linguistic:paraphrasing
Military innovation, chivalry, and equipment

Maximilian was a capable commander and a military innovator who contributed to the modernization of warfare, although he lost many wars, usually due to the lack of financial resources. The notable commentators of his time, including Machiavelli, Piero Vettori and Guicciardini rated him as a great general, or in the words of Machivelli, "second to none", but pointed out that extravagance, terrible management of financial resources and other character defects tended to lead to the failures of grand schemes. According to Matthias Pfaffenbichler, he did not accept the truth that war depended on money, and thus the problem was that despite his military-tactical talents, he rarely managed to convert military victories into long-term political successes. He and his condottiero George von Frundsberg organized the first formations of the Landsknechte based on inspiration from Swiss pikemen, but increased the ratio of pikemen and favoured handgunners over the crossbowmen, with new tactics being developed, leading to improvement in performance. Discipline, drilling and a highly developed staff by the standard of the era were also instilled. The "war apparatus" he created later played an essential role in Austria's rank as great power. Maximilian was the founder and organiser of the arms industry of the Habsburgs. He started the standardization of the artillery (according to the weight of the cannonballs) and made them more mobile. He sponsored new types of cannons, initiated many innovations that improved the range and damage so that cannons worked better against thick walls, and concerned himself with the metallurgy, as cannons often exploded when ignited and caused damage among his own troops. According to contemporary accounts, he could field an artillery of 105 cannons, including both iron and bronze guns of various sizes. The artillery force is considered by some to be the most developed of the day. The arsenal in Innsbruck, created by Maximilian, was one of the most notable artillery arsenals in Europe. His typical tactic was: artillery should attack first, the cavalry would act as shock troops and attack the flanks, infantry fought in tightly knitted formation at the middle.

A figure who contributed greatly to the development of the Innsbruck arsenal was Gregor Löffler. He entered Maximilian's service in 1513, following in the footsteps of his father Peter; his son Hans Christoph would also be the leading gunfounder in Europe. Löffler was the first gun master who became an arms manufacturer (who produced weapons on an industrial scale), and was also responsible for casting many of the statues in Maximilian's cenotaph. In addition to the central arsenal in Innsbruck, Maximilian built a chain of arsenals to protect his border: those in Sigmundskron and Trent against Italians, in Lindau against the Swiss, in Breisach against the French, in Vienna against the Hungarians, in Graz, Hochosterwitz, Laibach, Gorizia against the Turks and Venetians. In addition, there were the old Burgundian arsenals against France. On the other hand, Wilfried Tittmann stresses the central importance of the arms manufacturing center in Nuremberg (where the earliest handguns, which proved suitable for the field and export, were developed), not only concerning Maximilian's military system but also the early modern military revolution in general. Puype notices that Tittmann and Eugen Heer share the view that Maximilian's industrialization policy made Nuremberg "the metropole of the Upper German armament industry." Marius Mutz opines that Tittmann's demonstration of Nuremberg's importance is generally convincing, but that some of his points, notably that Hans Kalteisen (who served Maximilian and was Löffler's rival) had a Nuremberg origin or that developments in Innsbruck were based on Nuremberg's technology as well, are a bit overambitious.

Maximilian was described by the nineteenth-century politician Anton Alexander Graf von Auersperg as "the last knight" (der letzte Ritter), and this epithet has stuck to him. Some historians note that the epithet rings true yet is ironic, because, as the father of the Landsknechte (of which the paternity he shared with George von Frundsberg) and "the first cannoneer of the nation", he ended the combat supremacy of the cavalry, and his death heralded the military revolution of the next two centuries. Moreover, his multifaceted reforms broke the back of the knight class both militarily and politically. He threw his own weight behind the promotion of the infantry soldier, leading them in battles on foot with a pike on his shoulder and giving the commanders honours and titles. To Maximilian, the rise of the new martial ethic including even its violent aspect—associated with the rise of the Landsknechte, was also an unextractable part of his own masculine identity. He believed that fighting alongside his foot soldiers legitimized his right to rule more than did any noble trapping or title. In his time, though, social tensions were brewing, and the nobles resisted this belief. At the Siege of Padua 1509, commanding a French-German allied army, Maximilian ordered the noble knights to dismount to help the Landsknechte to storm a breach, but Chevalier Bayard criticized him for putting noblemen at risk alongside "cobblers, blacksmiths, bakers, and laborers, and who do not hold their honor in like esteem as gentlemen." Even merely mixing the two on the same battlefield was considered insulting. The French then refused to obey. The siege broke when the German knights refused to continue their assaults on foot and demanded to fight on horseback, also on basis of status. A furious Maximilian left the camp and ordered the army to retreat.

With Maximilian's establishment and use of the Landsknechte, the military organisation in Germany was altered in a major way. Here began the rise of military enterprisers, who raised mercenaries with a system of subcontractors to make war on credit, and acted as the commanding generals of their own armies. Maximilian became an expert military enterpriser himself, leading his father to consider him a spendthrift military adventurer who wandered into new wars and debts while still recovering from the previous campaigns.

Regarding the cavalry, in 1500, using the French gendarmes as a model, he organized his heavy cavalry, called the kyrisser. These cavalrymen, still mostly noblemen, were still fully armed, but more lightly—these were the predecessors of cuirassiers. Non-nobles began to be accepted into the cavalry (mostly serving as light cavalry—each lanze, or lance, contained one kyrisser and six to seven light cavalrymen) and occasionally, he knighted them too. For heavy as well as light cavalry, firearms began to replace cold weapons.

In military medicine, Maximilian introduced structured triage (triage itself had existed since the Ancient Egypt). It was in his armies that the wounded was first categorized and treated according to an order of priority—in times of war, higher priority was given to military personnel over civilians and the higher-ranked over the lower-ranked. The practice spread to other armies in the following centuries and coined "triage" by the French. During the Middle Age, European armies tended to bring with them workers who served the soldiers both as barbers (this was their chief function, thus the origin of their name in German, Feldscherer, or field shearer) and low-skilled paramedics (as opposed to a trained medicus) who worked on their external wounds. Beginning with Maximilian, each captain of a detachment (of 200–500 men) was compelled to bring a capable Feldscherer and provide him with medicine and equipments. These paramedics were subject to a level of control under a Oberfeldarzt (chief field doctor), although their organization was not stabilized until the seventeenth century and it also took a long time before the average level of these paramedics was raised substantially. The birth of the modern feldsher led to the formation of a military medical service, whose primary task, other than giving first aid, was to transport the wounded out of the battlefield as fast as possible with palanquins and wheelbarrows.

The emperor would not live to see the fruits of his military reforms, which were also widely adopted by the territories in the Empire and other nations in Europe. Moreover, the landsknechte's mode of fighting boosted the strength of the territorial polities, while more centralized nations were able to utilize them in ways German rulers could not. Kleinschmidt concludes that, in the end, Maximilian did good service to the competitors of his own grandson.

While favouring more modern methods in his actual military undertakings, Maximilian had a genuine interest in promoting chivalric traditions like the tournament, being an exceptional jouster himself. The tournaments helped to enhance his personal image and solidify a network of princes and nobles over whom he kept a close watch, fostering fidelity and fraternity among the competitors. Taking inspiration from the Burgundy tournament, he developed the German tournament into a distinctive entity. In addition, during at least two occasions in his campaigns, he challenged and killed French knights in duel-like preludes to battles.

Knights reacted to their decreased condition and loss of privileges in different ways. Some asserted their traditional rights in violent ways and became robber knights like Götz von Berlichingen. The knights as a social group became an obstacle to Maximilian's law and order and the relationship between them and "the last knight" became antagonistic. Some probably also felt slighted by the way imperial propaganda presented Maximilian as the sole defender of knightly values. In the Diet of Worms in 1495, the emperor, the archbishops, great princes and free cities joined force to initiate the Perpetual Land Peace (Ewige Landfriede), forbidding all private feuding, in order to protect the rising tide of commerce. The tournament sponsored by the emperor was thus a tool to appease the knights, although it became a recreational, yet still deadly extreme sport. After spending 20 years creating and supporting policies against the knights though, Maximilian changed his ways and began trying to engage them to integrate them into his frame of rulership. In 1517, he lifted the ban on Franz von Sickingen, a leading figure among the knights and took him into his service. In the same year, he summoned the Rhenish knights and introduced his Ritterrecht (Knight's Rights), which would provide the free knight with a special law court, in exchange of their oaths for being obedient to the emperor and abstaining from evil deeds. He did not succeed in collecting taxes from them or creating a knights' association, but an ideology or frame emerged, that allowed the knights to retain their freedom while fostering the relationship between the crown and the sword.

Maximilian had a great passion for armour, not only as equipment for battle or tournaments, but as an art form. He prided himself on his armor designing expertise and knowledge of metallurgy. Under his patronage, "the art of the armorer blossomed like never before." Master armorers across Europe like Lorenz Helmschmid, Konrad Seusenhofer, Franck Scroo and Daniel Hopfer (who was the first to etch on iron as part of an artistic process, using an acid wash) created custom-made armors that often served as extravagant gifts to display Maximilian's generosity and devices that would produce special effects (often initiated by the emperor himself) in tournaments. The style of armour that became popular during the second half of his reign featured elaborate fluting and metalworking, and became known as Maximilian armour. It emphasized the details in the shaping of the metal itself, rather than the etched or gilded designs popular in the Milanese style. Maximilian also gave a bizarre jousting helmet as a gift to King Henry VIII—the helmet's visor features a human face, with eyes, nose and a grinning mouth, and was modelled after the appearance of Maximilian himself. It also sports a pair of curled ram's horns, brass spectacles, and even etched beard stubble. Knowing that the extinct Treizsaurbeyn (likely Treitzsauerwein) family had a method to make extra tough armours that could not be shot through by any crossbow, he sought their servant Caspar Riederer, who helped Konrad Seusenhofer to recreate the armour type. With knowledge gained from Riederer, Maximilian invented a method "so that in his workshops 30 front and back plates could be made at once", in order to help his soldiers and especially his Landsknechte. The details of the process described are currently not known, but likely utilizing matrices with where armour parts could be stamped out from sheet metal.

Maximilian associated the practical art of hunting (as well as fishing and falconry) with his status as prince and knight. He introduced parforce and park hunting to Germany. He also published essays on these topics. In this he followed Frederick II Hohenstaufen and was equally attentive to naturalist details but less scientific. His Tyrol Fishery Book (Tiroler Fischereibuch) was composed with the help from his fish master Martin Fritz and Wolfgang Hohenleiter. To keep fish fresh, he invented a special kind of fish container. While he was unconcerned with the disappearance or weakening of the knight class due to the development of artillery and infantry, Maximilian worried greatly about the vulnerability of ibexes, described by him as "noble creatures", in front of handguns and criticized the peasants in particular for having no moderation. In 1517, the emperor banned the manufacturing and possession of the wheellock, which was designed and especially effective for hunting. Another possible reason for this earliest attempt at gun control might be related to worries about the spreading of crimes. He investigated, classified and protected game reserves, which also damaged the farmers' crops as he forbade them to erect fences. Game population quickly increased though. In one case, he became an unintentional species conservationist: As he had Tyrolean mountain lakes stocked with trouts, a variety of the last trout originating from the Danube, the Kaiser Max trout, has survived until this day in Gossenköllesee.

Since he was young, in Germany and especially in the Low Countries, he paid attention to the burghers' art of archery, joined archery competitions and gave patronage to crossbow and archery guilds (in military affairs though, he officially abolished the crossbow in 1517 despite its continued use in other countries). Although he never gained complete popular support in Flanders, these patronage activities helped him to build up a relationship with guild members who participated in his campaigns, notably for Guinegate (1479), and rally urban support during his time in the Low Countries. His name heads the list of lords in the huge 1488 Saint George guild-book in Ghent. In the early sixteenth century, he built a Guildhouse for the St.Sebastian's Archers at The Hague.

The 1511 Landlibell (a military statue and "a cornerstone of Tyrol's democracy", which established the foundation for Tyrol's separate defence organization by exempting the population from military service outside their borders but requiring them to serve in the defence of their region, and recognizing the connection between freedom and the rights to bear arms), which remained largely in effect until the fall of monarchy, led to the establishment of armed militia formations called (Tiroler) Schützen. The term Schützen had been used to refer to men armed with crossbows, but Maximilian enthusiastically encouraged riflemen and firearms. These formations still exist, although they have become non-governmental since 1918. In 2019, they organized a great shooting event in commemoration of the emperor.

Another art associated with chivalry and military activities was dancing. As the landsknechte's fighting techniques were developed, they no longer preferred fighting along a straight line (as exercised by even the Swiss until the end of the fifteenth century), but leaned towards a circle-wise movement that enhanced the use of the space around the combatant and allowed them to attack the opponents from different angles. The circle-wise formation described by Jean Molinet as the "snail" would become the hallmark of landsknechte's combat. The new types of combat also required the maintenance of a stable bodily equilibrium. Maximilian, an innovator of these types of movements, also saw value in their effects over the maintenance of group discipline (apart from the control of centralized institutions). As Maximilian and his commanders sought to popularize these forms of movements (which only became daily practice at the end of the fifteen century and gained dominance after Maximilian's death in 1519), he promoted them in tournaments, in fencing and in dancing as well—which started to focus on steps and the movements of the feet over the movements of the head and the arms. The courtly festivals became a playground for innovations, foreshadowing developemts in military practices. Regarding dancing, other elements favoured by Maximilian's court were the Moriskentan ("Moors' dance", "Morris-dance", or Moresca), the masquerades (mummerei) and the use of torchbearers. Torchbearers are a part of almost all of the illustrated costumed circle dances in the Weisskunig and Freydal, with Maximilian himself usually being one of them. Masquerades usually included dancing to the music of fifes and drums, performed by the same musicians who served the new infantry forces. The famous humanist philosopher Julius Caesar Scaliger, who grew up as a page at Maximilian's court, reportedly performed the Pyrrhic war dance, which he reconstructed from ancient sources, in front of the emperor. The annual Tänzelfest, the oldest children's festival in Bavaria, reportedly founded by Maximilian in 1497 (the event only appeared in written sources from 1658), includes dancing, processions, and reenactment of city life under Maximilian.