The Decline of the House of Luxemburg
“And since these especially ruinous harms to all of Christendom are not to be tolerated or suffered any longer, so we have completely agreed – with a well-considered disposition, by means of much and various discussion and counsel, which we have earnestly undertaken concerning this among ourselves and with many other princes and lords of the Holy Empire, for the assistance of the Holy Church, the comfort of Christendom and the honour and profit of the Holy Empire – that we want fully and specifically to remove and depose the above-written Lord Wenceslas as a neglectful procrastinator, dismemberer and one unworthy of the Holy Empire from the same Holy Roman Empire and all the dignities pertaining to it with immediate effect.” End quote
So concluded the Prince Electors of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and the Palatinate on August 20th 1400. King Wenceslaus IV, son of the great emperor Karl IV, king of Bohemia and duke of Luxemburg was to be deposed for his “evil deeds and afflictions [that are] are so clearly manifest and well known throughout the land that they can neither be justified nor concealed” end quote
How could that happen. Last time we looked at the house of Luxemburg, they directly held almost a quarter of the German lands, controlled two of the seven electoral votes, had manoeuvred themselves into pole position to gain the Hungarian and the Polish crown, with even a long-term option on Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Tyrol . But now, a mere 22 years later, the great second Carolingian empire lies in tatters. How is that possible? That is what we will look at today.
TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 165 – Wenceslaus the Lazy and Ruprecht of the Empty Pocket, which is at the same time episode 2 of season 9 “The Reformation before the Reformation”
“And since these especially ruinous harms to all of Christendom are not to be tolerated or suffered any longer, so we have completely agreed – with a well-considered disposition, by means of much and various discussion and counsel, which we have earnestly undertaken concerning this among ourselves and with many other princes and lords of the Holy Empire, for the assistance of the Holy Church, the comfort of Christendom and the honour and profit of the Holy Empire – that we want fully and specifically to remove and depose the above-written Lord Wenceslas as a neglectful procrastinator, dismemberer and one unworthy of the Holy Empire from the same Holy Roman Empire and all the dignities pertaining to it with immediate effect.” End quote
So concluded the Prince Electors of Cologne, Mainz, Trier and the Palatinate on August 20th 1400. King Wenceslaus IV, son of the great emperor Karl IV, king of Bohemia and duke of Luxemburg was to be deposed for his “evil deeds and afflictions [that are] are so clearly manifest and well known throughout the land that they can neither be justified nor concealed” end quote
How could that happen. Last time we looked at the house of Luxemburg, they directly held almost a quarter of the German lands, controlled two of the seven electoral votes, had manoeuvred themselves into pole position to gain the Hungarian and the Polish crown, with even a long-term option on Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Tyrol . But now, a mere 22 years later, the great second Carolingian empire lies in tatters. How is that possible? That is what we will look at today.
But before we start, I want to thank all of you for your unwavering support throughout these almost 4 years. Without your encouragement and support, this show would have ended up on the pile of discarded podcasts long ago. I am particularly excited about the recognition this humble effort is receiving from the academic community. Specifically I want to thank professor Duncan Hardy who has given me an advanced look at his forthcoming book on Law, Society and Political Culture in Late Medieval and Reformation Germany, which is the source of the quotations at the top of this episodes and which will appear regularly throughout the upcoming episodes. Thank you so much! And at the same time I want to thank my patrons who have been so kind to sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or have made a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. If you want to join them, you can do so at the price of jus a latté per month. But make sure you sign up from anything but your iPhone, as the evil kneecappers at Apple will charge you an additional 30% if you do so.
Special thanks today go to Chris E. J, Gilles L., John Thompson, Peter McCloskey, Martin Engelmann and Jim-V who have already signed up.
And with that – back to the show
An when I say back, we go all the way back to November 29, 1378. Emperor Karl IV lay on his deathbed, surrounded by his family and in particular his eldest son, Wenceslaus. Though Karl was an old man by the standards of his time, he was 62 years old when he passed, he only had his sons quite late in life. Wenceslaus, the eldest was 17, his half-brothers Sigismund and Johann were 10 and 8 years old. Apart from the three boys there were three sisters, Catherine, much older than the boys and married to Rudolf IV of Austria, plus Anne and Margaret, both still children. There were also some elder members of the House of Luxemburg, Karl’s brother Wenzel, the duke of Luxemburg and Brabant, and Karl’s nephews Jobst and Prokop of Moravia.
If we disregard Wenceslaus age, this was a pretty good setup from a dynastic point of view. Enough spare males to continue the family line should something untoward happen and two unmarried sisters to deploy for diplomatic gain.
Those of you who have listened to the last season will not be surprised to hear that Karl IV thought long and hard about this constellation and set everything up for success.
For one thing, he had given the younger sons enough assets and tasks to keep them from clashing with their older half-brother. Sigismund was engaged to Maria, the daughter and heiress to the kingdoms of Hungary and Poland, two of the largest and most difficult to manage monarchies in the whole of Europe. On top he was given the margraviate of Brandenburg, a land ravaged by decades of civil war that may need a lot of TLC, but came with a most valuable electoral vote. The youngest, Johann was given a modest duchy centred on the city of Görlitz, enough to live comfortably, but not enough to be a challenger to his brothers. His job was to support one of the other two – and being the spare should some unexpected harm befall any of them.
But most importantly, Karl IV had removed all obstacles previous sons of emperors had to deal with. Wenceslaus had been crowned king of Bohemia when he was barely 3 years old. At the age of 15 he was elected and crowned king of the Romans, an exercise that had cost his father literally millions, money he raised by handing over almost all that was left of the already much diminished resources attached to the royal title.
Hence when his father died, Wenceslaus immediately stepped up into the role of ruler of the empire. No tense election, no further bribes and no civil unrest. Just a smooth transition from father to son. The last time that had happened was almost 200 years ago, in 1190 when Henry VI took over from Frederick Barbarossa.
And when Wenceslaus came into the office on the Monday after the funeral, all was ready for him. His father’s advisors, some of whom had been with the house of Luxemburg for decades were happy to serve the young king. The chancellery, the office that kept the records and managed the correspondence was one of the most experienced and efficient in medieval Europe. The territories he ruled directly and that he could rely on for money and military resources were the richest and largest princely territories in the empire.
What could possibly go wrong? Well – everything!
What Karl IV could not protect his son from were the circumstances – and as Herodotus said, “Circumstances rule men; men do not rule circumstances.” You may counter with the great eastern philosopher Bruce Lee who famously said “To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities”. But that was the difference. Karl IV had been a Bruce Lee, Wenceslaus was not.
Much has been said and written about Wenceslaus, most of it less than flattering. But when he was 17, he was one of Europe’s best educated monarchs. He spoke multiple languages, had been tutored by some of the finest minds in the kingdom, including Johann von Jenstein, the bishop of Meissen and later archbishop of Prague, and his father had involved him in imperial politics a very young age.
And now this well trained and well set up young man was confronted with some of the most intractable problems of the already quite challenging 14th century. Two of these Problems were unfinished business left to him by his father and a further two had hit the in-tray more recently.
Let’s take them one by one:
First up is the thorny issue of the General Peace, the Landfrieden. As so often in history and current affairs, everybody wants peace but not everybody wants the same peace.
Karl IV and now Wenceslaus wanted a peace led by imperial institutions, meaning a structure where the imperial court and an imperial enforcement mechanism ensured that the roads and rivers are safe to travel on, feuding stopped and virgins, widows and orphans remain unmolested.
The cities liked the idea of safe roads and all that but were worried that the imperial courts and their police forces would be staffed with knights and princes, rather than their own people. Plus, so far no General peace had materialised despite decades of trying. Instead, the robber barons still stole all that was left of a traders wares after the extortionate princely tolls had been paid. So, the cities preferred to organise their protection themselves by forming leagues, first the Swabian League, then the Rhenish league and finally the Saxon League.
The princes too liked safe roads and rivers and all that, but would very much like to have their judges and their forces providing that peace. That would give them both the court fees and a hold over the cities to better shake them down for cash.
And finally, the knights, squeezed financially by the fallout of the Black Death, diminished socially by changes in military tactics and pushed around by both princes and cities resorted to robbery and feuding to make a living. So, I stand corrected, not everyone wanted peace, particularly not the knights. And to defend their ancient rights to plunder and robbery, or freedoms as they called it, they formed knightly associations like the Joergenschild in Swabia.
The second leftover issue was how to organise the kingdom of Bohemia. As I have been repeating to total exhaustion, being king of the Romans came with almost no resources. Hence to be an effective king of the Romans and later emperor, one needed their own territories in good order. Good order mainly means structured in a way that it produced enough coin to hire mercenaries, bribe electors and pay off competing claims. For Wenceslaus that meant he needed to turn the bundle of feudal rights he inherited into that we would recognise as a state, so not a medieval kingdom that worked through a cascade of personal obligations, but one where everybody below the king was a subject. This is what every monarch in Europe and every prince in the empire was trying to get to.
Karl IV had made a move into this direction in 1355 with his ambitious law code, the Majestas Carolina. But that project had to be almost immediately abandoned in the face of baronial opposition.
Bohemia was a particularly difficult place to introduce such a modern structure – in inverted commas. In Bohemia the great magnates, the barons, held their land free and unencumbered. They weren’t vassals of the king and as such they administered justice in their lands and if taxes were imposed, they kept as much as 60% if the funds raised for themselves. Bohemia was administered by a committee comprising the four great offices of state and the king that met four times a year. And the four great offices were usually staffed by members of the baronial class. Within the committee the king was just a first amongst equals.
The only parts where the king had sovereign authority was over his vassals who controlled a relatively small proportion of the kingdoms territory, his own estates and the Bohemian church.
Karl’s father, the blind king John of Bohemia had clashed hard with the Barons and ended up being forced to submit to their power. Karl too was unable to shift the formal structure, but by using his charm and cunning, and his elaborate concept of the crown of Bohemia as separate entity from the king as a person, he had been able to extract money, soldiers and even occasionally concessions from the barons. Wenceslaus wanted to keep pace with the rival dynasties in the empire, hence he believed he needed to break the power of the barons and streamline Bohemia along French or English lines.
Now we come to issue #3, the papal schism. For once, this was neither Karl’s nor Wenceslaus’ fault. But it was still Wenceslaus problem. As the schism became ever more intractable with Europe being split down the middle between supporters of the Roman and the Avignon Pontiff, the people were looking for an authority that could resolve the issue. And in search of an arbiter, public opinion harked back to the olden days when the emperor had been the shield and protector of the church. That concept may have dropped into the executioner’s basket when young Konradin’s head was forcibly disconnected from his body, but now that the world was in such dire straits, it was time to call the emperors back to their holy duty.
As if that was not enough, there was also #4 the dying of the great kings. It began with the death of Kazimir the Great of Poland in 1370, Waldemar Atterdag of Denmark in 1375, Edward III of England in 1377, obviously emperor Karl IV in 1378, Charles V, the Wise of France in 1380 and Louis the great of Hungary in 1382. Their successors were either young, like Richard II and Wenceslaus, female, like Jadwiga or Poland and Maria of Hungary or, most devastatingly, suffering from serious mental health issues in the case of Charles VI of France.
The succession crises this caused all across Europe created distractions that prevented the main actors from focusing on the great calamity that was the schism. And closer to home neighbours were dragged into protracted wars of succession. In Wenceslaus case that was the succession to the Hungarian and to a lesser degree the Polish throne.
Lots to do for the young hero of this episode.
And things are off to a reasonable start.
Wenceslaus proposed a concept for his general peace at his first diet in 1379. There was not as much resonance as he may have hoped, but it might be the beginning of something. The problem was that the different parties, the cities, the princes and the knights disagreed with each other on everything except for one thing, which was that they did not want what Wenceslaus wanted. In 1384 a peace was concluded between the princes and cities, the Heidelberger Stallung, which Wenceslaus rejected. But 3 years later Wenceslaus chancellor did endorse this solution, though we do not know where the king really stood on this..
Wenceslaus was politically close to the cities, in large part because that is where his parsnip was buttered. Of all the sources of income for a king of the Romans, the city taxes was the only thing left. But the cities did not want him. So, when he was trying to make himself the head of one of the city leagues, the Swabian league specifically, they turned him down.
That upset young Wenceslaus, but he did what he usually did in this situation, nothing.
Despite the Heidelberger Stallung, conflict between princes and cities worsened, leaving only a military solution. That happened on August 23, 1388 at Döffingen where a princely force led by count Eberhard of Würrtemberg routed the forces of the Swabian League. 3 months later the princes defeated the Rhenish League as well. Though they had won, the princes failed to impose their solution on to the country. The war had exhausted their resources.
At which point Wenceslaus could step in and declare his General Peace at Eger/Cheb which sets out that quote : “It has also been agreed, and we desire this before all other things, that when people travel through the Holy Empire or the areas encompassed by this land-peace, all roads, churches, monasteries, parsonages, churchyards, mills and especially all ploughs with horses and that which belongs to them and vineyards and fields and all things agricultural should be safe and be left in peace, and that nobody should attack, injure or damage them. And should anyone contravene this, it should be treated as robbery, and the land-peace should proceed against them as is written above.”
The empire was divided into seven circles each led by a superior officer appointed by the king. This officer would convene courts drawn from the cities and the princes to adjudicate.
That is a great result, one that had eluded his great father. Ok, he got there because the other parties were exhausted, so not exactly all his doing, but then, a success is a success. So congrats Wenceslaus.
Unfortunately that was the only bit of his reign that warrants congratulations.
Let’s move to agenda item #2, the Great Western Schism. What was Wenceslaus contribution there? Well, nothing I am afraid. The problem was that for him to have the authority to resolve the schism, Wenceslaus needed to be either a magnetic personality that everyone was willing to defer to or hold the imperial crown. Wenceslaus had neither. The personality issue is not exactly his fault, the lack of an imperial crown however sort of was. He had made multiple attempts to gather the funds for an imperial Romzug to get crowned by Urban VI and then later Urban’s successor. But all of these efforts came to nought. And the reason lay in part in his lack of drive and the other in his ability to make a right old mess of the other two problems, the general peace and the reorganisation of Bohemia. And whilst these problems remained at the forefront of royal policy, Rome had to wait. And whilst Christendom was waiting for the king of the Romans to get down to the Tiber, the schism became worse and worse. Again and again did the princes demand that Wenceslaus take the lead in resolving this fundamental crisis of Christianity. But he was dithering. He was officially a supporter of the Roman pope, by now Benedict the XIII, but when Benedict called upon him to protect him against Neapolitan incursions sponsored by the French and the Avignon popes, he failed to come help. Why, maybe because he did not want to annoy the French or maybe because he simply did not know what the right course of action was. This lack of decisiveness, the constantly shifting of allegiances without rhyme or reason was first confusing and then deeply irritating his negotiation partners.
So, what did he do all this time, from 1378 to 1400. Well mostly he tried to bring Bohemia to heel. His father had coalesced the Bohemian magnates around the idea of the Bohemian crown as a sacred object representing the kingdom itself. The barons were much more amenable to the idea of serving the kingdom and its patron, Saint Wenceslaus than the person of the emperor.
What Wenceslaus lacked was the ability to maintain ad exploit that elaborate intellectual structure. Instead he took the barons head on.
He watered down the role of the committee of the four great offices of state that ran the country. He created new offices that took over some of the Committee’s responsibilities. Then he staffed the new offices with loyal servants recruited amongst the lower nobility and even foreigners. Another move was that he claimed the right to seize lands of barons who had died without legitimate offspring. That was customary in the case of a vassals, but a terrible infringement of the ancient rights of the free Bohemian barons.
Things got even more heated when Wenceslaus got into a quarrel with the archbishop of Prague, his old tutor and advisor Johann von Jenstadt. This quarrel was as so often over land and privileges. It reached boiling point when Wenceslaus attempted to create a new bishopric separate from Prague staffed by one of his creatures. The archbishop countered this plan by electing someone else for the intended role. Wenceslaus had one of his famous tantrums and had one of the archbishop’s deacons, Johann Nepomuck arrested. Wenceslaus then had Nepomuck tortured, a process he seemingly participated in personally. And finally he had the severely injured prelate tied up and thrown off the Charles Bridge in Prague.
Nepomuck was canonised in 1721 and became the patron of Bohemia and the protector against floods and draughts, which is why you find his statue on so many bridges in catholic Germany.
The murder of Johann Nepomuck was a horrific crime that shocked most of europe, was later cited as one of the key reasons for his deposition, and pushed the Bohemian barons over the line. The question is, why Wenceslaus, who wasn’t a stupid man, did it.
By 1393 the king had badly deteriorated physically and mentally. He had suffered a severe illness in 1388. What made things worse was that his physicians recommended regular intake of alcohol to improve his humours, a prescription that send this already fragile individual down a path to severe alcoholism. In 1393 he narrowly survived a poison attack that further weakened him.
The barons used this weakness to present their grievances and when he refused formed a league of noble lords with the aim to gain control of the main offices of the kingdom, if need be militarily.
Wenceslaus turned to his half-brother Sigismund, the king of Hungary for help and the two signed an agreement to make each other the heirs to their respective kingdoms should one of them die without offspring.
That pushed Wenceslaus cousin, the margrave Jobst of Moravia over the edge, because Jobst had spent some fine gold to become the recognised heir to Wenceslaus. In his anger Jobst joined the league of Bohemian noble Lords and they took Wenceslaus prisoner and sent him to Austria for safekeeping. That was not such a great idea because the duke of Austria was persuaded by imperial princes, led by Ruprecht of the Palatinate, to let Wenceslaus go.
Once Wenceslaus returned to Bohemia, he acted like the proverbial elephant in the China shop, arrested his cousin Jobst of Moravaia, had a number of his enemies executed and even alienated his brother Johann of Goerlitz, pretty much the only member of his family he could trust.
The whole thing could have resulted in massive civil war, had not been for some fortuitous deaths, including that of his brother Johann from unexplained poisoning. His other brother Sigismund came in as a white knight and negotiated a fragile peace between Wenceslaus, the noble lords and cousin Jobst of Moravia.
And that peace was indeed fragile. In 1397 Jobst had several of Wenceslaus advisors murdered and the lords kept Wenceslaus cut off from the revenues of the kingdom.
And with this we are gradually heading into the fateful year 1400.
But before we get there just a few words about problem #4, the succession to the great kings. We will go through the ins and outs of that in later episodes, but the important point for Wenceslaus was that it incapacitated all the major monarchies in his neighbourhood, France, Poland, Hungary and England. And he needed them to deal with the key challenges, in particular the schism. Moreover, his brother Sigismund was deeply involved with the Hungarian succession which drained Wenceslaus coffers and took up a lot of headspace. As a consequence his foreign policy became increasingly erratic, swinging back and forth between France and England where the 100 Year’s War had resumed. In one of his worst miscalculations, he made Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan, a duke. That might have been intended to smooth his way down to Rome, but had the opposite effect. The other Italian states, Venice, Florence in particular were extremely concerned about this improvement to their rival’s status and hence blocked any attempt of Wenceslaus to move south. Equally the imperial princes were appalled that such a parvenue and ruthless dictator was admitted into their exclusive club.
And that is where we are in the year 1397. The last time Wenceslaus had shown his face in the Empire had been in 1387. Since then, 13 years of nothing. Diets had taken place in his absence and had even sometimes been called without his permission. Even if asked to appoint an imperial vicar to deal with the most pressing affairs in his absence, he had either not responded or appointed members of his family who too were extremely busy with other things. The Landfrieden, his great achievement of the 1380s had not been extended and was effectively void. He was embroiled in Bohemian and Hungarian affairs. But the worst accusation was that he had not resolved the schism, not even made an effort to resolve it. The empire, represented by the Prince Electors, concluded that they had no king.
Wenceslaus made one last ditch attempt. He called a diet in Frankfurt over Christmas of 1397. But that backfired badly. Wenceslaus wanted to join a French plan to depose both popes and elect a new one. The imperial princes told him in no uncertain terms that if he did that, they would depose him. He nevertheless travelled to Reims to negotiate with the French. Another catastrophe. He was stinking drunk most of the time and agreed to all that the French regent demanded. You want to marry your son to the sole heiress of the entirety of the Luxemburg possessions – sure, let’s do that. We should jointly solve the schism by firing both popes, let’s go ahead. And so on and so on.
That is where the prince Electors ran out of patience. This guy was not only useless, but dangerous. So they looked round for a suitable anti king. Their choice was King Richard II of England. But Richard turned them down. Richard had some issues of his own that left him with only 2 more years of on the throne.
After Richard’s refusal the prince electors decided to depose Wenceslaus and elect one of their won. Deposing an elected and anointed king was however no easy task. Negotiations over whether and how to do it had been going on for almost a decade, before the archbishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz gathered together with the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and took the plunge. In an elaborate and properly legalistic document they list all of Wenceslaus crimes and shortcomings, all “unbecoming his title as Roman king” justifying his removal.
What is interesting about this document is not so much the fact that a king was deposed. That had happened before, most recently with Adolf of Nassau. But it is remarkable in as much as it tried to square this decision with the Golden Bull. Though the Prince Electors are clearly deviating from the Golden Bull, by referencing it, they reaffirming its status as the basic law of the empire. So, if anyone had won in this, it was the Golden Bull.
The one who did not win in all that was the man they elected to be Wenceslaus’ successor, Ruprecht of the Platinate. Ruprecht was an extremely competent, sober man with a solid political instinct. He had been the dominant figure in the empire during Wenceslaus long absence. He had been the one engineering the Heidelberger Stallung and also the one who had freed Wenceslaus from his Austrian jail. Putting together the coalition of Prince Electors that deposed Wenceslaus was very much his work. He, and his father had been behind the few bits of imperial policy in this period that did actually work.
And he had the right idea. He decided to go down to Rome, get crowned emperor and then wanted to organise a new church council to end the schism.
But what he had not counted on was Karl IV’s great legacy, the stripping down of the imperial assets. Ruprecht simply did not have the money to do anything. His attempt to go to Rome was funded by German and Italian bankers, but ran aground when the Visconti held him off at Brescia long enough for his funds to run dry. He had to return north. After that, he was completely broke. In tavern all across the land he was made fun of as Ruprecht mit der leeren Tasche, Rupert of the empty pocket. He spent his remaining years on the throne in petty feuds with the archbishop of Mainz and efforts to solidify his territories in the Palatinate. At least on the latter he was successful and when he died in 1410, he left behind a consolidated territory along the Rhine and the Upper palatinate around Amberg, a land large enough to fund the construction of the castle of Heidelberg. I spent much of my youth in Heidelberg and so may be biased, but even as a ruin it very much deserves its position a some of Germany’s greatest tourist hotspots. If you get there, seek out Ruprecht’s palace the Ruprechtsbau and impress people by knowing who he was and why he failed.
When Ruprecht died in 1410, nobody seriously suggested that Wenceslaus was still king. Another 10 years of fighting with Bohemian barons, murders, drunken debauchery and ever deeper hatred of his brothers and cousins had left the king with barely more than an empty title that nobody recognised any more.
A new king had to be elected. After the debacle of Ruprecht’s kingship, the imperial princes knew better than to waste their wealth and reputation on this hopeless task. The only candidates were two other members of the Luxemburg family, Sigismund, the king of Hungary and Jobst, the Margrave of Moravia, Wenceslaus closest relatives who had contributed as much to his downfall as his enemies. But that is a story for another time. Next time we will dig deeper into the papal schism, that great calamity of the 14th century that contemporaries thought was as terrifying as the plague.
And whilst you wait you may want to brush up on some of the earlier episodes where we discuss the backstory of how the church ended up in Avignon, that is episode 92 “papal epilogue” or you may want to take a look at the state of papal affairs in episodes 144 to 148 when we talk about Henry VII, his rise to power as a papal champion in defiance of the king of France and is then dropped by the papacy when things got to dicey.
You can listen to all of these on historyofthegermans.com where you can also support the podcast by signing up as a patron or by making a one-time donation.