Around 1800, Weimar was seen as the ultimate ‘court of the muses.’ Yet Weimar was a politically insignificant, small, deficit-plagued court that could not match many others in splendor or opulence. Nonetheless, Carl August and his mother Anna Amalia succeeded in gathering around themselves such intellectual giants as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and Wieland, and used their fame to boost the prestige of the Weimar court.