When the Emperor Charles IV had come up with a genealogy for himself, he had suggested that his family were derived not only from Noah but also from Saturn, but this sort of enjoyable silliness would no longer wash in the more stringent atmosphere of the late fifteenth century. Now, after much mulling over his own lineage, Maximilian decided he was not in fact descended from Noah, but from the Trojan hero Hector. Presumably the court humanists, rather than rolling their eyes and making farting noises with their cheeks, must have smiled at the Emperor’s perspicacity, bowed deeply and returned
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