Emperor Maximilian II (review)

Emperor Maximilian II. By Paula Sutter Fichtner. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2001. Pp. xii, 344. $35.00.)

Paula Sutter Fichtner has followed up her biography, Ferdinand I of Austria (Boulder, Colorado: East European Monographs, 1982), Holy Roman Emperor from 1556 to 1654, with this careful, insightful, and elegantly written study of his son and successor, the often enigmatic Habsburg, Maximilian II, emperor from 1564 to 1576. Along with most historians, she judges him to have been, overall, a failure but also one whose inadequacies can teach us much about the intractable institutional, political, and religious issues that confronted him in the wake of the Reformation in Central Europe. His story was, she writes, an "abidingly human" and "strangely humbling" one (p. 4).

Maximilian was born in 1527 to Ferdinand, then territorial ruler of the Austrian lands and recently crowned king of Bohemia and Hungary, and his wife, Anna, through whom Ferdinand acquired the two kingdoms. From 1544 to 1548, Maximilian gathered experience traveling with the court of his uncle, Emperor Charles V, for whom he developed an intense dislike. The following three years found him serving as regent for Charles in Spain while his cousin, the future Philip II, garnered experience in Germany. In Spain he acquired a distaste for things Spanish except for his cousin Maria, sister of Philip II, whom he brought back to Vienna as wife and with whom he enjoyed a fundamentally happy marriage. In the following years he gradually secured for himself by 1562 the imperial succession in prolonged negotiations with his father, his uncle, and his cousin, assiduously cultivating the German imperial electors, Protestant and Catholic, who greatly feared the succession of a Spaniard. In 1562/63 he was also installed as king of Bohemia and Hungary and ruler of Lower and Upper Austria. Fichtner suggests that, always fragile of health, he may have expended so much energy in the effort to claim his inheritance that an adequate supply did not remain for his period of rule, especially after early setbacks.

During his long wait to acquire real power, Maximilian had been critical of his uncle's and his father's rule particularly in three areas, the organization of the government itself, defense against the advancing Turks, and relations between Protestants and Catholics. But he could do no better when his turn came. The Habsburg governmental apparatus in Central Europe had been further complicated by Ferdinand's bestowal of parts of the Austrian inheritance on Maximilian's brothers, Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles. Maximilian's desire to rationalize the system and eliminate corruption produced little result partly because of lack of competent personnel. An early large-scale offensive against the Turks in 1566 ended in a humiliating defeat and prolonged discouragement. Perhaps the emperor's most ardent hope was for reconciliation of the Catholics and Lutherans in the empire. He supported the Peace of Augsburg, and he disdained the Calvinists, but he foundered on the rising militance on both sides of the confessional divide.

As for any Austrian Habsburg the balance of dynastic considerations and imperial obligations challenged Maximilian. In an outstanding chapter Fichtner skillfully describes his relationship with his politically stronger cousin, Philip II, and especially his shifting position on the war in the Netherlands, where he generally counseled moderation but sympathized with aspects of Philip's policy. Along the way she clarifies the knotty question of the relationship of the Netherlands to the empire. An issue that has long baffled historians has been Maximilian's personal religious beliefs: were they Protestant or Catholic? Fichtner concurs with most scholarship when she places him in a beleaguered Erasmian party in the empire that downplayed the differences between the confessions at a time when most folks were accentuating them, and she recognizes that his religious policy was dictated as much by personal conviction as by considerations of policy.