Charles inherited a genuinely vast and unprecedented sprawl of territories from Maximilian, but no serious effort was made to give them any unity. He scurried from place to place, swapping around hats, crowns, necklaces and special cloaks. He was always reading up constitutions and mottos and being drilled on the membership and peccadillos of dozens of prickly aristocracies and urban oligarchies in different bits of Europe. At every turn he had to face rebellious townsfolk, Ottoman pirates, annoying Protestants, double-dealing German princelings and problematic family members.
