Assuming the Hapsburgs don't get Spain, and so his death is butterflied away. I know Maximilian was trying to reorganize the Empire's government, but died before it was completed, and Charles never had the time to invest in Imperial reforms. By the time the Hapsburgs were able to pay attention to the Empire, the Protestant reformation had killed any chance at Imperial unity. Could a more attentive ruler have reformed the Empire into something resembling the more centralized states of France and England, or at the very least less of a clusterfuck?
How much could Philip the Handsome have centralized the HRe
- Thread starter Prince of Permsia
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Well Philip the Handsome was the wrong man for that kind of job, so you need either a longer living Maximilian or a Charles V who do not get Spain
In what way was he the wrong man for the job? Was it that he was too eager to please his Burgundian vassals, and would have applied that mentality to the HRE?
Perhaps if you swapped Philippe and his sister's personalities, you could be cooking with gas, but Phil was (to quote another user), an example of what happens when you give absolute power to a teenager ruling the richest region in Europe.
Exactly, and that excluding the fact who his great love and loyalty to the French King was a source of frustration for both his father and his parents-in-law
In fairness he seems to have been quite prudent in his foreign policy, wanting to split the Hapsburg inheritance and keep the Netherlands out of a financially ruinous war. And his son Charles was certainly not an example of a prudent ruler at his father's age. As for the French King, which king was he close to? Louis XII or Francis. I suppose he could turn against France if Francis does something to piss him off, like say marrying Claude in place of his son.
Philip was an complete and utter simp towards any French king. He kind of believed in superiority of French culture.
And he was long dead well before Francis become King. His contemporaries were Charles VIII first and then Louis XII
I know, this senario assumes Johanna and Charles don't inherit Spain, and so Philip doesn't die during his stay in that country.
In any case he was the wrong man for the job... You need a longer living Maximilian, a Charles who do not inherit Spain (because either Miguel survive or his brother Ferdinand received it) or an ATL son of Maximilian who is similar to his father and not a spoiled, petulant child way too French for being an effective ruler in either Spain or Germany
I mean as for Charles V not getting Spain, you could have a pod where his brother revolts and seizes Spain during the Revolt of the Communeros. This was a very real possibility and something Ferdinand was leaning towards . A lot of Castilian nobles would have supported him as they didn’t want to be ruled by a “foreign” prince from the Low Countries.
The holy roman empire was a deverse place.
It had multiple ethnic groups, it had people with different languages different identities and in time different religious backgrounds. Any attempt to centralize the place runs head first into that issue. I would argue that trying to centralize the HRE just leads to an earlier demise. Its decentralized nature probally helped it last longer not shorter.
It had multiple ethnic groups, it had people with different languages different identities and in time different religious backgrounds. Any attempt to centralize the place runs head first into that issue. I would argue that trying to centralize the HRE just leads to an earlier demise. Its decentralized nature probally helped it last longer not shorter.
At that point is already too late. An earlier POD in which Ferdinand II is able to get Castile to replace Charles with Ferdinand as heir of Joanna work better
But that's true of anywhere. France also had different ethnic groups, different languages, different regional identities, and also had different religious backgrounds, yet it was able to centralize. The biggest issue I think is that unlike the states of Western Europe, the HRE for most of its existence never had any real threat to it. France and England each had the Hundred Years war which helped to create unified national identities, and the Iberian Peninsula had the Reconquista. By the time the Ottomans are at the gates of Vienna its getting rather later for the Empire to do anything.
Maximilian seemed to be doing alright. The HRE might not become France, but I think it could have been a more efficient version of itself, as opposed to the memetic clusterfuck it degenerated into.
Yes, the HRE need a longer living Maximilian or a similar minded ruler free to intervene there. Only Philip was NOT and can not be such ruler
Perhaps have Franz survive and have Philip disinherited by his mother.
I submit to this thread the notion that any one individual is unlikely to have a major effect on the discourse of imperial reform, which was being debated at all but the lowest levels of society.
Further, the empire did function as an institution, and fairly well at that. It might have done better, but France was hardly a model of efficiency itself, and the structure of the HRE involved a proportionally much larger share of the population in decision making and governance- that seems like not a bad thing. Especially people in the smaller principalities made frequent use of imperial institutions to prosecute their princes, and it was fairly common in larger principalities too. That seems an infinitely preferable situation to despotic governance of enlightened autocrats.
Militarily as well, the empire was able to act as a unified body when it needed to, more or less, and whenever imperial armies met French revolutionary armies of the same size, they tended to win.
Further, the empire did function as an institution, and fairly well at that. It might have done better, but France was hardly a model of efficiency itself, and the structure of the HRE involved a proportionally much larger share of the population in decision making and governance- that seems like not a bad thing. Especially people in the smaller principalities made frequent use of imperial institutions to prosecute their princes, and it was fairly common in larger principalities too. That seems an infinitely preferable situation to despotic governance of enlightened autocrats.
Militarily as well, the empire was able to act as a unified body when it needed to, more or less, and whenever imperial armies met French revolutionary armies of the same size, they tended to win.