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

 
 
54 
themselves. A crown and the title of ‘king’ would offer some semblance of unity to the 
geographically and culturally diverse Burgundian lands. Burgundy could now stand 
comfortably alongside any European kingdom, but it was still a disorganised assembly of 
various regions. In pursuit of a crown for himself, Philip entered into negotiations with 
Maximilian’s father, Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, concerning the creation of a distinct 
Burgundian kingdom. These negotiations came to nothing, though, and Philip remained, to his 
dismay, technically a vassal of both France and the Empire.
13
  
 
Philip’s son, Charles the Bold, continued this quest for a crown during his own reign.  
Charles ascended to power in 1467 and continued the efforts of his forbearers to unify 
Burgundy. Above all, Charles was a military man, and he had grand imperial ambitions. He was 
constantly at war with France, seeking to escape from subordination to the French king.
14
 In 
November 1473 Charles met with Frederick III at Trier. The ever-ambitious Charles wished to 
be more than just a duke and, technically, vassal to the king of France, and he was hoping to 
secure a crown and title of ‘king’ for himself, as his father had striven to do before him. It is 
possible that he wished to be king of the Romans and even to ascend eventually to the imperial 
throne. These were both non-hereditary titles, although it seems highly unlikely that Frederick, 
with his own son Maximilian soon entering adulthood, would have granted them to Charles. 
And Frederick indeed backed out of negotiations eventually, unwilling to share power with 
Charles.
15
 
                                                 
13
 Otto Cartellieri, The Court of Burgundy, trans. by Malcolm Letts (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, 
Trubner & Co., Ltd, 1929), pp. 9-15. 
14
 Charles the Bold: Splendour of Burgundy, ed. by Susan Marti, Till-Holger Borchert, and Gabriele 
Keck (Belgium: Mercatorfonds, 2009), pp. 39-44; Vaughan, Valois Burgundy, pp. 80-82; Cartellieri, The 
Court of Burgundy, pp. 20-23. 
15
 Graeme Small, ‘Of Burgundian Dukes, Counts, Saints and Kings (14 C.E. – c. 1500)’ in The 
Ideology of Burgundy: The Promotion of National Consciousness, 1364-1565, pp. 174-75; Vaughan, Valois 
Burgundy, pp. 28-30. 

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55 
 
Charles’ now infamous death came just four years later, on 5 January 1477. He had lain 
siege to the city of Nancy, capital of the duchy of Lorraine, in the hopes of uniting his 
northern and southern territories. The duke’s armies were leaving their camps when they were 
unexpectedly attacked by French forces, and, somewhere in the retreat, Charles was slain. In an 
instant, the direct male line of Valois succession to the Burgundian lands, established just over 
a century earlier by Charles’ great-grandfather, was broken.
16
   
 
While Charles never attained a crown of his own through the aid of Frederick III, there 
was to be a link between the Valois and the Habsburgs in the form of the 1473 negotiations 
between Frederick and Charles over the possible marriage of their children. When Charles was 
killed in 1477, there had been no definitive declaration of Mary’s betrothal to any European 
prince, although there were many men of note seeking her hand. As Charles’ only child, and 
thus heiress to Burgundy, Mary was a much sought-after bride.
17
  However, Charles had 
apparently wished for Mary to choose Maximilian, and in the end Mary was faithful to her 
father’s wishes. She married Maximilian just months after Charles’ death.
18
  
 
Of the four dukes of Burgundy, although they would have had a cumulative influence 
on Maximilian, it is Charles the Bold who is the most significant. It was Charles whom 
Maximilian would have known personally, whose court Maximilian would have been witness 
to, and whose daughter, Mary, he would wed. Through this union, a bond was created between 
                                                 
16
 Miller, Olivier de la Marche and the Court of Burgundy, c.1425-1502, pp. 174-73. 
17
 Mary seems to have been Charles’ only child, either legitimate or illegitimate. Unlike his father 
Philip the Good, who was rumoured to have fathered a multitude of illegitimate children from at least 
thirty-four mistresses, including twenty-six recognised bastards – a common practice in Burgundy – 
Charles apparently had no mistresses and no children outside of marriage, making Mary’s hand in 
marriage a great prize indeed: Charles the Bold: Splendour of Burgundy, p. 42.  
18
 Matthias Pfaffenbichler, ‘Maximilian und Burgund’, in Maximilian I: Der Aufstieg eines Kaisers, von 
seiner Geburt bis zur Alleinherrschaft 1459-1493, pp. 49-51. 

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56 
the houses of Burgundy and Habsburg, and Maximilian inherited a state and, what is more, a 
courtly culture, which would influence his own reign. 
 
In his study of the princely culture of Valois Burgundy, Arjo Vanderjagt divides the 
primary roles of the court into two broad areas: activities associated with the Order of the 
Golden Fleece and ‘the ideological and political justification of ducal rule as that of a sovereign 
prince’.
19
 Through a display of extravagance at court, the dukes of Burgundy could assert 
themselves as equals on the European stage of power, not just through military might but also 
through demonstrations of cultural sophistication, artistic patronage, and, when necessary, 
over-the-top luxury. Although, as Alistair Miller points out, ‘[t]he use of spectacle and 
pageantry was not of course uncommon during the later medieval period’, the Burgundians, as 
he puts it, introduced a ‘new sense of exhibitionism and scale’.
20
 These were lessons which 
Maximilian would take to heart. 
 
It was during the reign of the third Valois duke, Philip the Good, that this scale of 
Burgundian courtly opulence began to rapidly increase. This is perhaps best exemplified by one 
of the most famous events of his reign, the Feast of the Pheasant, staged by Philip in 1454 at 
Lille to publicise his desire to launch a crusade against the Turks (a cause Maximilian himself 
would later take up). The festivities began with a joust in the marketplace, after which 
attendees proceeded to the banquet. The hall was draped in tapestries, and luxurious fabrics 
and materials decorated the room. A particularly unusual aspect of the décor were the entremets, 
or table entertainments. These could be as simple and as easy to interpret as a cross with a 
sounding bell, representing the call to crusade, or as bizarre and indecipherable as a troupe of 
                                                 
19
 Arjo Vanderjagt, ‘The Princely Culture of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy’, in Princes and Princely 
Culture: 1450-1650, vol. 1, p. 54.  
20
 Miller, Olivier de la Marche and the Court of Burgundy, c.1425-1502, p. 100. 

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