Inevitably, perhaps, Maximilian’s performance with regard to the empire disappointed, but he was successful in significantly extending the dynastic might of his family. He took over the duchy of Tirol with its vast mining resources. Ambitious marriage alliances spread Habsburg entitlements west and east: in 1496 Maximilian’s son Philip wed Joan, the daughter of the king and queen of Spain, thus linking Habsburg Austria to Spain and the Netherlands (the future Charles V was born of this union in 1500); and in 1516 Maximilian’s grandson Ferdinand was betrothed to the heiress of Hungary and Bohemia. These connections, however, only escalated Maximilian’s internal and external problems. In foreign politics his ventures ended, for the most part, in calamities for the empire. Switzerland was lost in 1499, several Italian campaigns were repulsed, and an attempt against the duchy of Burgundy brought the hostility of France and led to the fall of Milan. Even the imperial crown eluded Maximilian: his advance on Rome for this purpose was halted, and he had to be content with the self-bestowed title of Roman emperor-elect.

These reverses strengthened a reform party among leading members of the empire’s estates (Stände); especially prominent was their spokesman, the archbishop-elector of Mainz, Berthold von Henneberg. Given the long rivalry between emperor and estates, it goes without saying that their respective plans for reforming the empire diverged on crucial points of direction and control. The estates, acting from their—to them entirely legitimate—sense of the prerogatives of particularism, favoured a central administration responsive to them; the emperor, to the contrary, insisted on organs subservient to him, modeled on bureaucratic agencies recently established in Burgundy and Austria and shored up by the authority-enhancing principles of Roman law.

At the imperial diet held in the city of Worms in 1495, the estates, whose members had begun to see themselves as the authentic representatives of the whole country, prevailed. The four reform measures adopted on this occasion were in large part intended to limit the emperor’s powers. An “Eternal Peace” outlawed private feuds, with steps taken, and agreed to by the emperor, to implement this pacification. An Imperial Chamber Court functioned as supreme tribunal for the empire, most of its judges being named by the estates. An empirewide tax, the “Common Penny,” was imposed, the collection of which fell to the estates. To these measures was added, in 1500, an Imperial Governing Council to monitor, under the domination of the electors, the empire’s foreign policy. Maximilian was able to impede the operation of this body (it was reestablished in 1521), but overall the emperor’s reform objectives had come to nothing.

The historical judgment of this failure has swung widely, on one hand between scorn for Maximilian’s imperial “fantasies”—for whose realization a reorganized Germany was to furnish the means—and respect for his grasp of the country’s perilous geopolitical situation, and on the other hand between sympathy for the estates’ single-minded pursuit of the imperatives of regional state building and disdain for the parochialism of their political vision. Most historians have found Maximilian’s actions distorted by a brand of romantic idealism. (In all seriousness he proposed to Bayezid II that Turks and Christians should settle their differences by the rules of the tournament; he also cherished for a time the hope of becoming pope as well as emperor.) What is clear is that the reform effort so briskly launched at the beginning of his reign resulted in permanent confrontation between sovereign and estates, a posture in which neither party could outmaneuver the other and every matter of policy required tenacious negotiation. In light of this permanent tug of war, the notion of a universal realm ruled by a “German” emperor does seem fantastic, though it never lost its ideological force. No one in the empire possessed plenary authority, but real power was shifting to territorial rulers and their bureaucratic agents and to the magistrates of larger cities. This shift was to be of the greatest importance in determining the direction in which the Reformation established itself in Germany.