Finances

Courts were very expensive to run, and chapels could consume a significant percentage of the court’s budget. Since many singers were in clerical orders, the ruler could keep down costs by appointing singers to ecclesiastical benefices. These were church offices whose income was derived from an investment made as part of an initial foundation, often as part of a testamentary bequest. The terms of the foundation laid out the liturgical services desired by the founder. These might involve regular masses said for the soul of the founder, or votive services such as the performance of antiphons such as Salve regina. Depending on the amount of money provided in the foundation, the musical component of such benefices might involve chant, polyphony or organ. Even benefices that included no provision for music could serve the chapel, since they could be granted to singers in the ruler’s chapel, who would then appoint a vicar to carry out the liturgical requirements of the foundation while sharing its income with the cleric-singer who held the benefice.

The initial foundations specified who had the right to present candidates for each benefice to the relevant ecclesiastical authority (generally bishops or the heads of religious houses); these authorities generally, though not inevitably, endorsed the ruler’s candidate. Since rulers had the resources to establish many well-endowed foundations, their heirs accumulated the right of presentation to ever-growing numbers of benefices. As heir to many territories, Maximilian had the right of presentation to hundreds of benefices. He could therefore use the promise of promotion to ever more lucrative, prestigious or convenient benefices to promote singers within his chapel. His presentation of the Slovene Georgius Slatkonia as Bishop of Vienna was simply one extreme of a series of finely graded ecclesiastical appointments that lay in Maximilian’s hands.[14] There is much documentary evidence that Maximilian was personally involved in the presentation of his chaplains to various benefices, thus positioning himself as ultimate source of patronage. Beside the basic income from benefices, members of the chapel received money for the expenses associated with their attendance at court on its travels.

Members of the chapel who were not clerics had to be paid directly from the budget of the court, though they were sometimes appointed to positions in the imperial administration, such as toll-collectors; in such cases they evidently appointed representatives who carried out the everyday business associated with the appointment, analogous to clerical vicars. Secular members of the chapel might also be rewarded in kind, such as housing, or supplies of firewood, fish, butter, wine, meat or cloth. When Maximilian seized territory in the Veneto in 1510, he distributed parcels of land to several members of his chapel, such as Isaac, Georg Vogel and Sigmund Vischer.[15]