A Shadow of a King

After the death of Rudolf von Habsburg the electors chose another, now truly impecunious count, Adolf von Nassau to be king. They chose him over Rudolf’s son Albrecht and over the overwhelmingly most powerful prince in the empire, King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia.

This cultured and competent man became known to German history as a Schattenkönig, a shadow of a king, unable to wiggle out of his ties to the overbearing electors. Acting as mercenary in the pay of king Edward of England and failing to create his own Hausmacht in Thuringia, many history books skip over his six years on the throne.

Nevertheless, the events of his election and deposition form another crossroads in the history of the German lands that set the Holy Roman empire further down the path to become neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 142: Adolf von Nassau – A shadow of a King. This is also Episode 5 of Season 8: the Holy Roman Empire 1250-1356 .

After the death of Rudolf von Habsburg the electors chose another, now truly impecunious count, Adolf von Nassau to be king. They chose him over Rudolf’s son Albrecht and over the overwhelmingly most powerful prince in the empire, King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia.

This cultured and competent man became known to German history as a Schattenkönig, a shadow of a king, unable to wiggle out of his ties to the overbearing electors. Acting as mercenary in the pay of king Edward of England and failing to create his own Hausmacht in Thuringia, many history books skip over his six years on the throne.

Nevertheless, the events of his election and deposition form another crossroads in the history of the German lands that set the Holy Roman empire further down the path to become neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

Before we start I have a tip for you. If you are a fan of University Challenge, and quite frankly who would listen to 140 episodes of obscure German history and isn’t, tune in on April 8^th at 8:30 GMT on BBC 2 for the final. For those of you not based in the UK, university challenge is a quiz show running since 1962 where university teams compete with each other. Many former contestants became leading intellectuals, actors and politicians. The questions are such that most people feel incredibly smug if they get 2 or three right per show.  One of your fellow listeners, Justin Lee is on the team of Imperial college and my god, he and his team are smashing it. They are now in the final. Last week Justin even got a question on Frederick II which he obviously aced. The final will be epic since their likely opponents are no slouches. Go tune in on BBC iplayer on April 8^th at 8:30 GMT. If you are abroad you can watch via a VPN.  

And as always I want to give special thanks to our patrons, Mike R, Carl S., Wayne D., Katherine E. Grant M. and Bobby K. who have kindly signed up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans

Now, back to the show

On July 15^th, 1291 king Rudolf I of Habsburg went on his last journey, to Speyer, the burial place of kings and emperors since the days of the great Salians, Konrad II and Henry III. One would expect that once the magnificent gravestone was placed over the mortal remains of the man who had ruled the realm for 18 years, the immediate next step would be to call the electors to Frankfurt to choose a new king.

But for months nothing happens. Finally, in November 1291, 5 moths after Rudolf’s death does the archbishop of Mainz as archchancellor in charge of elections invites the other electors to an imperial diet in Frankfurt on May 2^nd, 1292.

Why did that take so long?

Since the election of Henry the Fowler in 919, the imperial crown was formally an elective monarchy, though in practice, as long as there was a son, and the son was not a minor or obviously incompetent, the son had followed the father on the throne.

And Rudolf von Habsburg had a son, Albrecht, the duke of Austria. Albrecht was born in 1255, so 36 years of age, a competent, though not particularly likeable ruler of an imperial principality. Plus he had 12 children, more than enough to ensure the continuation of the dynasty.

So by tradition, the electors should elect Albrecht von Habsburg. But they did not. We talked last week about Rudolf’s efforts to ensure Albrecht’s election during his lifetime and the unwillingness of the electors to support his candidature. Once his father had died, Albrecht seemingly tried to gain support amongst the electors. One of them, Ludwig, who was duke of Bavaria and count Palatinate on the Rhine was however the only elector he could bring over to his side. Attempts to get close to the archbishop of Cologne seemingly went nowhere

We know practically nothing about the early stages of the negotiations, so it is hard to gage whether Albrecht had made any advances to the other electors and whether they had any chance of success. The earliest documents date from the spring of 1292 when the discussion must have been going on for 6 months already.

We can get a glimpse of what the thinking of these guys was from a letter one of the electors, the duke of Saxony wrote to king Wenceslaus of Bohemia. There he pledged his vote to whoever Wenceslaus chose in exchange for 4,500 mark of silver plus a guarantee for the payment of 800 mark of silver Rudolf owed him and the support in a case he was fighting against the archbishop of Magdeburg.

But money was not everything. This was also about power. Last time the electors had elevated a man of some standing, largely because the pope insisted on having a functioning imperial ruler able to help shore up the sore remains of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

But in 1291 the city of Accre, the last outpost in the Holy Land itself had fallen to the Muslims. That was not the end of the crusades, but the crusades that followed were odd attempts on the flanks of Muslim power or in the Baltics. The great project to take Jerusalem was over. And that meant the papacy had less interest in the empire than before. Hence the electors were allowed to do as they pleased.

And what pleased them was to assert the elective nature of the royal and imperial title by denying the son the father’s crown. And this had become a lot easier thanks to the increasing formalisation of the voting process. In the past an ambitious candidate could get himself elected through tactical bribery and intelligent scheduling that kept hostiles away from the electoral diet. Konrad III did that and to a degree Frederick Barbarossa. We could even count Henry II amongst those that engineered their election.

Now these ruses no longer worked. A valid election required the votes of all seven electors, whether they were present at the diet or not. And thanks to Rudolf’s insistence, these seven were now set. So even if Albrecht would have rustled up 2 or three votes plus a smattering of minor lords and bishops the election would not be as easily accepted as Konrad III’s or Frederick Barbarossa’s. In all likelihood the other electors would have elected their own man, bringing the realm into a civil war.

From this point forward for the next roughly hundred plus years the electors will consistently deny the succession from father to son. The crown will shift between major princely families interspersed with the occasional poor count. Every time this happened, the incoming ruler will have to make far reaching concessions, pay out massive bribes and pass on more of the dwindling imperial possessions to the electors. And even that does not assure the safety of the newly acquired status. 2 of the upcoming 10 rulers will be deposed, one murdered, one killed in battle and one of them considered so poor he was known as Ruprecht “with the empty pocket”.

This strengthening of the electoral nature of the empire stands in stark contrast to the hereditary monarchies in the rest of Europe at the time. West Francia, the kingdom that would ultimately become France had started out as an elective monarchy and had remained at least formally elective until king Philipp Augustus in the 12^th century.

But by the end of the 13^th century the French monarchy was not just in practice but also formally hereditary, its king was given the epithet of “Most Christian King” and had achieved the status of sacred monarch, able to heal the sick purely by his touch.

Hereditary kingship incentivises the ruler to consolidate powers under the crown, rather than in the hands of his family. If a ruler can be sure that his son will become the next ruler it is sensible to seize vacant fiefs for the crown and invest in a bureaucracy that supports a centralising monarchy.

If the ruler can be sure that his son will not become king, as had been established at the election following the death of Rudolf of Habsburg, the incentive model shifts. Building up royal powers as Rudolf had done with his revindication policy did no longer make sense. All the fruits of these efforts would go to someone else, most likely one of the king’s rivals. And worse, the more powerful the role of king, the more likely the next king would go after his predecessor’s recent gains. So the rational move was to use the temporary position as ruler to expand the family fortunes, so that the clan would be powerful enough to field a candidate in a later election.

Historians in the 19^th century have censored the electors for their decision to break the dynastic chain. Their actions had condemned royal power to be hollowed out further and further until the famous Voltaire quip about neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire had become a reality.

But is that justified. Could we have expected the electors to choose Albrecht of Habsburg as king in 1291? Should they have given the Habsburgs the opportunity to build out royal power in the Empire, first in Swabia and Franconia and then reaching out into Saxony and further North and East? Could they be expected to sacrifice their interests so that the regnum Teutonicum could go down the same path as the French and English kingdoms, just with a 100 to 200 year delay.

The French monarchy which was in an equally dire situation in the mid 11^th century was allowed to build up its power base over time. The mighty dukes and counts surrounding the Ile de France did not care much about the royal title because it led so little actual power. And even if one of them had developed an interest, they were so deeply disunited, that they would have found it very difficult to agree on one amongst their own. So the kings were left alone, passing the crown from father to son and patiently building themselves up to a point where they could challenge and take down the mighty dukes and lords, one by one.

In the empire the situation was different. Royal power, weak as it was, was not irrelevant, in particular in the areas that were close to the king, in Swabia and Franconia. But even in the north and in Italy, some of the old prestige of the emperors was still there. And as we have seen with Rudolf of Habsburg, that position could be leveraged to propel a family into the rank of imperial prince. So the electors cared about who was king. And, other than the French nobles in the 11^th century, they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats. They did co-ordinate their voting behaviour, often forming voting blocks going into an election.

So the electors could choose to make someone a powerful ruler which would be the best solution for the empire. But for each of them individually that wasn’t the ideal outcome. Unless one became the powerful monarch himself, the increased power of the king would come at the expense of their own position. Acting in your own interest in this situation is what economists call a prisoner’s dilemma, not a moral failing.

And so we find that from now on the choice of a powerful ruler required special circumstances, be that war and other threats, lavish bribery and firm commitment to respect the elector’s rights which in turn reduced royal power further.

In 1292 there was no threat of war or otherwise, no coercion by the pope, no overwhelming bribery. The electors could avoid choosing Albrecht.

This also explains why the electors did not choose Wenceslaus II of Bohemia to become king in 1292. When his father Ottokar was already a hugely impressive ruler, his son Wenceslaus II exceeding him. He gained his family the Polish and the Hungarian crowns, at least temproray. It was under his rule that silver was found in Kutna Hora, adding even further to the wealth of Bohemia.  We will no doubt hear more about him as we go along.

I think it is at this point that I need to correct something I said in episode 140 that the king of Bohemia was king in name only and that his title was purely honorific. Some of our Czech listeners contested this notion, some quite vehemently. I guess as always there are two perspectives on this.

If you take the perspective of the emperors and the imperial princes, they did see the Bohemian crown as a vassal of the emperor. The rulers of Bohemia were originally only awarded the title to each king individually and it wasn’t until 1198 that the title became hereditary. It was hence a title awarded to a vassal and as such could be removed in case the vassal broke his commitments, not a theoretically eternal grant by the grace of god like for instance the king of France.

If you look at it from the Czech perspective, the Bohemian ruler was his own master in his kingdom. No emperor could demand to come to Prague without being invited. Emperors did not exert influence in domestic affairs within Bohemia and the king of Bohemia could not be summoned to imperial diets unless they happened near the Bohemian border. Hence the kings of Bohemia may have regarded the vassalage relationship as a formality worth accepting in exchange for the influence on the politics of its closest and largest neighbour. And they had used the term “by the grace of god” before.

So, both of these perspectives are factually correct. When I described the fall-out of the diet in Nurnberg at 1274, I focused on the imperial perspective to highlight the audacity of Ottokar when he claimed to be an independent king, no longer bound by vassalage. I admit I should have been more nuanced on this and I will try to do better next time.

Now going back to Ottokar’s son Wenceslaus II,he not only amassed various crowns,  but also surpassed him in the world of diplomacy. As the election of Rudolf’s successor was approaching,  he had lined up two other electors, the duke of Saxony and the margrave of Brandenburg to vote in a block with him. They did not agree yet who to vote for except that they would not be voting for Albrecht of Habsburg. What makes that particularly salient was that both Wenceslaus and the duke of Saxony were married to Albrecht’s sisters and the Margrave of Brandenburg’s co-ruler was too.

So, that puts Albrecht out of the game.

What about Wenceslaus. He has three votes already, his own plus Saxony and Brandenburg. Historians argue that part of the arrangement between the three princes had been that Wenceslaus could use their votes only to elect a third party, not to elect himself. There was then also the question whether the three archbishops could be convinced to vote for Wenceslaus given his enormous wealth and power. In any event, there is no indication in the documents that Wenceslaus at any point even contemplated putting himself up for election.

If we are taking stock, we have the count Palatinate on the Rhine who is voting for Albrecht and the other three secular electors are going to vote for whoever Wenceslaus decides should be king, but not Albrecht.

At which point it is in the hands of the three archbishops to select a new king. Mainz and Cologne take the lead and they chose someone broadly linked to both their families, count Adolf of Nassau.

Adolf von Nassau was really a poor count, unlike Rudolf of Habsburg who had been a wealthy count. The county of Nassau had been divided and he was only count of Nassau-Weilburg which included the bustling metropolises of Weilburg and Idstein, all in the Taunus mountains north of Frankfurt.

Adolf wasn’t only poor and from a comital family, so definitely second division, if not regionals, which as far as the electors are concerned was great. He had also fought with the Archbishop of Cologne at the battle of Worringen we mentioned last week, so a loyal supporter of the bishops. But what qualified him beyond all other poor counts with loyalty to important churchmen was his willingness to sign practically any piece of paper any of the electors put to him.

Adolf promised the archbishop of Cologne to pay him 25,000 mark of silver, return castles and towns lost during the war of the Limburg succession, coerce the city of Cologne to do penance before the archbishop, never to let Cologne become a free imperial city, never to admit any of the archbishop’s enemies or their representative to his council etc., etc., pp. Similar arrangements were signed with the archbishop of Mainz who was given two cities in Thuringia, the representatives of the king of Bohemia received the imperial lands around Eger and Pleissen as well as the promise of a favourable decision should Wenceslaus claim the return of Austria, Styria and Carinthia from the Habsburgs and so on and so on.

The electors had their perfect king. Tied down by arrangements, all safeguarded by collateral, that meant he could barely go to the outhouse with a written permit from the archbishop of Cologne.

Take a wild guess why Adolf von Nassau took the job and signed all these papers. Well, he had seen how count Rudolf von Habsburg raised his family to become imperial princes and he wanted to do the same thing.

So he began a two pronged approach. On the one hand he started a diplomatic dance aimed at getting himself out of all these agreements he had signed at the start of his reign. And he was a cunning little count. He became very active in the areas a king was expected to deliver on, peace and justice. He travelled relentlessly around the parts of the kingdom accessible to him and wherever he went he heard cases as a judge and renewed the Mainzer Landfrieden. His court attracted minnesaenger and many nobles out for a good time. That gave him enough standing in the land to gradually slip out of the political ties to the archbishop. He entrusted the role of Vogt for the lower Rhine to John of Brabant, the enemy of the archbishop of Cologne. And he managed to marry his daughter to the new Count Palatinate on the Rhine who he then tied to himself through various treaties. He reconciled with Albrecht of Habsburg which meant disregarding the Bohemian king’s demands for Austria.

All that is great but does not make one an imperial prince. That opportunity arose when the House of Wettin collapsed into one of its customary internecine feuds. If you want more detail, check out episode 107 – the House of Wettin. In broad brushes, the Landgrave Albrecht, called the degenerate, had been at war with his entire family for a solid 25 years. He had fought his father, his sons, had rejected his wife, the sole surviving legitimate child of emperor Frederick II and chose to pass all his vast possessions, the margraviate of Meissen, the Landgraviate of Thuringia and the land of Pleissen to his illegitimate son. The wars that this policy engendered were vicious and destroyed the immensely wealthy Wettiner lands.

When Albrecht the Degenerate was defeated by his sons, he fled to the court of king Adolf. Adolf treated him kindly and offered to buy his rights on the Wettiner inheritance. The price, a mere 12,000 mark of silver, a ridiculous sum given that these lands included the mines of Freiberg, one of Europe’s richest sources of silver.

The reason for the discount was that Albrecht the Degenerate did not possess any of the lands he sold to Adolf. They were held by his sons, Frederick the Bitten and Diezmann. Adolf invaded at the head of a royal army in 1294 and pushed Frederick and Diezmann out.

This could have been Adolf’s great moment. The Landgraviate and the margraviate were each imperial principalities and though for the moment devastated, but inherently incredibly rich.

But it was not. There were a couple of problems.

As I mentioned, Adolf wasn’t a rich man. As king he now had the revenue from the royal domain that Rudolf had kindly assembled for him, but that was never enough to fund a military expedition into Thuringia. Nor could he count on the electors to support him in an endeavour that was exactly the kind of thing they had wanted to avoid with all these endless contracts.

The source of funds came from abroad. King Edward I of England had begun hostilities with France in alliance with Flanders and Burgundy. And he was looking for a diversion that would bind French forces whilst he attacked from the North. Adolf was to provide that diversion. The official treaty was all royal alliance and high politics, but underneath was a pretty simple deal, money for swords. Adolf had no particular reason to attack France, certainly not in the middle of his Thuringian operation. But the money came in handy and he actually never attacked the French. It all stayed hush, hush, until some clergyman found out and the pope castigated him for acting not like a king but like a mere sell sword. Things weren’t helped when it later surfaced that he had also taken money from the king of France as well, this time for not attacking.

Meanwhile in Thuringia, Adolf’s policy began to ruffle feathers with the electors. Meissen and the Pleissenland were areas that Wenceslaus of Bohemia regarded as part of his zone of influence. Like his father, he was not too keen having a king of the Romans, now augmented to imperial prince on his doorstep. The Archbishop of Mainz had important interests in Thuringia around his city of Erfurt. He also got a bit miffed when Adolf replaced him as Landvogt of Thuringia with one of his supporters.

Adolf might have got away with it had several of the electors not come together in 1297 for Wenceslaus’ much delayed coronation in Prague. This may have been where they first floated the idea, but by 1298 it went from mere chatter to serious talk about deposing the king.

The archbishop of Mainz had invited Albrecht of Habsburg to voice some grievances he had against Adolf in front of the electors. Though this meeting in Frankfurt did not happen as such, a month later the archbishop plus the duke of saxony and the margraves of Brandenburg got together to open a case against the king. Mainz soon after received authorisation from Cologne and Bohemia to act on their behalf and even the count palatinate, son in law of Adolf joined in.

Once opened and the legitimacy of the court established, the result was a foregone conclusion. Adolf was convicted for breaking the peace, breach of the agreements made at his election, the extraction of funds from the church and for good measure, desecration of the Host.

Upon conviction Adolf was deposed and replaced with – drumroll- Albrecht von Habsburg.

This time a impecunious count was not an option. Adolf von Nassau was not going to lay down his crown without a fight. And he was in charge if an army. The electors needed to select someone who could lead forces against Adolf and win. And that man was Albrecht von Habsburg.

Albrecht had already been fighting Adolf for some weeks by the time the electors had made their decision. He had set off from Austria in early march 1298 and has been playing cat and mouse with Adolf’s army, marching all across Swabia, between Ulm and Breisach. In June Albrecht decided to take his troops further north along the Rhine river, whilst Adolf followed him on the opposite shore.

The whole game of marching here and there continued around Alzey and Worms until news reached both camps  that Adolf was definitely deposed and Albrecht elected the new king. That meant the electors could now officially get involved in the fighting and with Mainz and Cologne not far, Adolf von Nassau needed to strike before support for his enemy arrived.

On July 2^nd, 1298 Albrecht lined his army up on top of a hill near the village of Göllheim. Adolf von Nassau who came from the North had to attack uphill and into the sun. For Albrecht the key was to hold out and inflict as much damage on his opponent as possible. He knew help would arrive in the end. Adolf on the other hand needed an immediate and comprehensive victory. So he fought ferociously, leading his troops from the front, as any good medieval monarch should. Albrecht allegedly kept his cool on top of his little hill.  

And he was right to do so. The odds were stacked too far against Adolf. In one of the rolling attacks he was pushed of his horse. Heavily wounded he got onto another steed, but he was unable to put his helmet back on, the sun was blinding him and he was felled by one of Albrecht’s men.

Adolf’s body was taken to a Cistercian monastery. Albrecht did not permit the dead king to be buried in Speyer cathedral, as Adolf had requested. But the next emperor Henry VII allowed the transfer and that is where he still lies. One of his descendant had his funerary monument remade in 1824 and it now shows him life size praying in the vestibule of the cathedral.

The counts of Nassau-Weilburg never became kings again. Their lands, much enlarged later became a duchy with its centre in Wiesbaden. And in 1890 they became the grand dukes of Luxemburg where they still rule to this day

The cousins of our king Adolf of Nassau rose even higher. One of them was William of Nassau-Dillenburg born in 1533. As a child William inherited vast estates in the low countries as well as the principality of Orange from a French cousin. That principality was named not after the fruit, but after a lovely little town in Provence that features one the best preserved Roman theatres in the world and is well worth a visit. William took on the name William of Orange and became also known as William the Silent when he led the Dutch protestant rebellion against the Spanish. The house of Orange still reigns over the Netherlands and as a mark of respect the Dutch national teams play in an orange strip.

But for our narrative, these greatest moments for the house of Nassau lie in the far future. Our preoccupation is now Albrecht of Habsburg, finally king, seven years after his father’s death. We will find out how he gets on next time. I hope you will join us again. And do not forget to tune in on BBC iplayer on April 8^th at 8:30 GMT for the final of University Challenge and watch Justin Lee do his thing!