his successors would expand over the next four centuries. The Britannica Encyclopaedia comments on Maximilian's achievements: Maximilian I [...] made his family, the Habsburgs, dominant in 16th-century Europe. He added vast lands to the traditional Austrian holdings, securing the Netherlands by his own marriage, Hungary and Bohemia by treaty and military pressure, and Spain and the Spanish empire by the marriage of his son Philip [...] Great as Maximilian's achievements were, they did not match his ambitions; he had hoped to unite all of western Europe by reviving the empire of Charlemagne [...] His military talents were considerable and led him to use war to attain his ends. He carried out meaningful administrative reforms, and his military innovations would transform Europe's battlefields for more than a century, but he was ignorant of economics and was financially unreliable. Hollegger notes that, as Maximilian could not persuade his imperial estates to support his plans, he cultivated a system of alliances, in which the germ of modern European powers could be seen – like in the game of chess, no piece could be moved without thinking ahead about the others. According to Cauchies, it was after the fifteen struggling years of Mary and Maximilian's joint rule and then of Maximilian's sole rule, the state building project first envisioned by the Burgundian dukes showed concrete results: "a consortium of territories nevertheless emerged which found its place in the West under the heirs, Philip the Handsome and Charles V.". Nevertheless, even though an innovative leader of stature, Maximilian's zealous anti-French sentiments (to which, even the Senlis Treaty was a failure), his project of imperial universality and his Habsburg heritage tended to make him out of touch with the Burgundian perspective, as displayed by his son Philip, a peace-loving monarch, and his court (although in his mind, Maximilian probably imagined himself as the true defender of the Low Countries, that inexplicably always rejected him so much). Haemers notes that, for the Dutch, it is impossible to celebrate him the way Germans or Austrians do, even if that is about the troubled feelings Maximilian left and national pride, rather than true reflection of the past. Hugh Trevor-Roper opines that, although Maximilian's politics and wars accomplished little, "By harnessing the arts, he surrounded his dynasty with a lustrous aura it had previously lacked. It was to this illusion that his successors looked for their inspiration. To them, he