31.7. 1527 King Maximilian II is born.

After ascending the throne, Maximilian II, as Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia and Hungary, followed his more conciliatory Catholic father. He had fifteen children. He died as a result of heart and kidney failure.

Maximilian II was allowed only twelve years of independent rule. He was a bit of a black sheep among all the Habsburgs of the 16th century. He was openly sympathetic to the Lutheran religion and refused to confess and receive the sacraments of the dying while still on his deathbed. Historians to this day cannot agree on his actual preference for the denomination. Maximilian's Lutheran leanings troubled his father Ferdinand I, though he too was considered a more conciliatory Catholic-

He even sent his son to be re-educated in strictly Catholic Spain in his youth and married his own cousin, Maria of Spain, who was the daughter of Emperor Charles V. "Although their marriage was not entirely happy because of their completely different natures, they had fifteen children together," Felix Krumlowsky writes in Woe to the Women Whom Men Rule: The Turbulent Fates of Bohemian Sovereigns and Noblewomen.

After ascending the throne, Maximilian II, as Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia and Hungary, took after his more conciliatory Catholic father. In Bohemia he was at first represented by his brother Ferdinand of Styria, who secretly married a mere bourgeois daughter, Philippina Welser. Maximilian II. He was also known for his kindly attitude towards Jews. In 1567 he even confirmed Jewish privileges.

Maximilian II died on October 12, 1576 at the age of forty-nine. Although he often moaned, his death was unexpected. While his wife Mary, after he had to lie down that summer, concentrated mainly on firing his personal physician, since he was a Protestant, he refused the presence of a Catholic priest, confession and last rites.

"Because his entourage feared that he would convert to Protestantism in the last moments of his life, the Viennese Bishop was asked to come to him in disguise, just in case," writes Stanislava Jarolímková in her book What's Not in the Textbooks.

The cause of the king's death was a weak heart and kidneys, just as with his son Arnost. However, syphilis may also have played a role. Rudolf decided that his father would be laid to rest in the royal tomb of St. Vitus. The streets that the funeral procession was to follow from St. James Church to Prague Castle on 22 March 1577 were cleared and lined with planks. Behind the coffin walked a black-clad Rudolf, his face covered with a black cloth.

Sources: The Turbulent Fates of Bohemian Sovereigns and Noblewomen, Stanislava Jarolímková, What's Not in the Textbooks, www.wikipedia.org