Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 349 CHAPTER II. DESCENT OF THE IMPERIAL CROWN FROM MAXIMILIAN TO CHARLES V. DIET OF AUGSBUKG, 1518. Had there been at this moment a powerful emperor, he might have turned these agitations to vast account. Supported by the nation, he would have been able to revive the ancient opposition to the papacy, and to inspire his people with a new life founded upon religious ideas. Maximilian was by nature far from being inaccessible to such a project. Indeed, the expression he once let fall to Elector Frederic, that he wished " to take good care of the monk," for that it might be possible some time or other to make use of him, betrays what was passing in his mind; but for the moment he was not in a condition to follow it out. In the first place, he was old, and wished to secure to his grandson Charles the succession to the empire. He regarded this as the closing business of his life. He had laboured all his days, as he said, to aggrandize his house: all his trouble would, however, be lost, if he did not attain this his final aim. But, for this, he especially required thesupport of the spiritual power; for the minds of men were not yet so far emancipated from the ideas of the middle ages, as that they could be brought to recognize in him the full dignity of emperor, without the ceremony of coronation. While meditating the project of raising his grandson to the rank of king of the Romans, the first difficulty that occurred to Maximilian was, that he himself had not been crowned. He conceived the idea of causing himself to be crowned, if not in Rome, at least with the genuine crown of a Roman emperor, which he hoped to induce the papal court to send across the Alps, and opened negotiations with that view. It is evident how necessary it became for him, not only not to irritate...