Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usages
- Map 1 The Empire in 1547
- Map 2 The Peace of Westphalia, 1648
- Part I The Empire, the German Lands, and Their Peoples
- Part II Reform of the Empire and the Church, 1400–1520
- 5 Reform of Empire and Church
- 6 The Empire and the Territorial States
- 7 The Reform of the Empire in the Age of Maximilian I
- 8 Ideals and Illusions of Reforming the Church
- Part III Church, Reformations, and Empire, 1520–1576
- Part IV Confessions, Empire, and War, 1576–1650
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - The Reform of the Empire in the Age of Maximilian I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures, Maps, and Tables
- Acknowledgments
- A Note on Usages
- Map 1 The Empire in 1547
- Map 2 The Peace of Westphalia, 1648
- Part I The Empire, the German Lands, and Their Peoples
- Part II Reform of the Empire and the Church, 1400–1520
- 5 Reform of Empire and Church
- 6 The Empire and the Territorial States
- 7 The Reform of the Empire in the Age of Maximilian I
- 8 Ideals and Illusions of Reforming the Church
- Part III Church, Reformations, and Empire, 1520–1576
- Part IV Confessions, Empire, and War, 1576–1650
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The popular and aristocratical powers in a great nation, as in the case of Germany and Poland, may meet with equal difficulty in maintaining their pretensions; and in order to avoid their danger on the side of kingly usurpation, are obliged to withhold from the supreme magistrate even the necessary trust of an executive power.
Adam FergusonFifteenth-century Germans who traveled southward to Italy or westward to the Low Countries saw wondrous things and suffered deeply hurtful jibes at their backwardness. A Pole or Hungarian journeying in the German lands might feel the same, but Italians who traveled in them gave far more injury than they endured at native hands. Giovanni Antonio Campano (1429–77), a humanist-poet and bishop who worked in the Roman Curia, came as a cardinal's secretary to the Imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1471. It was his first venture outside his native Italy, and what he saw, and smelled, and what he had to eat and drink appalled him. “Nothing is filthier than Germany,” where “there is no life except drinking,” and each glass of the sour wine “makes me cry.” The muses have no homes here, he adds, for there “reigns a monstrous spiritual barbarism, [as] none but a few know literature, and no one elegance.” In Italy Italians treated Germans as country bumpkins, barbarians who knew nothing about how to live.
When Maximilian and his father met Duke Charles of Burgundy at Trier in 1473, Latin elegance as usual trumped German solidity.
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- German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650 , pp. 107 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009