Fifteenth-century Germans who traveled southward to Italy or westward to the Low Countries saw wondrous things and suffered deeply hurtful jibes at their backwardness. A Pole or Hungarian journeying in the German lands might feel the same, but Italians who traveled in them gave far more injury than they endured at native hands. Giovanni Antonio Campano (1429–77), a humanist-poet and bishop who worked in the Roman Curia, came as a cardinal's secretary to the Imperial Diet at Regensburg in 1471. It was his first venture outside his native Italy, and what he saw, and smelled, and what he had to eat and drink appalled him. “Nothing is filthier than Germany,” where “there is no life except drinking,” and each glass of the sour wine “makes me cry.” The muses have no homes here, he adds, for there “reigns a monstrous spiritual barbarism, [as] none but a few know literature, and no one elegance.” In Italy Italians treated Germans as country bumpkins, barbarians who knew nothing about how to live.

When Maximilian and his father met Duke Charles of Burgundy at Trier in 1473, Latin elegance as usual trumped German solidity.