ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the urban situation and examines conditions in the countryside and in the mines, looking further at pre-industrial labour, and explores a full survey of life at the court of Maximilian and his second wife, Bianca Maria Sforza. This court was probably the largest single enterprise within the tertiary sector of the pre-industrial Austrian economy, and it gives a significant insight into the ruling attitudes towards handling domestics, old-age pensioners and the deserving poor—as seen through the eyes of Maximilian himself. The true test of Maximilian’s propagandistic popularity came with very brutal peasant revolts in Inner Austria between March and August 1515. Maximilian’s finances were too overburdened by more weighty dynastic and foreign diplomatic and military policies for him to provide directly effective paternalist rule over his Inner Austrian peasants. Their interests were bargained away to rapacious courtiers–burgher, noble and ecclesiastical–in return for services rendered to the Crown elsewhere.
