Oct. 6, 1906.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
53i 
Maximilian, who for a quarter of a century of 
his adventurous career occupied the Imperial 
throne of the Holy Roman Empire. His span 
on earth, curiously enough, was exactly the same 
as that of his French brother author who pre¬ 
deceased him by more than a century, for when 
(in 1391) a bear-hunt ended the hunting days of 
Count Gaston, he was in his sixtieth year, at 
which age also the “Last Knight of Chivalry,” 
as Maximilian has so often been called, took 
(in A.D. 1519) that short cut to paradise which 
we have heard was reserved to all good veneurs. 
Typical of the fact that in this ruler’s lifetime 
fell the birth of the age we call the Modern, Maxi¬ 
milian’s craving to see himself in print betrays 
the spirit of modern life. If he was the last 
knight of the mediaeval age he was also the first 
author of modern times, eager to see his 
doughty deeds set forth in the quaint black- 
letters of Hans Schonsperger, the Augsburg 
printer, and elaborately illustrated by the dili¬ 
gent gravers of Hans Burgkmair and other 
famous pupils of Diirer. 
Maximilian’s restless activity in the field of 
battle and of sport, which has been the sur¬ 
prise of all historians, was equally great in the 
department of letters. Upward of one hundred 
monographs dealing with the most diverse sub¬ 
jects, from religious disquisitions and family 
heraldry to treatises on artillery, the arts of war, 
theology, the occult sciences and sport were 
planned by him, and in most cases left in a 
more or less finished condition, at least in 
manuscript, by this versatile Hapsburg prince. 
As works of adventure in war and in sport the 
two that are best known' are, of course, the 
sumptuously got-up “Theuerdank” and “Weiss- 
kunig.” Though the allegorical language in 
which Maximilian narrates his various adven¬ 
tures by sea and by land detracts from the 
directness of the tale, these two interesting 
works rank very high among the ancient chron¬ 
icles of sport, for the best artists of their time 
bring before our eye in graphic pictures the 
methods employed by this great nimrod in hunt¬ 
ing the stag, the bear, the boar and the chamois. 
And however incompatible with strict accuracy 
of detail may seem to us a childlike ignorance 
of the laws of perspective, we have abundant 
proof that the Emperor laid great stress upon 
accurate delineation according to the somewhat 
primitive conception of art prevalent four hun¬ 
dred years ago. 
Another sporting work by the hand of this 
“sportsman and emperor,” as he called himself 
in his correspondence with his daughter, the 
Governess of the Netherlands, is a highly inter-- 
esting treatise called “The Secret Book of Sport,” 
the original manuscript of which was discovered 
only a few decades ago and immediately printed 
by a learned student of ancient venery. We 
shall have to refer to it on more than one oc¬ 
casion while treating the contents of what is 
the real subject of these pages, viz., an hitherto 
unpublished hunting-book of Emperor Maxi¬ 
milian, of which it fell to the present writer’s 
lot to discover the original manuscript adorned 
by two of the curious illustrations here repro¬ 
duced. 
This work is the “Gejaid Buch” written for 
Maximilian by his Master of the Game, Carl 
von Spaur, in the years 1499 and 1500. 
That such a book had been written by the 
keen royal sportsman’s orders was no secret to 
students, for I had myself read an unillustrated 
manuscript transcript preserved in the Stadthal- 
tcrei Archiv in Innsbruck, but the original of the 
work had disappeared from Austria, and its 
whereabouts, in spite of many inquiries, re¬ 
mained unknown. Three or four years ago, 
while on a round of visits to Continental 
archives, I happened to be examining some 
MSS. in the Burgundian Library, now forming 
part of the Royal Library in Brussels, and while 
so occupied came across a small folio, the plain 
vellum cover of which showed many traces of 
wear. A glance at its pages, and more particu¬ 
larly at the finely executed illuminations illus¬ 
trative of sporting scenes, thrust upon me the 
pleasurable conviction: that I was holding in 
my hands the long-lost original. 
In France, Germany and Austria where,as every 
one knows, great attention is paid to the study of 
ancient venery, and where the literature on this 
attractive subject is incomparably richer than 
ours, it was not difficult to find a' publisher for 
the manuscript which a happy chance had with¬ 
drawn from the dusty shelves of the Burgundian 
Library. By the time these lines reach the 
reader’s eyes Maximilian’s “Gejaid Buch” will 
be'before the public, a patriotic publisher of 
Innsbruck having undertaken the costly repro¬ 
duction in facsimile of the illuminations. And 
not only is this work issued, but also a repro¬ 
duction of a similar book of Maximilian’s deal¬ 
ing with fishing, written four years later and 
illuminated even more profusely by the same 
artist who illustrated the “Gejaid Buch.”* This 
richly adorned manuscript had long been known 
as one of the treasures of the Court Library in 
Vienna, whither it had been taken a century 
ago from the famous Tyrolese castle of Ambras, 
which in the sixteenth century was the home of 
what undoubtedly was the most precious collec¬ 
tion of art objects and natural history curiosi¬ 
ties then existing. Several of the illuminations 
in the “Fishing-Book” really relate more to 
hunting than they do to Walton’s art, and as 
they deal with precisely the same region, i. e., 
North Tyrol, I have given three of the pictures 
dealing with hunting. Unfortunately it is im¬ 
possible to reproduce in these pages the rich 
coloring of the plates; hence a great deal of the 
effect of these superb illuminations is lost. The 
originals are a good deal larger—viz., I2^in. 
by 8Hm. 
And now, after this somewhat lengthy intro¬ 
duction, let us proceed to examine this ancient 
hunting-book. It exclusively relates to moun¬ 
tain sport in the northern districts of Tyrol 
which were the favorite resorts of the sport- 
loving Maximilian. By a glance at its pages he 
could at once ascertain the head of chamois and 
red deer in any of the two hundred and odd lo¬ 
calities described therein. In the short intro¬ 
duction Carl von Spaur and Wolfgang Hohen- 
leyter, his “game secretary,” state that they 
exercised the greatest diligence in collecting all 
available information, and personally visited and 
explored all the glens and fastnesses appertain¬ 
ing to their King’s preserves, which in Maxi¬ 
milian’s days practically included every glen and 
mountain range worth having for hunting pur¬ 
poses. When chamois or deer-drives were to 
be arranged, the book gave the fullest topo¬ 
graphical information with useful directions con¬ 
cerning the posting of the sportsmen and hints 
as to the localities where their royal master 
could find quarters for the night. With regard 
to the latter preference was of course given to 
any castle in the neighborhood, though when in 
the more elevated regions, such as the famous 
Hinter-Riss, now the Duke of Coburg’s cele¬ 
brated preserve, Maximilian had faute de mieux 
to sleep in log alphuts of the most primitive 
description. On many occasions, to avoid sleep¬ 
ing in such uncomfortable places, he covered 
extraordinarily long distances on horseback, for 
in those days the remoter valleys were approach¬ 
able only by miserably kept bridle-paths. On 
some occasions this indefatigable sportsman 
must have started from his headquarters in the 
middle of the night, getting back only after 
some thirty-six hours in the saddle. 
This chronicle enables one to throw light upon 
a vexed question, viz., whether mountain game 
has increased or decreased, and what are the 
effects of close preserving. The writer, who 
has shot many score of chamois in about a dozen 
of the localities described by Maximilian as the 
scene of his own sport, can vouch for the fact 
that in many of these localities there are to-day 
three or four times the number mentioned in 
the “Gejaid Buch.” Needless to say, this is only 
the case where keepers are constantly on the 
watch to prevent poaching. In other districts, 
such as peasant communes, where the shooting 
has been open to the natives for generations, 
there is not a single chamois left to remind one 
*Messrs. S. Low, Marston & Co. are the London 
agents where both books can be seen and ordered. The 
huntirtg book, which has prefaces by Count Wilczek and 
Dr. M. Mayr, Director of the Imperial Archives in Inns¬ 
bruck, and an introduction by the writer, is dedicated 
by permission to H. M. the Emperor of Austria, as 
ardent a sportsman as was his great ancestor the author 
of the work. 
of the hundreds that peopled the same moun¬ 
tains four hundred years ago. Of red deer, on 
the contrary, no such favorable report can be 
made. With the exception of one or two lo¬ 
calities, principally in the Hinter-Riss and in 
the preserves of Princes Hohenlohe and Auers- 
perg, they have completely disappeared. 
Though the “Gejaid Buch” is principally oc¬ 
cupied with stag and chamois-hunting, there are 
half a dozen highly interesting references to a 
yet rarer game, viz., the ibex, the chase of 
which was the object of Maximilian’s highest 
ambition. These beasts were then still to be 
found in isolated bands in a few of the remotest 
districts of Tyrol, and Maximilian made stren¬ 
uous efforts to prevent their complete extermin¬ 
ation. Only those acquainted with the very 
voluminous correspondence of this keen sports¬ 
man can form any idea of the close attention 
paid by him to every detail connected with the 
chase. Engaged as he constantly was in wars 
that entailed weary campaigns in remote parts 
of Europe, or in the suppression of rebellions in 
distant provinces, or in the personal supervision 
of lengthy sieges, it is truly marvelous to dis¬ 
cover with what minute care all matters relat¬ 
ing to the sport he so dearly loved were attended 
to. In the thick of a bloody war in the Nether¬ 
lands, we find him writing letters about a young 
ibex buck some peasant women in a remote 
little Tyrolese valley were keeping for him, or 
promising in an autograph letter a silk dress to 
each of certain peasants’ wives in a isolated glen 
in the same country as a reward for preventing 
their husbands from poaching this rare game, or 
giving instructions where a particular couple of 
hunting hounds were to be kept and what was 
to be done with their puppies. 
To the general reader unacquainted with the 
localities referred to in the text of the “Gejaid 
Buch” the illustrations will be of far greater 
interest than the text. They betray with one 
exception the well-known disdain in which Maxi¬ 
milian held gunpowder, at least for sporting 
purposes. His field and siege artillery he was 
keenly eager to develop as much as lay in the 
power of the very primitive arsenals of those 
days. In neither of his. great autobiographical 
works “Theuerdank” and “Weisskunig,” which 
were written later than the “Gejaid Buch,” does 
he refer to the use of firearms for big-game 
shooting on more than a single occasion, when 
he tells the well-known story of his feat of hit¬ 
ting at the first shot with his cross-bow a 
chamois standing more than 200 yards above 
him, at which one of his men, versed in fire¬ 
arms, had vainly let off his “fire-tube. ’ As our 
reproductions and the “Theuerdank” pictures 
show, the method employed by Maximilian in 
the chase of the chamois was to approach them 
close enough to kill the beasts, either by throw¬ 
ing a short javelin-like spear, or to stick them 
by means of a long spear when they were 
cornered in some spot from which the animals 
could not escape. Either method with an ani¬ 
mal of the chamois’ sure-footedness and agility 
was necessarily of a most precarious nature. Not 
only had the men to be fearless cragsmen, as 
sure-footed, almost, as the game they wished to 
approach, but the nature of the ground had to 
be exceptionally favorable to this method of 
cornering wily and fleet-footed beasts. In the 
picture of the chamois-hunt we see the beaters 
with immensely long Bergstocke in their hands 
and crampons on their feet, lining the snowy 
ridge, while dogs are driving the chamo.is toward 
the place where it was hoped to approach them 
spear in hand. Maximilian had a great love for 
hounds, and we know he possessed some. 1,500 
of them. For his methods of hunting the 
chamois they were probably quite indispensable, 
and numbers no doubt were killed every year 
by tumbling from cliffs, or by avalanches of 
stone set loose by chamois above. Nowadays 
dogs are never used for chamois-hunting, for 
arms of precision make their assistance unneces- 
sary, and they frighten the game much more 
than do the beaters. 
On the other side of the picture we see the 
process of ausfellen — i. c., sticking a cornered 
beast with the immensely long Jadgschaft, the 
hunter's position beneath the animal being, of 
course, a somewhat, risky one, for the falling 
