electors began to despair of their policy of opposition. They resolved that it was but a waste of time and money to hold Diets in the absence of the King. Two years before it had been the highest goal of their ambition to summon the Estates without waiting for the formality of the royal writ.
Concurrently with these new developments, Maximilian forged other weapons against the reforming oligarchy. So long as he possessed but a purely personal authority, he was powerless against the new system. He therefore resolved to start counter-organisations, emanating from the royal prerogative, which might be taken into account against those established by the Estates at the expense of his supreme authority. Besides this general motive, he found a particular object for such action in the condition of his Austrian territories, which were as disunited and disorderly as feudal States were ever wont to be. He had already begun to combine the ordered administration of his hereditary lands with a rival imperial system that sprang from the royal initiative. The first great step was Maximilian’s Hofrathsordnung of 1497. Since the ancient Hofrath of the Middle Ages had been merged in the Hammergericht of Frederick III, which had in its turn been superseded by the Reichskammergericht of the reformers, there was no royal Court adequate to support and represent the Crown either in the Empire or the hereditary lands of the House of Austria. Maximilian now set up a permanent Aulic Council (Hofrath), competent to deal with “all and every business that can flow in from the Empire, Christendom at large, or the King’s hereditary principalities.” This body was to follow the royal Court, was to be appointed by the King, and was to decide on all matters by a majority. It was not only a High Court of Justice, exercising concurrent jurisdiction with the Reichskammergerwht. It was also a supreme administrative body. It was to stand to the Empire and the Estates as the Concilium Ordinarium of the late medieval English Kings stood to England and the English Parliament. Next year, Maximilian further improved his executive government. The Hofkammerordnung of 1498 set up a separate financial administration, dependent on the Emperor, and subordinated also to the Aulic Council, which heard appeals from its decisions. This body, which was to sit at Innsbruck, was to centralise the financial machinery of Empire and hereditary dominions alike under four Treasurers, one for the Empire, one for Burgundy, and two for Austria. About the same date the Hofkanzkiordnung completed these monarchical reforms by setting up a Chancery or Office of State on modern lines and with powers such as could never be given to hereditary Chancellors like the Rhenish Archbishops. In these measures the King offered to his subjects rival guarantees for order, peace, and prosperity to those procured for them by the Diet. After the Gelnhausen meeting he proceeded still further on the same course. He set up a new Kammergerickt, consisting of judges appointed by himself, and this body actually had a short and troubled life at Ratisbon. He also talked of a new Reichsregiment, which was to be a Privy Council dependent on King alone; but this scheme never came into being.
Had Max been a great statesman, aiming at one thing at a time, this system might have been the beginning of a centralised bureaucracy that would have soon pervaded the whole Empire with monarchical ideas of administration. But he was neither persevering, nor wholehearted, nor far-seeing enough to pursue deliberately the policy of making himself a despot; and his reforms soon showed themselves to be but the temporary expedients of an ingenious but superficial and temporising waiter on events. In a few years fresh royal ordinances upset the system as easily as it had been called into being; and in practice Maximilian’s reforms were not much better carried out than those of the Diet. The Aulic Council ceased to exist, and its revival was only forced upon Maximilian by the Estates of his own dominions, which saw in a standing council of this sort a means of checking arbitrary prerogative. Max died before the renewed Aulic Council came into working order. Later, its permanent establishment was secured, and as time went on it proved a rather formidable rival to the imperial Chamber. In after ages it was found more advantageous to take suits before the Emperor’s Court than before the Court of the Empire, because justice was cheaper, quicker, and more certain in the Aulic Council than in the imperial Chamber.
Maximilian soon ceased to take much interest in reforming the Empire by royal prerogative. But he continued to busy himself with schemes for strengthening and unifying the administration of his hereditary dominions. He had long ago chased away the Hungarian conquerors of Vienna, and put an end to the division of the Austrian lands between two rival branches of the Habsburg House. The Aulic Council and the Innsbruck Chamber had a less direct bearing on the Empire than on the hereditary dominions, for the whole of which the Chamber might well have been the source of a single financial system. But Maximilian soon set up, in place of the single Hofkammer, two Chambers sitting at Vienna for Lower Austria (i.e. Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, Styria and Istria), and at Innsbruck for Upper Austria (Tyrol, Vorarlberg and East Swabia), with perhaps a third organisation for the scattered Vorlande in the Black Forest and Elsass. In 1501 followed an elaborate plan of administrative reform for Lower Austria, which established six executive, judicial, and financial bodies at Linz, Vienna, and Wiener Neustadt. These are the first signs of a reaction from Maximilian’s centralising policy which became stronger towards the end of his reign. It is hard to determine how far this proceeded from his instability,