“War is a force that gives us meaning,” wrote the veteran foreign correspondent Chris Hedges — an adage he delivered with vicious irony. War can pick up the dull, lousy clay of your little human life, and refashion you into a hero or martyr. War muffles brute inequities of power and capital, and entrances you with blandishments of honor. War is a storyteller, with a tale so grand and corrupt that even death becomes beautiful. Five hundred years ago, at a moment of political rebellion and economic anxiety, a leader arose who understood the public allure of the martial imagination, and how war could turn a noble into something like a superman. He was Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire, and out of an iffy inheritance in Austria he emerged as one of the most powerful leaders in Renaissance Europe, presiding over territories from the modern-day Netherlands all the way to Croatia. He had some successes on the battlefield, yet it was not principally his military prow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“War is a force that gives us meaning,” wrote the veteran foreign correspondent Chris Hedges — an adage he delivered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-publications"],"yoast_head":"\n