Abstract
Reviewed by: Martyn Rady, University College London, UK
Maximilian I’s horoscope or geniture was composed at his birth by no less a scholar than the mathematician and astronomer, Regiomontanus. Regiomontanus identified Mercury, Venus and Mars as the child’s guiding planets on which account he would be restless, communicative, bellicose, and a lover of beautiful things. Maximilian, king and emperor, was certainly all of these, although for him the most beautiful item was himself. Portraits, woodcuts, fictional autobiographies, and the tomb in Innsbruck, begun twenty years before his death, advertised Maximilian’s real and imagined achievements as well as those of his putative forebears.
Like every other ruler, Maximilian employed astrologers at his court and took them into his circle of patronage. Darin Hayton examines the careers of half a dozen of Maximilian’s astrologers and their various accomplishments, which in terms of observatory and mathematical rigour were not insignificant. Most of the time, Maximilian’s astrologers were involved in the production of ephemerides, which gave the daily position of celestial bodies. These were published as tables or in a simplified form as wall calendars, which noted the best times of the year for planting, sowing, taking a bath, and so on. Ephemerides were vital tools for navigation but in land-locked Austria were mostly used for predictive purposes. Composing charts and, more importantly, learning how to read the tables drawn up by others were vital to casting horoscopes. Unsurprisingly, the most popular lectures at the University of Vienna were those dedicated to the study of ephemerides.
Astrologers used their charts and calendars as a way of advertising Maximilian. They included the Habsburg coat of arms prominently, drew attention to the emperor’s genealogy and geniture, and related how in general terms his political mission to heal the Church and unite the German princes was celestially ordained. On occasions, Maximilian consulted them to obtain advice on the most propitious time to engage in an enterprise – as for instance on the eve of the Landshut Succession War of 1503–1505, or of the opening of negotiations with Wladislas II of Hungary in 1506. Such occasions seem, nonetheless, to have been rare – at least, Darin Hayton mentions only a handful. Altogether Maximilian seems to have bowed to the superior wisdom of his astrologers much less than did his father, Frederick III, who postponed his own wedding so that it should happen only under the most propitious of conjunctions.
Scholars hoping to establish how astrology influenced the ‘politics of Maximilian I’ (to quote from the book’s title) will thus be disappointed. Maximilian’s tame astrologers contributed to his image and to the lustre of his house, but their day-to-day influence over policy is far less obvious. Partly the absence of evidence for their direct involvement arises from the limitations that the author sets, according to which astrology is a ‘science of the stars’ (3), akin to astronomy except that it has predictive and explanatory functions in respect of human affairs. There were plenty of star-gazers, however, who were part of the circles around Maximilian, but whose astrology intersected with hermetic magic, spirit-conjuring and demonology. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who was with Maximilian in 1510–1511, was one such practitioner, but Agrippa’s mentor, Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim, also dedicated several occult texts to the emperor. Trithemius is, however, largely ignored by the author and Agrippa is overlooked entirely.
Doubtless Darin Hayton spends such little time on the hermeticists because their interest was never in careful calculations and observations, but more in the application of astrology to speculative magic. Even so, it was with these that Maximilian most likely dallied. Maximilian’s semi-autobiography, the Weisskunig, records how, as part of his education, he sought out knowledge of the black arts and found a master to teach him, while avoiding anything that might imperil his soul. Later accounts would make this master the otherwise ubiquitous Doctor Faustus, but it is more likely to have been Abbot Trithemius.
Throughout Central Europe, magical texts circulated, bringing together astrology with occult knowledge. A recent book has itemized their spread, particularly in the court of Maximilian’s adversary, Matthias Corvinus of Hungary (see thus Benedek Láng, Unlocked Books: Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe, 2008). There were, we know, copies of the Picatrix, which combined magic with astrology, circulating in Vienna, including one of the best collections of talismanic symbols. Darin Hayton tells us much of Maximilian’s relations with one set of astrologers, but there was surely another group whose influence on his policies was equally significant but altogether more mysterious.