Ep. 226: Maximilian I (1493-1519) - A Grand Plan for a Great War
History of the Germans
Dirk Hoffmann-Becking
4.9 • 550 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2026
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Europe's political landscape is shifting fundamentally. No longer are wars fought between kings and their vassals, and emperors against popes - it is all about the balance of power. and this balaance is firmly out of whack. The largest, richest and most populous part of Europe, the empire that still formally included Italy, the Low Countries, the Swiss Confederation, Bohemia and Burgundy, was also its politically weakest entity, whilst the kings of France leveraged their smaller but more coherent state into European dominance.
The struggle between France and its neighbours with england looking on was to become the dominant political pattern of Western European politics for 250 or arguable 350 years.
Maximilian has a Grand Plan that could have nipped these centuries of death and destruction in the bud. But he did not...
Karl Marx once said that history repeates itself twice, first as tragedy and then as farce. he was wrong on many (not all) things. This one repeats not twice but ten, if not dozens of times, but first as farce and then as tragedy...
Enjoy the ride..
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans. |
| 0:07.0 | Episode 226, A Grand Plan for a Great War. |
| 0:13.0 | Let's rise on the wings of an eagle and look at Europe in and around the year 1500, or more precisely, 1496. The year Maximilian I put its grand plan |
| 0:24.2 | into action. A grand plan, so grand, you can turn it into a woodcut and call it a triumphal arch. |
| 0:32.1 | Looking down from 10,000 feet, we can see that the endless conflicts between the kings and their vessels are rapidly abating. |
| 0:40.4 | Even the Holy Roman Empire has developed a constitution that bans the endless feuding and created |
| 0:45.7 | institutions that, more or less, kept everyone pulling in the same direction. |
| 0:51.7 | In this world of centralized authorities, civil servants, lawyers, cannons and |
| 0:56.4 | masked pikemen, medieval notions of faith and loyalty do not count for much anymore. |
| 1:02.3 | 17 years later, Machiavelli will write, quote, |
| 1:05.9 | In the actions of all men, and especially of princes, where there is no court to appeal to, one looks to the end. |
| 1:14.2 | So let a prince win and maintain a state, the means will always be judged honorable and praised |
| 1:20.5 | by everyone. He, by the way, never said the words that the end justifies the means, but that is clearly what he meant. |
| 1:29.4 | Winning for a prince was keeping a state afloat through the vagaries of fortune, everything else. |
| 1:34.8 | Cruelty, generosity, honesty, deception are just tools in the fight for survival. |
| 1:41.6 | It is no coincidence that Machiavelli's focus on the ruthlessness of the princes |
| 1:46.0 | was born in Northern Italy. It was in Northern Italy that the fundamental imbalances in this |
| 1:51.9 | new political framework of Europe had been put into stark relief. Then and now the wealthiest parts |
| 1:59.7 | of Western Europe, and Northern Italy, the Rhone Valley, |
| 2:03.3 | southern Germany, the Rhineland, the low countries in southern England. |
| 2:07.7 | This is where most of the trading, innovation and manufacturing happened. |
| 2:12.2 | Cloth, metalwork, arms, armour, art, luxury goods travelled up and down that route to be distributed further |
... |
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