In the service of Emperor Maximilian I of Habsburg

For much of his youth Agrippa presented himself as the emperor's man. Maximilian I of Habsburg, King of the Romans from 1486 and Emperor-elect from 1508, was a ruler always short of money but rich in projects, passionate about genealogy, the art of war and humanist culture. Around him gravitated secretaries, diplomats and men of letters who moved from one mission to the next. In this mobile world Agrippa found his first position for some years.

Secretary and messenger

The letters indicate that Agrippa carried out tasks as a secretary and diplomatic agent, travelling between the lands of the Empire, France and Italy. In 1510 he went to England, apparently on a mission whose precise purpose we do not know, and in London he was the guest of John Colet, dean of St Paul's Cathedral, with whom he studied the epistles of Saint Paul. It was an important encounter for his religious formation.

The nature of these assignments nonetheless remains vague. Agrippa was never a senior official, and his position depended on the goodwill of intermediate patrons. Imperial service gave him above all a title he could use at court and a certain protection in difficult moments, as when he was accused of heresy at Dole.

The Italian campaigns and the title of knight

Agrippa later claimed that he had fought for seven years in the imperial armies in Italy, during the wars that followed the League of Cambrai of 1508, and that he had been knighted on the battlefield for his valour. On the title pages of some works he did indeed style himself eques auratus, golden knight. There are no independent documents confirming either the knighthood or the length of his military service.

Scholars consider it plausible that he followed the imperial troops during some phase of the Italian Wars, perhaps in administrative rather than combat roles. The knightly title should therefore be taken as the author's own claim. In sixteenth-century society, after all, a scholar who also declared himself a soldier and knight combined the two traditional paths to nobility: arms and letters.

A bond that lasted

The relationship with the House of Habsburg accompanied Agrippa throughout his life. After Maximilian's death in 1519, protection passed in spirit to the emperor's daughter, Margaret of Austria, governor of the Netherlands, and to his grandson Charles V. It was Margaret who in 1529 appointed him archivist and historiographer, and to her Agrippa had dedicated, as early as 1509, his treatise on the nobility of the female sex.

Service to Maximilian thus explains many aspects of Agrippa's career: his presence in Italy, his familiarity with diplomacy, his dealings with cardinals and princes. It also explains the fragility of his condition. An imperial secretary depended on irregular payments and shifting favours, and Agrippa often complained in his letters of salaries never paid and promises not kept. Financial insecurity would be the constant of his existence, right up to his final years, spent among debts, journeys and requests for help.