Season 08 – From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull (1250-1356)

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Emperor Karl IV gets his son Wenceslaus IV crowned king of the Romans

This is the last episode of this season and it is time to say goodbye to Karl IV, Ludwig the Bavarian, Henry VII, Albrecht of Habsburg, Adolf von Nassau and Rudolf of Habsburg. These have been some eventful 138 years.

When Karl IV died in 1378 he left behind an impressive list of achievements but also a number of failures. And he left behind a son, Wenceslaus he had invested with so much hope and so many crowns, it not only broke the bank but even chunks of the political edifice he had so patiently built.

How and why is what we will discuss in this episode.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 163 – Succession and Legacy, also episode 26 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”.

This is the last episode of this season and it is time to say goodbye to Karl IV, Ludwig the Bavarian, Henry VII, Albrecht of Habsburg, Adolf von Nassau and Rudolf of Habsburg. These have been some eventful 138 years.

When Karl IV died in 1378 he left behind an impressive list of achievements but also a number of failures. And he left behind a son, Wenceslaus he had invested with so much hope and so many crowns, it not only broke the bank but even chunks of the political edifice he had so patiently built.

How and why is what we will discuss in this episode.

But before we start the usual reminder that all this advertising-free German history fun is funded by the generosity of our patrons who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and signed up as Patrons or have made a one time donation. And today I want to thank Jim V., Chris E. J, Gilles, John Thompson, Peter McCloskey and Martin E. who have so lavishly endowed us.

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And with that, back to the show

These last three episodes we have looked at Bohemia, the Empire, the expansion of the Luxemburg  possessions and the international successes of Charles IV. Now it is time to talk about his Achilles heel, his obsession with his son and heir, Wenceslaus.

The last time a son had followed his father on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire had been in 1191 when Henry VI took over from Frederick Barbarossa. One could claim that Konrad IV took over from Frederick II in 1250, but Konrad IV was never crowned and his reign in the empire was confined to his duchy of Swabia.

Spoiler alert, Karl IV will be the first emperor who gets his son elected and crowned during his lifetime. But that came at a price.

Before we can get into this we need to take a quick recap of Karl IV’s family history. He had been married a total of four times. His first marriage was to Blanche of Valois, the sister of king Philip VI of France, a marriage arranged whilst he lived in Paris. The couple were married for 18 years, but had only two children, both girls, but no son and heir.

Her death in 1348 came at an extremely opportune moment for Karl, because he was now free to marry Anne of Bavaria, the daughter of the Count Palatinate on the Rhine who brought him a crucial electoral vote as well as strategic positions in the Upper Palatinate. This relationship produced a much desired son, but the child died in infancy. Anne too died soon after.

Wife #3 was Anna of Schweidnitz, daughter and heiress of one of the Silesian dukedoms that Karl wanted to integrate into the Lands of the Crown of Bohemia. Anna was just 14 at the time they got betrothed and lived to age 23. In that time she got crowned Queen of Bohemia, Queen of the Romans and finally in 1355, she was crowned empress in Rome. But most importantly after first giving birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1358, in 1361 she delivered the long awaited heir, a boy called Wenceslaus.

Like so much of Karl’s activities, the birth of Wenceslaus was an elaborately designed spectacle. Karl had his heavily pregnant wife brought to Nürnberg, by now one of the three symbolic cities of the empire, alongside Frankfurt and Aachen. And he had invited the electors, imperial princes and representatives of the great cities  for a diet at the same time.

On previous visits the emperor had stayed in the comfortable mansions of one of the great Nürnberg bankers where he could enjoy all creature comforts. But that would not do for the birth of an imperial child. So the family moved up the hill into the drafty castle once built by the Hohenstaufen emperors.

By ensuring his son was born in the imperial castle above the great imperial city, in the presence of the whole of the empire, Karl projects a clear message. This child, his son, was not just the future king of Bohemia, but he was also destined to be the future emperor.  

My god is he a happy father. This is what he wrote to the Bohemians: quote: “Rejoice in the hearts of all our faithful! rejoice, our dear subjects, let the whole nation hold a great festival of joy. All Bohemia, and all its provinces, rejoice at the great happiness that has befallen you. You rich and poor, you young and old, rejoice, for behold the royal lineage has brought forth a scion! Heaven has finally granted our ardent wishes, and the Empress, our consort, has given birth to our heir to the throne, as promised by God! His appearance was like the rising sun dispelling the fog, for this newborn also dispelled the fickleness, indecision, fear and hope from the hearts of our subjects, and brought back their previous happiness, serene confidence and love.” End quote.

He may be laying it on thick, but then he was already 45 years old and until then without a male heir. This lack of a successor left the entire political structure he had built fragile. And that fragility impacted not just him, but the whole of his empire that could still remember the endless sequence of civil wars that had followed an imperial vacancy. Therefore it is likely that there were indeed celebrations of joy across the empire, welcoming the long awaited heir.

Karl’s excitement culminated in the weeks that followed. He had the baby weighed in gold, which he sent to Aachen in recognition for the miracle he attribute to the intercession of the saints and relics in this other great imperial city. He then called for the imperial regalia to be brought over from Prague to Nürnberg to be exhibited to the public.

For the christening 2 weeks later 5 electors, 18 bishops and numerous princes came to the church of St. Sebaldus in Nürnberg. Having just been to the christening of my niece and nephew, I know that children can sometimes be less than co-operative in religious ceremonies. Reports about young Wenceslaus christening tell of the little boy being more than obstinate. Stories circulate that in his revulsion he had soiled the holy water and even the fouled the altar, a bad omen for what may be coming.

Bad omen or not, these celebrations did not go down well with the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs who saw their chances of returning to the imperial throne vanishing. The events may therefore have triggered their attempt to overthrow Karl in alliance with the kings of Poland and Hungary. This conspiracy as we have heard, failed, in part because Anna of Schweidnitz was kind enough to expire in childbirth a year later, making way for Karl’s fourth marriage to Elizabeth of Pomerania. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of king Kasimir the Great of Poland and this union underpinned a new arrangement between Poland and the emperor, which in turn let the Habsburg conspiracy crumble into dust.

The marriage to Elisabeth of Pomerania lasted until Karl’s death and produced 6 children, 4 of which survived. The eldest of the two surviving sons, Sigismund will feature heavily in our next season, so keep him in mind.

But back to Wenceslaus. Karl is unperturbed in his urge to promote his precious little boy. First he creates a new altar for the coronation church in Aachen, dedicated to St. Wenceslaus where a Czech speaking priest is to pray for the now deceased members of the House of Luxemburg, including for Wenceslaus mother.

As soon as little Wenzeslaus could walk, he was crowned king of Bohemia. Karl’s advisers had tried to dissuade him from this, in large part because they feared it would be almost impossible to guide the child once crowned. After all, sending an anointed king on to the naughty step was fraught with complex issues of “lese majeste”. And as you probably know, the naughty step was not introduced until the early 2000s, so we are talking about much more hands-on punishments here.

Then, to paraphrase Jane Austin, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a crown, must be in want of a wife. The young man in question being unable to even form the words “I do” was no obstacle for him to be promised in marriage to a daughter of the Burggrave of Nürnberg. That engagement ended when a better opportunity arose to get him a Wittelsbach bride, and a little later a Hungarian princess. Finally it is 14-year old Johanna von Wittelsbach who snatches the nine-year old heir.

3 years later Wenceslaus becomes the elector of Brandenburg, making him an imperial prince alongside his royal Bohemian title.

When Wenceslaus turns 15, the emperor gets going on his most ambitious project for his precious son, getting him elected and crowned king of the Romans. And ambitious it was.

Let’s start with the legal obstacles.

All the provisions of the Golden Bull are based on the implicit assumption that the previous emperor had died. There are no rules about electing a king of the Romans whilst the predecessor is still alive.

Plus, the Golden Bull had explicitly set out that an elector was only able to cast his vote when he had become 18 years of age, which suggests an emperor should also at least be 18 years old.

But regulation, schmogulation, if only enough bribes are paid, the Electors ewre all too happy to set aside these judicial niceties.

Ah, enough bribes. That was a bit of a problem. For one the bribes required came to a stunning quarter of a million florin. A princely sum that already but coming just in the wake of the 500,000 florin Karl had promised the Wittelsbachs for the margraviate of Brandenburg. Where to find such a princely sum? The imperial lands, cities, castles, tolls and so forth had already been pawned, sold and otherwise alienated in the run-up to Karl’s own election and coronation. Karl had bought back some of it during the course of the last 20 years, focusing mainly on freeing the imperial cities from the control of the territorial lords.

But these imperial cities were difficult to pawn again. Because in the intervening period Karl had ever so often asked the cities to fund his projects such as the journeys to Rome, his various coronations and acquisitions. And in exchange for payment of these taxes the cities had made Karl promise that he would never again pawn them away or diminish their privileges.

But needs must. So, Karl goes about pawning and selling imperial cities to territorial lords as if there had never been any such agreements. The crassest treatment was suffered by the city of Cologne, still Germany’s largest. To obtain the vote of the archbishop of Cologne, Karl had to revoke a number of privileges for the city. the problem was that he had just recently issued a charter granting Cologne a wide range of privileges and almost complete independence from the archbishop’s control. The only way to solve this conundrum was for the imperial chancellery to blatantly declared that they had never issued such a charter and that whatever paper the good citizens of Cologne held in their hand was not worth the parchment it was written on. When the baffled citizens protested pointing out their long track record of loyalty to the empire, Karl placed the whole city under the imperial ban.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cities had already been quite upset about the Golden Bull that prevented them from forming city alliances for mutual protection, whilst at the same time not producing a general peace, a Landfrieden, for the whole empire. How were the roads going to be made safe if they could neither do it themselves nor rely on the government. In their eyes the emperor had not only failed them but was now charging excessive taxes, and worse, placing them under the control of territorial lords who wanted to dismantle their freedoms.

18 Swabian cities, led by the city of Ulm formed the Schwäbische Bund, a league of defense against imperial overreach. When Wenceslaus was finally elected and crowned in 1376, the cities refused to acknowledge him as king unless he vouched not to pawn them to anyone, ever.

Wenceslaus responded by declaring an imperial war against the cities and brought an army before the walls of Ulm. But that was as far as he got. His forces were – as so often in this period – unable to overcome the city’s defenses.

The success boosted the citizens of Ulm’s self-confidence and they began work on the Ulmer Muenster, a parish church that was to outshine all other churches in the land, even its cathedrals. Its tower was to rise higher than any other in the land, even in the whole of Christendom. Their architect was none other than the Father of Peter Parler the master builder responsible for St. Vitus cathedral and the Charles bridge in Prague. The great tower was only finished in the 19th century, but at 161 meters became the highest church tower in the world.

The other outcome of the defeat was that Karl and Wenceslaus had to agree a ceasefire that wa supposed to turn into a lasting agreement. Negotiations were protracted. In a rather blatant twisting of the facts, Karl declared that he had never thought of pawning any of his most loyal imperial cities. The cities did not believe a word of that and by 1377 the Schwäbische Bund had grown to 28 members. Even the staunchly loyal city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber joined the alliance. They had even entered into negotiations with Karl’s enemies, the Habsburgs and count Eberhard of Württemberg.

At that point the emperor and his son realized that they were in a bit of a pickle. The cities had been not just an important source of taxes and soldiers funding the imperial tasks, but they had also been a counterweight to the power of the princes and in particular the prince electors. By alienating them, there was a genuine risk that the cities, even the still loyal ones like Nürnberg and Frankfurt could switch sides and leave the Luxemburgs isolated.

This point was likely made most forcefully by the members of Karl’s chancellery, many of whom were members of the educated elites of the cities. The same argument was made by his closest advisers and financiers, the great bankers of Nurnberg, Augsburg and Regensburg.

In 1377, father and son cave and solemnly promise that the imperial cities of the Schwäbische Bund cannot ever be pawned. Having rewarded the rebels, this privilege was then extended to the imperial cities that had remained loyal.

Making the imperial cities unalienable was certainly politically opportune, but it also removed the very last asset an emperor could use to fund any imperial infrastructure. From this time onwards, anyone carrying the crown of the Holy Roman Empire will have to depend predominantly on his own financial and military resources for whatever projects he -and very rarely she – wants to pursue.

Rebuilding his dynasties’ relationship with the cities preoccupied in his last years. In the summer of 1378, after return from his trip to France we discussed last week, he was in Nürnberg to hold a diet and was shocked to find still so many of the Swabian cities not attending. The problem had clearly not gone away despite all the assurances.

One final act was to write his testament. And as much as he wanted to pass all his possessions plus the lands of his half-brother, the duke of Luxemburg to his beloved Wenceslaus, he concluded that this would cause too much friction in the family. Therefore, he split this enormous territory that made up almost a quarter of the empire north of the Alps between his sons. Wenceslaus did get the lion’s share, i.e., the kingdom of Bohemia with Moravia and Silesia. But Brandenburg went to Wenceslaus half-brother Sigismund. A third brother, John was made duke of Görlitz, but as a vassal to his older brother. Apart from his sons, Karl had to also consider his nephews, the children of his brother Johann Heinrich of Moravia. The eldest of them, Jobst, went on to inherit Moravia, technically as a vassal to Wenceslaus, but we will see how that pans out.

On November 29, 1378 Charles IV passed away in his splendid capital, the city of Prague, aged 62, probably from general exhaustion and the severe gout he had suffered from for decades. He had ruled the empire for 30 years, not counting the first 2 years of civil war against the Wittelsbachs.

In this time, he had profoundly changed the empire. The Golden Bull became the bedrock of a newly defined empire, the Holy Roman Empire forever ridiculed by Voltaire. But as we discussed in the Golden Bull episode, there wasn’t much room for Karl to do anything other than recognizing the power of the princes. And, quite frankly, living in a country where a centralized monarchy has sucked all economic, cultural and political activity into a 607 square mile plot of overpriced land, I do see great advantages in the more fragmented structure of Germany where multiple cities host world leading industries, where one can have dozens of internationally recognized museums spread across the country, where towns have literary and theatrical traditions going back centuries and still thriving and where the states elect their own parliaments and governments – for good and for bad.

His other achievement was to bring the relationship between pope and emperor onto a new plane. This was not all his own work, his predecessor Ludwig the Bavarian had already cut a path here, and the weakness of the Avignon papacy was a major factor as well, but the fact remains that after 300 years of conflict literally to the death, from here forward pope and emperor acted in unison. Whether that was a good idea is something we will discuss by my estimate for the next at least 12 months.

And the most recognizable legacy of his reign is no doubt the city of Prague, its famous bridge, its cathedral, the extension that more than doubled its size, the astoundingly large squares, its university and the various monasteries and churches he founded. We have not talked much about his other great project, like his intended capital for Brandenburg in Tangermuende and  the castle of Karl Steijn near Prague. If you ever get to Czech Republic, make sure you go there. Few medieval buildings exist that still breathe the spirit of its creator, as much as this does.

But despite his great achievements, he also failed to deliver in some crucial dimensions. The Golden Bull has always been a stripped-down version of a much larger legislative concept. What he had initially hoped to achieve is usually summarized under the title of general peace or Landfrieden. The Landfrieden is quite a bit more than just the idea of an agreement between princes and cities to keep the piece.

The way Karl thought about it was set it out in the Majestas Carolina, his abandoned project to create a new legal framework for Bohemia kingdom. This concept incorporated a lot of the provisions from the Constitutions of Melfi (episode 80) that Frederick II had implemented in his kingdom of Sicily.

Under a general Landfrieden, there would be an obligation for all parties to refrain from violence and instead bring their disputes before a judge. The judges would base their decision on the provisions in the law code and their decision was final. Anyone who would take up arms against that decision would become and enemy of the state and be persecuted by the state authority.

This would have given the emperor a monopoly of violence, as it was gradually been implemented in France and England. Trial by combat and feuding was to be replaced by written law implemented by institutions, resulting in a dramatic increase security and in consequence of communications and trade. It is a concept we find pretty basic and normal today but for medieval aristocrats it was an unacceptable infringement of their political rights. They had become used to being able to mold the law according to their personal preferences, and to use force in the pursuit of their perceived rights. In particular as it related to people of lower social standing, i.e., peasants and burghers, aristocrats did not believe to be bound by any rules. Only the interaction between aristocrats was to be governed by the chivalric code but again, not by a law made by the monarch.

These reforms failed on the resistance of the barons in Bohemia and Karl was smart enough not to try it in the empire where his position was weaker.

With the general peace being a no-go, the other reforms, such as common standard for coinage also fell by the wayside. It will be Karl’s successors who will spend the next 100 years dragging the elites of the empire kicking and screaming into a system of law and institutions that provides a general peace.

This story and the other big issue, the schism in the church and the recurring demands for church reform will be the subject of our next season. I have not yet decided on the title, so stay tuned. Next week I have lined up an interview with Vaclav Zurek, researcher at the Prague Academy of Sciences who has just written a biography of Karl IV, which is coming out in English translation this autumn. I am sure you will enjoy hearing this story from a Czech perspective.

See you on the other side.

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International policies of Emperor Karl IV

For more than a hundred years the Holy Roman Empire was a mess of constant infighting between and within the great princely families. But by the 1360s the consistent policies and elaborate diplomacy of emperor Karl IV had produced a degree of stability not seen by anyone alive.

With the home front calm, the emperor can again assume a role on the European stage, setting in train seminal events that will reverberate across the centuries…

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 162 – Schisms and Deals, the international policies of Emperor Karl IV, also episode 25 of season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”.

For more than a hundred years the Holy Roman Empire was a mess of constant infighting between and within the great princely families. But by the 1360s the consistent policies and elaborate diplomacy of emperor Karl IV had produced a degree of stability not seen by anyone alive.

With the home front calm, the emperor can again assume a role on the European stage, setting in train seminal events that will reverberate across the centuries…

But before we start it is once more time for me to come before you like an Avignon pope in search of an armed escort to Rome. You know that keeping this show on the road is already a whole lot of work as it is. Now that we move into the early modern period the research effort required is growing exponentially, which is why I am contemplating adding some support to the team. And that will come at a cost, a cost that is borne by our generous patrons who have signed up on my website historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time contribution or subscribe on Patreon. Please remember that if you own an iPhone, do not sign up on Patreon from the phone since Apple will charge you a whopping 30% for nothing. And thanks a lot to Richard J, Guenter R. fan of the Simplicissimus, Madeleine S., Stefan K., Tom J. and Patrick A. who have already made the plunge.

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These last two episodes we have focused on domestic policy, specifically the Golden Bull and how it shifted the political structure of the empire without saying anything fundamentally new. Now it is time to look at Karl IV’s role in a European context.

And the first point to make is that there was a role in a European context at all. For the last 100 years the kings and emperors had been preoccupied holding on to the bucking Bronco that was the Holy roman empire. When they ventured abroad it was to get to Rome to be crowned and ideally coming back without succumbing to disease, excommunication or attempted murder.

Karl’s clever policies and generous offers of marriages and military support, neither of which ever arrived kept his enemies divided and the empire free of major civil wars. And so he was the first ruler since Frederick II to cast his eye beyond the borders of the empire.

And cast afar he does. In 1370 he develops an interest in the Hanse and in Denmark. Yes, all the way north. No emperor had given a thought to these far flung places for centuries. Yes, Frederick Barbarossa had been in Lübeck in 1181 as part of the campaign to topple Henry the Lion. But that was an exception to the rule. Since Henry IV the emperors had stayed well clear of Saxony, unless they were Saxons themselves like Lothair III and Otto IV.

If you have listened to the series about the Hanseatic League, the year 1370 is the year when the Hanse in general and Lübeck in particular reach the absolute pinnacle of political, not economic, reach. They have just defeated king Waldemar Atterdag, the morning dawn who had reconsolidated the Danish kingdom. As a consequence the Hanse had gained a de facto monopoly on Baltic trade, namely the furs and beeswax from Novgorod, the grain from all along the Baltic coast and Poland, the metals from Sweden and most importantly the herring from Denmark, the staple food during the over 200 fast days catholic europe observed at the time.

One indicator how important the imperial court had become was that when Waldemar Atterdag fled Denmark after his defeat, he came to Prague. He lobbied the emperor to punish the Hanse cities for daring to attack an anointed monarch. But Karl had no intention to go after Lübeck. The city and its Hanse associates featured highly in his plans to foster the economy of his lands. One of his many projects was to divert trade from the traditional North south route along the Rhine to a new route from Venice via Vienna, Prague and Brandenburg to the Baltic and the North Sea.

Karl did not only refuse to help king Waldemar of Denmark, he actively supported Lübeck. He appointed the Burgermeisters of Lübeck as his imperial vicars, making them the most senior representatives of the empire in the North. This is the first time such a role was granted to anyone who wasn’t a senior aristocrat. And on the 20th October 1375 he showed up in person. For a full 11 days the city of Lübeck celebrated an imperial visit, a celebration that wrecked the city’s already fragile public finances. In return he formally addressed the members of the council as “Herren”, or lords, which must have felt great.

And then he did the other thing he was so good at, keeping people guessing. Whilst the emperor was wined and dined by the great merchants of the Hanse, king Waldemar Atterdag had finally passed away without a male heir. The result was a war of succession between the duke of Mecklenburg and Waldemar’s daughter. Margaret. The Hanse very much supported Margaret as they did not want to be surrounded on all sides by a ruler of both Denmark and Mecklenburg. Karl let slip that he preferred the Mecklenburg succession. Did he really or was that just another bargaining chip in his constant complex game of give and take? My guess it was the latter.

Whilst Lübeck was the northernmost end of his travels, he also travelled south again. And this time on a pan-European mission.

The reason for this journey lay in Avignon. By 1365 the popes had resided outside of Italy for 60 years already. The reigning pope, Urban V was the sixth pontiff to live in Avignon. They had made themselves comfortable in the splendid papal palace, they had bought the Comtat Venaissin, the county surrounding Avignon from the house of Anjou and Karl had released it from imperial overlordship.

But still the popes chafed under the influence of the French kings. Ever so often the popes had to make decisions in the interest of the house of Valois they would not otherwise have made. And this bias was making the church lose ever more prestige amongst the other monarchs across europe. Feeling the pinch, the successors to St. Peter had been looking for ways to get out of the clutches of the French. There was one obvious way to do that, and that was returning to Italy, and if possible returning to Rome.

The popes had tried to lay some groundwork by sending the energetic cardinal Albarnoz to rebuild papal influence in Rome. By the way Albarnoz was the cardinal who had accompanied Cola di Rienzi and then helped topple him. But despite hiring mercenary armies and fighting his way across what used to be the papal states, Albarnoz’ resources were simply insufficient to secure a safe return for the pope to Rome.

Given that none of the Italian republics and autocracies wanted the pope back, the only power in europe that could secure a return of the pontiff was the emperor. So when Karl came to Avignon in 1365 to discuss various other subjects to do with the plague of unemployed soldiers rampaging across the countryside, pope Urban V steered the conversation forcefully towards a second journey to Rome.

We do not know whether Karl embraced the idea joyfully out of his profound piety or whether he believed it to be a massive waste of time and money. But he could not refuse Urban’s demand. As emperor he was the protector of the church and Christians all across europe longed for the pope to return to Rome. One famous propaganda image of the time shows Saint Bridget of Sweden cowering amongst the ruins of a desolate Rome praying for the return of the pope.

Pope Urban V sets off for Italy in 1367 and miraculously made it to Viterbo. But then he runs out of puff. There is no way he can get into the Holy city by hook or by crook. The pope now demands Karls help most urgently.

Karl had been delayed by another outbreak of the Black death, the reluctance of princes and cities to provide money and soldiers and the usual complexity of Italian politics. Finally in April 1368 did he set off with a sizeable army, mostly comprising mercenaries. He entered Italy from the North East via Friuli and Aquilae and made his way to Milan. Barnabo Visconti, the ruler of Milan is not only a longstanding opponent of the emperor but also reluctant to let the pope get back into the papal states. As usual, there is a bit of moderate fighting before Karl got everybody to sit down around a table and hammered out a deal. The Visconti agreed to let the imperial army pass, provided a 1,000 additional helmets in exchange for being made imperial vicars of Lombardy.

Next stop is Tuscany where Karl gains free passage by approving whichever party had just recently seized power in whichever bloody coup and is now in need of some legitimacy.

In October 1368 Karl IV entered Rome and on the 29th of this month he welcomed pope Urban V at the gates of the city. Honoring an entirely made up ancient tradition Karl dismounts his charger and leads the papal horse with the pope on top to the Lateran palace. This service of the groom had been a point of contention for popes and emperors since forever. Some observers, like for instance the great Nurnberg banker Ulman Stromer described this act as a humiliation for the Reich. Others, like the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati sees it as an image of hope, the two leaders of Christendom acting in unison, returning the church to its natural home.

It is the latter image that finds more currency across europe. And it is backed up with further displays of unity. Pope and emperor spent the next two months in close proximity, discussing how Italy in general and the papal states in particular could be stabilized.

Tuscany was a particularly complicated part of the conundrum. They tried to instigate a coup in Siena, but that failed. The next focal point was the Lucca. Lucca had fallen under Pisan control, something the Lucchese found unbearable. So in spring 1369 Karl took his army to Lucca and declared it a free and imperial city, thereby cancelling the Pisan overlordship. The Pisan could not do much about that, in part because of Karl’s army and in part because they were caught up in brutal infighting between the elites and the middle classes. Lucca still commemorates this day with a great parade on every Sunday after easter, the day the city threw off the Pisan yoke.

All good stuff, but now summer is approaching and with it the risk of disease goes up stratospherically. Karl took his army and returned across the Alps. So much for ever lasting unity between pope and emperor.

Poor pope Urban V realized quite quickly that there was no way he can hold out in Rome by himself. He packed his bags and returned to Avignon, no doubt cursing the inconsistency of the emperor. Urban V died a few months later, passing the baton on to Gregory XI.

The old pope may be gone, but the fundamental problem has not gone. The popes still needed to go back to Rome. After Urban V’s debacle, his successor Gregory XI did not rely on the emperor to pave the way to Rome. Instead of oaths and loyalty, Gregory XI and his legate, Robert of Geneva, believed in the power of money. The pope hired even more mercenaries including the famous company of John Harwood who forged a way to Rome with fire and sword. It was a hard fight since almost all north Italian cities had joined a league intended to stop the pope from returning. But return he did. He entered Rome on January 17th, 1378. By March 27th of that same year he was dead.

At that point things get a bit out of control. When the cardinals who had come along to Rome met to elect a successor, a mob gathered outside and demanded the election, not just of an Italian, but of a Roman. The cardinals inside were almost to a man, French. So they chose the next best option, Bartolomeo Prignano, the archbishop of Bari and vice-chancellor of the church. He was at least Italian, if not Roman. The new pope took the name Urban VI and was duly presented to people. The mob dispersed believing they had got their wish granted. It took them a little while to figure out that Urban VI was Neapolitan rather than Roman, enough time for the majority of cardinals to skip town and flee back to  the safety of Avignon. Once they had arrived back home, the Avignon cardinals declared the election of Urban VI null and void, due to the threats to life and limb they had experienced. And they then proceeded to elect Robert of Geneva, perpetrator of the massacre of Cesena and other godly deeds as pope Clement VII.

This is the beginning of the western Schism, the almost forty years when two and sometimes three competing popes tore the Christian world apart. One pope would reside in Avignon under French protection, another in Rome, supported by, amongst others, the Holy Roman Emperors, including Karl IV. We will hear a lot more about the schism when we get into the next season, but suffice to say that this split did nothing to rebuild the already severely damaged moral authority of the papacy.

The Western schism is surely one of the seminal moments in the late middle ages with implications that reverberate into modernity. But as far as the role of the empire or more precisely the position of the emperor himself was concerned, another long term trend is taking shape. And that is the beginning of a rivalry between France and the empire/the ruling family of the empire.

Let us just quickly recap where the French monarchy is in the 1370s.

The Hundred-years war had begun in 1337. The first major battle at Crecy took place in 1346, a battle that Karl had actually taken part in and where his father had died in an act of chivalric madness. King Edward III of England had won this battle and used it to acquire the city of Calais. When the Black death hit in 1348, hostilities ceased for a few years. Action resumed in the 1350s but French luck did not improve. The next encounter at Poitiers in 1356 goes horribly wrong. The king John II called le Bon, the Good was captured. In the subsequent treaty of Bretigny the French ceded vast amounts of territory around the west and south west of France to the English on top of a 3 million ecu ransom for the release of the king. In return king Edward III of England renounced his claim to the French crown.

King John II was called “the Good” for reasons I will explain in a minute, but should in fact been called John the apocalyptically useless. He returned from captivity upon payment of the first third of the ransom and the provision of new hostages, including two of his sons. When one of his sons escaped, John II felt honor-bound to return back into captivity. John II died in England in 1364.

Many contemporaries interpreted his return to England as praiseworthy adherence to the chivalric code, which is why they called him the Good. But in practical terms this act was catastrophically ill judged. France was on its knees due to the enormous ransom payments, the loss of large sways of territory and the hordes of unpaid soldiers ransacking the countryside, not to mention the recurring waves of the Plague. What the country needed was an effective ruler trying to put things right. With John II absent, the burden of royalty fell on his eldest son, the future king Charles V. Charles V was nothing like his father, he was a diligent and competent man who attracted exceptional military commanders to his service like Bertrand du Guescelin.

But he was fighting with one hand tied behind his back. For one he had his father still in England which ruled out any action against the English. He also was seriously short of cash, forcing him to call the estates general that squeezed concessions out of him. But one of the most serious long term problems was his father’s generosity. John II had four sons and he left them each vast territories carved out of the royal purse. The youngest who had stayed with his father in captivity was most generously rewarded, Philip was made duke of Burgundy.  Philip would later acquire the county of Flanders by marriage which made him the richest peer in France, rich enough to challenge royal authority, which is the story of Agincourt, Joan of Arc etc.

But we are still a bit before that. Charles V, despite all his handicaps, managed to secure his reign in France and in 1369 resumed hostilities with the English.  And again, patiently, one by one, the French, led by Du Guescelin recovered every single bit of territory they had given up in the treaty of Bretigny. This process was completed in 1378 with the English reduced to Aquitaine and Calais.

What all this means for our emperor Karl is that he could step into a power vacuum left by the French preoccupation with the English. He could assert imperial authority on the western border by holding his splendid diet in Metz, he could even get the future Charles V to accept his lands in the Dauphine and Franche Comte as an imperial fief including the whole kneeling and swearing bit. In 1365 he took a few days off from his negotiations with pope Urban V and nipped down to Arles to get himself crowned king of the Arelat, the ancient kingdom of Burgundy. Again, nobody had done that since the days of Barbarossa. He then used the opportunity to reorganize this kingdom. In particular he moved Savoy out of the Arelat and under direct control of the empire.

The weakness of the French court may also have been one of the reasons why the Popes felt able to attempt a return to Rome.

But this weakness did not last forever. As I said, by 1378 Charles V had returned at least his territorial position back to the status quo ante. The country was still a lot poorer with the plague and decades of war and plundering mercenaries, but overall, the French were back in the saddle.

And being back in fighting force could only mean one thing, the French were looking for some new acquisitions. And there was an opportunity out there that was truly enormous. The house of Anjou, the cadet branch of the French royal house had amassed a whole host of crowns, Sicily, Hungary, Poland and Provence in particular. And they had the decency to die out, at least in part. King Louis the Great of Hungary was blessed with three daughters, but no son.

King Charles V of France moved quickly and managed to get his younger son Louis engaged to King Louis’ eldest daughter and heir presumptive, Catherine. The calculation behind this was obvious. Once cousin Louis of Hungary had snuffed it, the battle hardened French army would go to Hungary with pitstops in Provence and Sicily. And once there, Poland would be the next one on the list.

Our friend Karl IV, though now rapidly approaching his sixties, suffering abysmally from gout and the consequences of the mystery illness he had contracted in the 1350s, realized the deadly danger this plan posed for him and the empire. If the French were to rule the two kingdoms in his back, Hungary and Poland, the empire would be surrounded and would in the long run fall to the Valois as well. There was no room for a great House of Luxemburg and the seven electors in this scenario. Therefore this French plan needed to be scuppered and scuppered at all cost.

So in 1378 he took his son and heir Wenceslaus and set off to the city where he had spent his youth, Paris. No crowned emperor had been to Paris since Otto II’s ill-fated attempt at taking the city in 978. Such a visit caused no end of complexity for the court officials in charge of protocol.

According to roman law, which by now was accepted as the basis of temporal justice across France the emperor was the unconstrained ruler of the known world. Karl was emperor and France was part of the world, so Karl was at least in theory, the absolute monarch in France. But at the same time this could not be. All these last few centuries French lawyers had worked on the basis that the king of France was standing in for the emperor with all the rights that come with it. That worked fine as long as there is a zero percent chance of the actual emperor ever showing up.

Now Karl was far too politically savvy to insist on a legal fiction that would never be implementable. But what he did insist on was that the emperor did formally rank above the King of France. All the sequences of greeting and serving food and so forth were important to him, because most of his power rested on the imperial prestige.

Charles V and his courtiers did an exceptional job of treading the fine line between recognizing the imperial authority whilst not really admitting that the king of France was subordinate to the emperor. The event is recorded in a whole host of illuminated manuscripts and it is quite interesting to see how much care the painters took to depict the relative rank of  the two monarchs.

There was one ceremony however that the French were unwilling to allow to let take place on French soil. And that was the reading of the Christmas story in church. Because Karl had the habit to read the crucial verses “And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from the emperor Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed” whilst wearing his full imperial regalia, crown, scepter and orb, basically appearing as the emperor Caesar Augustus in church.

To stop that  from happening, the French held Karl back in Cambrai, on imperial territory until after Christmas 1377.

Once all these issues of protocol were sorted out, the two monarchs finally sat down to hash out their differences. No record of the discussions exists. All we know is what happened next.

The emperor appointed the dauphin of France, the future Charles VI as imperial vicar first in the Dauphine and then in the whole of the Arelat. With that the French monarch became the de facto ruler of Provence and the Rhone valley, territories that had once been part of the kingdom of Lothar and hence lands the French kings had always and forever believed were theirs. Though Charles VI was only made imperial vicar for life this appointment is usually seen as the moment when Provence leaves the purview of the Holy Roman Empire. It would still take until 1486 before Provence became formally a part of France.

Meanwhile the marriage between Louis of Valois and Catherine of Hungary did not take place. That was in part due to the fact that Catherine died aged 7 in 1378. But that was not the only reason. King Louis of Hungary still had another daughter, Hedwig, who he could have betrothed to young Louis. But that did not happen. Instead Hedwig remained unmarried at her father’s death, went to Poland, changed her name to Jadwiga and married the grand duke of Lithuania creating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Now I am not one to speculate about what happened here, but my best guess is that Karl and Charles had come to an agreement. The French King gave up his plans on Hungary and in exchange he got Provence. As the Germans say, better the sparrow in your hand than the dove on the roof.

If that was so, then we also see here a clear reorientation of imperial policy. Giving up positions in the west in the interest of expanding and deepening holdings in the east would be a key feature of Luxemburg and later Habsburg policy. It is also the beginning of the rivalry between the kings of France and the Holy Roman Emperors, a rivalry that would be an axis of European politics for 400 years, basically until Frederick the Great and the English mix things up.

As you hopefully see, this period of the 14th century is one of enormous change that lay the foundations for the events that will dominate the subsequent centuries. One last item we still have to tick off the list and that is the whole subject of succession. That is what we will do next week. I hope you will join us again.

And before I go let me just remind you that you can support the podcast by going to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or find a link to patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

by on

Karl IV’s Hausmacht

“In the regions of Germany, he worked to establish peace and foster the affairs of the empire. Then, in the same year, during the month of November, he entered the city of Metz, a city both large and exceedingly famous, where, as it was said, no emperor had been walking under the crown for 300 years. He was received with great solemnity by the princes, nobles, and citizens. The citizens of the city went out to meet him three miles away, presenting him with the keys to the city and all its gates, willingly submitting themselves and their possessions to his empire with all benevolence. And there was great joy at the entrance of the lord emperor; all the clergy and the entire populace joyfully met him, warmly welcoming him, and led him to the episcopal residence prepared for his lodging, with relics, hymns, and songs.

Afterwards, the lord emperor stayed there and summoned an imperial court and council with the princes of the empire to be held in the same city during the upcoming feast of the Nativity of Christ. When the feast of the Nativity of the Lord approached, the ambassadors of the lord pope arrived at the imperial court, namely Cardinal Talleyrand and the Abbot of Cluny. Additionally, the two sons of the King of France, the firstborn and the second, the nephews of the lord emperor, also came. Furthermore, the archbishops of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz were present, along with the Duke of Luxembourg, representing the King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer. The Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, also attended, as well as the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the arch-steward, and the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, the holders of the great offices of the Holy Empire.

On the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, during Matins, the lord emperor, adorned with imperial insignia, read the Gospel before the aforementioned princes that began with: ‘A decree went out from Caesar Augustus,’ and the lord cardinal sang the first Mass before the emperor, from whose hands the lord emperor humbly and devoutly received the Holy Eucharist. Then the Archbishop of Cologne celebrated the High Mass of that day, and after it was solemnly performed, all the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates, as well as secular princes, led the lord emperor and the lady empress, dressed in imperial robes and insignia, solemnly to the banquet hall prepared in the town square and exquisitely decorated, where many tables and seats were set up for the invited guests.

When the lord emperor was seated at the head of the table, the holders of the great offices of the empire came forward, each performing their respective duties according to custom. First came the aforementioned archbishops the archchancellors of Germany, Italy and Burgundy each carrying their imperial seals. Then the Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, came on his charger before the table, carrying oats in a silver vessel for the imperial horses, and he seated each prince at the table in the place designated for them. After him came the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, on horseback, carrying a golden basin and beautiful towels, and he offered water to the emperor, who was seated on the throne. Next, the Count Palatine brought food in golden dishes and, after tasting it, placed it before the emperor. After him came Wenceslaus, Duke of Luxembourg and Brabant, the brother of the lord emperor, representing the lord King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer, carrying wine in golden cups, and after tasting it, he gave it to the emperor to drink. Finally, the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, and the Count of Schwarzburg, the under-huntsman, came with hunting dogs and many horns, making a great noise, and they brought a stag and a wild boar to the prince’s table with all due cheerfulness.

A great feast was held on that day, the likes of which no one could recall. After the feast, the lord emperor bestowed various magnificent gifts upon the different princes, and they all departed with joy and happiness to their own lands. In the same year, the emperor laid the foundation or the primary stone for the new Prague Bridge near the monastery of St. Clement. In the year of our Lord 1358, the lord emperor went to Bohemia and constructed many buildings there.” end quote

All is well in the empire. The Golden Bull had been debated, agreed, sealed and then celebrated at the great diet in Metz you just heard about. The first time in decades that all the Prince Electors had come together and performed the ancient duties of their offices. Even the Dauphin of France had come to do homage to Karl IV for the lands he held inside the empire.

But did all the princes join in the joy? No, not really. There are always some who felt left out and they will try to upturn the new order. How they tried to do that and why these efforts laid the foundations for the future Habsburg empire is what we will discuss today…

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 161 – A Luxemburg Empire, also episode 24 of Season 8: from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

“In the regions of Germany, he worked to establish peace and foster the affairs of the empire. Then, in the same year, during the month of November, he entered the city of Metz, a city both large and exceedingly famous, where, as it was said, no emperor had been walking under the crown for 300 years. He was received with great solemnity by the princes, nobles, and citizens. The citizens of the city went out to meet him three miles away, presenting him with the keys to the city and all its gates, willingly submitting themselves and their possessions to his empire with all benevolence. And there was great joy at the entrance of the lord emperor; all the clergy and the entire populace joyfully met him, warmly welcoming him, and led him to the episcopal residence prepared for his lodging, with relics, hymns, and songs.

Afterwards, the lord emperor stayed there and summoned an imperial court and council with the princes of the empire to be held in the same city during the upcoming feast of the Nativity of Christ. When the feast of the Nativity of the Lord approached, the ambassadors of the lord pope arrived at the imperial court, namely Cardinal Talleyrand and the Abbot of Cluny. Additionally, the two sons of the King of France, the firstborn and the second, the nephews of the lord emperor, also came. Furthermore, the archbishops of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz were present, along with the Duke of Luxembourg, representing the King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer. The Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, also attended, as well as the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the arch-steward, and the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, the holders of the great offices of the Holy Empire.

On the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, during Matins, the lord emperor, adorned with imperial insignia, read the Gospel before the aforementioned princes that began with: ‘A decree went out from Caesar Augustus,’ and the lord cardinal sang the first Mass before the emperor, from whose hands the lord emperor humbly and devoutly received the Holy Eucharist. Then the Archbishop of Cologne celebrated the High Mass of that day, and after it was solemnly performed, all the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates, as well as secular princes, led the lord emperor and the lady empress, dressed in imperial robes and insignia, solemnly to the banquet hall prepared in the town square and exquisitely decorated, where many tables and seats were set up for the invited guests.

When the lord emperor was seated at the head of the table, the holders of the great offices of the empire came forward, each performing their respective duties according to custom. First came the aforementioned archbishops the archchancellors of Germany, Italy and Burgundy each carrying their imperial seals. Then the Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, came on his charger before the table, carrying oats in a silver vessel for the imperial horses, and he seated each prince at the table in the place designated for them. After him came the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, on horseback, carrying a golden basin and beautiful towels, and he offered water to the emperor, who was seated on the throne. Next, the Count Palatine brought food in golden dishes and, after tasting it, placed it before the emperor. After him came Wenceslaus, Duke of Luxembourg and Brabant, the brother of the lord emperor, representing the lord King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer, carrying wine in golden cups, and after tasting it, he gave it to the emperor to drink. Finally, the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, and the Count of Schwarzburg, the under-huntsman, came with hunting dogs and many horns, making a great noise, and they brought a stag and a wild boar to the prince’s table with all due cheerfulness.

A great feast was held on that day, the likes of which no one could recall. After the feast, the lord emperor bestowed various magnificent gifts upon the different princes, and they all departed with joy and happiness to their own lands. In the same year, the emperor laid the foundation or the primary stone for the new Prague Bridge near the monastery of St. Clement. In the year of our Lord 1358, the lord emperor went to Bohemia and constructed many buildings there.” end quote

All is well in the empire. The Golden Bull had been debated, agreed, sealed and then celebrated at the great diet in Metz you just heard about. The first time in decades that all the Prince Electors had come together and performed the ancient duties of their offices. Even the Dauphin of France had come to do homage to Karl IV for the lands he held inside the empire.

But did all the princes join in the joy? No, not really. There are always some who felt left out and they will try to upturn the new order. How they tried to do that and why these efforts laid the foundations for the future Habsburg empire is what we will discuss today…

But, before we start just the usual reminder that the history of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by going to my website historyofthegermans.com and look for support the show. There you can ether join Patreon or make a one-time donation. And thanks a lot to Brigham T., Vincent C., Christopher B., Charisse P for a second time, Owen O. and Julian T. who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

Last week we discussed the Golden Bull of 1356, its content and significance. And despite the fact that there wasn’t much fundamentally new in the provisions, by writing down the detailed process for the election of a King of the Romans, it fixed in place who the seven electors were and – by omission rather than explicitly – that the pope had no say in the choice of ruler.

We discussed why the popes had to accept this resolution to the 300 year conflict between Rome and the empire, a conflict that had dominated our narrative for the last 160 episodes. So, if you have not listened to it, do it now.

But the pope wasn’t the only loser from the Golden Bull. There were also the Bavarian Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs.

The house of Wittelsbach had two electoral votes in 1357, one as Counts Palatinate on the Rhine and one as margraves of Brandenburg.

As I mentioned before, the fundamental difference between the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs was that the Habsburgs almost always stuck together in the interest of the dynasty, whilst the Wittelsbachs literally always fought amongst each other. In a way Karl owed his ascendance to the throne to one of these family squabbles which led to the defection of the Wittelsbach count palatinate to his side in 1348. The different branches would constantly fight each other, then divide territory between them in complex treaties and succession arrangements. This propensity to quarrel with their brothers and cousins is at least partial reason why the capital of Germany is now Berlin rather than Munich.

One of these complex treaties amongst members of the House of Wittelsbach was an arrangement between the Palatinate line and their cousins, the sons of Ludwig the Bavarian whereby the two sides of the family would take turns in exercising the electoral vote.

The Golden Bull prohibited this arrangement as it sets out that only the count Palatinate could cast a vote. That froze the dukes of Bavaria, specifically Ludwig the elder out of this vote.

But he still had another one, that of Brandenburg. Brandenburg as you may remember had initially been acquired by emperor Ludwig the Bavarian for his son Ludwig the Elder and had become the key battleground of Karl’s war over the imperial crown. Karl had supported a usurper called the false Waldemar who had thrown Ludwig the Elder out of the Margraviate. In 1350 Karl had settled with the Wittelsbachs, dropped the false Waldemar and enfeoffed Ludwig the elder as margrave again.

But for Ludwig the Elder Brandenburg was a bit second best. The county’s soil was famously sandy, gaining it the nickname the Reichsstreusandbuechse. So it wasn’t particularly fertile. Moreover, the Wittelsbachs never managed to get a proper grip of the margraviate. Local lords and the cities, in particular the largest, Berlin, kept feuding with each other and with Ludwig the Elder. The war of the false Waldemar had further devastated the land, so that net, net there was not much profit to be made of that territory. And, it was a long way from Munich.

As one would expect, Ludwig the Elder was very disappointed with the outcome of the Golden Bull. Hence he started a feud against Karl and tried to bring together a coalition of opponents to Karl’s reign which we will talk about in a minute in more detail. Amongst the members of this coalition should have been his 5 brothers, each holding a bit of  the vast territory their father had gathered together in 30 years on the throne.

But Ludwig the Elder stumbled over the perennial Achilles heel of his house, the endless bickering. Karl managed to pull three of the five brothers over to his side with the promise of one of his daughters in marriage and ever-lasting support, that -as we know – never materialises.

In the end Ludwig the Elder caved in. He even passed the margraviate of Brandenburg to his two brothers, Ludwig the Roman and Otto the Lazy, two, as you may gather, not very dynamic stewards of the lands that would rise to dominance in centuries to come.

Mismanagement, lack of interest and rather complex arrangements over inheritance meant that in 1373 the Wittelsbachs were willing to sell the margraviate to Karl IV for the astronomic sum of 500,000 gold florin. Raising these funds brought him to the edge of what he could extract from Bohemia, the empire and all his other assorted positions.

Despite the truly enormous price, the deal was a bad one for the Bavarian Wittelsbachs. By selling Brandenburg they were kept out of the exclusive circle of the electors until 1623. Not being electors, the family did not move to primogenitor and so the duchy of Bavaria remained split into four different branches, Munich, Ingolstadt, Landshut and Straubing, each too small to play a significant role in German, let alone European politics. It took until 1505 before the four branches were reunited and Bavaria mattered again.

For Karl, the acquisition of Brandenburg, even in its sorry state was a major deal. It did fit into his broader strategy and vision.

As we are talking about people who were disappointed with the Golden Bull, one very vocal group were 19th century historians. They blamed Karl for selling the empire down the river. By giving the Prince electors king-like status inside their lands, he had made the creation of a powerful state as they were emerging in France and England, impossible. And many claimed he did it deliberately, as he was king of Bohemia first and emperor second.

This assessment is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the situation of the empire in the 14th century and the process how the French monarchy had become so dominant.

First up, there was no way Karl or anyone else was able to force the imperial princes, let alone the prince Electors into a system of centralised monarchy. The privileges and rights that granted them independence from imperial control were already hundreds of years old when Karl took over. The emperors who had made serious attempts, Henry IV, Lothar III and Barbarossa had found themselves in hot water very quickly. There was no imperial administration or infrastructure except for the chancery and a rudimentary court system. No capital, no army and hardly any resources to fund the state.

But the even more important point is that the Capetion kings did not come to dominate France by enforcing the ancient royal rights. No, they rose to hegemony by acquiring one county and duchy after the other as their own private possession. These private possessions were then comingled with the crown. In other words, the great princes of France weren’t defeated but disinherited.

If you look at Karl’s approach to the empire, he was doing exactly the same thing. He was patiently acquiring one county or duchy after another, growing his personal fiefdom in the hope  that – at some point – his dynasty would own every single duchy, margraviate, county and city in the empire. Exactly the way the French kings had done since the 11th century.

And in this way Karl acquired not just Brandenburg, but vast holdings in an area called the upper palatinate, which is roughly between the Czech border and Nurnberg. He built a system of connecting castles and estates, all the way from Nurnberg to Frankfurt as the nucleus for further expansion. He bought lower Lusatia and then upper Lusatia. His brother Wenzel had also built a major position in the West around Luxemburg and Brabant. As emperor he controlled the imperial cities mostly in Swabia. Through family ties he controlled parts of Bavaria. Through a complex marriage strategy Karl created options on other territories, should the incumbent die without male heirs, all driven by this concept of Hausmacht. And he bought Brandenburg. At its height, the Luxemburgs controlled a quarter of the empire directly.

And this quarter wasn’t just in the south. Karl becomes the first emperor to go to north for centuries, he is the first to visit Luebeck since Barbarossa. The great rift between the old duchy of Saxony and the rest of the empire is being bridged.

Therefore, even for a 19th century historian, who judged every action on whether it was helpful or unhelpful for the creation of a centralised nation state, Karl’s approach should have been applauded. The attempts to subdue the princes never worked, so time to try a new strategy. Buy what you can, what you can’t marry and only what resists to the end, conquer.

Still we aren’t done with the critics of the Golden Bull. It’s fiercest opponent is Rudolf IV, duke of Austria, head of the House of Habsburg. For the Habsburg the Golden Bull was a slap in the face. Other than the Wittelsbachs, they had not been given any electoral seat, nada, silch. And they had been the house that had placed two kings on the throne and been one of the three great families that had dominated imperial politics in the first half of the 14th century.

What really irritated them was that the Prince Electors had been given an elevated social status above the other imperial princes. The prince electors had special rights in their territories few other lords enjoyed. They were the inner circle that was meant to advise the emperor in annual conventions. Whenever there was an official imperial dinner, the Electors sat at a high table, whilst the other imperial princes were relegated to the lower tables in the second rank.

And Rudolf did not want to sit at the cat’s table. He was after all a descendant of Rudolf von Habsburg and duke of Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, count of Tyrol and Landgrave in Alsace. These were the actual titles, but since taking over the duchy of Austria, the Habsburgs had engaged in some serious mythmaking. The first thing was to co-opt the Babenberg family that had held Austria from the 10th century onwards and can trace back even further to the Carolingian times. The Babenberg’s were not just ancient but also most venerable. They had produced a string of dukes with epithets like “the Devout”, “the Illustrious”, “the Glorious” and “the Holy”. The latter, Leopold became a particular focus thanks to the miracles that were attributed to him. As the Habsburgs now claimed they had received Austria as an inheritance from the Babenberg’s, instead of by legalised theft, they also began using Babenberg names, in particular Leopold.

This notion of ancient, if not holy ancestry sat even more awkward with the relegation to second division in the Golden Bull.

Rudolf needed to reassert the standing of his family and therefore instructed his chancery to generate five documents to p[ove the eminence of the house of Austria. Three of those were copies of existing privileges, but two were something different. The first was a charter from emperor Henry IV from 1056 confirming the existence of 2 letters in the possession the Babenberger duke Ernst of Austria. The first letter was from none other than Julius Caesar addressed to the people of Noricum, the Roman province roughly equivalent to Austria. In this letter Caesar asked them to accept his uncle as their ruler, who had been given absolute rights over them as their feudal lord. The second letter is from emperor Nero, saying that Noricum/Austria is by far the most splendid of the Roman provinces and that henceforth it should be released from all taxes and duties to the empire. Caesar’s uncle was – as you can guess – the ancestor of the Babenbergs and hence the Habsburgs.

Then there is a second document, the privilegium maius, or greater privilege. That was based on something that actually did exist, the privilegium minus, or lesser privilege by which Barbarossa had elevated the Babenbergers to dukes of Austria (see episode 50). That privilege had already granted wide reaching rights to the dukes of Austria, but Rudolf needed more. He instructed his chancery to include provisions such as the right to wear a special crown that included the fillet or headband normally reserved for actual kings. And with this crown came a new title, “palatine archduke”. There we go, the Habsburgs invented the title of archduke. The title came with a lot of honours, including sitting to the right of the emperor at public events, leading processions and been given equal rank to the electors.

These documents, in particular the letters from Caesar and Nero were received with unreserved hilarity by contemporaries. Asked of his opinion, the poet and great Latinist Petrarch called the obvious anachronisms “not just risible but stomach churning”.

Still Rudolf insisted, all this was true and, since the Habsburgs did win in the end, the Greater privilege including the letters were considered genuine until the 19th century.

But Rudolf did not just fight with the quill. He did put together a coalition with the Wittelsbachs and the kings of Hungary and Poland against Karl IV.

Why the Wittelsbachs joined is quite obvious. As for the kings of Poland and Hungary, they had grown concerned about the rise of Karl’s power. His interest in Brandenburg and further north made the Poles uncomfortable. Then there was Karl’s long time association with the Teutonic Knights who had been clashing with the Poles over Pomeralia and Lithuania. As for Hungary, its ruler was the king of Poland’s named successor and as such had a strong interest in the wellbeing of his future kingdom.

Even though Karl was by now in a vastly more powerful position than either the Habsburgs or the Wittelsbachs, a war against their combined forces and those of Poland of Hungary would be hard, if not impossible to win.

As always, Karl resolved the issue, not with weapons, but with diplomacy. He went to meet king Kasimir the great of Poland in person and reassured him of his good intentions towards his kingdom. And to underpin that, he dropped his support for the Teutonic Knights in the conflict over Pomeralia (see episode 134). And to seal it all off, in 1363 he married Kazimir’s granddaughter, Elizabeth of Pomerania.

With Poland out of  the coalition, the king of Hungary had no reason to support a Habsburg-led insurrection. This king of Hungary was Louis I, called the Great. He was from the French house of Anjou that also ruled the kingdom of Naples. Louis was an eminently capable ruler who vastly extended Hungary and – like Karl – provided the country with a foundational document, this one remained in force even longer, until the end of the first world war. Not only that, he finally inherited Poland from Kasimir who had no male heir in 1370.

The two monarchs grew closer over time and in 1373 Louis promised his second daughter Mary in marriage to Karl’s second son, Sigismund. This would become very significant in the future, as Louis died without male heir. His three daughters, Catherine, Mary and Hedwig would inherit Hungary and Poland. When Louis died in 1382, Catherine was married to the dauphin of France, Mary was betrothed to Sigismund and Hedwig was not yet promised. Those of you who have listened to the series about the Teutonic Knights may remember Hedwig. The nobles of Poland called her to rule the kingdom, changed her name to Jadwiga and married her to Jogaila, the grand prince of Lithuania. These two than created the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth that stretched from the Baltic to almost the Black Sea.

His coalition broken, Rudolf’s plan to defeat Karl and potentially even become emperor himself had fallen apart. But again, Karl reacts as a diplomat, not as an autocrat. He could have probably sought a military resolution, but that was, as he kept saying, far too expensive and unpredictable.

Instead he sat down with the angry archduke and soothed his pains. He accepted some of the provisions of the greater Privilege despite knowing them to be fake. He confirmed the Habsburg acquisition of Tyrol and he agreed a family compact. This compact set forth that should either family die out in the male line, the other should inherit all their possessions.

Wow, what a long list of great options Karl had accumulated. By marrying Elizabeth of Pomerania, he had gained an option on the duchy of Pomerania and, through her grandfather Kasimir, an option on Poland. Then he had got his second son Sigismund an option on Hungary, and again possibly on Poland. And thanks to the family compound with the Habsburgs, an option on Austria.

And that last option looked pretty good for Karl. He had by now three sons, Wenceslaus, Sigismund and Henry plus a brother, Johann Heinrich of Moravia with his son Jobst. A lot of dudes, whilst Rudolf IV himself had no children and died already in 1364, leaving his lands to two brothers, Albrecht III and Leopold III, who, unusual for the Habsburgs, squabbled and divided their lands.

But then option probabilities change over time and in particular long dated ones can pay out in the most unexpected ways. But that is a story for an entire new season, far too much for a single episode.

Next week we will discuss what I initially thought I could fit in here, which is Karl’s policy in the west of the empire, in particular his relationship with France and the events in Brabant. We will also talk about Karl’s succession plans and how he gets those implemented. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go – I am afraid- you will hear the inevitable bit about the History of the Germans being advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month. And if you sign up after November, make sure not to subscribe through the Patreon app, only through the Patreon website.

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The Basic Law of the Holy Roman Empire

“Every realm that is divided internally will go to ruin, for its princes have become the comrades of thieves. The Lord has poured out the spirit of deceit among them, so that they grope about at midday as though in darkness, and He has withdrawn the light from their dwellings, so that they are blind and leaders of the blind. And those who wander in the dark run into things, and those who are blind of spirit bring about evil deeds, which occur in disunity. [..]

You, Jealousy, have soiled the Christian Empire, which was reinforced by God with the virtues of faith hope and love, just like the indivisible Trinity, and whose foundations stand firmly on the kingdom of Christ; you have soiled it with your ancient poison that you have spewed forth like an evil snake on the Empire and its members. And to shatter the pillars and to bring the whole structure to collapse, you have incited disunity among the seven electors, who should illuminate the Empire like the light of the seven lamps of the mind.

But in the name of the office which we hold as Emperor we are obliged to act against disunity and struggle among the electors [..] for two reasons: because of our Imperial office, and because of our rights as an elector.

In order to increase the unity among them, and to bring about unanimity during elections and to avoid disgraceful divisions and to close the door to the multiple dangers that arise from them, we have issued the laws written down here at our festive Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, in the presence of all the spiritual and worldly electors, and before a large crowd of other princes, counts, free lords, lords, nobles and urban delegates. From our Imperial throne, decorated with the imperial insignias and treasures, wearing the imperial crown, after ripe deliberation, we issued them on the basis of our unrestricted imperial powers, in the year of our Lord 1356, on the 10th of January, in the tenth year of our royal power and the first of our Imperial power.”

So begins one of the most important constitutional documents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. But what did it actually say, and even more important, what did it not say and how does it fit into the context of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. That is what we are going to discuss in this episode.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 160 – The Golden Bull of 1356, also Episode 23 of Season 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

“Every realm that is divided internally will go to ruin, for its princes have become the comrades of thieves. The Lord has poured out the spirit of deceit among them, so that they grope about at midday as though in darkness, and He has withdrawn the light from their dwellings, so that they are blind and leaders of the blind. And those who wander in the dark run into things, and those who are blind of spirit bring about evil deeds, which occur in disunity. [..]

You, Jealousy, have soiled the Christian Empire, which was reinforced by God with the virtues of faith hope and love, just like the indivisible Trinity, and whose foundations stand firmly on the kingdom of Christ; you have soiled it with your ancient poison that you have spewed forth like an evil snake on the Empire and its members. And to shatter the pillars and to bring the whole structure to collapse, you have incited disunity among the seven electors, who should illuminate the Empire like the light of the seven lamps of the mind.

But in the name of the office which we hold as Emperor we are obliged to act against disunity and struggle among the electors [..] for two reasons: because of our Imperial office, and because of our rights as an elector.

In order to increase the unity among them, and to bring about unanimity during elections and to avoid disgraceful divisions and to close the door to the multiple dangers that arise from them, we have issued the laws written down here at our festive Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, in the presence of all the spiritual and worldly electors, and before a large crowd of other princes, counts, free lords, lords, nobles and urban delegates. From our Imperial throne, decorated with the imperial insignias and treasures, wearing the imperial crown, after ripe deliberation, we issued them on the basis of our unrestricted imperial powers, in the year of our Lord 1356, on the 10th of January, in the tenth year of our royal power and the first of our Imperial power.”

So begins one of the most important constitutional documents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. But what did it actually say, and even more important, what did it not say and how does it fit into the context of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. That is what we are going to discuss in this episode.

Before I start there is an important piece of information. Apple has decided that it will take 30% of any new pledge you make via the Patreon App from November onwards. Android users and existing pledges are unaffected, so you do not need to do anything.

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And with that, back to the show

Even if you grow up in Germany, there is not an awful lot of political history of the 14th century you are likely to be taught. But two events you will hear about, one is the Interregnum and the other the Golden Bull. Why, because the Golden Bull remained on the statute books of the Holy Roman empire until 1806, and it governed its main political event, the election of a new emperor, throughout that time. It was never amended or changed. Creating a system to select a ruler that lasts unchanged for 450 years is no mean feat, and some have called it the constitution or the Basic Law of the Holy Roman empire.

That alone would be reason enough to dedicate a whole episode to it, but the significance of the document goes well beyond providing a procedure for the choice of a ruler.

When Karl IV returned from his imperial coronation in Rome in the summer of 1355 he was riding high. He had been crowned emperor with the blessing of the pope, he had made peace with the other powerful imperial families, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs and he had asserted his and the empire’s power on the western frontier against the acquisitive French.

Having reached a degree of recognition few of his predecessors could have dreamt of, he wanted to use his power to put his two realms, that of Bohemia and the Empire onto a more stable footing. We have already heard that his plan to pass a fundamental law, almost a constitution for Bohemia had floundered on the resistance of the Bohemian barons.

But that did not discourage him from trying the same in the empire. He called an imperial diet to Nuernberg for January 1356 to discuss his proposal for a decree that would be later called the Golden Bull. By the way, the Golden Bull is not the only golden bull. The term means that the document had been sealed with a golden seal, marking it out as particularly important. But there have bee dozens if not hundreds of golden bulls. Some or famous, like the golden bull of Rimini that granted the Teutonic Knights ownership of Prussia and if you ask a Czech about the Golden bull, they would think of the one that turned Bohemia into an inheritable kingdom in 1212.

But in a German context The Golden Bull is the one issued in 1356/57 by Karl IV. Before we talk about why it is so important, let’s first look at what it actually says.

The Golden Bull is an imperial decree comprising 23 chapters first issued at the imperial diet in Nuernberg on January 10, 1356 and then amended by a further 8 chapters at a subsequent diet in Metz almost exactly one year later.

The majority of the document deals with the process of the imperial election and the role of the prince electors.

When I went to school, we were told that the Golden Bull established the system of election by the seven electors, but anyone who has listened to this series knows, that this is not so. Election by seven electors, namely the three archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and the Margrave of Brandenburg had been standard practice since at least the election of Rudolf von Habsburg, way back in 1273.

But what the Golden Bull does is making sure that from now on there should no longer be any more contested elections. And that is achieved by resolving certain open questions once and for all, and by closing down some loopholes.

The first thing was to make sure there is not going to be any confusion who these seven electors were. In the past this had been a problem since for instance the two branches of the ducal house of Saxony, the Sachsen-Wittenbergs and Sachsen-Lauenburgs each had claimed the right to elect. Equally the Wittelsbachs had set up a system of rotation between the Bavarian and the Palatinate line about who would be allowed to cast the vote. And, as we have seen in the election of Ludwig the Bavarian, ambitious candidates sometimes pulled prince-electors out of their hats, nobody had expected.

The Golden Bull made sure that there could only ever be seven men who could be the Prince lectors.

First it states that the vote for Saxony rested with the Sachsen -Wittenberg and that the Palatinate vote could only ever be exercised by whoever is the count Palatinate on the Rhine. The Sachsen Lauenburgs and the Bavarian Wittelsbachs were told that they were just imperial princes, like everyone else, something the latter in particular will resent for centuries to come.

Then a system of strict male primogenitur is introduced for the Prince-Electors. Only the eldest son of the elector should become elector and should also inherit all the lands associated with the electorate. Lands belonging to an electorate could not be divided up, sold, pawned or otherwise given away. Should an elector die without issue, his brother or his brother’s eldest son should take over. Is the elector younger than 18, his most senior male uncle was to cast the vote. And finally, if there is no male heir left, the electorate falls back to the emperor who can enfeoff it to any other suitable candidate.

The Golden Bull contains further provisions for the Prince electors that grant them pretty much all the imperial rights within their territories. They were now almost kings in their own lands. They could establish cities, build castles, set taxes, mint coins at will. Their judicial system was almost completely insulated from the imperial power, etc., etc.

Then there are very detailed procedural rules. The election has to take place in Frankfurt. The election is to be called by the archbishop of Mainz within a month of the death of the previous emperor. If he does not, the electors have to come to Frankfurt on their own accord. Electors who fail to show on the date, lose their vote. Each elector shall bring no more than 200 retainers, only 50 of whom are allowed to bear arms. The city council of Frankfurt is tasked with keeping the peace between the different groups.

Upon arrival the electors are to hear mass at the church of St. Bartholomeu, the church nowadays called the Kaiserdom. There they would also vote on the new ruler, each giving their vote in turn with the archbishop of Mainz voting last. Prince Electors could vote for themselves. If after three months they have failed to select a candidate, the electors are to be reduced to just bread and water. Whoever is elected by the majority has to be unanimously recognised as the emperor.

The coronation should take place in Aachen and the king should hold his first diet in Nuernberg

And then there are even more detailed rules and regulations, including detailed provisions about who sits where at dinner, who leads which procession and so forth.

All these rules were designed to make sure that the elections could take place peacefully and could only ever produce one legitimate King of the Romans. And in that respect, the Golden Bull was a huge success. Whenever there was an election, only one candidate was elected. That however did not mean we are completely out of the woods as regards competing kings. How that happened we will find out when we get there.

Apart from the provisions about the election and the prince electors, there are a few more, somewhat random chapters. On bans any form of associations, confederations or unions between cities or between individual lords, effectively outlawing city leagues, like for instance the Hanseatic League. But it also banned the associations that the Reichsritter, the knights had formed to protect their interests against the encroaching territorial princes. Karl also banned the practice of cities to admit local nobles as citizens, thereby removing them from the feudal context of their overlord. And finally there is an even more watered down version of the ban on feuding that Frederick II had included in the Mainzer Landfrieden more than 100 years earlier.

So, if we look at the heart of the Golden Bull, there is not an awful lot of new stuff. What it does, is sorting out the open questions and designing a procedure that reduces if not eliminates double elections and some provisions that limits the city’s and knight’s ability to fend off the encroaching territorial princes. All the rest, the idea of seven electors, the privileges to do as they like in their lands etc., had been standard practice for a long time, or go back to the Mainzer Landfrieden of Frederick II.

So, nice, but not earth shattering. So, why did contemporaries see it as something of huge importance? Why did they produce no less than 173 copies, some of which like the copy produced for king Wenceslaus IV, the son of Karl IV, includes delightful images of pretty washing girls, wild men and pretty birds .

As is sometimes the case, the real significance of the Golden Bull isn’t what was in it, but what wasn’t. And what wasn’t in the Golden Bull at all was any mention of the Pope. If anyone had listened to these last 159 episodes you have most likely retained at least one thing, that the pope was a seriously big deal for the empire. But now he does not even get ignored in this foundation document that set out the election process in enough detail that we know who walked in front of who when entering the city of Frankfurt on election day.

Was it an omission – no way. This was deliberate. A deliberate exclusion of the pope from the election of future emperors thereby removing the successor of St. Peter from the fabric of the empire that he had dominated since the days of Henry IV. And as much by luck as by design it worked.

How did the Golden Bull became the formal end point in a 300 year conflict between the popes and the emperors?

If we look back at what happened and what drove this sometimes brutal clash between Rome and the Kaiser, it boils down to three broad drivers, what we called the three roads to Canossa in episode 30.  And these three were the rise in lay piety, the reform papacy and the internal conflicts in the empire that first erupted in the Saxon rebellions of the mid-11th century.

Let’s start with Lay Piety. What happened in a nutshell was that as medieval society enjoyed centuries of economic expansion, even people outside the church hierarchy found the breathing space to care about their spiritual wellbeing. They demanded competent priests who could guide them in living a life that pleased God and would make sure they will be counted amongst the righteous at the last judgement. This pushed for a reform of the church that was initially led by the emperor and many of his magnates.

The popes only got involved in this movement when it was already well under way. Pope Leo IX, (1002-1054) was the first pope who took charge of the task to clean up what was sometimes called the Pornocracy. His successors turned out to be equally capable and over the next 200 years the church cut down on simony and corruption, consolidated the theological underpinnings of the faith, improved the quality of the clergy, supported strict religious orders and through all that wrestled control of the reform process from the emperors.

This rise of the papacy to ever greater moral authority led them to claim temporal power over kings and emperors. The two swords were no longer equal, Innocent III declared that, like the moon, the monarchs received their lustre only as a reflection of the papal sun. And on a more tangible level, the two powers clashed over the question of investiture, i.e., who selects the bishops and archbishops, over power in Northern Italy and then even more intensely over who controlled the kingdom of Sicily

The first bust-up was during the reign of Henry IV that included the famous scene of the emperor kneeling in the snow begging the pope for forgiveness. But pretty much every one of the emperors that followed, found himself in some sort of dispute with the pope, even those that had set out as papal champions. Henry IV, Henry V,  Frederick Barbarossa, Otto IV, Frederick II, Ludwig the Bavarian were excommunicated, whilst Lothar III, Henry VI, and Henry VII came close.

What tilted the balance in favour of the papacy was that this conflict wasn’t the only one the emperors had to deal with. The other frontline was the resistance of the aristocrats against a centralising, tax raising monarchy. This conflict broke out in the open again under Henry IV but it continued all throughout the Middle Ages, often somewhat inaccurately labelled as a fight between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen.

The Golden Bull is issued just at the time when all of these trends either petered out or changed direction.

Lets start at the back, the civil wars between princes and emperors. These ended more or less with the reign of emperor Karl IV.

Issuing the Golden Bull reconfirmed and strengthened the rights of the electors to act like kings in their own territories. The emperor had formally accepted the freedoms of the princes that Otto von Nordheim had so vehemently demanded in 1077.

Then he had sold or pawned almost the entirety of the resources that supported an imperial administration, which made the throne an exceedingly unattractive proposition. Only the largest of territorial princes could afford to be emperor, and with some small deviations, that is how the empire will work from here on out. Only the Luxemburgs and later the Habsburgs had enough Hausmacht to meet the imperial expenses.

And last but not least, the 30 years under papal interdict had fostered a sense of unity amongst not just the imperial princes, but the population as a whole. At the Kurverein zu Rhense in 1338 the prince electors, three of them veritable archbishops, had unanimously declared quote “that it is according to the law and ancient custom of the empire, approved that once someone has been elected as King of the Romans by the prince-electors of the empire or by the majority of the same princes, even if in discord, he does not need the nomination, approval, confirmation, assent, or authority of the Apostolic See to assume the administration of the goods and rights of the empire or the royal title.” This notion was then signed by a vast number of lesser lords and cities. No longer could the pope hope to use disunity in the empire to push his interests.

Which gets us to the second key driver of the conflict between papacy and empire, the rise of the reform papacy. We have talked about that yesterday and so we do not need to go into that much detail. But the main point is that the moral authority of the church had begun to erode after its total victory over Frederick II and his descendants. And once they had moved to Avignon that trend became an avalanche. John XXII condemnation of the poverty of the Franciscans, the shocking display of wealth by the cardinals and the papal court, the political dependency on the French king, the greed, the sale of ecclesiastical positions, all that and more put people off.

And with that erosion of moral authority, the church was no longer the institution people looked to as their guide to heaven. We already heard about the Flagellants who emerged during the years of the plague. But the writings of early reformers, of William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and so forth circulated amongst the educated classes, as did Petrarch scathing critique of the Avignon papacy and the visions of St. Bridget of Sweden. John Wycliff blamed the unworthy clergy for the plague in one of his earliest works. As literacy levels had improved significantly in particular amongst the merchant class in the cities, some of these ideas circulated more and more broadly.

By the time the Golden Bull was issued, the papacy had lost the ability to effectively fight the emperor. They had lost the spiritual leadership amongst the faithful, were politically boxed in and could no longer piggyback on the internal divisions of the empire.

And they also had a lot less reason to fight the emperors. Not since the catastrophic defeat of Karl’s grandfather Henry VII had an emperor attempted to exert effective power in Northern Italy. They were happy to declare a Visconti or Este an imperial vicar or elevate a Gonzaga to a margrave, all in exchange for cash, but apart from safe passage to Rome, they had demanded very little. And when Karl left the eternal city on the day of his coronation, he sent a clear signal to Innocent VI that he would not interfere with the papal states.

The conflict between the popes and the emperors was over. And because it was over, Karl could issue the definitive guide to an imperial election without mentioning the pope, and everybody, the pope included understood that a papal approbation would no longer be required. The elected king of the Romans was in charge of the empire from the moment he was elected and would remain so to his death.

The Golden Bull stated what should have been obvious to everybody at the time, but by stating it, made it real. That is why princes and cities all over the empire demanded copies of the document. And that is also why it was such a watershed moment.

Now that the destructive conflict with the papacy was formally over and the princes and emperor had found a permanent settlement, the empire could begin a new phase in its development. In this new phase the empire can finally establish its own institutions, the Reichstag as the political coordination mechanism between the imperial estates and the Allgemeine Landfrieden, Reichshofgericht and Kreise as a tools to provide policing and justice across the empire. The Golden Bull may not have broken new ground intellectually, but it was the kick-off document that launched the second phase of the Holy Roman empire that would last until 1806 surviving even Europe’s most devastating religious war.

Now that is my interpretation of what the Golden Bull was and what it meant. As you can imagine for such a totemic document there are many other views. So if you want to get really deep into it and can find a way to feed it into deepl or any other translation engine of your choice, there is a pretty comprehensive compendium published in 2006 called “Die Goldene Bulle Politik, Wahrnehmung Rezeption”. In it the crème de la crème of German medieval scholars investigate every nook and cranny of the document in over more than a 1000 pages.

I am afraid I could not follow up on all of these in the 25-30 minute format of this podcast. But we will touch upon some next week when we talk about the reception of the Golden Bull, in particular in Vienna where Karl’s son in law Richard IV of Austria, called the Founder is arch-irritated about some of his peers being formally elevated to a status above him. And in his anger he does what everybody else would do – he went down the archive and unearth some letters from Julius Caesar and Nero to his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.  And then there is the relationship between the empire and France, the various other constitutions that are created during that period and lots more. I hope you will join us again.

Before I go – I am afraid- you will hear the inevitable bit about the History of the Germans being advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month. And if you sign up after November, make sure not to subscribe through the Patreon app, only through the Patreon website

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Karl IV’s journey to Rome

This season has now gone on for 22 episodes. We started with the interregnum of largely absent rulers and after a brief renaissance under Rudolf von Habsburg the empire became a sort of oligarchy where 3 families, the Luxemburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs took turns on the throne. Succession usually involved some form of armed conflict between the contenders and a struggle with the pope over who had precedence. Whoever emerged victorious then used the ever-dwindling imperial powers to enrich his family at the expense of the others.

When in 1349 Karl/Karel/Charles IV emerged triumphant from the latest of these conflicts, chances were that the same game would start anew, civil war between the three families, excommunication and murder. But it did not. Why it did not is what we will talk about in this episode…

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 159 – The rise to Imperial Power, Charles IV journey to Rome, also episode 22 of season 8 From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

This season has now gone on for 22 episodes. We started with the interregnum of largely absent rulers and after a brief renaissance under Rudolf von Habsburg the empire became a sort of oligarchy where 3 families, the Luxemburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs took turns on the throne. Succession usually involved some form of armed conflict between the contenders and a struggle with the pope over who had precedence. Whoever emerged victorious then used the ever-dwindling imperial powers to enrich his family at the expense of the others.

When in 1349 Karl/Karel/Charles IV emerged triumphant from the latest of these conflicts, chances were that the same game would start anew, civil war between the three families, excommunication and murder. But it did not. Why it did not is what we will talk about in this episode…

But before we can all breathe a great sigh of relief, the gods have made it so that I have to hold the beggars bowl up to you again, my graceful listeners. This show is, as you know, free of advertising, apart of this my grovelling. And if you want to keep yourself safe from me droning on about my varied mental health issues, holiday rental preferences or sleeping problems, there is only one thing to do. Go to historyofthegermans.com/support and give generously. And thanks so much to Michael W., Admiral Geekington, Timo B., Admiral von Schneider, Barry M. and Greg B. who have already signed up.  

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Next thing, I have to admit to an error, or more precisely to a serious lack of knowledge. I did say last week that the cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague was unique in as much that it sat on the top of a hill, half an hour’s walk from the centre of the city and within the precinct of the royal castle. All that is correct, apart from the bit about it being unique. As some of you pointed out, the cathedrals of Meissen and Krakow are similarly inside the compound of the territorial ruler, away from the city centre. I then looked at the locations of several other cathedrals founded east of the Elbe River and it becomes clear that the concept of the cathedral inside the royal or ducal compound is the norm rather than the exception. Esztergom, Naumburg, Brno to name just a few have a similar setup. However, west of the Elbe, in particular in the lands that had once been part of the Roman empire, cathedral churches tend to be in the centre of town. And that makes sort of sense.

The citizens of the Roman empire had largely converted to Christianity by the 4th century and hence when the bishops built their cathedrals and palaces, they did it amongst the faithful, largely independent from the secular ruler. Meanwhile the pagan Slavs who lived east of the Elbe had been converted by fire and sword in the 10th, 11th and 12thcentury, which meant the bishop’s churches had to be located within the castles of the rulers for protection against a hostile population. And that is where they remained, often to this day.

The fact that I could not remember a place where the cathedral was located in the royal castle reveals the experience of someone who had grown up in West Germany and has not travelled anywhere as extensively in central Europe as I should have. And I have been reading books by predominantly West German authors who also seem to suffer from the same bias. That is history for you, so often as much about the author than it is about the subject. Will try to do better next time.

And with that, back to the show.

Last week we discussed Karl IV’s political and architectural projects in Bohemia. This was however only one of the crowns he had by now acquired. As we discussed 3 episodes ago, Karl had managed to overcome the opposition and had been unanimously elected by all seven electors and then crowned king of the Romans in Aachen in 1349.

In 1350 he had reconciled with his last remaining serious adversary, Ludwig the elder, the son of the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian and margrave of Brandenburg. This reconciliation involved on the one hand that Ludwig would be returned to his margraviate and the current usurper, now dubbed “the false Waldemar” be dropped. And in return Ludwig handed over the imperial regalia, including the Holy Lance, the purse of St. Stephen, various coats and socks and the imperial crown.

Beyond this exchange, Karl also promised to use his influence at the papal court in Avignon to finally lift the excommunication pope John XXII had put on Ludwig’s father and then ultimately over the whole Wittelsbach family 30 years earlier.

And shortly after that all political activity at the royal court ceased. That was in part down to the plague which had by now reached Bohemia. But there was also a mysterious illness. For about a year the king of the Roamn was afflicted by some sort of paralysis none of his doctors could identify. It wasn’t the Plague, otherwise he would have either died or recovered much more quickly. Nor was it the gout he would suffer from for the rest of his life. This sudden loss of ability to act, move and even speak remains a mystery, not least because none of the sources from the court mention it at all. We only know of it through sources from the empire who noticed the absence of their ruler.

He finally rose from his sickbed in 1352, but he never fully recovered. His spine remained impaired, giving him a somewhat hunched appearance. His days as a shiny knight at tournaments were now comprehensively over. He had never enjoyed them much and only taken part when it was absolutely unavoidable. He was so not his father’s son.

The other way in which he differed from the knightly blind king was in his preference for diplomacy over war. War was expensive and unpredictable, whilst playing the different sides against each other cheap, intellectually thrilling and something he was just very, very good at.

Having made peace with the Wittelsbachs, one of the great imperial families of the 14th century, he now needed to settle things with the other one, the house of Habsburg. The Habsburgs had done alright under the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. They had gained the duchy of Carinthia and the county of Tyrol. The latter turned out to be a genuine lottery win as silver mining in the region was gaining pace. Ove the next 300 years more and more mines opened in Tirol, the largest in Schwaz which would at some point employ 10,000 miners who dug up 85% of all silver found in Europe.

Whilst this is all good news for the dukes of Austria, not everything was going according to plan. For one, the usually so fertile family had experienced one of its occasional bouts of reproductive decline and was reduced to just Albrecht II, the lame and his son Rudolf IV, the Founder. But the biggest issue were some renegade peasants back home in their original homeland. The three cantons, Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden that had defeated duke Leopold at Morgarten in 1315 have continued to undermine Habsburg control of the Aargau and the roads leading to the Gotthard pass. In 1332 the city of Lucerne, until then part of the Habsburg zone of influence had joined the three Waldstaetten and they had formed the “eternal Swiss Confederation”.  In 1351 Zurich, then and now the largest city in Switzerland joined the confederation. In 1353 Bern, Zug and Glarus came in as well.

This had now become more than an irritation for the Habsburgs and Karl was happy to exploit the situation. He offered the Habsburgs to rein in on these obstinate commoners, if Albrecht and Rudolf kept the peace and let him pass down to Italy should he want to go to Rome. To further firm up the alliance Rudolf became engaged and later married Catherine, the daughter of Karl and – in the absence of a son – his heiress.

Karl never made good on his promise to go after the Swiss. He joined the Habsburgs and their army attacking Zurich but after a few skirmishes forced the parties on to the negotiation table. The subsequent peace included recognition of the Swiss confederation, very much to the chagrin of the Habsburgs. But by then it was too late and there was little they could do about it.

It is with these promises of help that rarely materialised in actual military support and the generous handout of titles and imperial vicariates that Karl solidified his reign in the empire.

In 1354 he moved his focus to the western side of the empire. One reason was that his great uncle, the legendary archbishop of Trier, Balduin had finally passed away at the grand old age of 69. Having become archbishop aged 22 he had lifted two members of his family on to the imperial throne, his brother Henry VII and now Karl. In the meantime he had fostered the power of the electors at the Kurverein zu Rhens and at the same time strengthened the territorial power of his archbishopric. Karl may have never liked him, and vice versa, but they had supported each other in the interest of the dynasty.

So when Karl rushed to Trier as soon as news had reached him of his relative’s demise, it wasn’t to mourn his long lost mentor. No, what he was after was a legendary hoard of gold and silver everyone believed the wily bishop had gathered during his 47 years on the episcopal throne. When Karl arrived the treasure, if it had ever existed, was gone. Still he coerced the new archbishop to hand back the lands his great uncle had forced him to hand over as an electoral bribe in 1344. And in the absence of precious metal, he raided the spiritual wealth of this, the oldest cathedral in the German lands. The staff of St. Peter, a third of the veil of the virgin Mary, a piece of the finger of St. Matthew and the obligatory piece of the holy cross were packed up and sent to Prague.

Then he went to Luxemburg where his half-brother Wenceslaus had now turned 18. Wenceslaus was supposed to inherit Luxemburg but Karl had seized it upon their father’s death. Now it was time to honour the bling king John’s wishes and Wenceslaus received Luxemburg, which Karl elevated to a duchy and imperial principality at the same time. Young Wenceslaus then married Joanna, the eldest daughter and heiress of the duchies of Brabant and Limburg, which was followed by the happy event of duke John of Brabant dying in 1356. Wenceslaus and his wife gained control of this exceedingly wealthy part of the world after granting the citizens of Brabant a large number of rights in a document called the Joyeuse Entrée which we will look at next week. For the moment the important point is that the Luxemburgs got hold of Brabant, at least tripling their position in the west and all that against opposition from the count of Flanders and behind him, the king of France.

The empire was on the up. And to make it absolutely clear that there was a new broom in the house, willing to protect the western border of the empire against constant French incursions, Karl held an imperial diet in the city of Metz, right on the border to France. No emperor had been to Metz since the days of the Hohenstaufen. This event in March 1354 was meant to rebuild the sense of belonging to the empire that had been waning. Ever more often had the local powers taken their disputes to the courts and Parlamants of France, believing that there was no justice to be obtained from the weak imperial power. Karl imposed an imperial peace on Lothringia whereby they should resolve their conflicts peaceably in courts of their own peers, rather than by the French.

Such local peace agreements had been a tool of imperial policy for a long time, but the last decades had seen them running out and/or being ignored. Karl used them extensively in all the areas he travelled through. And he could back them up with the sheer strength of his personal wealth and prestige. In the east the house of Luxemburg controlled Bohemia, which had almost doubled in size since the days of Ottokar II and in the West they  ruled the combined duchies of Luxemburg and Brabant. And Karl could rely on the support of the great imperial cities, in particular the richest and most powerful of them, Nürnberg.

Many citizens of the empire experienced imperial administration for the very first time. By 1355 Karl had become the most effective guardian of the empire in generations.

With the empire under his control, we move on to – yes I can hear you groan – the inevitable journey to Rome. Should that not be over by now? Didn’t the Electors declare that the elected king was automatically the ruler of the empire, even without coronation of approbation by the pope? Did Karl not remember the catastrophic outcome of his grandfather’s attempt to pacify Italy, let alone his own experience as a young man trying to chart a path through the endless squabbles between the various communes, republics and autocracies?

Sure, he did, but even though an imperial Romzug was no longer an absolute must, it still added to the cachet of an emperor, in particular an emperor like Karl who derived more of his power from symbols and the letter of the law than from the yielding of swords.

So a trip to Rome was on the agenda, but such a trip was not as urgent as it had been for his grandfather or for Ludwig the Bavarian. Karl had time to plan how he could thread his course through the convoluted Italian and papal politics.

Papal politics should have been easy. As we have discussed before, Karl owed the beginnings of his career to his mentor, the pope Clement VI. But by the 1350s that relationship had soured.

When Karl reconciled with the excommunicated Wittelsbachs, first by marrying the daughter of the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and then by making deals with the sons of Ludwig the Bavarian, the pope was incensed. The whole point of supporting Karl as the new king of the Romans had been to squash the Wittelsbach and their nest of heretics that was Munich. And once the excommunicated usurpers were gone, the popes would regain control of the imperial church.

Well, none of that happened. Karl had no intention to become a papal lapdog. Instead of taking orders from Avignon, he strengthened imperial oversight of the church to the point that he invested more bishops during his reign than any emperor had done since Barbarossa.

What also did not help was that Karl let slip that he found Clement VI’ propensity for bling and hard partying unsuitable for his office, comments that made their way back to Avignon.

With Clement VI refusing to send cardinals to crown him, Karl had two options. One was to boost his diplomatic efforts in Avignon in the hope of changing Clement’s mind. The other was to do as his predecessor had done and go to Rome to accept the crown from the Senate and People of Rome as the ancient Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus have done.

This latter option materialised in 1350 in the form of a visit to Prague by Cola di Rienzi, the Tribune of the People of Rome. Cola di Rienzi is one of those characters that warrant a whole podcast by themselves and I may produce one for the Patreon feed. But since he is very much a figure of Italian history, rather than German history, here are just the bare bones of his story.

Cola di Rienzi, actual name Nicola Gabrini was the son of a wine merchant. Being clever and talented, he received a thorough education and rose to become a notary and diplomat for the city of Rome. In 1347 he led a public revolt that catapulted him to the leadership of the city, where he promised to resurrect the ancient Roman republic with him as the Tribune of the people.

How come a wine merchant’s son can rise to be the ruler of the eternal city? The answer lies in the truly dissolute state of Rome and the papal states in the middle of the 14th century. It is now more than a generation since the popes had left Rome to settle in Avignon. Without the papal court the income streams that had sustained the city had dried up. Not just the lavish expenditure of the popes and cardinals but also the bribes paid for ecclesiastical judgements, the approval of episcopal appointments, the income from absolutions etc., etc., all that was now spent in Provence.

Rome, unlike the other great Italian cities did not have much commercial or industrial activity. Barely 20,000 souls lived in a city once built for millions. To generate some cash the popes had declared holy years in 1300 and in 1350 that brought in thousands of pilgrims. The tradition exists to this day by the way and the next holy year is 2025.

But these Jubilees took place only every 50 years. In the intervening years, the impoverished Romans had fallen into the hands of warring aristocratic factions, the Colonna and the Orsini. Most Romans huddled within the bend of the Tiber marked by the triangle of the Mausoleum of Augustus at the north, Castel Sant’Angelo to the west and the Tiber Island to the south, the area called the abitato. The Vatican Borgo, stretching from St. Peter’s to the river, retained its boundaries set by the walls of Leo IV. The remaining 215 hectares (almost 4.7 square miles) within the ancient Aurelian Wall lay nearly empty. This disabitato remained a dangerous waste of forest, vineyard, and garden, interrupted only by the irregular masses of Rome’s fortified monasteries and the fortress-towers of its barons, by hamlets scattered around the major churches and the militarized hulks of Rome’s vast ruins. Meanwhile in Florence, Siena, Milan and Venice churches and palaces rose up that could rival the splendour that had once been Rome’s

Cola di Rienzi tapped into the discontent of the Roman masses, promising them an end to the current mismanagement and a return to the glory of ancient Rome. By all accounts he was an engaging orator who could whip up the crowds. He was also a populist and fantasist who promised the world but was unable to maintain a functioning administration, let alone deliver on these pledges.

His first run as Tribune of the Roman People lasted a mere seven months, at the end of which he slunk out of town in the middle of the night. From 1347 onwards he hid for 2 years in a community of Franciscan who adhered to the rule of strict poverty promoted by Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham. In 1349 he embarked on a journey across plague ridden europe in search of allies who would help restore the glory of Rome.

That is why he showed up at the court of Karl IV in Prague in 1350. And the emperor was listening. After all Cola di Rienzi still had supporters in Rome and all across Italy including the celebrated poet Petrarch.

Though he may have been tempted by the proposal to get his coronation swiftly and with the support of the Roman populace, there were a number of issues with that though.

One was that his predecessor who had accepted the crown from the people and not from the pope had always faced issues of legitimacy. Karl himself had never recognised Ludwig’s imperial title.

Moreover, it would have also been a truly unforgivable affront to the pope that would turn the simmering disappointment into open conflict. A conflict that judging by the example of Ludwig, could go on for decades and hamper his efforts to stabilise the empire under his reign.

So Karl had Cola di Rienzi arrested and sent to Avignon. By all accounts that should have been a death sentence. But by the time he had arrived, pope Clement VI had died and his successor Innocent VI saw an opportunity in the plebeian rabble rouser. In 1354 he sent Cola di Rienzi together with a cardinal to Rome to oust the regime of the aristocrats and bring order to the place, make it ready for a return of the pope.

Cola’s second attempt to restore ancient Rome lasted not much longer than the first. Rienzi made some stirring speeches and put the Colonna and Orsini on trial. He managed to have a few of them beheaded before the two archenemies joined hands and also the cardinal realised that Rienzi may not be entirely on board with the idea of the return of the Holy Father.  A crowd gathered outside the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline hill demanding his head. He tried to make one last speech to defend himself and his track record but could not get through. The mob set the palace alight. Cola di Rienzi fled the building in disguise but was recognised and then horrifically maimed and killed.

As I said, a fascinating and dramatic story that Richard Wagner made into his first and worst opera and that allegedly inspired Adolf Hitler. As I said, well worth a whole podcast.

But why does this story matter beyond the fact that Karl had rejected the offer to be crowned by the people of Rome?

What it illustrates is how far the power of the Avignon church had declined. If a pope has to resort to a populist firebrand in his attempt to exert control over his capital, the situation must be quite dire.

And it was. These 40 years in Avignon had had a devastating effect on the standing of the church. We have not gone quite all the way back to the days of the Pornocracy in the 9th and 10th century, but a lot of the political capital the reform popes since Leo X have patiently built into the imperial papacy of an Innocent III has been washed away in an excess of corruption and ostentatious display of wealth. Then there was the political dependency on the French kings who could force the pope to sanction the raid of the Templars.

Few people in the cities and villages ever saw the extravagant luxury of the papal palace but they did see what happened to the Franciscans and Dominicans. These mendicant orders enjoyed a lot of respect for their good works and adherence to the vows of poverty. When John XXII forced them into accepting gifts and property, the brothers and even more, the papacy lost the moral high ground. And it was the moral high ground that papal power was based on.

More and more voices criticised the pope and demanded a change in his behaviour and a return to Rome. One of them was Petrarch and another was St. Bridget of Sweden. She was a high aristocrat who had come to Rome during the holy year of 1350. Shocked by the state of the city she threw herself into charitable works and as things got traction, founded her own order of nuns. What made her famous across europe were her religious visions. And in one of those visions God told her to tell Pope Clement quote “ it shall not be forgotten how greed and ambition flourished and increased in the church during your time, or that you could have reformed and set many things right but that you, lover of the flesh, were unwilling. Get up, therefore, before your fast approaching final hour arrives, and extinguish the negligence of your past by being zealous in your nearly final hour! End quote.

Once Clement’s final hour arrived in 1352 as predicted, the church tried to improve. They replaced the worldly pope Clement VI with Innocent VI, an altogether more sober head of the church. But the pope’s room for manoeuvre was  very limited. Reforming the church back to a semblance of moral authority ran into the opposition of entrenched interests, his attempt to regain Rome through Cola di Rienzi had failed and left him marooned in Avignon under the watchful eye of the French.

And it was exactly this weakness of the pope that Karl had bet on. One of the few options Innocent VI had to counterweigh French influence was through the empire. Karl may not have lived up to papal expectations, but he was still less overbearing that the king of France. And he had enormous prestige and still some influence in Italy.

And that is why Karl was confident that once he were to set off for Rome the new pope would fall into line and send him a cardinal for the coronation.

Karl set off for Italy in September 1355 with just 300 men. The reason he did not bring an army as his grandfather had done was simple, he had no interest in conquering Italy. All he wanted was to travel down to Rome, get crowned and go home again. He had made that very explicit in a letter he had written to Petrarch. The great poet had begged him to bring peace to his war-ridden Italy. To that Karl responded quote “The times have changed my most venerated poet laureate. Freedom has been crushed, the bride of the empire, together with all the other Latins, have been wedded into servitude; justice has become the whore of avarice, peace has been driven out of the people’s minds and the virtues of men have vanished so that the world is descending into the abyss” end quote.

No, Karl had been to Italy before and got the T-shirt. No way was he going to take sides in this never ending game of Whack-a-mole. All he wanted was free passage. To achieve that he joined an alliance led by Venice against Milan. Once he had crossed the lands of his allies, he headed for Milan, signed a deal with the city’s rulers, the Visconti, who handed him 150,000 gold florin and the iron crown of Lombardy. Next stop is Florence where he promised help against Milan in exchange for 100,000 florin and recognition of imperial overlordship, the first time in centuries the city on the Arno river had bent the knee. Then he goes to Siena who make Karl their podesta in exchange for protection against Florence, and so forth and so forth, I guess you get my drift.

Somehow this has turned into a veritable walk in the park. Part of his success is clearly his diplomatic skill that allowed him to double cross all his interlocutors with impunity. But he is also genuinely popular. He is one of the very few emperors who speak Italian. Wherever he goes, he chats with the people, he gets down from his horse to shake hands. They even forgive him his now obsessive raids of churches and monasteries for relics. He remains calm in all circumstances, both when the citizens of Siena parade him through the city on their shoulders in triumph as well as when a rebellion in Pisa puts him and his now third wife in mortal danger.

On April 2nd does he arrive before Rome . And for the next three days he visits all the great basilicas and monasteries of the eternal city, disguised as a pilgrim. Most probably many a saint was missing a few bones once the mysterious pilgrim had left.

The coronation date was set for the 5th of April.

Which now leaves the question, is there a cardinal available to perform the ceremony? Oh you bet. Though Karl had not even bothered to inform the pope of his departure for Rome, seven month earlier, as soon as he was under way Innocent VI caved in. The cardinal bishop of Ostia, the #2 in the papal hierarchy was dispatched to Rome to do the deed. The only condition was that Karl should not spend more than a day in the eternal city.

And so, for the first time in now 150 years did Rome see a peaceful imperial coronation. Both St. Peters and the Lateran welcomed the emperor and he and his wife were crowned following the ancient coronation ordo. No wading through blood, no arrows shot into the dining hall, just a really nice party.

And, as promised, Karl IV left Rome at sundown and returned to his lands north of the Alps as the universally recognised Holy Roman Emperor. And he was truly universally recognised, the pope accepted him, the Italian cities as far as they ever would, recognised him as their king and emperor, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs had made their peace with him, his family possessions, the much enlarged kingdom of Bohemia and the duchies of Luxemburg and Brabant made him the by far richest and most powerful imperial prince.

Not since the early years of Frederick Barbarossa had an emperor gained such a position of power. And it was this power he would now use to create what many called the constitution of the Holy Roman empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. And that is what we are going to look at next week. I hope you will join us again.

And if you feel swept away by all that goodwill and splendour in the History of the Germans remember that the show is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month.

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Karl IV’s great plans for his capital city

“Karl, by the grace of God, King of the Romans, ever august, and King of Bohemia [  ]

We have turned over in careful contemplation, and have been diligently pondering how our hereditary kingdom of Bohemia may flourish in all its beauty, thrive in peace, and not fear the loss of its riches to its enemies, and how the general good and benefit of the said kingdom may prosper, how its’ governance may grow from good to better, and how it could plant a new seed for the faith in god.

To soundly provide for these things, neither sparing our labors nor expenses, we have decided to extend, expand, and newly delineate the city of Prague, recently elevated to metropolitan status at our insistance and request, situated in the midst of the kingdom and in a most fertile place, frequented by peoples from various regions and parts of the world, whose houses and buildings, inhabitants, and the multitude of people surrounding it, as well as the influx of people to it, which no one can count, especially because of the general study that we have decided to establish in the said city, cannot conveniently accommodate.”

So begins the charter that founded one of the Middle Ages most ambitious infrastructure projects, the creation of Prague’s New Town, the third city to be created near the ancient castles of the kings of Bohemia, making the combined city larger in surface area than Cologne, only surpassed by Constantinople and the eternal city. A new Rome was to rise on the shores of the Vitava River, a place adorned with churches and monasteries evoking the holiest places of Christianity and squares on such a monumental scale that reminds one more of the 19th century than the 14th. Prague still today attracts “people to it which no one can count”

This is what we will talk about today. Not just what he built, but why and how….

But before we start let me thank Dana J., Charisse P., James M., Eddie, Henrik R., Thomas H. and Margaret P. who keep this show advertising free by signing up as patrons on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. If you want to join this gang of generous givers, go there and before you know it, you will find your name read out here too, on top of basking in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude.

Video

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 158 – Prague – The New Rome? Karl IV’s great plans for his capital city, also episode 21 of Season 8 From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

“Karl, by the grace of God, King of the Romans, ever august, and King of Bohemia [  ]

We have turned over in careful contemplation, and have been diligently pondering how our hereditary kingdom of Bohemia may flourish in all its beauty, thrive in peace, and not fear the loss of its riches to its enemies, and how the general good and benefit of the said kingdom may prosper, how its’ governance may grow from good to better, and how it could plant a new seed for the faith in god.

To soundly provide for these things, neither sparing our labors nor expenses, we have decided to extend, expand, and newly delineate the city of Prague, recently elevated to metropolitan status at our insistance and request, situated in the midst of the kingdom and in a most fertile place, frequented by peoples from various regions and parts of the world, whose houses and buildings, inhabitants, and the multitude of people surrounding it, as well as the influx of people to it, which no one can count, especially because of the general study that we have decided to establish in the said city, cannot conveniently accommodate.”

So begins the charter that founded one of the Middle Ages most ambitious infrastructure projects, the creation of Prague’s New Town, the third city to be created near the ancient castles of the kings of Bohemia, making the combined city larger in surface area than Cologne, only surpassed by Constantinople and the eternal city. A new Rome was to rise on the shores of the Vitava River, a place adorned with churches and monasteries evoking the holiest places of Christianity and squares on such a monumental scale that reminds one more of the 19th century than the 14th. Prague still today attracts “people to it which no one can count”

This is what we will talk about today. Not just what he built, but why and how….

But before we start let me thank Dana J., Charisse P., James M., Eddie, Henrik R., Thomas H. and Margaret P. who keep this show advertising free by signing up as patrons on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. If you want to join this gang of generous givers, go there and before you know it, you will find your name read out here too, on top of basking in the soft glow of your fellow listeners gratitude.

Support the Show – Become a Patron

And with that – back to the show

Last week was a bit tough, but then the 14th century was a tough time to be alive. But despite all the horrors there were some delightful things happening at the same time. And one of these was the architecture created in that period. It is in the 14th century that the Hanseatic cities reached the peak of their political power, when the spires of churches and city monasteries in Lübeck, Hamburg, Wismar, Riga and Tallin rose to the sky. New cloth halls adorned Ypres, Krakow, Ghent and Brunswick. The celebrated city halls of Stralsund, Bremen and Muenster date back to this period as do the innumerable half-timbered houses you find all across the German lands that shape the idea of the romantic Germany for hundreds of thousands of tourists every year.

But the largest, the most ambitious construction project of the 14th century happened on the eastern edge of the empire. A project on a scale unprecedented since the days of ancient Rome. Prague was to rise from an important city to the largest city in the empire in the span of 2 years. Yes, 2 years or less was the timescale that Karl IV set for the city to be built in his own words “so properly constructed that the houses may be conveniently inhabited and lived in”.

Ah, and then there is the date. The foundation document for Prager Neustadt dates to March 8, 1347, just as the first grain shipments from Caffa enter the port of Messina in Sicily, bringing rats, flees and Yarsinia Pestis, leaving barely 2 years before the disease reaches Prague.

Now before we survey the greatest of Karl’s projects, we need to take a step back to see the broader strategy behind it.

The actual starting gun for the Make Prague Great project had sounded 3 years earlier, in 1344. It was then that Karl, at the time still only the crown prince convinced his friend, the pope Clement VI to raise the status of the bishopric of Prague to an archbishopric.

This does not sound much to modern ears. Has anyone noticed that pope Francis recently raised Las Vegas to an archbishopric? No, me neither. But in the Middle Ages, this was a seminal moment. The church was still by far the superior organisational structure in europe, much more complex and coherent than any state administration. And the boundaries of dioceses had a significant effect on the temporal political structure within it.

Long term listeners may remember episode 14 when we talked about Otto III’s trip to Gniesno in Poland. At that point, in the year 1000, Otto III raised Gniesno to become an archbishopric. From that point forward the Polish church was no longer subject to oversight by the archbishop of Mainz, which meant Poland’s rulers found it somewhat easier to withdraw from the imperial orbit. The same happened in Hungary where Esztergom was founded as an archbishopric in 1001.

Of the three monarchies on the eastern side of the empire only one, Bohemia, remained subject to the archbishopric of Mainz, and was the only one that remained within the political structure that became the Holy Roman Empire. Coincidence, me thinks not.

The creation of a Bohemian archbishopric may have been delayed unduly, but it was a key puzzle piece in the Karl’s creation of what he called “the Crown of Bohemia”, the constitutional construct that he hoped would cement his and his family’s rule of these lands for eternity.

More about that later. First we need a cathedral for the freshly minted archbishop, who also happened to be one of Karl’s closest advisors and confidants, Arnost of Pardubice. On November 21, 1344 work began on St. Vitus cathedral. This cathedral is unique in so many ways, the first of which is its location. I cannot think of any other cathedral that towers over a city, a solid half hour walk uphill from the main square. And that speaks to the role the archbishop of Prague was to assume in the political system of Bohemia.

The Bohemian church had been created by St. Wenceslaus way back in the 10th century. At the time the majority of Bohemians were pagans and it was the ruler’s efforts to convert the population that led to the Christianisation of the country. Hence the bishops were always extremely close to the dukes and later the kings of Bohemia. Their residence and their cathedral was within the precincts of the royal castle, not down in the town with the people. A very different setup to the way bishops operated in the empire, or even France and England. At some point Karl jokingly referred to the archbishop as his personal chaplain.

St. Vitus was hence as much royal chantry as it was the archepiscopal cathedral. To build it, Karl wanted the latest and greatest in cathedral fashion. Hence he appointed Matthias of Arras, a Frenchman who may have been working on some of the great cathedrals of Northern France, in Amiens or Beauvais and had most recently been involved in the construction of the papal palace in Avignon. Matthias was a competent man who designed a layout of the church along classic French lines putting emphasis of proportions and clear, mathematical composition of the whole. Matthias died in 1352 having finished only the easternmost part of the choir. His successors continued with his plan until the arrival of Peter Parler in 1356. Peter Parler was just 23 when he was given the commission to complete St. Vitus cathedral. Having been apprenticed to his father since his youth, he had worked at the church of the Holy Cross in his hometown of Schwäbisch Gmund. Aged 19 he sets off as a journeyman travelling to many of the great construction sites of Europe at the time, the cathedrals of Cologne, Paris, Strasburg and potentially even England. Upon his return he rejoins his father who had been given a huge project, the building of the Frauenkirche in Nurnberg that was to be erected over the ruins of the old synagogue, the destruction of which had triggered the massacres of the Jews in the city as we heard last week. Karl had been closely involved with the Frauenkirche he intended specifically to be used for key imperial ceremonies and events. And that is where he noticed Peter and called him to Prague.

Peter Parler brought a new style to not just St. Vitus cathedral but to many of Karl’s great projects. Peter Parler was both a sculptor and an architect. Once he gets involved in St. Vitus, the cathedral shifts away from the strict lines of Matthias of Arras to a new innovative style that gives it the almost organic qualities that would spread across europe as the late gothic style. This is best exemplified by the new type of vaults he created for the choir of St. Vitus. In a classic gothic church, the groin vaults have single diagonal rips from one pillar to the other. Parler doubled their number creating a set of crossing rips that not only improve structural integrity but also created a sort of net-like pattern. This and the balustrade that he added to the naves as a way to make the upper floors of the cathedral feel as if they were floating above the congregation as a vison of the heavenly Jerusalem were two key elements of the Parler Style. The Parler Style was rapidly adopted first across the empire in Landshut, Nurnberg, Vienna and then throughout the Hanseatic league from where it spread all over Poland, the Low countries and even as far as the cathedral of Seville that features both net vaults and a Parler balustrade.

Peter Parler and his sons and workshop would be leading many of Karl’s projects both in Bohemia as well as across the empire. They have shaped the way Prague looks today and also built St. Stephens in Vienna. They are a big deal.

Within St. Vitus cathedral there is a chapel that was to become the heart of Karl’s concept of the Bohemian crown, the chapel of St. Wenceslaus. This chapel features no just one of the most intricate of Parler Vaults but is also decorated with 1300 semi-precious stones and frescoes depicting the passion of Christ and the life of St. Wenceslaus.

It once held two immensely valuable objects, one of which is still there. The first was a reliquary of St. Wenceslaus in the form of a bust and the second, the crown of St. Wenceslaus. Now I cannot say whether the bones inside the reliquary were indeed those of St. Wenceslaus, but what we know for a fact is that the crown placed there had never been worn by the good king Wenceslaus. Not because he wasn’t a king, but because this crown had been made on Karl’s orders in 1344, the year of Prague’s elevation to an archbishopric.

During Karl’s reign this crown was kept in St. Wenceslaus chapel on the bust of its namesake for most of the year. That was a huge deviation from the normal procedure. Medieval crowns were often kept with the other regalia in a treasury, often a heavily fortified castle. They were the property of the ruler who could take them along for trips and use them as a means of representation whenever he wanted to. The crown of St. Wenceslaus only left the chapel on special occasions and for coronations. It wasn’t the crown of the king, but the crown of a saint the king would occasionally be allowed to borrow. That is actually still the case today. The crown is kept in a chamber next to the chapel locked by seven locks, the keys to which are held by seven dignitaries including the president and the archbishop of Prague and the original is only shown to the public on special occasions.

What was the point of commissioning an extremely expensive crown and then pretend it had been St. Wenceslaus crown all along so that it had to remain with the saints remains?

That brings us back to Karl’s idea on how to solidify his regime in Bohemia. As we talked about in the episode about Karl’s youth, the hold of the Luxemburgs on Bohemia was extremely fragile. Karl’s father spent most of his time outside the kingdom where he was extremely unpopular and had lost the power struggle with the barons. In his autobiography Karl makes a big song and dance about how much the Bohemians loved him, his ability to speak the language, his descent from the ancient Premyslid dynasty etc., etc., But even in the middle ages a spot of linguistics and an eminent mother  cannot have been enough, in particular not in a kingdom whose barons and patricians held the reins of power and at least believed they could elect and depose their kings at will.

The more I read about Karl the more I get to admire his political instincts and pragmatism. Because rather than fighting the barons and patricians as his father had done, he tied them into his political structure. He created the crown of St. Wenceslaus as a symbol of the Bohemian Kingdom outside his own person. The crown of Bohemia became more than a physical object, but a symbol that personified the Bohemian lands, its customs and rights and privileges. And Karl poured everything into this concept. In his role as king of the romans he declared the lands of Silesia and some territories west of the Bohemian forest to be not just his personal fiefs, but inseparable parts of the crown of Bohemia. He declared that all the barons and lords were integral to the “universitas regni Bohemia”, of the commonwealth of the crown of Bohemia. And to further elevate the crown as a physical object, he enclosed in it a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. The pope declared the crown a sacred object that conveyed salvation to those who prayed before it.

By creating this object that held all the power in the kingdom, all he then had to do was to make sure that nobody else could take hold of it. And that was via the coronation ceremony. A ceremony he conveniently had designed himself. This involved the usual anointing, seating on the throne and lifting of the crown, but now by a Czech archbishop rather than a German one. But what made it special was that not all the songs were in Latin, nor were they in German, but in Czech. Few things could reassure the Czech-speaking population under pressure from the influx of German speakers since the early 13th century than their king singing the Kyrie Elision in their language.

The crown of Bohemia now had a great resting place in the St. Vitus cathedral that was rising up. But that wasn’t enough splendour for Karl. If he wanted to elevate Bohemia to a kingdom on par with the great monarchies of France and England, he needed a capital. And since he was not just the king of Bohemia but also the elected king of the Romans and hence future emperor, this capital needed to be suitable for such an august monarch.

Hence we find ourselves in March 1347 in a field outside the walls of Prague’s Old Town watching Karl IV laying the first stone in the greatest plan for a city extension of the entire middle Ages. When Charles first arrived in Prague in the 1330s the city comprised about 2.5 square kilometres of build-up space and had roughly 15,000 inhabitants. The city was actually two cities and two royal castles. There was the Mala Strana, the Little Side or Lesser Town in English which had risen up below Prague castle. On the opposite side of the Vitava sat the Old Town. And downriver on the Vitava sat the Vhysegrad, the residence of the early medieval Bohemian rulers.

As we have seen in many other places, most extremely in Gdansk, each of these entities were independent cities with their own councils, markets and city walls.

The New Town that Karl ordered to be built was hence given its own city rights and privileges. In the foundation charter he was generous in his awards, granting the new place the same rights the Old Town had received. The new Town was to get its own city council, its aldermen and city defences. However, as the Old town had lost a lot of its privileges during the reign of King John the Blind, these rights were less extensive than they would be for an imperial or a free city in the empire. He made up for the lack of civil rights by providing generous tax incentives, more than enough to fill the place.

And what a place it was. The Prague New Town comprised 7.5 square kilometres, three times the Old Town and Little Side combined. This new settlement surrounded the Old Town on all three sides, stretching from the old castle of Vhysegrad to the Vitava upriver from the old town. The wall built to protect the settlement was 3.5 km long, 6 to 10 meters high and took less than two years to build. Karl had already bought a lot of plots inside this wall before construction began and now sold these under the condition that the purchaser would begin construction within one month and completes the work within 18 months. With the New Town the population of Prague rose to 40,000 making it the largest city in the German lands alongside Cologne. In terms of surface area it became the third largest after Rome and Constantinople.

But what took peoples breath away both then and today was the monumentality of its market squares. The area today called St. Wenceslaus square that today looks like a classic 19th century avenue built to represent the glory of the nation was then called the Horse market. And it was already 60 metres wide and 750m long, far larger than anything anyone had seen before. Well except for Charles Square which at 80,550 square metres is still one of the largest city squares in the world and definitely the largest medieval square in Europe.

This square-driven megalomania had a clear message. At a time when space inside walled cities was at huge premium and city streets were narrow and bridges built up with houses, a city square large enough to hold 12 simultaneous football matches screamed look at how large a defensive wall I can build. Or more precisely how large a defensive wall the crown of Bohemia can build.

Talking about open spaces, in 1357 construction began on the one bit of Carolinian infrastructure ever visitor to Prague had been on, the Charles Bridge. Despite the tourists and intrusive sellers of pointless titbits and drunk teenagers, this remains my favourite bridge in the world. Two gates at each end, a beautiful view of both sides of the city and its elegant construction tells again of the great skill of Peter Parler and his workshop. And the fact that this bridge had no houses on it when London and Paris only had bridges that looked like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence is just another sign of the immensity of Karl’s project.

The Neustadt filled up rapidly in part with overspill from the Old Town and the Little Side where space had been at a premium. There had also already been some suburbs in what would later become the New Town. But mostly these were new arrivals.

Many were Jewish.  As Charles said in his foundation document quote “Considering the weakness of the Jewish people, we take under our special protection all and each Jew, both male and female, sons and daughters, and all their goods, who will come to inhabit the said New City, [  ] commanding all and each justice of the kingdom, especially of our city of Prague, modern and future, to protect and defend the Jews from all disturbance, molestation, and injury.” That is a bit rich given Karl’s involvement in the persecution of the Jews that led to them fleeing east in the first place.

He also invited settlers from the West and East to come to Prague and many did. That is in itself a tremendous achievement given the Plague had just wiped out roughly a third of Europe’s population leaving lots of opportunities for ambitious and mobile men and women to make their fortunes nearer to home.

Another major draw of Prague was that it gradually became a bit of a holy place. Karl had a habit of collecting relics. Maybe not a habit, more of an obsession. He became famous for demanding to cut of bits and pieces of saints whenever he came to visit a monastery or pilgrimage church. Sometimes he paid for the privilege, sometimes he just took the bones. In St. Gall he had the head of one of its saintly abbots sawn off as the holy body refused to separate from its uppermost section. Foreign dignitaries quickly realised that the way to the king of Bohemia’s heart was through dusty bones and holy pieces of cloth. One of those claimed to be the tablecloth used at the Last Supper.

But whilst this all sounds a bit weird, it had a certain logic to it. Relics did provide relief from time spent in purgatory if the sinner prayed next to them. The church provided elaborate tables laying out how many years one gets off for how many Ave Marias in front of which saint’s remains. So bringing a large number of relics to Prague was quite the same as ambitious mayors courting art collectors to place their works into museums they promise to build for them.

Whilst Karl kept many of the relics for himself, he donated even more to various churches on his demesne, in particular in the New Town of Prague. Pilgrims would come to pray in these churches boosting the business of inns and traders of all kinds. Others would decide to live in Prague to be closer to these most effective items of salvation. Charles even obtained a papal charter that gave particular absolution for pilgrims who came to see the great relics contained in the Bohemian crown, the Holy Lance and other holy objects that were paraded through the streets of Prague on certain holy days.

And finally there is another draw, the very first University founded east of the Rhine river. This was again one of Karl’s very first decisions after becoming King of Bohemia, to found a university he named after himself in his typical modesty. As so often in his early years it was his good relationship with Pope Clement VI that made that possible. Clement granted a bull establishing a place of general studies in January 1347. Later historians with an anti-papal bent would insist that the university was founded through a Bohemian royal golden bull in 1348.

In any event, the university began operating around that time, modelled on the University of Paris offering all four faculties, including theology. Students came from the empire and from Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Hungary and even Scandinavia. But it differed in some significant way from the universities as they existed to date. The university of Prague was founded and maintained by the king of Bohemia. Previous universities had been created by the scholars and teachers who were paid directly by the students. Lecturers in Prague were housed in colleges as had been the case in Oxford and Cambridge, but in Prague the lecturers were paid by the university and hence by the state, a system that would take hold across most of central Europe.

Whilst most of the things we discussed today relate to Karl’s role as king of Bohemia, the University was something different. This foundation was quite explicitly meant to be an institution open to everyone in northern europe, not just Czech speakers. In fact in the early days of the university less than a quarter of students were Czech speaking. That the university was hugely attractive to non-Czechs should not be surprising since for anyone in the empire as well as in Poland and Hungary, Prague was a whole lot closer than Paris, Bologna or Oxford. This issue of language and who the university was for will become an important topic further down the line, so just keep that in mind. But for now what we have is a truly international institution which raised the profile of Prague, the crown of Bohemia and its bearer even further.

When we put it all together, the whole thing begins to make sense. What Karl is attempting here is a redefinition of the Kingdom of Bohemia. A kingdom increasingly detached from the empire, its most senior bishop no longer reporting to a archbishop over in the German lands, a capital massively enlarged with squares on a scale that takes people’s breath away, a centre for pilgrims who find it a new Jerusalem or at least a new Rome and throning above all the cathedral of St. Vitus and within it the crown of St. Wenceslaus the manifestation of this commonwealth.

By 1355 it is clear to see for everyone that Bohemia is flourishing under its new ruler and that it had come together as a kingdom, ruler, nobles, patricians, scholars and artisans all united in one purpose.

And that is when Karl decides that it was time to harvest what he had sowed. This new entity, the crown of Bohemia needed a constitution. Surely he did not use the word constitution in the way we would use it today but he meant something quite similar, a written document that set out explicitly who was to decide what, which rights one had against the state and what the state could to those who failed to obey.

This document he called the Majestas Carolina, I am not sure I can translate that. It opened up with several sections on what to do with heretics, which implies the anti-clerical trends had been boosted by the recent plague. The next section is about preserving the resources of the crown, effectively prohibiting the sale and mortgaging of certain royal estates and cities – so far so uncontroversial by 14th century standards.

What raised eyebrows were the rules about the Landfrieden, the common peace. Bringing peace and protecting travellers had been demanded of rulers since time immemorial but had still failed to materialise. Emperors, kings, dukes, counts and cities across medieval Europe tried and tried to rein in on banditry and feuds, sometime by force, sometime through voluntary agreement, but usually with limited success.

The Majestas Carolina took a straightforward approach. Karl simply banned mot just feuds and banditry it any form of harm done Toni’s subjects.   An administrative structure comprised of bureaucrats and lawyers was to enforce this peace and adjudicate the conflicts underlying the feuds. As for the nobility, they were to be co-opted into the royal apparatus, serving the crown of Bohemia by providing advice in the council and military support in war. All power was therefore concentrated in the crown of Bohemia, any rival structure such as voluntary agreements or alliances amongst the barons and/or cities were explicitly prohibited.

That all sounds eminently sensible. Almost word for word exactly as sensible as the Constitutions of Melfi issued more than a hundred years earlier by Frederick II for his kingdom of Sicily. And like the Constitutions of Melfi, it ran into opposition from the barons. For them the Majestas Carolina would have brought an unacceptable loss of power. No longer were they the sole judges in their land. And even worse, once the law was written down, they could no longer make it up as they went along. And let’s not forget, feuds and banditry had become a major source of income for the knights whose revenues from agricultural activity had dried up, now that they had to pay their few remaining peasants more money.

The Majestas Carolina, as sensible a lawbook it was, got shot down by the barons. When Karl called a general assembly in 1355 to pass this shiny capstone of the Bohemian reforms, he faced a hostile crowd. Pragmatic as he was, instead of trying to push and causing a civil war, he just came back to the barons one morning and said that a terrible accident had befallen his project. The one and only copy that some barons had already signed had accidentally fallen into the fire and had burned down. Without the book I am afraid, nobody can sign it. I am sorry to disappoint you all who wanted to commit to the project. It must have been a sign of god that this was not the way forward. So all stays as was. Thanks everyone for coming. See you next year.

And that is what I will say now too, see you next week when we look at Karl’s policy beyond Bohemia, namely his approach to the empire, which may include his second, more successful attempt at passing a constitution. I hope you will tune in again.

And just to conclude, remember that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go the patreon.com/historyofthegermans or to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month.

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The Disastrous 14th Century

In around 1320 near the lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan the rats started dying. Shortly after the inhabitants became affected with terrible diseases. Some started coughing up blood and all who did, died within 3 days. Others developed swellings of the lymph nodes, particularly in the groins and armpits. Roughly half of them died within five days. A small number saw their feet and fingertips turn black. All of those died.

Everyone who could still leave sought refuge in towns and villages that had not been affected. The disease travelled with them. By 1330 Chinese chroniclers recorded a plague affecting the Mongol hordes. In 1346 a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on Crimea succumbed to the disease. In their final push to cow the defenders they catapulted the diseased corpses of their comrades into the city. The siege lifted grain transports from Caffa to Italy resumed. The disease reached Messina in Sicily in 1347. In 1348 it had enveloped most of Italy. 1349 it crossed the alps, by 1350 people died in their thousands in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It took until 1353 before this wave of the plague petered out, leaving between 20 and 60% of the population of Europe dead. The disease returned in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400. After that intervals became longer but the plague never went away completely and still today a couple of 100 people die worldwide of Plague every year.

Despite having lived through a pandemic only recently, we have all realised that the impact of such an event goes far beyond the gruesome statistics. It is much too recent an event to get a grasp of the impact COVID 19 had on the economy, political system and society in general, but clearly something has changed. Now imagine the plague, which in terms of death toll was between 10 and 30 times worse and crucially affected young and old equally. The fallout was exponentially greater not least because it came on the back of several other calamities. It is these impacts we will mainly focus on in this episode. So let’s dive in..

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 157 – The Black Death and other Calamities, also episode 19 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”

In around 1320 near the lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan the rats started dying. Shortly after the inhabitants became affected with terrible diseases. Some started coughing up blood and all who did, died within 3 days. Others developed swellings of the lymph nodes, particularly in the groins and armpits. Roughly half of them died within five days. A small number saw their feet and fingertips turn black. All of those died.

Everyone who could still leave sought refuge in towns and villages that had not been affected. The disease travelled with them. By 1330 Chinese chroniclers recorded a plague affecting the Mongol hordes. In 1346 a Mongol army besieging the Genoese trading city of Caffa on Crimea succumbed to the disease. In their final push to cow the defenders they catapulted the diseased corpses of their comrades into the city. The siege lifted grain transports from Caffa to Italy resumed. The disease reached Messina in Sicily in 1347. In 1348 it had enveloped most of Italy. 1349 it crossed the alps, by 1350 people died in their thousands in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It took until 1353 before this wave of the plague petered out, leaving between 20 and 60% of the population of Europe dead. The disease returned in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400. After that intervals became longer but the plague never went away completely and still today a couple of 100 people die worldwide of Plague every year.

Despite having lived through a pandemic only recently, we have all realised that the impact of such an event goes far beyond the gruesome statistics. It is much too recent an event to get a grasp of the impact COVID 19 had on the economy, political system and society in general, but clearly something has changed. Now imagine the plague, which in terms of death toll was between 10 and 30 times worse and crucially affected young and old equally. The fallout was exponentially greater not least because it came on the back of several other calamities. It is these impacts we will mainly focus on in this episode. So let’s dive in..

But before we start the usual reminder that this show is advertising free and that I also have shortened this section to the absolute minimum. So, please give generously on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to Jan M., Isaac B., Robin G. George b., Clive S. and Ben E. who have already signed up

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Now back to the show.

The 14th century wasn’t off to a good start. In 1309 weather patterns changed and for 8 years Europe experienced a sequence of wet summers and extremely hard winters. Crop failures weren’t uncommon in the Middle Ages, but they tended to be short lived. This sequence of 8 bad years was exceptional and it had a compounding effect. Yields in 14th century were quite low. I saw numbers of just 3 to 4 grains per seed. That was above the levels of the 10th century but not much. Improved agricultural technology such as the horse-driven plough and crop rotation were offset by 200 years of expansion of agricultural land into less and less productive parcels.

The problem was that if one seed produced just 4 grains, a quarter of the harvest had to be set aside as seed for next year. In normal years about 10-30% of the produce was sold at market, depending on proximity of urban centres. The rest aka 2 grains per one seed was needed to feed the peasant and his family. In a crop failure the harvest dropped to half of the normal yield or less. Now we have just 2 grains per seed, 1 of those is needed to seed the next harvest and only 1 grains is available to feed the farmer and for sale. Given the producers used to have 2 grains just for themselves, they are now starving even if they do not sell anything. But not selling anything would be difficult since the peasant owed rent to the local lord in cash or had to deliver a fixed amount of produce in lieu of payment. Having given away some of their scarce grain, farmers had to dip into the grain reserved for seeding next year’s crop. Which means that even if the following year is a good year, not all fields will have been seeded and the total harvest is lower than normal.

If you have several years of crop failure in a row, the seed reserve shrinks and shrinks so that even in years with decent yields the absolute amount of harvest is down dramatically. That is what happened in 1309 to 1317. The series of crop failures exhausted the system. Even though the Hanse merchants were now busy bringing grain from the Prussia, Lithuania and even Ukraine into the empire, famine gripped almost all of Europe.

As always children were the worst affected. Childhood malnutrition has long-term outcomes for its survivors, including impaired growth, altered body composition, greater cardiometabolic disease risk, cognitive impairment, and behavioural problems. Not an ideal starting point for these children who are in the 30s and 40s when we get to the Black Death.

But before that we have a plague of locusts in 1338 and 1346 and a massive earthquake in 1348.

And then comes the big one:

Quote: “The mortality began in Siena in May 1348. It was a cruel and horrible thing and I do not know where to begin to tell of the cruelty and the pitiless ways. It seemed to almost everyone that one became stupified by seeing the pain. And it was impossible for the human tongue to recount the awful thing. Indeed, one who did not see such horribleness can be called blessed. And the victims died almost immediately. They would swell beneath their armpits and in their groins, and all over dead while talking. Father abandoned child, wife husband, one brother a brother; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices. Nor did the death bell sound. And in many places in Siena great pits were dug and piled deep with the multitude of dead. And they died by the hundreds both day and night, and all were thrown in those ditches and covered over with earth. And as soon as those ditches were filled more were dug.”

This how Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, a citizen of Siena who had buried his five children with his own hands described the seminal event of the 14th century, the Black death that lasted from 1346 to 1353 in Europe.

As a listener to the History of the Germans you have already heard me giving a number of accounts of the Black Death so I will not repeat all the well known details. But there is something I came across recently that I hope you will find interesting.

For a long time it was believed that the Black Death had been a unique event resulting from a specific mutation sometime in the 14th century. But it is now firmly established that the plague had been around for thousands of years earlier. Researchers have found DNA of Yarsinia Pestis the bacteria that caused the disease in human remains from 3600BC. And there had been several other outbreaks, the best known of which was the Justinian Plague in the 6th century that petered out in the 8th and killed about a third of the population around the mediterranean rim.

The Black Death of 1346-1353 in Europe was followed by a number of regular outbreaks until it disappeared in the 18th century. A hundred years later we had several large outbreaks in Asia and even today people die of the plague, mainly in the democratic Republic of Kongo, Madagascar and Peru.

Which leaves us with the question, why can such a devastating disease appear seemingly out of nowhere then reappear in 10 to 15 year intervals before seemingly vanishing for centuries? Most other communicable diseases, Cholera, Malaria, Smallpox and COVID 19 etc. circulate in the human population until defeated by vaccination or changes in sanitation. The Plague mysteriously disappears leaving not even immune carriers amongst the human population behind.

Two zoologists, Keeling and Gilligan published an article in Nature in 2000 that provides a hypothesis that at least I find very convincing.

Their starting point is a fairly obvious observation, the plague isn’t a predominantly human disease, but first and foremost a disease of rodents, namely rats. The fleas that transmit the disease only attack humans if they cannot find a rat nearby. Basically, they prefer rat blood to human blood. So as long as there are enough rats for the fleas to feed on, the plague does not get transmitted to humans.

There are separate populations of rats where the plague is endemic but thanks to widespread immunity in this population, the bacterium remains contained. And these populations might have existed all over the world, and – spoiler alert – they still do.

Looking at it that way, it becomes clear how these spontaneous outbreaks happen. One scenario is that a population of mostly immune rats comes into contact with another population that is not immune, the bacterium kills them very much the same way it kills humans. As the fleas run out of rats they attack humans. Or alternatively, the rats die for another reason, for instance the lack of food due to widespread crop failure, the same things happens. Fleas run out of rats to feed of and move on to humans.

So, what likely happened is that somewhere in the Mongol empire, most probably near lake Issy-Kul in Kyrgysistan for some reason the rats died and the disease then spread to humans. Once it hits humans, it can be conveyed not just by fleas, but also by coughing, which may account for the rapid dissemination across Asia and Europe.

And that also explains why the disease reappeared randomly over the following centuries all across Europe. After the first outbreak the bacteria was still circulating in rats that were largely immune but not in humans. When those rats died for whatever reason, for instance because the humans killed the rats as a way to protect themselves from diseases, the hungry fleas spread the disease to humans again. The disease then peters out once the rat population recovers and the flea no longer jump on the humans.

Now here is the worrying bit. There are still populations of rats and other mammals in North America that carry the plague bacteria. These are mostly wild rats living outside the major cities and so far no outbreak has occurred. But as the plague has had extended periods of being dormant, it could show up any moment. And once it does, the last thing we want to do is eradicate the rats. If we did that, the hungry fleas would overcome their disgust for human blood, and the impact would be even more catastrophic. Ah, and some of these strains have become resistant to antibiotics…. Top tip from the History of the Germans podcast: Don’t kill rats, we may need them.

Now let’s get back to the 14th century and look at the impact.

The first wave of the plague took 3 years from the first reported cases in Messina in Sicily in 1347 until the disease took hold in Scandinavia and another year to make it to Poland. But when it came, it came with force. In 1350 the city Council of Bremen ordered to list the names of everyone who had died from the Plague and collected 6,966 names. Add to that an estimated 1,000 unknown corpses and assuming the city had about 12,000-15,000 inhabitants at the time, more than half fell victim to the disease.

Hamburg reported the death of 12 out of its 34 bakers, 18 of its 40 butchers, 27 out of its 50 civil servants and a staggering 16 out of 21 members of its council. Similarly, Lübeck, Wismar, Reval and Lüneburg reported death rates of 30% and more amongst the members of their city councils.

We have less detailed numbers for the south of Germany and Bohemia, but the estimates range from 20 to 60% of the population dying from the Plague. We than have another series of pan-European outbreaks in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400, each taking another material percentage of the population.

The Historian Joerg Hoenisch expects the population in what is today Germany to have fallen from 6-7 million to 4-4.5 million and in the empire overall from 12-13 million to 8-9 million. We also notice that the reproduction rate during the period declined and given the high mortality, population numbers kept declining consistently until 1420.

Unsurprisingly such a massive cull did have huge implications for the economy, society and politics.

Let’s start with economics. And spoiler alert, as horrible as that sounds, it wasn’t all bad.

Imagine a world where practically overnight 30% of the population disappears, more in the densely populated cities and maybe somewhat less in the countryside.

The first thing is that there are simply less mouths to feed – demand for foodstuff drops dramatically. When demand drops prices drop. Prices for foodstuff were determined in the cities, With urban populations contracting even faster, grain prices in particular declined rapidly in nominal terms. In real terms the decline was even more significant because the gold and silver coins did not vanish with its previous owners, causing material inflation in other goods.

This fall in grain prices had a major impact on the economics in the countryside. By the 14th century the legal situation for most peasants in the empire had improved significantly. Serfdom had largely vanished and had been replaced by rents, most often paid in cash rather than produce. As the farmers received less and less coins for their hard labour, they found themselves unable to pay the rents. The landowners, the knights, lords, abbots and bishops saw their income drop and put pressure on the peasants to pay them in full. In this situation of falling income and rising rents, lots of peasants left for the cities, where the decline in population had created new opportunities.

At which point the landowners had an even bigger problem. A significant percentage of their peasants had died in the plague. Of those that survived, a lot have run away to the cities. To keep the remainder to toil on the land, there were two options. Carrot or stick. The carrot was to pay agricultural labourers a fair wage and or reduce rents. The other was to exert force, turning them back into serfs. Depending on political conditions and geography, in some regions we have a return to serfdom, but the more common outcome was that the remaining rural population resisted, sometimes in the form of peasant revolts until they saw their incomes improve.

At the same time the rural landscape changed. With fewer people available to work on the land, the marginally productive parcels were abandoned. To improve security and efficiency small villages and outlying farms were abandoned in favour of larger villages. About 40,000 settlements, roughly a quarter of the total disappeared during the 14th century.

The shortage of labour and the concentration in the larger villages further improved the bargaining power of the peasants. Many villages were able to establish their own administration led by a Vorsteher or Schöffe who would also assume the role of judge for minor crimes and civil disputes.

Having got rid of the marginal fields, yields improved to five grains per seed and by concentrating in the larger villages, production could be diversified. These higher value products found markets in the cities at better prices, leading to a further improvement of the material situation for the rural population. According to an analysis by the Bank of England, this period was the one and only time between the 10th and 18th century that real incomes of the working population material improved, the one and only time.

The big losers in this game were the landowners, in particular the Reichsritter, the knights or what we used to call the Ministeriales. So far, they had maintained a fairly comfortable existence as the lion’s share of the monetary proceeds of agricultural activity ended up in their pockets. But this had now shifted. The knights saw both the total and their share of the agricultural income decline. As the value of labour rose, the value of land shrunk. At the same time their relevance as a military force was also rapidly eroding as commoners with longbows, halberds and crossbows were mowing down the lower of French, Habsburg and any other chivalry. Shut out from their main sources of income, they were left with two options, brigandry or submission under a more powerful player. A lot chose brigandry, but that turned out to be no more than a stepping stone to submission.

The territorial princes, a growing force since the days of the early Hohenstaufen got a major boost from the Black Death. Not that their resources weren’t affected but they were less impacted than the knights. They had already built a rudimentary administration and had sources of income not associated with land ownership such as taxes, tolls and the ability to reduce the content of precious metal in their coins.

As a consequence, the princes were able to incorporate many knightly holdings into their territories. Either by convincing them that this was their only option, or if the knight had turned brigand, by defeating and expropriating them.

But not all knights submitted to territorial lords. Many preferred to align themselves with the big cities that recovered surprisingly quickly.

The cities had suffered the brunt of the mortality of the Black death. Many had vanished, but those that survived were able to replenish their populations with peasants fleeing the oppression of their local lords and the lawlessness caused by the brigands.

What happened in the cities with these peoples is still subject to debate. On the one hand the plague and the regular outbreaks that followed created a shortage of labour, not just simple manual labour but also artisans and merchants. Hence ambitious men willing to build up their skills found ample opportunities to step into the shoes of their deceased predecessors. On the other hand, the richest families, the patricians found themselves even richer than before, provided they survived. The patrician families were an intermarried oligarchy so that the inheritance of the plague victims was distributed within a small pool of survivors. These survivors held all the levers of power. In most cities the council was refilled by appointment from within a small number of patrician families, not by election.

Into this situation stumbled the impoverished knights asking for help in fending off the greedy princes on their doorstop. The cities were happy to take them in as so-called Pfahlbürger, citizens but – despite their aristocratic background – not patricians. They could stay on their castles and would form part of the city’s military force. As a consequence we find now cities in the German speaking part of the empire like Nürnberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber or Zurich with large territories around their cities, a bit like the Contados of the Italian communes.

This structural change in the cities caused serious frictions. On the one hand the patricians flouted their inherited wealth and were less and less interested in economic activity, whilst the artisans, some of whom had become successful entrepreneurs found themselves shut out of political power. And the social underclass of labourers, apprentices, maids and servants found themselves often in circumstances not better and sometimes even worse than the villages they had left.

Insurrections against the patricians and the city councils they controlled happened in regular intervals all across the empire. They were often triggered when the inept patrician administration had borrowed excessive amounts for prestige projects leaving the community overindebted which subsequently required tax increases. These insurrections were most often suppressed, usually with the help of patricians from neighbouring cities and the Pfahlbuerger, the knights who had joined the cities. But over time in particular the Southern and Western German cities allowed the artisans representation on the city council. The Hanse was an exception since the patricians were closely linked across the core cities and suppressed these attempts to overthrow their regime, something we discussed in the series on the Hanseatic League.

All these economic and political changes leave behind a quite fundamentally different empire. An empire where the population shrinks, economic activity shifted towards the big cities, the knights see their role eroding and turn to brigandry, peasants gain more freedom and self-determination.

But beyond these material changes, something also changed in the minds of people.

The initial reaction is best described by Agnolo di Tura, called the Fat, our friend from Siena: quote  “And then, when the pestilence abated, all who survived gave themselves over to pleasures: monks, priests, nuns, and lay men and women all enjoyed themselves, and none worried about spending and gambling. And everyone thought himself rich because he had escaped and regained the world, and no one knew how to allow himself to do nothing. Each person lived according to his own caprice, and everyone tended to seek pleasure in eating and drinking, hunting, catching birds, and gaming. “ End Quote. He clearly leaves out the bits not suitable for a family show.

Emerging from the trauma, suddenly rich beyond their expectations and having realised how short life could be, people went all out for hedonism. This is the time when fashion went from shapeless tunics into tight fitting leggings and shirt jackets for men and body-hugging dresses for women. Bocaccio published his Decameron which is full of stories about practical jokes and erotic adventures, Chaucer, who writes not much later too has his fair share of saucy stories.

But beyond this outbreak of fun or debauchery, depending on your viewpoint, the society of the 14th century was asking the obvious question: Why? Why did they have to live through a century of plague, famine, war and death? Why did God release the four riders of the apocalypse on us.

The reaction to this question varied. The Avignon church, its corruption, wealth and ostentation made a great scapegoat, in particular in the empire where anticlerical sentiment was already deeply ingrained. But also in the Decameron or in Chaucer, the dissolute cleric is a classic trope.

Others saw the failure in themselves, their sinfulness and lack of repentance. The flagellants appeared across all of europe, groups of initially only men who would whip themselves three times a day, twice publicly and once in private in the knight. The reason for that was from a letter, allegedly written by Jesus where he promised not to destroy the world as long as there would be regular lashings and people would honour the Sunday rest.

Contrary to the usual perception, few flagellants joined these groups permanently. The idea was to do penance for 33 1/3 days, one day for each of Jesus life on earth. People from all walks of life took part, from the desperately poor to rich merchants and even nobles. Women were admitted only fairly late in the movement’s short history

The flagellants as a concept had been around since 1261. But they only turned into a mass movement when the plague hit, and probably helped a lot in spreading the disease. The official church opposed the movement as it further exposed their worldliness and they succeeded in suppressing it by the 1350s.

The Flagellants were a  pretty gruesome spectacle, but largely harmless. Then there was another, a horrific way, how people tried to make sense what happened. As so many societies before, they laid the blame on the Other, and the most other group in the world of the 14th century were the Jews. They had their own language, laws, communities and above all, they were the only non-Christian religion tolerated in Europe.

By 1348 there were 350 Jewish communities in most towns and sometimes villages along the Rhine river and its tributaries. Most of these communities were small. The larger ones in Mainz and Trier counted about 250-300 people, Cologne was significantly larger and Nurnberg might have had as much as 1,500 Jewish inhabitants out of maybe 25,000 citizens overall.

Jews had been living in this area since the time of the Romans. The Jewish community in Cologne is recorded from the 4th century onwards. In the 11th century Worms and Mainz had been centres of Jewish learning, law and culture of international significance.

Life for the Jewish communities became more and more constrained since the time of the crusades. We have talked about the massacres of the Jewish communities in the build-up of the First Crusade in episode 53, still the only episode of this show with an NSFW rating.

Ever since the 11th century Jews in the empire enjoyed the protection of the emperor, not because he recognised them as fellow monotheists, but because that was how he justified taxing them especially hard. Frederick II being the notable exception, not for the taxation but for the respect he paid them. This protection was not always effective as central authority declined so that the obligation to keep them safe and the associated taxes were increasingly assumed by the territorial princes, often the bishops.

Despite the promise of safekeeping there were persecutions and pogroms in 1298 that killed about 3,000 people, and another one in 1336 and 1338 in Bavaria. The leader of one of these attacks, a knight Uissingheim was finally apprehended by the bishop of Wuerzburg and executed, though by that time 900 jews of Wuerzburg lay dead already.

Persecution of the Jews wasn’t specific to the empire. King Edward I had expelled the Jews from England in 1290, following a long tradition, whilst in France expulsions were ordered in 1254, 1306 and 1322. This may explain the relative density of Jewish populations in the empire where they enjoyed a still precarious but somewhat safer existence.

All that came to a dramatic end when the plague hit in 1348. Rumours had spread from the South of France that the Jews had poisoned the wells in order to wipe out the Christians, adding to previous notions that Jews had murdered Christian children in satanic rituals and desecrated the host, all baseless – just in case I need to say that.

These rumours were taken up with great enthusiasm across the empire and a terrifying mass murdering and killing began. Some of these pogroms were driven by a mop that had formed spontaneously. But more often than not the persecution of the jews was tied in with local politics if not authorised by the authorities.

One example happened in Strasburg. The city had been in the midst of one of these constitutional crises that I have described before. The artisan guilds and lower classes demanded participation in city politics from the patrician rulers of the city. The leaders of the revolt took advantage of the febrile atmosphere and blamed the Jews for the plague and demanded the council should therefore  kill them all. The Ammeister, the senior city magistrate refused and the city guard protected the Jewish community. But public pressure was such that the Ammeister was forced to step down and as the chronicler recorded: quote “On Friday they caught the Jews. On Saturday they burned them. There were about 2,000 of them. Those who converted were spared. And children were taken out of the fire against their parents wishes, baptised and brought up by Christian families. All the debts owed to the Jews were cancelled, their pawns and letters of credit returned. The cash was distributed amongst the guilds.” End quote. Just to complete the story, the Ammeister who had tried to protect the Jews was exiled and his fortune split amongst the patricians

It was often the debt, including the debt of the city itself that enticed the authorities to join and sometimes even organise the persecution. Nurnberg owed 70,000 gold guilders, roughly the cities annual budget. Their Jewish community perished…

Some cities tried to protect their Jewish neighbours, like Frankfurt and Ulm, though the mob in Frankfurt did get its way in an orgy of bloodshed in the end.

Which leaves the question, where was the emperor, the official protector of the Jews. That emperor was Karl IV, king of Bohemia. He did well in his own homelands, in Luxemburg, Bohemia and Moravia where the Jewish communities remained largely unmolested. As for the rest, not so much. Some have argued that given he had only just gained full recognition as king of the Romans in 1349 and was heavily indebted, his ability to provide any material protection was limited. But that is only part of the story. In his negotiations with the cities and with Ludwig of Brandenburg he disposed of Jewish property even before the owners had been killed. In Nurnberg he approved the destruction of the Synagogue and its replacement with a church, which made clear that Karl would not raise a finger to protect the largest Jewish community in his realm. Two days later the burning began.

With that – at least in my eyes – he had moved from heartless passivity to collaboration. A stain on his character he never recognised or even mentioned.

As for Jewish life after the Black Death, some communities recovered, often those where the territorial lord had kept them safe, but Jewish life remained a shadow of its form vibrancy. Many jurisdictions imported the Venetian concept of a separate quarter for Jews, the Ghetto. Their former role in high finance was assumed by the banking families of Augsburg and Nurnberg, forcing them down to being small time traders and moneylenders to the poor. They were made to wear a special headgear, the Judenhut and a yellow marker on their clothes. As time went on they were formally expelled from various cities and territories, namely Strasburg in 1389, Prague in 1400, Vienna in 1421, Augsburg 1440, Breslau 1453 and Carinthia in 1496. Many jews left for Poland where King Kasimir the Great welcomed them with open arms and where they helped the cities and the country to prosper.

Was this all that followed from the Black Death? Probably not. But this is all I have time for today. I have not yet decided what we will look at next week, but probably the much more cheerful topic of Karl IV’s expansion of the city of Prague, turning it into the largest city in the empire leaving behind monuments that still take your breath away today. I hope you will join us again.

Before we go, just the usual reminder that all this is only possible because some of you are generous enough to support the show either by becoming a patron by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation on historyofthegermans.com/support

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Karl IV Fights and schemes his Way to the Throne

The year is 1346 and we have, yes, another succession crisis. Without checking through my 1500 pages of transcripts, I have counted a total of 14 contested imperial elections in the 427 years we have covered so far. Henry the Fowler, Herny II, Henry IV, Henry V, Lothar III, Konrad III, Philip of Swabia, Otto IV, Frederick II, Konrad IV, Richard of Cornwall, Adolf of Nassau, Albrecht of Habsburg and Ludwig the Bavarians all had to contend with anti-kings or severe opposition to their ascension to the throne.

I guess you are bored with these and so were the citizens of the empire. But here is the good news. From Karl IV’s reign onwards these succession crises will become fewer and fewer. Why? One reason is of course the Golden Bull we will discuss in a few episodes time. But there is another one, which had to do with the way Karl IV overcome the opposition. He claimed it was divine providence, but modern historians point to a much more temporal force that tied the imperial title to the heirs of the house of Luxemburg…

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 156 – What price for a crown, also episode 18 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”

The year is 1346 and we have, yes, another succession crisis. Without checking through my 1500 pages of transcripts, I have counted a total of 14 contested imperial elections in the 427 years we have covered so far. Henry the Fowler, Herny II, Henry IV, Henry V, Lothar III, Konrad III, Philip of Swabia, Otto IV, Frederick II, Konrad IV, Richard of Cornwall, Adolf of Nassau, Albrecht of Habsburg and Ludwig the Bavarians all had to contend with anti-kings or severe opposition to their ascension to the throne.

I guess you are bored with these and so were the citizens of the empire. But here is the good news. From Karl IV’s reign onwards these succession crises will become fewer and fewer. Why? One reason is of course the Golden Bull we will discuss in a few episodes time. But there is another one, which had to do with the way Karl IV overcome the opposition. He claimed it was divine providence, but modern historians point to a much more temporal force that tied the imperial title to the heirs of the house of Luxemburg…

But before we start the usual reminder that the History of the Germans is advertising free. And that is only possible because some of you are willing to make a contribution to the show. As you know, you can do that either by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time contribution on my website historyofthegermans.com under support the show. And let me thank  Birgit L., Brian C., Brian P., Christoph H., Gareth W., Gregory W. and Iskren C. who have given so generously.

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Last week we left our most recent imperial hopeful at the Battle of Crecy, his father dead, he himself much impaired, possibly physically wounded, fleeing the field of battle.

Yes, he had been elected king of the Romans by five Prince-electors, but despite the extraordinary expense in bribes and concessions, this had been a low-key affair. At Rhens, where the election had taken place only a smattering of knights and counts had attended. And a rushed coronation had to take place in Bonn as he could not get into Aachen and lacked the imperial regalia, crucial for the legitimacy of the event.

Returning from France with the body of his father and his much diminished forces, he stopped in Luxemburg. He was so broke, he had to borrow money from a local banker to pay for John of Bohemia’s funeral.

Gathering resources became his number one objective and he did not care much where these came from. So, he took over the county of Luxemburg for himself even though his father’s testament had granted it to his stepbrother Wenzel. Wenzel was admittedly only 9 years old at the time and Luxemburg needed to be protected. Still, a bit of a cad move.

His biggest problem was that the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian who had ruled for over 30 years was still around. He was 64 years old and seemingly still in good health plus had been blessed with a total of five sons, so many, he ran out of ideas what to call them. He named two of the Ludwig, Ludwig the Elder, who was – guess what – the older one and Ludwig the Roman, who was called that because he was born in the eternal city.

Moreover, very much to Karl’s chagrin, his election had not galvanised the opposition against the Bavarian as he had hoped. In particular the great cities, by now the financially most important estate in the empire remained firmly with the Wittelsbachs providing the funds for the impending civil war.

The other big problem he had to deal with was that public opinion saw him as a creature of the papacy. It was after all pope Clement VI, his great friend and mentor who had supported him in the run-up to his election. After 20 years under church interdict the mood in Germany had turned against the Avignon popes to a degree unmatched in any other part of medieval Europe. And this sentiment had taken hold across the social classes, not just the peasants who had to pay ever increasing taxes to the church but also the senior clergy who no longer elected their own abbots and bishops but even the territorial princes had complaints about ecclesiastical overreach. Karl did not help his case when he reconfirmed his oath to support the papacy to a degree no emperor before him had done.

Even the king of France, Philip VI, for whom he and his father had fought at Crecy was at best lukewarm in his endorsement of Karl. Maybe Karl should not have shown his disapproval of this spendthrift monarch so openly when he lived in Paris…

Apart from the political problem, he also had a logistical one. Since his father had died, he needed to get to Prague to claim his kingdom. Though Bohemia was an inherited, not an elective kingdom, the Bohemian barons had shown in the past that they were willing and able to replace their monarchs. Plus, he needed to achieve some military success that would convince his potential allies that he was serious.

Emperor Ludwig knew that and therefore calculated that Karl would somehow make his way to Bohemia, raise an army there and then attack one of the two Wittelsbach possessions next door, Bavaria or Brandenburg. The aging emperor and his oldest son Ludwig of Brandenburg fortified castles and amassed troops on the Bohemian border.

Now remember that Karl was a cold and calculating chess player, not a hard charging chivalric knight always attacking where the mass of enemies was thickest. Aiming to be two steps ahead, Karl decided against doing the obvious but instead to attack the Wittelsbach underbelly that had been stripped of troops to defend Bavaria and Brandenburg. That underbelly was the county of Tyrol.

In all secrecy Karl gathered support amongst the lords of the Northern Italian cities who knew him from the campaigns of his youth. He then sweettalked the patriarch of Aquileia and the bishop of Trient into providing troops and attacked Tyrol from the south. His army moved rapidly into what is today called South Tyrol and the Wittelsbachs were caught on the wrong foot. Ludwig the Elder, the count of Tyrol and husband of Margarete Maultasch was up north defending Brandenburg with most of his soldiers.

But Karl, cunning as he was, had not thought about the subsequent moves on the chessboard. Though the count of Tyrol and most of his vassals were away, his countess, the formidable Margarete Maultasch was not, and Margarete Maultasch was not prepared to yield to Karl, not ever, because she could not. You may remember that she had been married to Karl’s brother, Johann Heinrich and had him thrown out of the county. Not only that, shortly after that she had married Ludwig the Elder of Wittelsbach without her previous marriage being annulled. The emperor Ludwig had granted her a civil divorce, but in the eyes of the church and a large chunk of the public opinion, she was still married. And that meant, if she surrendered now, she would have been hauled before an ecclesiastical court as a bigamist. The penalty for bigamy was flogging followed by exposure to the crowd at the scaffold, plus she would have lost Tyrol not only for herself but also for her son.

Hence Margarete Maultasch could not yield, ever. She gathered what small forces she had and fortified the ancestral residence of Schloss Tyrol above Meran. If you ever have a chance to go there, take a look. Schloss Tyrol is, even by the standards of Tyrol with many amazing fortresses atop steep mountains an outstanding position. And it had been strengthened by generations of counts of Tyrol, making it almost impregnatable.

Margarete Maultasch held out against Karl and his allies for several months until her husband finally arrived from Berlin with a relief army, sending Karl packing.

This failure seemed like a nail in the coffin of Karl’s ambition. Disguised as a pilgrim, he travelled through Austria to Bohemia. He did meet with the Habsburg duke Albrecht on the way but could not convince him to join his cause. Albrecht was as much a calculating chess player as Karl and he was not willing to take sides at a point when the outcome was so open. All he promised was neutrality for now.

In August Karl was finally back in Prague. There he celebrated a coronation as king of Bohemia which to his great relief attracted at least some of the imperial princes. What enticed them to come, you will hear in a minute.

First, we need to talk about Bohemia. Though he was popular in Bohemia, the Bohemian barons drove a hard bargain. Karl had to confirm all ancient privileges plus guarantee that no “foreigners” would gain any of the senior positions in the kingdom, that no vassals could be forced to fight beyond the border, that royal claims on completed fiefdoms were to be restricted and that certain taxes were abolished.

In return the barons allowed the coronation to go ahead and even provided the funds to muster sizeable army to attack Bavaria or Brandenburg. And just when he was about to order the departure for Munich news arrived that the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, at the age of 65 had gone on a bear hunt and had not returned. I am not sure what is more astounding, that a 65 year old man suffers a heart attack when facing up to a bear with bows and arrows or that there were actual bears in Fuerstenfeldbruck, a place known more for its erratic driving style than its megafauna.

This event elicited two reactions. Karl thought, definitely not for the first time, that his extraordinary luck was another sign from God who had made him his champion. The reaction in the Wittelsbach camp was shock and despair. Their position had rested to a large extent on Ludwig’s personality, his competent statesmanship and the fact that he had been on the throne for 33 years and that everybody accepted him as emperor despite the interdict and the dodgy coronation.

Now they needed a new champion. If these had been the Habsburgs, the family would have rallied around the eldest of the sons, Ludwig the Elder, the margrave of Brandenburg and Count of Tyrol. But the Wittelsbach were a more disjointed lot and there were some issues with Ludwig, him being a bit of a ladies’ man, in particular the ladies of his courtiers and allies. And Ludwig was one of only two Prince Electors in the family and there was a debate whether an elector could vote for himself at an election.

So, they needed someone else. I mean there were four more sons of the emperor, but they could not decide for any one of them, for reasons, see above. That led to the natural choice of, drumroll, King Edward III of England, the victor of Crecy and all out 14th century super lad. How they got this idea is totally beyond me. The Wittelsbachs had just cheated Edward out of his wife’s inheritance, the counties of Holland and Hennegau. Edward was also still busy with the French, that war isn’t called the hundred years war for nothing. Very much to the Bavarians’ surprise, Edward III politely declined the offer.

Next one on the list was Fredrich der Ernsthafte, the serious of Wettin, himself landgrave of Thuringia and Margrave of Meissen. That made a lot more sense. Friedrich’s lands were sandwiched between Bohemia and Brandenburg, making him a target for the ambitions of either houses. He would be dragged into the conflict whether he wanted or not, hence steadfast support of the Wittelsbach plus the promise of bits of Brandenburg was a compelling offer.

Friedrich the Serious was about to draft his letter of acceptance when he heard bewildering news from Magdeburg.

In Spring 1348 an old man in pilgrim’s garb had appeared at the gates of the castle of Wolmirstedt and had demanded to see the archbishop of Magdeburg. He had an important message for the prelate he said. The guards refused him access to the prince of the church, as one would. Then the man asked for just bread and wine, as was owed to him as a pilgrim. The old man was sitting down in the hall chewing on his bread when one of the aides of the archbishop spotted him noticed something unusual and exclaimed: “this is the ring of margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg”, pointing to the signet ring the old man was wearing. The pilgrim was brought before the archbishop and asked where he got this ring from. At which point the old man revealed that he was the margrave Woldemar of Brandenburg. Which was surprising, since Woldemar of Brandenburg had died in 1319, i.e., 29 years earlier. Not only that, his body had been buried with great pomp in the abbey of Chorin in the presence of many princes and lords.

Well, the pilgrim said, that burial had been a fake. He, Woldemar had been riven with guilt for marrying his first cousin and had decided to do penance by going on a long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. And to make it more of a penance he had pretended to be dead. But now he was back, released from his sins and willing to release his lands from the grip of the louche and tyrannical Ludwig the Elder of Wittelsbach.

The archbishop Otto of Magdeburg immediately bought this thoroughly convincing story and declared the old man to be indeed the one and only Woldemar the Great, true margrave of Brandenburg and Prince Elector of the empire. In return the grateful margrave rewarded the archbishop with valuable castles and lands.

Soon after the cousins of the Margrave, the counts of Anhalt and the dukes of Saxen-Wittenberg came to see the man and  confirmed his identity as their long lost relative Woldemar of Brandenburg. In return Woldemar made them the heirs to the margraviate since he was unlikely to father any children given his advanced age.

Quite rapidly lord and knights of Brandenburg heard of the story and they too recognised their old lord and master. What convinced them was not just the physical similarity between him and the old margrave, but also his knowledge of specific events in the past, his speech and mannerisms. Ah, and they recognised him for his legendary generosity when he handed them rights, lands and castles.

As the new old Woldemar gathered supporters, the actual margrave of Brandenburg, Ludwig the Elder, head of the house of Wittelsbach and main opponent of Karl of Bohemia saw his hold on the territory slipping away. He had been unpopular with the locals, in part for his loose morals but probably even more for his tight fiscal policies.

For our Karl, the return of margrave Woldemar was another gift from God. He met up with the man, declared that he was the real thing and confirmed him as the margrave of Brandenburg and in all his other fiefdoms. And in return Woldemar gave him upper Lusatia.

For the next two years Brandenburg suffered in a civil war between Woldemar and Ludwig the Elder. The war sucked in not just Karl, but also the king of Denmark, Waldemar Atterdag, the great foe of the Hanseatic league and the dukes of Pomerania and Mecklenburg.

Now if you have followed the chronology, you may have noticed which year we are in, yes 1348 and in 1348 a massive event that ill upturn medieval society had begun, the Black Death. The conflict was however so intense, even the massive death toll the disease brought barely stopped the fighting.

In the vagaries of war and disease outcomes are unpredictable. Despite support from Bohemia, Ludwig the Elder gradually got the upper hand in the conflict.

But by then it had already been to late for the Wittelsbachs.

Karl had once again outsmarted his enemies. His first coup had been to convince the patricians of Nurnberg that their interest lay in the east, in Bohemia and Hungary and that hence he was a more useful ally than the Wittelsbachs. With Nurnberg came many of the Swabian cities, once a key source of funds and support for the Wittelsbach cause.

And then he turned the tables once more when he used the constant friction within the Wittelsbach family. The count palatinate Rudolf was a Wittelsbach but like his father had an ambivalent relationship with Ludwig the Bavarian and the rest of the family. Karl charmed the old man to let him marry his daughter Anna, sole heiress to the principality. The marriage was agreed and then concluded within days. The old count palatinate got his estates to swear Karl fealty in case of his death and even gave him control of his administration. The Palatinate hugely strengthened the Luxemburg position in the west and brought him the Upper Palatinate that lay between Bohemia and his latest ally, the city of Nurnberg.

Karl was as I said before the exact opposite of his father. John of Bohemia would have sought victory on the battlefield and absent that gained death and glory. Karl did not care about glory and he also wasn’t keen on war. But still he wanted to win and win at all cost. And when I say at all cost I mean it.

Karl bribed the imperial princes lavishly. Prince Electors got land and what was left of the imperial rights to mint coins and collect tolls. The Pomeranians and Mecklenburgers were made dukes and imperial princes. Friedrich the Serious of Meissen was given land and cash.

The Historian Ferdinand Seibt had calculated that Karl spent a total of 1.8 million gold florins. A stunning sum by any measure. If you know your history of the hundred years war, you may remember that king Edward III had funded the campaign in France with loans from the Florentine bankers, the Bardi and Peruzzi to the tune of 1.5 million golf florins and when he was unable to pay it, he declared England bankrupt. His default leading to the collapse of a whole generation of Florentine banking houses, creating the opening for the Medici to rise to power.

Karl spent even more on his fight for the throne than Edward had spent on the campaign in France. Most of the money, about 900,000 florins went to the Prince Electors, 500,000 to the other imperial princes, 300,000 to counts and barons and 100,000 to the cities and individual patricians. The cheapest of them was it seems the anti king the Wittelsbach finally fielded, Count Gunther of Schwarzenberg. This knight and mercenary commander was the only one prepared to accept this suicide mission. Gunther lasted just three months after his election before he accepted 20,000 florins as payment for stepping down. He died a few weeks later. Do I need to tell you that Karl saw this again as a sign that he was God’s anointed.

By June 1349 the process was completed. The heavily bribed princes elected him again in Frankfurt and he was crowned again, this time in Aachen by his uncle Balduin of Trier. A year later he reconciled with the Wittelsbachs who handed over the imperial regalia. He dropped Woldemar who he now realised had been fake all along and enfeoffed Ludwig the elder with Brandenburg. Waldemor was given a caste to live out his last days.

Which leaves only one question. Where did Karl get his 1.8 million Florins from. Well, it wasn’t Bohemia whose barons remained tight fisted. Instead, Karl raided what was left of the lands and properties associated with the royal and imperial title. You remember that way back at the beginning of this series king Rudolf of Habsburgs spent most of his reign rebuilding the imperial domain. His policy of Revindication had been extremely successful and large parts of the properties the Hohenstaufen emperors had once ruled returned into royal control. Under his successors this stock had already shrunk somewhat, but when Karl appeared on the scene there was still quite a lot left. Within the first 2 years of his reign, almost all of it dissipated in bribes and awards. That is where the 1.8 million florins cam from. These weren’t cash payments but contributions in kind. Castles, toll stations, mints, advocacies over important abbeys, taxation rights over free and imperial cities etc., etc., etc. The resources meant to run the empire disappeared down the greedy throats of the imperial elites.

Karl will try to claim some of it back in the remainder of his reign but will ultimately give it away again when he secured the election of his son Wenceslaus as king of the Romans.

What that meant was that becoming king of the Romans became unaffordable to anyone not able to fund the entire administration of the empire out of their own funds. Without the royal lands no “poor count” like Rudolf von Habsburg or Henry of Luxemburg could ever again rise to the top of the tree after being elected. That removed the wildcard we had seen in previous elections and left the crown to whoever was the richest prince in the empire. And in 1349 Karl count of Luxemburg, king of Bohemia, margrave of Moravia, duke of Silesia and lots more was the richest of the imperial princes. Opinions differ about why he did strip the imperial title of all its resources. Was it necessity to gain the throne or was it a cunning long term plan aimed to shut out any of the other families from ever gaining the imperial diadem. This is one of the things we will never know because Karl’s autobiography breaks up with the election in 1346, meaning we are back to conjecture based on chroniclers and charters.

Now what does the empire look like Karl IV ruled over in 1349. Not great is the answer. We have the usual feuding and declining agricultural production but there is now another enemy, an enemy  impervious to arms or bribes that was making his way east and north, the Black Death. And that is what we will be talking about next time. Not just the horrors of the epidemic, but also how the loss of a third of the population changed the economic and mental landscape of the 14th century. I hope you will join us again.

But before I go just the customary shout out about the fact that the History of the Germans has remained advertising free for all these years and that I intend to keep it that way. And that depends a lot on the generosity of our patrons and you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support.

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The Future Emperor’s Dadddy Issues

You have heard me complaining regularly over the last 154 episodes that what we report as political ambitions or strategic plans of the kings and emperors was pure conjecture derived from their actions and public statement. But we could never know what they were really thinking because none of them kept a diary, or if they did they did not survive to today.  The subject of today’s episode however did write an autobiography, which is believed to have been written by the emperor himself, at least in large parts. So, for the first time we hear an emperor telling his own story. Do you want to hear it? Well, here he describes what he called his most seminal moment of his youth:

That night, as sleep overcame us, a vision appeared to us: an angel of the Lord stood beside us on our left side, where we lay, and struck us on the side, saying, “Rise and come with me.”

We responded in spirit, “Lord, I do not know where or how to go with you.” And taking us by the hair of the front part of our head, he lifted us into the air over a great line of armed knights who were standing before a castle, ready for battle. Holding us in the air above the line, he said to us, “Look and see.” And behold, another angel descending from the sky, holding a fiery sword in his hand, struck one in the middle of the line and cut off his genital member with the same sword, and he, as if mortally wounded, agonized while sitting on his horse.

Then the angel holding us by the hair said, “Do you recognize him who was struck by the angel and mortally wounded?” We said, “Lord, I do not know him, nor do I recognize the place.” He said, “You should know that this is the Dauphin of Vienne, who, because of the sin of lust, has been struck by God in this way; therefore, beware and tell your father to beware of similar sins, or worse things will happen to you.” [..]

[..] Suddenly, we were restored to our place, the dawn already breaking. [..] To our father and Thomas, we had not told everything as we had seen; only that the Dauphin was dead. After some days, a messenger came bearing letters that the Dauphin, having gathered his army, had come before a certain castle of the Count of Savoy and that he had been shot by a large arrow from a crossbow in the middle of all his soldiers and had died after a few days, having had confession. Then our father, hearing the letters, said, “We are greatly astonished at this, because our son had foretold his death to us.” And he and Thomas were very amazed, but no one spoke of this matter with them afterward.”

There you go, the emperor Karl IV has divine visions. Not quite what you were expecting, but as it happened a good window into his way of thinking. But do not worry, Karl wasn’t just an excessively devout collector of relics, he was at the same time an astute and often ruthless politician who gave the Holy Roman empire its constitution and placed his heirs on the throne for the next centuries.

So let’s talk about Karl’s journey from his youth to becoming the King of the Romans.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 155: The Youth of the Emperor Karl IV, also episode 18 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

You have heard me complaining regularly over the last 154 episodes that what we report as political ambitions or strategic plans of the kings and emperors was pure conjecture derived from their actions and public statement. But we could never know what they were really thinking because none of them kept a diary, or if they did they did not survive to today.  The subject of today’s episode however did write an autobiography, which is believed to have been written by the emperor himself, at least in large parts. So, for the first time we hear an emperor telling his own story. Do you want to hear it? Well, here he describes what he called his most seminal moment of his youth:

That night, as sleep overcame us, a vision appeared to us: an angel of the Lord stood beside us on our left side, where we lay, and struck us on the side, saying, “Rise and come with me.”

We responded in spirit, “Lord, I do not know where or how to go with you.” And taking us by the hair of the front part of our head, he lifted us into the air over a great line of armed knights who were standing before a castle, ready for battle. Holding us in the air above the line, he said to us, “Look and see.” And behold, another angel descending from the sky, holding a fiery sword in his hand, struck one in the middle of the line and cut off his genital member with the same sword, and he, as if mortally wounded, agonized while sitting on his horse.

Then the angel holding us by the hair said, “Do you recognize him who was struck by the angel and mortally wounded?” We said, “Lord, I do not know him, nor do I recognize the place.” He said, “You should know that this is the Dauphin of Vienne, who, because of the sin of lust, has been struck by God in this way; therefore, beware and tell your father to beware of similar sins, or worse things will happen to you.” [..]

[..] Suddenly, we were restored to our place, the dawn already breaking. [..] To our father and Thomas, we had not told everything as we had seen; only that the Dauphin was dead. After some days, a messenger came bearing letters that the Dauphin, having gathered his army, had come before a certain castle of the Count of Savoy and that he had been shot by a large arrow from a crossbow in the middle of all his soldiers and had died after a few days, having had confession. Then our father, hearing the letters, said, “We are greatly astonished at this, because our son had foretold his death to us.” And he and Thomas were very amazed, but no one spoke of this matter with them afterward.”

There you go, the emperor Karl IV has divine visions. Not quite what you were expecting, but as it happened a good window into his way of thinking. But do not worry, Karl wasn’t just an excessively devout collector of relics, he was at the same time an astute and often ruthless politician who gave the Holy Roman empire its constitution and placed his heirs on the throne for the next centuries.

So let’s talk about Karl’s journey from his youth to becoming the King of the Romans.

But before we start it is time again to say thanks to all of you who are supporting the show, be it by posting on social media, writing articles on medium and elsewhere, recommending the show to friends and family and by making a contribution on either patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support. And special thanks to Dale Winke,  Theresia C.,  Andrew Gaertner, Constantin-Catalin R, Benny, and Colby D who so generously keep the show advertising free.

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And now back to the story.

On May 14, 1316 in Prague the royal couple of Bohemia, John, the not yet blind and his wife Elisabeth celebrated the birth of their first son. This was their third child, the two older ones Margaret and Jutta had been girls and the arrival of a male heir was a source of great joy.

The boy was named Wenceslaus after his maternal grandfather, the great Premyslid king of Bohemia and Poland, Wenceslaus II. As was customary he spent his first years with his mother. But by the time he had turned 4, the relationship between his parents had soured. Advisors convinced his father, king John of Bohemia that his wife was about to hand over their firstborn son and heir to the throne to one of the Bohemian political factions. That would have seriously jeopardised John’s rule since he was only king thanks to his marriage to Elisabeth. So John attacked the castle where Elisabeth lived with her children, banished her and the girls to Melnik and took hold of young Wenceslaus. It seemed that Wenceslaus did not take the separation from his mother well. To break his resistance, quote: “Wenceslas, [  ], the firstborn, at four years of age, was placed in harsh custody in Cubitum for two months in a cellar, so that he saw light only through a hole.” End quote.

This was unbelievably cruel, even by the standards of the Late Middle Ages. Harsh custody means being locked up in a cold and dark dungeon presumably on poor food and water. I find it hard to imagine that anyone could come out of 2 months of that at that age without some serious mental health issue.

Maybe his excessive piety and belief in visions and divine mission were a way to overcome this trauma. When he built his magical castle of Karlsteijn in a remote valley, he spent most of his time there in a jewel encrusted room full of saint’s relics and only a small window for light and a trap to bring him food. Apart from this bit of armchair psychology, what is clear from his autobiography is that his relationship with his father remained cold and distant throughout his life. He would never see his mother again.

Aged seven he is sent to the court of the king of France, as was the tradition in the House of Luxemburg. He seemed to have enjoyed his time there. The queen of France was his aunt Maria and as he wrote, quote: “the king Charles IV loved me very much”. So much indeed that he became his godfather and gifted him a new name, Charles or Karl. Apparently Wenzel or Wenceslaus was not suitable for the French court. King Charles of France took his godfatherly duties very seriously and found his ward a wife, a daughter of Charles of Valois.

When Karl described his godfather, he called him a good king because he wasn’t greedy, listened to his advisors and his court was a splendid gathering of the wisest secular and ecclesiastical princes. These three attributes, listening to advisors, avoiding greed and having a splendid court full of highly respected nobles were Karl’s ambitions for a great king. Three attributes his father quite thoroughly lacked.

Karl also observes that his brother-in-law the new king Philip VI who succeeded king Charles IV lacked at least two attributes, he ignored his predecessor’s experienced counsellors and he succumbed to greed and avarice. How much of these sentiments he shared with the king is unclear. But he might have talked about these with his best friend who would remain close until he died, Jean, the son of Philip VI and better known as Jean le Bon, the king of France who was captured at the battle of Poitiers.

Whilst in Paris he makes another very important connection. Pierre Roger, the abbot of Fecamp was one of king Charles’ closest advisors had preached mass on Ash Wednesday 1328 and his rhetoric and deep religious insights left the now 13-year old crown prince of Bohemia hugely impressed. Karl sought his acquaintance and even convinced him to become his tutor in religious studies. Pierre Roger will have an impressive ecclesiastical career that ended with him becoming pope Clement VI in 1342.

But that is still in the future. Karl’s days in Paris end in 1330 when his father calls him and his wife to come to Luxemburg. What he did there is not entirely clear. In his autobiography he mentions four times that he was called to Luxemburg by his father but not what he did there.

The political reason for Karl’s departure from Paris is however clear. John of Bohemia had begun his bold attempt to take over Northern Italy. This project had not only intensified the conflict with the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian, but it also irritated king Philip VI of France.  The French crown was developing an interest in Northern Italy that would only grow and grow in the 14th and 15th century. And now John of Bohemia had stepped on their toes which meant Karl had to leave Paris.

Karl’s stay in Luxemburg lasted just one year. Finally his father asked him to come down to Italy and help him running his newfound powerbase in Lombardy. Initially father and son fought side by side, expanding their influence into Tuscany by taking over Lucca. All was looking great and so John returned home to deal with the political fallout back in the empire and in France.

Karl was 16 years old and nominally in charge of a political project that had defeated his grandfather Henry VII, the great emperors Frederick II and Frederick Barbarossa and pretty much anyone in between. His father had left him one of his advisors, the count Louis of Savoy who was very familiar with the local politics.

Karl describes the various ups and downs of  this campaign in some detail, but highlights three events that would again shape his idea of himself.

The first happened just 3 days after he had arrived in Pavia where his father had gathered his forces. Karl had been to morning mass as was his habit and since he intended to take communion had foregone breakfast. Returning to the hall of his palace he found several of his companions in a terrible state, vomiting and pale. Three of them would die that same day. Clearly they had been poisoned. Karl noticed an attractive young man walking across the room he did not know. When approached the young man pretended to be mute. Karl was suspicious and had him questioned. After three days of torture the man confessed that he had put poison in the breakfast upon orders from the Visconti of Milan.

Karl’s conclusion from this event wasn’t that after three days of torture anyone admits to any old tale. No, he concluded that god had protected him from certain death by means of an early mass and that hence he was destined to do great deeds in the service of the lord.

The next special moment happened at the one significant battle he fought during this campaign, near the castle of San Felice in October 1332. This was towards the end of the Italian adventure and the Visconti, della Scala and Este had turned against the Bohemians. Karl was pretty much alone since the count of Savoy, his protector and main advisor had also vanished. Still he gathered an army from his last remaining allies and confronted the Italian lords. The battle began in the afternoon and by nightfall almost all of his knights were unhorsed and even Karl’s mount was killed. When he got up and looked around he believed defeat was imminent. But suddenly the enemy turned to flight. Another miracle, this one attributed to Saint Catherine whose feast day it was.

The third was the vision he had about the angel and the angelic castration of the dauphin of Vienne we heard of at the top of the episode.

So you get his drift. All and everything is controlled by God and the saints. Regular prayer, veneration of the saints and adherence to the moral teachings of the bible are the key not just to heaven and to survival but also to worldly success.

Not total success though. Despite Karl’s victory at the battle of San Felice and his father’s return at the head of reinforcements from France, the adventure ended in failure when the money ran out. King John had to sign a peace deal abandoning his allies to the mercy of the Visconti, della Scala and Este. But when he offered the loyal city of Lucca to the Florentines for money, Karl could not bear such treachery and convinced his father to find a more honourable solution.

Karl is 18 at the end of this campaign, he had been knighted after the battle of San Felice and despite the projects ultimate failure, his standing amongst his peers and in the eyes of his father had improved. He had also shown clear signs of becoming independent, not just on the issue of Lucca, but even earlier when he attacked Florence without first consulting with his father.

From Italy, father and son travelled through Tyrol where Karl’s brother Johann Heinrich had married Margarete Maultasch, then to Lower Bavaria, lands of his sister Margaret and from there to Bohemia. When they arrived in Prague there was nobody from the family to greet them. Karl’s mother had died, his sister Bonne had gone to France together with his youngest sister Anne. The kingdom was left to its own devices.

His father, as was his habit stayed in Bohemia no longer than strictly necessary to extract some cash from the local barons and cities. And then he left his oldest son in charge of the kingdom. This is how Karl described the state of Bohemia: “We found this kingdom so neglected that we could not find a single castle that had not already been mortgaged together with all the royal goods. So we had no other place to stay except in one of the town houses, like a common burgher. Prague Castle, however, was so ruinous, dilapidated and run-down because it had been completely abandoned since the time of King Ottokar. In its place, we had a large and beautiful palace built from scratch at great expense, as it still appears to the observer today.”

For the next two years – as he proudly reports – did he regain possession of numerous castles, released others that had been pawned and pushed back the power of the barons. And remember he is still in his late teens and early 20s. And again his resentment for his father shines through when he points out that the Bohemians loved him ”because he was from the ancient line of Bohemian kings”, whilst his father was a foreigner, an interloper who did not even speak the language. As for languages by the way, Karl claims to be fluent in German, French, Latin, Italian and Czech. All this instruction by the future pope Clement VI had clearly borne fruit.

It seemed that Karl was so successful in rebuilding royal power in Bohemia that the barons leaned on his father to remove him from his post as governor. Even the margraviate of Moravia that he had received a few years earlier was removed from his direct control.

These next few years he is given missions by his father in Tyrol to help his brother Johann Heinrich and his wife Margarete Maultasch as well as campaigns in Hungary, Silesia, Prussia and Italy. But all of these had very clear limitations and did not give Karl immediate control over significant assets of the family. Though he does not mention anything about his personal feelings in this regard in his autobiography, it seems clear that relations between father and son had cooled down even further.

The real break between the two came when John of Bohemia reconciled with emperor Ludwig the Bavarian in 1340. John recognised Ludwig as the legitimate emperor, swore loyalty and received his fiefs as a vassal from the Bavarian. That decision flew into the face of everything Karl believed in. Karl was not just deeply pious but also very strongly supportive of the papacy. For him Ludwig was an excommunicate, his coronation as emperor had been a farce and by all means the electors should have deposed him long ago.

When Karl heard that John had gone over to the emperor’s side he raced to meet him in Miltenberg. In his autobiography he blames his father’s yielding to the emperor on deceit and breach of solemn promises by the Bavarian. But the reality is more likely a serious shouting match between father and son. In any case, Karl refused to sign up to the agreement and the Bohemian barons refused to ratify it.

It was Karl who from this point forward ruled Bohemia without much regard for his father’s wishes. Father and son made a deal whereby Karl became the ruler of Bohemia and John would receive 5,000 florin upon promising not to come back to Prague for 2 years. John disappeared to France where he fought for King Philip VI as his governor of Guyenne.

It is around this time that John loses his eyesight completely. And it is also the time when Margarete Maultasch throws her husband, Karl’s brother out of Tyrol. When emperor Ludwig followed this up with granting Margarete Maultasch a civil divorce and marry her to his eldest son also called Ludwig, the reconciliation between the Luxemburgs and the Wittelsbachs became null and void and Karl felt vindicated.

But John still wanted to reconcile with Ludwig. He recognised Ludwig’s right to Tyrol in exchange for Lusatia, a mortgage over Brandenburg and 20,000 florins in cash. But Karl and his brother Johann Heinrich again refused to sign on the dotted line, saying that if their father got hold of the cash he would only waste it with his mates in the Rhineland and they, the two brothers, would still look like  schmucks.

Meanwhile another event had taken place that would have an even bigger impact on Karl’s life than break with his father. His friend from his youth, Pierre Roger, the abbot of Fecamp had succeeded in his march through the institutions and had been elected pope Clement VI with the votes of the now 14 French, 3 Italian and one Spanish cardinals, the only cardinal who did not vote for him was a further Frenchman who was too ill to join the conclave. This composition of the college of cardinals shows just how overwhelming French influence over the Avignon papacy was. No Englishman, no German let alone Pole, Bohemian or Hungarian carried the purple hat of a cardinal.

Karl, with his father in tow, spent a lot of time in Avignon between 1342 and 1346. Initially at least pretending they were seeking a reconciliation between the pope and the emperor, the discussions quickly shifted to ways to remove Ludwig from his position.

It is quite surprising that all throughout the 24 years after the battle of Mühldorf the papacy never put up an anti-king to challenge Ludwig. The most likely explanation was that Ludwig’s position in Germany had remained strong. He could count on the imperial and free cities that he supported through rights and privileges. The Habsburgs had been rewarded for their support with the duchy of Carinthia and aid in their fights against the Luxemburgs.

King John of Bohemia, a friend of the king of France and loyal to the pope would have been the natural choice as papal champion, but never dared to step up. One of the considerations there were almost certainly the broadly anti-French and anti-papal mood in the country. As we mentioned some episodes earlier, we are – very gradually – moving into a period where people identify more and more along linguistic and cultural lines. And the encroachment of French power into the kingdom of Burgundy and the ancient duchy of Lothringia sat uneasily with many observers. Even more significant was the disapproval of the Avignon papacy with its ostentatious display of wealth, interference in the local church appointments and increasingly efficient tax collecting infrastructure. The latter was the main reason most of the German clergy, including even Balduin, the archbishop of Trier who was John’s uncle sided with Ludwig.

But by the mid-1340s Ludwig had overstretched the patience of the imperial princes. By then he had seized Brandenburg, Lower Bavaria, the Palatinate and now Tyrol and a bit later Holland and Hennegau for his almost innumerable sons. This concentration of power made even their closest allies amongst the territorial lords uncomfortable and the means by which he had taken the Tyrol from the Luxemburgs had alienated the clergy.

All these discussions in Avignon and elsewhere culminated in an event early in the year 1346 when the pope first declared that Ludwig had not shown enough contrition to be allowed back into the bosom of mother church and hence the Prince Electors should choose a new king of the Romans, preferably Karl, the margrave of Moravia and crown prince of Bohemia. In exchange Karl made a number of concessions to the pope that went far beyond anything an emperor or future emperor had yet committed to the papacy. This commitment was the price for papal endorsement and a price Karl was willing to pay. We will see how much this will cost him going forward.

With full papal endorsement he could now gather electors. The pope procured the archbishop of Mainz he had managed to place into his position against a candidate supported by emperor Ludwig. As for the remainder, all depended upon the support of Balduin of Trier, not the most powerful but the most capable and most respected of the Electors. Balduin had become archbishop aged 22, had placed his brother Henry VII on the throne 36 years earlier and had dominated imperial politics for decades. He may be Karl’s great uncle but their relationship seemed to have been distant. Karl never mentions Balduin in his autobiography,  not even when he talked about that year he stayed in Luxemburg when he was 15 or 16 and almost certainly met him multiple times.

Balduin had settled into Ludwig’s camp during the Kurverein zu Rhens. Getting him to switch sides turned out to be very expensive. Imperial lands and cities were to be given to Trier, even castles and lands belonging to Luxemburg itself were handed over on top of astronomical sums of money and the promise to always submit to his great uncle’s advice. These excessive demands may be the reason for Karl’s animosity for the member of his family who was probably most similar to him, cerebral, pious, clever and driven.

But however expensive Balduin was, he was worth every penny. On May 20th 1346 five electors, the three archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, the duke of Saxony and King John of Bohemia got together at Rhens and elected Karl of Moravia, grandson of the emperor Henry VII as king of the Romans. Pope Clement VI sent his approbation even though Karl had not asked for it explicitly.

Things moved along quite rapidly from there. Karl and his father instead of doing a tour of the empire gathering support for the newly elected king went to France and the fateful battle of Crecy, where John died his heroic or foolish death and Karl was smart enough to leave before things went totally pear shaped.

Returning from Crecy, Karl made a half-hearted attempt to dislodge Ludwig from Tyrol that failed thanks to the determined resistance of the countess Margarete Maultasch. From there he returned to Bohemia and waited.

He did not have to wait long. The emperor Ludwig of Bavaria, the man who had dominated imperial politics for 33 years, the victor of Muehldorf, the excommunicated ruler who brought about the end of papal dominance over imperial politics in the Kurverein zu Rhens and who expanded Wittelsbach territory to its largest extent died from a heart attack on October 11, 1347.

Karl should now be the undisputed King of the Romans, but I am afraid the fight for the crown had only just begun. Next week we will hear about the lengths Karl, now Karl IV will have to go through to dispense with anti-kings and even use the services of one of the Middle Ages most mysterious figures, the false Waldemar. I hope you will join us again next week.

And just to conclude, remember that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too. All you have to do is to go the patreon.com/historyofthegermans or to historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up for the cost of a latte per month.