Maximilian I Dies at Wels

January 12, 1519

The Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, lifelong schemer and patron of Duerer, died with his coffin already traveling beside him. His grandson Charles, heir to Spain, Burgundy, and now the Austrian lands, prepared to buy the imperial election. The map of Europe was about to be grotesquely enlarged. His obsession with posthumous reputation led him to plan an enormous tomb at Innsbruck surrounded by bronze ancestral statues, never completed.