The Tournament and its Role in the Court Culture of Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519)

 
 
48 
Chapter 2: Tournaments in the Life and Career of Maximilian 
 
2.1 Introduction 
Throughout his lifetime (1459-1519), Maximilian hosted, witnessed, and participated in a large 
number of tournaments – those meetings of athletic competition focused around the joust or 
foot combat and normally involving some element of spectacle. In various ways, tournaments 
became an integral part of his life. This chapter will present a study of those which have been 
compiled over the course of this research, serving as a wide-ranging and thorough 
representation of the various types of tournaments and the occasions for them in which 
Maximilian was involved, either as an organiser, a participant, or a spectator.
1
 The tournaments 
span many years, giving us a picture of the way Maximilian kept tournaments a part of his life 
throughout his reigns as archduke of Austria, king of the Romans, and Holy Roman emperor.
2
 
This chapter will also provide an integrated discussion of how tournaments featured in the 
course of Maximilian’s life and reign alongside the other key events of his lifetime. 
 
This collection of tournaments was brought together using a variety of primarily 
written but also pictorial sources. The starting point for locating this information was the 
Regesta Imperii (see Chapter 1, Section 1.6).
3
 This was a particularly valuable resource when the 
                                                 
1
 There is, it should be noted, a degree of difficulty in defining what constitutes ‘a tournament’. A 
tournament could last over a period of months; numerous jousts normally took place over these long 
stretches of time, and the sources are not normally specific on the exact number. This raises another 
difficulty: it is often impossible to know if Maximilian was a participant or merely a spectator, although 
there are, luckily, many instances where he is specifically described as taking part, and his opponent is 
often named as well. This frequency of participation would lead one to believe that when there is 
simply a passing reference to a tournament taking place, it is more likely than not that Maximilian was 
directly involved as a competitor, even when it is impossible to say for sure.   
2
 For a map of Maximilian’s Holy Roman Empire, see Appendix 1, Figure 1. 
3
 A search in the Regesta Imperii of the volumes relating to Maximilian’s lifetime (RI XIV 
Maximilian I: 1486/1493-1519) yields 71 results for turnier, 110 for rennen, and 67 for stechen. 

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49 
original source was not easily available or accessible. For the most part, however, descriptions 
of tournaments have been located across a broad range of source material and from a variety 
of cultural perspectives. These are mainly the edited collections of letters, Urkunden, and Akten 
described in the introduction, as well as several chronicles, and, in some cases, the illustrated 
Turnierbücher.   
 
This chapter will be divided by periods of Maximilian’s life. It will also include an 
examination of his Burgundian inheritance, as an understanding of Maximilian must begin with 
an understanding of Burgundian culture and history. For a list of the dates, places, and 
purposes of the primary tournaments in which Maximilian was involved, including his role in 
them, see Table 2 at the end of this chapter. This list encompasses those tournaments which 
have been identified thus far. However, there are a variety of caveats that come along with this 
undertaking. For one, it is almost certain that those recorded represent only a selective sample 
of the total number of tournaments in which Maximilian was involved during his life. Indeed, 
it is likely impossible to put forth a specific number of how many tournaments, in total, 
Maximilian was involved with during his lifetime. One reason for this is that it is likely many 
casual jousts occurred on a frequent basis which were not worthy of mention and simply did 
not make their way into any chronicle or official letter which was then archived and preserved. 
Many of the jousts which are recorded in reference to Maximilian, as this chapter will show, 
sound quite spontaneous, as if they were thrown together on a whim. This means there could 
have been countless such jousts organised at the last minute by Maximilian with his 
companions who were at hand. These may have been informal occurrences, with little attached 
splendour or spectacle, which were simply part of an afternoon’s amusement. There are, as will 
be shown in this chapter, several passing references to tournaments like this in various sources. 
It is probable that there were just as many which were held but never written about, as they 

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50 
would have been considered insignificant or were not attached to a larger, more noteworthy 
event.  
 
 
2.2 The Burgundian Inheritence and Influences 
 
In 1473 Maximilian travelled to Trier with his father to engage in negotiations with 
Charles the Bold over the prospect the marriage of Maximilian and Charles’ daughter Mary. 
There as a young man Maximilian met Charles the Bold and experienced Burgundian court 
culture for the first time (to which he was much more open than the reserved Frederick).
4
 
Fichtenau speculates that in this lavish court he saw the world of his beloved mother, Eleanor 
of Portugal, which he had never before truly experienced. He saw it nicht als Nachklang der 
Vergangenheit, sondern als Vorspiel einer reichen und großartigen Zukunft.
5
 His love of tournaments and 
of lavish court culture were steadily growing.  
 
Four years later, in 1477 the eighteen year old Maximilian married the twenty-one year 
old Mary of Burgundy, sole heiress to her father’s lands.
6
 Because of this Mary was the most 
eligible woman in Europe and had several suitors competing for her hand, the most prominent 
rival to Maximilian being Charles, son of Louis XI of France.
7
 Later, Juan Luis Vives, a 
Valencian scholar, and author of the sixteenth century manual The Education of a Christian 
                                                 
4
 Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I.: Das Reich, Österreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit, vol. 1, 
pp. 96-104. 
5
 ‘not as an echo of the past, but as a prelude to a rich and great future’; Fichtenau, Der Junge 
Maximilian, p. 18. 
6
 Mary was the daughter of Charles and his second wife, Isabella of Bourgon. For more on Mary, 
see Olga Karaskova, ‘“Unq dessoir de cinq degrez”: Mary of Burgundy and the Construction of the 
Image of the Female Ruler’, in Authority and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Chronicles, ed. by Juliana 
Dresvina and Nicholas Sparks (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), pp. 319-44. 
7
 Wiesflecker, Kaiser Maximilian I.: Das Reich, Österreich und Europa an der Wende zur Neuzeit, vol. 1, 
pp. 122-36. 

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