History of the Germans Podcast

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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 154 – The Blind King John of Bohemia (1296-1346)

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 154 – The Blind King John of Bohemia, also Episode 17 of Season 8 – From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

Because they cherished his honour and their own prowess, his knights consented. [..] In order to acquit themselves well and not lose the King in the press, they tied all their horses together by the bridles, set their king in front so that he might fulfil his wish, and rode towards the enemy.

This deed made such an impression on the Edward, the Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince that he honoured his foe by adding the Bohemian ostrich feathers and the dead king’s motto “Ich Dien”, to his own coat of arms. So to this day the Blind King’s heraldic symbols and German motto features on Prince William’s coat of arms, the Welsh Rugby Union Badge, some older 2p coins and various regiments in Britain, Australia, Canada and even Sri Lanka.

Let’s dive into this story…

But before we start the usual reminder that whilst I do all this for fun and giggles, the whole enterprise is only possible if some of you feel it in their heart to support the show. I know that you do not get an awful lot for that apart from my eternal gratitude and the even more important gratitude of your fellow listeners. If you sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support you become the one who puts the coins into the Jukebox so that everyone can hear the music. And let me thank Paul A., Sam, James A., Ben G., Dan A., Rip D. and Luca B. who have taken the plunge already.

King John of Bohemia has become the “where is Wally” in practically every episode since #145, and he had appeared even earlier in the Teutonic Knights’ season. He was a man of such abundant energy and sturdy gluteus maximus that for more than 30 years he could appear at almost every event of significance between Kaliningrad and Florence and between Toulouse and Prague.

King John of Bohemia was born as a mere count of Luxemburg on August 10, 1296 in the town of Luxemburg. His father was count Henry VII of Luxemburg, ruler of a middling principality that had recently experienced a catastrophic defeat at the battle of Worringen.

As always little is known about his youth, but by the age of 8 or 9 he is sent to live at the court of the king of France. At that time his family had firmly hitched their fortunes to the Capetian monarchs. His father had fought in various battles for king Philip the Fair, had sworn an oath of loyalty to him. N return the French king used his influence with the pope to elevate John’s uncle Balduin to the archepiscopal seat of Trier at the tender age of 22.

The link between the Luxemburgs in general and John in particular was not merely political. Paris was by now the cultural capital of europe. 14^th century art, literature, learning and most importantly the code of chivalry reached their apotheosis here. And John embraced all of these. Throughout his life he would travel to Paris at every conceivable opportunity to take part in tournaments, banquets, festivities and even the occasional war, just to immerse himself in the splendor of the French court. He allegedly also studied the liberal arts at the celebrated university of Paris. Judging by his later life, the lure of a damsel in distress much outweighed the intellectual delights of Thomas Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua.

This stay in Paris comes to an end when his father was elected king of the Romans in 1308. Though the French monarch initially endorses Henry VII’s ascension to the throne, even though that derailed his brother’s ambition for the same job, he quickly began to regret that. The new king of the Romans main policy focus was to gain the imperial crown in Rome, which put him on a collision course with King Philip the Fair of France. And as a side-effect of that, young John had to leave Paris.

In 1310 a delegation from Prague arrived in Henry VII’s camp that brought an offer that fundamentally changed John’s life trajectory.

The visitors, led by the abbot of the Cistercian abbey of Aula Regia or -and I will butcher this terribly now: Zbraslav in Czech. It also included members of the Bohemian nobility as well as leading burghers of the two largest cities, Prague and Kutna Hora. And the offer they brought was nothing less than the crown of Bohemia, the richest, largest and most august of the principalities in the empire.

Weirdly John’s father was a bit lukewarm about the prospect of making his 14-year old son the king of Bohemia. For one, this adventure in the east might detract him from his #1 objective, the coronation as emperor, the first in almost a hundred years and key to avoiding a transfer of the imperial title to the kings of France. Moreover, Bohemian politics were extremely convoluted and many astute politicians, like Albrecht of Habsburg and Henry of Carinthia had failed to tame its unruly estates. And finally he was concerned about his son’s emotional wellbeing – or at least pretended to be. The crown came with a bride attached, Elisabeth, daughter of the great Premyslid king Wenceslaus II and sister to the murdered king Wenceslaus III, veteran of multiple palace coups and 18 years of age, too much for his tender son he said.

Henry proposed his brother, Walram, instead; an accomplished warrior and though maybe not the greatest of diplomats, but better than a teenage dilettante. The Bohemians however remained firm. They wanted the emperor’s flesh and blood. Either that or they would go out looking for someone else. And that was no idle threat. Sometime in the last century and a half the Bohemian estates had gained the right to choose their ruler by themselves leaving their imperial overlord with no more than the privilege to confirm the chosen ruler.

With options and time running out, Henry VII relented and gave the boy to the Bohemians. Within a month the young man was married to the hastily dispatched Elisabeth, enfeoffed with Luxemburg and Bohemia and given a modest military detachment to gain his kingdom.

The story goes that John and Elisabeth disliked each other from the very first moment they set eyes on each other. Though as we will see their relationship will fall apart later, it is unlikely this had been the case right from the beginning. A noble lady in the 14^th century knew that she would not be able to choose her future husband, nor should she expect him to have any attributes she might like in a man. Cases of outright refusal as we have seen in the case of John’s sister Marie are massive exceptions. All Elisabeth could legitimately expect was for John to treat her with the respect owed to her station, but not much more. The groom had a bit more discretion, but when it came to a marriage with such immense political benefit, he might as well have married a 50-year old without teeth as the abbot of Zbraslav put it.

In October 1310 John bade farewell to his mother and father and set off for Bohemia. He would not see either of them again. Both died from the exertions of the ultimately doomed Italian campaign as we talked about in episode #146 and #147.

Given John’s young age and lack of experience, his father had surrounded him with his most experienced advisors. Chief amongst them Peter von Aspelt, the archbishop of Mainz, most senior of the electors, descendant of a former servant of the Luxemburg family and, the former chancellor of the Premyslid kings of Bohemia. Peter knew the kingdom and its complex politics well. Alongside him rode the count of Henneberg, Werner von Castell and the Landgraf of Leuchtenberg, all men from the western side of the empire and loyal to the house of Luxemburg.

When they arrived in Bohemia, they found the gates of Prague and Kutna Hore closed to them. Because on the Hradčany/Hradschin, the castle overlooking the city of Prague there was already a king of Bohemia. Our old friend Henry of Carinthia, the father of Margarete Maultasch. Henry was married to Elisabeth’s older sister, had been elected king and had no intention to yield his position, even though he had lost the support of the majority of the Bohemian elites.

After some to and fro the patricians from Prague who had been part of the delegation convinced their fellow burghers inside the city to open the gates and let John in. Henry of Carinthia realized that he did not have enough support to repel John and his supporters and yielded. And with that John of Luxemburg entered the royal castle and a few days later was crowned king of Bohemia by Peter von Aspelt.

John had gained an entire kingdom without a single blow, which was great, but John had gained an entire kingdom without a single blow, which was also bad. Bad, because his regime had been created and was hence entirely dependent upon the support of the Bohemian high aristocrats and the elites in the great cities. And that was no coincidence.

The last of the Premyslid kings of Bohemia, Wenceslaus III had died in 1306 and with him the last remains of the centralised command and control structures his grandfather Ottokar II had installed, collapsed. The high aristocracy of Bohemia had stepped into this vacuum, cycled through three kings in 5 years thereby asserting their right to elect and, as just demonstrated, remove the king, approve or refuse taxes and make decisions about war and peace.

John, or more precisely his mentor, Peter von Aspelt tried to push back the power of the barons and recreate the old centralized state infrastructure with its bureaucrats and royal power. Support for this approach came from the cities, the church and a small number of barons. The vast majority of the aristocracy however refused to yield and conflict became inevitable.

Hostilities kicked off shortly after Peter von Aspelt had left Prague to deal with the process of electing a new emperor after John’s father, the emperor Henry VII had perished in Italy in 1313.

What provoked the uprising was something that John would become famous for, his constant changing of tack, an unsteadiness that frustrated his supporters and left his allies suspicious of his next move.

In 1313 John had yielded to the demands of the Bohemians to remove his German speaking advisors he had brought in from the west and replace them with local senior barons. But within just months of this attempt at reconciliation, John changed his mind and threw the Bohemians out again and re-established his friends as marshal and chancellor of the kingdom.

The backlash came immediately and with force. The barons took up arms and threatened to put a call into the Habsburg dukes of Austria whether they would like to become king of Bohemia. John and Elizabeth’s position deteriorated rapidly as forces from Luxemburg took a long tome to arrive and were insufficient to suppress the entirety of the Bohemian barons. Quite quickly, the royal cause was in trouble. John then did what a great chivalric knight is supposed to do in this situation, he left the country, deserting his wife. Aspelt made a last attempt to sort things out in 1317 but returned to Mainz having despaired of the complexity of the situation and his frazzled ward.

The queen, Elisabeth tried to rally her supporters in Prague and Kutna Hora to fend off the barons which provided another half year of relief before John finally reappeared with Luxemburg troops. But these prove again to be insufficient and the royal couple was pushed back into the westernmost quarter of the kingdom. At that point John had enough.

He capitulated and agreed with the nobles on a kind of Magna Carta for Bohemia. The barons were to take control of the financial management of the kingdom, including the taxation of the major cities and the proceeds of the great gold and silver mines in the Ore Mountains and Kutna Hora. This set-up was to remain the basis of royal power in Bohemia until the 30 Years War, interrupted only during the reign of John’s son Charles.

This is the moment when the marriage of John and Elisabeth reached breaking point. Elisabeth had grown up at the court of her father Wenceslaus II, one of the richest monarchs in western europe, who had been crowned king of Poland and had even placed a claim on the kingdom of Hungary. All this Premyslid dominance was now gambled away by this feckless teenager the barons had forced her to marry.

Whilst John was celebrating the resolution of the conflict with hunting and feasting on the castle of one of the great barons, Elisabeth was plotting revenge. A few months later, Elisabeth and her allies, the citizens of Prague attempted a coup against her own husband. But that coup failed. The aristocrats now backed John and with some glee and traditional fiscal incompetence suppressed the citizen rights of Prague, which lost its freedoms for the next hundred years.

The marriage of John and Elisabeth never recovered, even though he forced her into 3 more pregnancies thereafter. As for Bohemia, John never spent any more time there than strictly necessary. He would call an assembly of the barons to award him funds for his endless campaigns and adventures and once he had received the cash, would leave and let the barons get on with whatever they wanted to do. Meanwhile Elisabeth and her children watched in horror as royal power seeped away.

Freed from the constraints of actually ruling a kingdom, John embarked on a frantic lifestyle somewhere between an international diplomat and an errant knight in search of glory and maybe political gain. Theoretically his base was Luxemburg, but even there he rarely stayed more than a few weeks.

His political aim, if he had any, was to expand his lands, ideally creating a contiguous territory where he could not just widen but also deepen his influence. He had two realistic options. One was to try to build out his position in the west of the empire, adding neighboring duchies and counties to Luxemburg. Option 2 was to expand his kingdom of Bohemia either northwards into Silesia, westwards into the region around Eger/Cheb and maybe even revive his predecessor Wenceslaus II’s claims on the Polish and Hungarian crowns. And, being John of Bohemia, he also believed there was a third option, the option many a northern potentate had fallen for, ever since the Markomanni had crossed the Danube in 167 AD, John wanted to conquer Northern Italy. And there was a fourth option which was to simply travel around and go wherever the sound of war was heard

Juggling three major projects across three corners of the empire all at the same time resulted not just in a punishing travel schedule, but also in a massively convoluted foreign policy stance. If he wanted to expand in the west of the empire, he needed the support of the French king, if he wanted to expand Bohemia into Poland or Hungary, he needed the support of Ludwig the Bavarian, and if he wanted to go down to Italy he needed access to the Alpine passes which meant either an alliance with the Habsburgs or one with Henry of Carinthia.

Previous historians had blamed the frazzled political agenda and the constant shifting of alliances and projects on John’s personality, and that argument carries some weight. But he also operated in a political environment that was inherently unstable. Three political groupings contested the lead of the empire, the Wittelsbach, the Habsburg and his own family, the Luxemburgs. The fragility of this three body problem forced all players to act instantly every time the system got out of balance and grab whatever was in the vicinity. Though arguably John was the one whose actions were more likely than that of the others to tilt the balance.

In the early years of John’s reign as king of Bohemia his allegiances were relatively stable. The Habsburgs were his natural opponents due to the proximity between Vienna and Prague and the still dormant claim the Habsburgs had on Bohemia. The Habsburg claim was the nuclear option the Bohemian nobles kept mentioning every time John tried to knock them back.

Being opposed to the Habsburgs meant that John had to support Ludwig the Bavarian. In fact Ludwig had been chosen by the Luxemburg party as their candidate for the imperial crown once they had realized that they could not gain enough votes to raise John himself to the throne.

That is why John of Bohemia fought with Ludwig at Mühldorf against Frederick the Handsome, a battle where he showed his mettle both as a fighter and as a war leader.

But after the battle relations between the emperor and the king of Bohemia cooled down rapidly. As we said, one of John’s ambitions was to expand his territory from Bohemia. As reward for both the support at the election and in the civil war he had received the lands around the city of Eger/Cheb, an area that later formed part of the so-called Sudetenland. But John wanted more. He did acquire first lower and then upper Lusatia to the north and had his eyes on the margraviate of Brandenburg.

The last margrave of Brandenburg of the house of Anhalt had died in 1319 and the local powers had begun carving up the territory. John expected to be enfeoffed with Brandenburg by his great friend Ludwig, but Ludwig did not want another electoral vote to go to the Luxemburgs and hence granted the margraviate to his son. This decision brought the end of the Wittelsbach-Luxemburg alliance. To avoid the Luxemburgs and Habsburgs ganging up on him, Ludwig offered Frederick the Handsome the curious joint rule we discussed in episode 151. John was now isolated. To shore up his position he got himself the backing of the king of France and the Pope.

We are now in 1325 and the pope had excommunicated Ludwig and moved heaven and earth to stop him from acquiring the imperial crown. The papal opposition preoccupied Ludwig who set off for Rome. The Habsburgs at the same time suffered the loss of the energetic Leopold leaving only the rather sluggish Frederick the Handsome pursuing the interests of the House of Austria. These circumstances meant John had pretty much free reign to pursue his politics in Poland and Hungary despite his isolation.

Poland at this point was just beginning to recover from its long period of fragmentation that had followed the death of Boleslaw Wrymouth. First king Wladislaw Lokietek, Ladislas the elbow-high and the Casimir the Great were consolidating the dozens of duchies back into a functioning kingdom. One part of Poland, Silesia had experienced a particularly extreme form of fragmentation. According to Wikipedia there were a total of 46 Silesian duchies, which I think is a bit extreme, but an estimate of about 20 different dukedoms, held by descendants of one 12^th century duke of Silesia is not a bad estimate. Their weakness and the geographic position between Bohemia, Poland and the empire made Silesia easy prey for the intrepid king of Bohemia. 17 Silesian dukes became vassals of the king of Bohemia between 1327 and 1335. Given Silesia was still part of Poland these efforts brough John in conflict with the king of Poland. Ladislaus and later Kasimir tried to prevent the defection of Silesia and allied with the Lithuanians in an attack on Bohemia. In return John allied with the Teutonic Knights and participated in three winter crusades in Lithuania in1328/29, 1335 and 1345/46.

The conflict ended when John gained the overlordship over Silesia from king Casimir the great of Poland against the promise to drop his claim on the Polish crown and a sizeable cash payment. He got the same approval from Ludwig the Bavarian in exchange for his ultimate sign off on the Kurverein zu Rhens he had initially refused.

These transactions almost doubled the size of the kingdom of Bohemia. When the king of Bohemia had previously been the richest and most powerful of the imperial princes, anyone who could tame the unruly Bohemian barons would now be towering over all the other electors. Silesia became an economic powerhouses of eastern europe. Its wealth benefitted the Luxemburg and later the Habsburg kings of Bohemia until in 1740 Frederick the Great seized Silesia in an unprovoked attack that led to the Three Silesian war and the Seven Years War that created Prussia’s position as a major European power and – as they say – the rest is history.

At the same time as John was expanding his kingdom of Bohemia, he also worked hard at an even more ambitious project, the conquest of Northern Italy. This project was again bult more on a suite of coincidences than long term planning. It kicked off with the rapprochement between John and his predecessor as king of Bohemia, Henry of Carinthia. John organized a bride for the ailing duke of Carinthia and, even more importantly, married his son Johann-Heinrich to Henry’s daughter, Margarete Maultasch of episode #152’ fame.

This alliance opened the route into Italy via the Brenner pass. And that route he took in 1330 with 400 armored knights and headed for Brescia. You as faithful listeners of the History of the Germans will remember that Brescia had been the city that broke the army of emperor Henry VII and the disease that arose from the corpses of the men and horses had ultimately killed his wife, the mother of John of Bohemia. But Brescia had called for John to come and to take over the protection of the city. Whatever John’s feelings may have been when he saw these fateful walls, if he had any, it did not show. He gladly accepted the declarations of eternal loyalty from the citizens and took up residence in the city palace. His arrival caused more and more cities to seek his protection against the increasingly overbearing Visconti of Milan, the della Scala of Verona and the Este of Ferrara. In just a couple of weeks John of Bohemia became the ruler of Lombardy. Even the tree powerful Lombard families submitted to him. All this reminds one of the enthusiastic welcome his father Henry VII had received in Milan. And very much in the same way as it happened to his dad, the vibe as my son would call it, changed rapidly. The Bohemian Rhapsody lasted just 18 months. One by one the cities called off their allegiance as John had the audacity to ask for funds to maintain his army. By 1332 he and most of his troops were back home north of the alps.

All that this adventure yielded was even more conflict between John and the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian and a dimming of the enthusiasm for John’s antics at the French court. Even his uncle Balduin, the Archbishop of Trier was drifting into the imperial camp.

But indefatigable John put in the hours on horseback and managed to appear in Prague, Frankfurt and Paris within the same month, picking up cash in Bohemia, negotiating with Ludwig and having a long sit-down with the king of France.

Parallel to the acquisition of Silesia and the conquest of Lombardy, John pursued anther project closer to his home county of Luxemburg, or more precisely several projects. One was to help his uncle Balduin to become archbishop of Mainz on top of the archbishopric of Trier he already held. Then he wanted to get hold of the Palatinate which would have created a Luxemburg territory stretching from Koblenz to Heidelberg dominating the Rhine and Moselle river with its trade and rich wine production. The Palatinate was however core to the interests of Ludwig the Bavarian. And open warfare was not a real option. Instead John tried to trade. At one point he offered the kingdom of Bohemia in exchange which made him even more unpopular in Prague if that was at all possible. Later he put the Tyrol on the table which, guess what, seriously irritated the Tyrolians and drove the final nails in the coffin of the marriage of his son with Margarete Maultasch.

So, one out of three projects worked out, he expanded Bohemia massively but had failed in Italy, Tyrol and the Middle Rhine.

But then he got engaged in a fourth project, the one he became most famous for and that had no reward apart from the esteem of his fellow European high aristocrat. It was his involvement in the most significant conflict of the 14^th century, the 100 years’ War.

The trigger for the hostilities was a dynastic change in France. King Philip the Fair, he of the burning of the Templars had died in 1314 leaving behind three sons. All three of them died in quick succession and by February 1328 the house of Hugh Capet had died out. The seemingly inexhaustible Capetian loins had produced just one boy, born posthumously who survived just 4 days.

Two contenders for the crown now faced up to each other. Philip of Valois, grandson of king Philip III through his father, Charles of Valois stood against Edward III, king of England and grandson of king Philip IV through his mother Isabella. It is quite frankly doubtful that anyone, even the English court believed this claim was valid. France had embraced the Salian law that ruled out inheritance in the female line hundreds of years ago. But Edward III was a lad and this cause was as good as any to kick off some jolly fighting.

The war did not really get going before 1337, in part because Edward III was not ready, but the build-up had been under way ever since Philip VI had ascended the throne.

John of Bohemia was extremely close to Philip of Valois, or Philip VI as he should be called. They ere the same age and had grown up together at the Paris court, both of noble blood but neither destined to become kings. Now they found themselves on the upper echelons of the European political stage. The Luxemburgs had been vassals of the French king for a long time, despite their status as imperial princes. Even his father, the emperor Henry VII had at some point sworn unconditional loyalty to the French king. John’s sister Marie, the beautiful girl who had refused to marry Henry of Carinthia, had ultimately wed the last of the Capetian kings, Charles IV.

And in 1332 John of Bohemia had married his daughter Jutta to the dauphin, the future king of France Jean, called the Good. Jutta changed her name into Bonne and though she died before jean became king, her children, the king Charles V, the dukes of Berry, Anjou and most significantly of Burgundy became the dominant figures during the middle of the 14^th century.

But apart from the enormous prestige that such family connections brought him, there wasn’t much tangible benefit coming from this connection. John tried to leverage the French relations and hence influence over the papacy in his negotiations with Ludwig the Bavarian who had was still excommunicated. But little came of it.

In 1338, John was made governor of Guyenne, facing off against the English in Gascony. Not sure what was in it for him, nor did he and so he returned back to the empire shortly afterwards.

In 1339/1340 John returned to the empire and reconciled with the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. The emperor recognized John’s acquisitions in Eger and Silesia and in return John accepted the loss of Carinthia to the Habsburgs.

Ah, in all this manic back and forth I have almost forgotten the other thing he was so famous for. During his second crusade in Prussia he had suddenly experienced loss of vision in his right eye. Some believe it was a genetic disease common in the Luxemburg family, others blame a severe eye infection he caught during the cold and wet Baltic January. In any event he consulted a physician in Breslau in 1338 who made sure he lost all sight in the right eye. In 1340 having learnt little about the skills of medieval doctors, he went to another physician in Montpellier who knocked out the remaining good eye so that he was now completely blind.

That did not stop him from continuing his lifestyle as a knight errand rushing from one battle or tournament or banquet or wedding or imperial diet to the next.

But his luck was gradually leaving him. His son Johann Ludwig was chucked out of Tyrol in 1341 and Ludwig the Bavarian brought it into his orbit by granting Margarete Maultasch a civil divorce. His son in law, duke Henry of Lower Bavaria died and this duchy too went to the emperor Ludwig. Uncle Balduin had to give up his ambitions for the archbishopric of Mainz.

As the 1340s continued, John focused more on fun than frontline politics. It was his son Karl who took the lead in the next leg of the ascend of the House of Luxemburg leading to the final break with emperor Ludwig the Bavarian and Karl’s election as king of the Romans in 1346, something we will discuss next week.

As for John, he decided to go on another Reise into Prussia, fighting despite his blindness in Samigitia and even ended up in another confrontation with the King of Poland. Into all this joyous chivalric activity comes the news that king Edward III of England was putting together an invasion force. The 100-Years War was finally getting going for real. The King of France demanded the military assistance the king of Bohemia had promised again and again since 1332.

And so, in August 1346, 50 years old and blind, John and his son Karl found themselves on the field of Crecy facing Edward III and the Black Prince with their longbowmen. The outcome you have heard of at the top of this episode.

King John died how he liked to live, fighting for honor, not just material gain. Some have argued that his last attack was a veiled attempt at suicide of a disabled man who saw his extraordinarily talented son overtaking him. That is unlikely. John was by no means as pious as his son, but he was a good Christian and as such suicide was unthinkable. It is more likely that he acted in line with the chivalric code he had lived by all his life. After all the French knights ran up the hill at Crecy again and again and again, riding over the bodies of the dead and dying men and horses in the knowledge that they would likely die too. At the end of the battle the French had lost nine princes, 10 counts, a duke, and archbishop and a bishop. John was just one more high aristocrat perishing in the mud blinded not just by his disease but also by the search for glory.

What made him stand out in the eyes of his peers as one of the greatest of chivalric heroes was not just the courage to ride unseeing into the midst of a battle but also that he fought not for his own lands or material possessions, but to honour an oath he had given to another king.

John of Bohemia wasn’t the last knight, but he was a figure of a world that was slowly fading away. A world where armoured men on horseback were invincible and hence had to be tamed by a complex set of rules they called the chivalric code. For someone like John the dos and don’ts of the aristocratic society he lived in ranked pari passu with the demands of power politics. Fighting for the Teutonic Knights out of a crusading vow or for the king of France out of an obligation as a vassal was of equal importance, if not of higher importance than taking up arms against Ludwig the Bavarian to protect the Tyrol. Travelling half way across europe to attend a tournament in Paris even if that meant leaving your kingdom undefended was something he did without thinking about it.

Managing money and the nitty gritty of the administration of his kingdom was beneath a true knight. As were the concerns of the burghers and merchants let alone the wellbeing of the peasants.

John felt at home in Paris as much as in Luxemburg, Frankfurt or Pavia, maybe not so much in Prague where everybody hated him. He was a member of an international elite that intermarried and interacted without much thought about nationality and language.

Next week we will meet his son, Karl, emperor Karl IV who was nothing like his father. Where John is living by a system of knightly values believed to be ancient and unchanging, Karl is a much more modern figure, rational, calculating, ranking politics much above romantic notions of honor. Karl fought at Crecy too, but as the chronicler Froissart noted quote, “when he saw that things were going badly for his side, he turned and left.” Karl had better things to do than dying in the mud for the lost cause of a foreign king.

I hope you will join us again next week when we get to know this astounding new leader.

Before I go let me tell you again that the History of the Germans s advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by going to patreon.com/history of the German or to historyofthegermans.com/ support.

Now if you have listened all the way to here, you deserve a last titbit about John of Bohemia. After the battle of Crecy his body was brought to Luxemburg where he was buried at the abbey of Altmünster. When that abbey was destroyed in 1543 his body was moved to another abbey nearby. In 1795 Luxemburg was taken by French revolutionary troops and the graves of the counts and dukes of Luxemburg were raided, its contents spread around or thrown into the river. It was a local industrialist from across the border, Pierre Joseph Boch, founder of what would later become Villeroy and Boch, makers of China and porcelain bowls who saved the ancient bones. John’s remains stayed in the attic of the Boch family in Mettlach until 1833 when king Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia toured the region. The Prussian king who claimed John as his ancestor ordered his chief architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel to build a chapel near Kastel-Staadt where the old king was buried again and remained until 1945. It was in the last days of the war that a Luxemburg crack team of operatives stole John’s remains from this chapel in Germany and brought them back to Luxemburg, where they still lie in Notre-dame Cathedral.

So, when next time you drop your Savile row trousers made by appointment of his majesty the Prince of Wales and sit down on a Villeroy and Boch seat, you may feel the presence of king John of Bohemia, but do not worry, he cannot see you.

Episode 153– The Rise of Nürnberg

by History of the Germans Podcast on 27th June 202426th February 2026

Against all the odds..

“In the same way that Jerusalem is the navel of the world, is Nurnberg the navel of Germany” is how Matthäus Dresser described the city in 1581. The astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus moved to Nurnberg in 1471 because there” …one can easily associate with learned men wherever they live. Because of the cosmopolitanism of its merchants, this place is regarded as the center of Europe”.

How did this city grow within 200 years from an imperial castle far from the main transport links, without a harbour and on famously poor soil into one of the three most important urban centres in Germany whose merchants were well regarded in all corners of the world, whose printers published the works of Europe’s leading intellectuals, whose artists were and remain of global renown and whose engineers produced breakthrough after breakthrough.

Let’s find out

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So far I have:

Ep. 153: The Rise of the City of Nürnberg in the 14th Century

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 153 – The rise of the city of Nürnberg, also published as episode 16 of Series 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull, 1250-1356.

Let’s find out

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Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II and at the time cardinal legate in the empire wrote that quote “when comparing one nation with another, there is no reason to rate the Italian cities above the German ones. The German cities appear so youthful, as if they had been created and built just a few days earlier”. High praise indeed.

In the late 15^th century when this was written there were nearly 3,000 cities in the wider empire north of the Alps, not all of them comparable to Florence, Milan or Rome. Some had barely more than a few hundred inhabitants and served more as the lord’s castle than as trading metropolises. The ones he is likely to have referred to were the three largest and commercially most important ones, Cologne, Lübeck and Nürnberg.

So, let us take a look at whether the future pope and creator of his own ideal city, the lovely Pienza in Tuscany was exaggerating, and if not, how Germania turned from a land of impassable forests into a a landscape dominated by cities, large and small.

Nobody would have suggested that German cities, even the largest ones, in and around the year 1200 could compete with a sophisticated and wealthy metropolis like Milan or Venice. To understand why such comparison was at all conceivable, we have to go back to the fundamental changes in the economic landscape since then.

One of the main axes of medieval German history had been the expansion eastwards we covered in Season 5. If you have not listened to it, the broad brush story is that from around 1150 onwards about 200,000 people moved from the densely populated regions of Flanders, Holland and the Rhineland into the lands east of the Elbe roughly equivalent to the area of the former east Germany. In a second roughly equal sized wave that began around 1250 German speaking migrants moved further east, into Silesia, Poland, Prussia, the western part of Bohemia, Hungary, modern day Romania and many more places.

The emigration was organised by professional Locatores who were employed by the local lords, some of them Germans, but often also Polish, Hungarian or Bohemian princes who were looking to cut down the forests and develop their land. They would offer the immigrants the opportunity to own a sizeable plot in a to be founded village or town in exchange for an initially low level of taxation. This process was in many ways similar to the opening up of the American West and had a similar impact on economic growth. By 1350 this process had been more or less completed. By then, almost all of europe had been brought under cultivation, either by colonists or by the existing population.

In parallel to this expansion eastwards, almost all of the land in the western parts of the empire that had so far been regarded as not attractive enough also got developed. What we can see from archaeology and the names of parcels of land is that by the 14^th century agriculture had been penetrating into areas where yields were truly marginal. Bogs have been drained and alpine valleys brought up to grow rye and barley. Vines was planted as far north as the valleys of the Ems, Weser and Oder, even in Prussia. At no point before or after was there more acreage used for agriculture in europe than in the 14^th century.

This indicates that by 1350 the population expansion that had began in the 10^th century should have reached its natural limits. Without a major improvement in agricultural production technique, the land was simply not able to feed any more people, except if there was a way to import food from areas that still produced surplus. And such areas did exist, in the lands further east. The Ukraine was a breadbasket not just today, but already then. As we heard in series 6, regions for instance along the Baltic coast geared up to provide foodstuff for the densely populated territories in the West. These foodstuffs included not just grain, but also salted herring and stockfish as well as beer, wine, honey and lots more.

We did discuss one leg of this trade in quite some detail in the series about the Hanseatic League. There was a similar leg of this trade on the east-west axis further south, initially along the Danube river and later across the middle of Germany along the key nodes of Leipzig and Nürnberg.

To put that into context, Germany’s largest city, Cologne consumed 5-7,000 oxen per year that were driven down 300km from Frisia and the Emsland, innumerable pigs were made to walk even further from Lorraine or Meissen to Cologne. Grain, which did not spoil so easily was transported across even larger distances.

The other set of commodities the western cities needed were metals, both precious metals like gold and silver as well as base metals like iron, copper, tin and lead. The 14^th and 15^th century is a time of innovations, in particular in armour and mechanics. For instance, cities took immense pride in their elaborate town clocks. These were initially operated as water clocks, but from the late 13^th century onwards these were replaced by mechanical clocks. By the middle of the 15^th century, there were over 500 mechanical clocks in operation on public buildings across europe. These new instruments required high quality iron or copper to work. And as we mentioned many times before, the great mineral reservoirs were in Bohemia, in Saxony, in Hungary and in Sweden. By the time of Margarete Maultasch the deposits of silver and base metals in Tirol were also going into production.

This rising demand for commodities changed the way things were transported. A merchant bringing luxury items like precious stones, silks or spices could carry his wares on horseback or on a mule train. Transporting tons of herring or grain across half of europe required either boats or heavy wagons. And that meant what was needed was new infrastructure. Sometimes cities needed to be connected to rivers by canals, like for instance the canal linking Lubeck to the Elbe that was built in 1398. Another example is the construction of the Via regia that started in the 13^th century and connected Kyiv and Moscow on one end and Burges and Santiago de Compostela at the other.

These new trading connections shifted the centre of European trade eastwards from the 13^th century onwards. Whilst the German cities along the Rhine, in particular on the lower Rhine had been closely integrated into the European trading system, the new cities further east, such as Leipzig, Breslau, Krakow, Nürnberg and Regensburg were now linked into these pan-European commercial networks as well.

On top of these structural changes, the German cities benefitted from political events as well. In 1284 the trading fairs in Champagne that had been the key location where Italian purveyors of luxury goods met with Flemish cloth merchants, went into a surreptitious decline. One of the reasons for this was that king Philipp the Fair, he who had the Templars dissolved and had lifted Henry VII on the throne, had made a major economic policy mistake. In an attempt to centralise France he placed heavy taxation on the Italian merchants coming to Champagne, waged war against the cities of Flanders; prevented their merchants from entering France and blocked the export of French wool. Within just 20 years, the once thriving fairs of Champagne had collapsed.

This foolishness was followed by the 100 years war that had been brewing for a long time but kicked off in earnest in 1337. The resulting devastation of in particular north eastern France disrupted the traditional routes from Italy to Flanders along the ancient roman roads from Marseille to Lyon, Reims, Troyes, Arras and then to Ghent and Bruges.

The great beneficiaries of this blockage were the German cities. And not only those along the Rhine. Because more and more passes opened across the Alps, including the already mentioned Gotthard, wares now travelled directly north from Venice and Florence on the via imperii to Augsburg, Nürnberg and Leipzig and from there either to Flanders and France via Frankfurt or North to the Hanse world or even eastwards into Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

As for the fairs, these continued, just not in Champagne. The fair at Frankfurt took their role as the great place of exchange between East and West and North and South.

All these different megatrends, population growth, the colonisation of the east, the shifting trading patterns from luxury to commodities, the troubles and foolishness of French kings can explain a lot of what is happening here. But there is something else going on that is remarkable. If you remember when we looked at the foundation of Lübeck, there was a big question mark why this place, not necessarily at the geographically most promising corner of the Baltic could rise to such prominence against the competition from the already established city of Haitabu. Something about the people who moved there, the political and educational system must have helped to create this success.

And if you think Lübeck was a bit of a long shot, the other great trading city of the 14^th century, Nürnberg was an even more surprising story.

Nurnberg’s origins are a bit obscure. The city first appears as an imperial castle in 1050, during the reign of emperor Henry III. The next time we hear about it is during the wars between Lothar III and the Hohenstaufen when the emperor besieged Konrad III in Nurnberg, unsuccessfully. That suggests that by then the castle had already become a sizeable fortress. Once Konrad III had become king, Nürnberg became a popular place for him to stay and was made the administrative centre of the imperial lands surrounding it. The administration was entrusted to a Burggrave which again indicates the significance of the location. From 1190 onwards the position of Burggrave was given to the counts of Zollern, direct ancestors of the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia and German emperors.

The Burgraves prove to be very apt operators and managed to expand their territory materially from their base on the castle of Nürnberg. Meanwhile a settlement grew up below the castle. Initially the merchants and artisans who came there mostly served the castle. The castle had by now become one of the central locations for the Hohenstaufen emperors. Frederick Barbarossa came here 12 times and held 5 imperial diets here. Sponsorship by the Hohenstaufen continued under Henry VI who expanded the castle.

The big step up came in 1219 under Frederick II. Frederick II granted the city and its merchants imperial protection and exemption from various tolls. In his reasoning the emperor noted that the town needed support because it had no vineyards, that its river, the Pregnitz wasn’t navigable and that its soil was poor.

And he wasn’t wrong. Nurnberg had none of the advantages other successful cities had benefitted from. It had never been the seat of either a territorial prince or a bishop. It did not get a university before the 18^th century, it wasn’t on any major trading route before it forced the routes to go through their town, it had no harbour or quay where to land wares by ship, it had no natural resources and its land as well as the surrounding territory had sandy, poor soil. Even the forests that surrounded it would not have lasted long, had it not been regularly replanted.

How they became the foremost trading city in the southern part of the empire has been the subject of debate for a long time. One indicator may have been a document issued by Ludwig IV, the Bavarian in 1332. This charter references special trading rights and privileges for citizens of Nurnberg in over 70 other cities in the empire. If you remember the series about the Hanse, one of the great value propositions to its members had been special trading privileges in various placees. The difference here is that the Hanse gained rights for instance in Bruges by coordinated action across multiple cities that held a collective monopoly on certain key products. What Nurnberg managed was to acquire a similar position exclusively for its own merchants and that without a genuine monopoly position.

To understand how they got these, we have to look a bit under the hood of the Nurnberg model. Again, if you remember the Hanse merchants were organised and operated through a system of social control. If you were a Hanse merchant in Riga and you traded with a colleague in Hamburg, you either had some family ties to and/or you knew each other well from time spent together at one of the Kontor houses in Novgorod or Bergen. Moreover, you would control your partner in Hamburg by having relationships with other merchants in Hamburg who would keep an eye out for prices, trends and unusual behaviours of your counterpart. In return you would do the same for these other merchants. Business dealings were also incredibly interlinked, with merchants constantly handling funds and wares on someone else’s behalf. And all that without double bookkeeping. Basically, the Hanse was a system built entirely on trust, and because of it, the Hanse firms rarely grew to become large operations. And there was no need for banks, as merchants would grant credit to each other.

Nurnberg was organised very differently. Its merchants operated much more like the illustrious Italian houses, the Bardi, the Peruzzi and later the Medici. That means each of the great Nurnberg families, the Pfinzing, the Mendel, Stromeir, Kress, Rummel, Pirkheimer, Koler, Grantel and Imhof had their own system of connections and maintained their representative offices abroad. These firms weren’t just merchants, they were also bankers. They built relationships with kings, emperors and the territorial lords who they advised on finance and on the most important technology of the late middle ages, mining.

One of the place where they gained the strongest footholds was in the kingdom of Hungary. Nurnberg merchants received their first trading privilege there in 1357. For the next 50 years the Nurnberger and the Florentines competed for the right to exploit the rich silver, copper and gold mines of Hungary. Nurnberg won this contest, largely because they could organise the supply of competent miners from the Harz mountains and other mining centres and because they had developed the Saiger process, a secret method to separate silver from the copper ore. That was so important that king Sigismund decided to expel the Florentines, seize their money and grant Nurnberg a monopoly on mining in Hungary. That monopoly at some point covered 90% of European gold production and 30% of silver and copper.

Mining and metalwork was an important industry in Nurnberg and its surrounding areas. They had access to iron ore from the upper palatinate and used wood from the surrounding imperial forests for the smelting. These woods needed to be replenished regularly, so the mining entrepreneur Peter Stromeier came up with the idea of sowing the cleared forests with fast growing spruce, the first attempt at sustainability in the otherwise quite rapacious Middle Ages. And the beginnings of the classic German needle forests we have today.

Another skill the ingenious Nürnbergers developed was a way to pump out so-called drowned pits, which again led to dramatic improvements in productivity.

But they did not stop at just mining the raw materials. Nurnberg was also the place where we find the first machines to draw wires. Wires are made by drawing thicker piece of metal through consecutively smaller holes. This was initially done by hand, but later by using watermills. By the way water and windmills too are something that only really took hold in the 14^th century. And wire was a crucial component in various other products, namely nails, needles, rivets, eyelets and mail shirts. Wire was also a key for the wire screens used in the production of paper, where Nurnberg was again taking the lead. The quality of their products was such that it was exported all across europe and even into the Ottoman empire and Persia.

These basic industries laid the foundations for Nurnberg’s golden age in the late 15^th and early 16^th century when Peter Henlein produced the first ever watch, Albrecht Durer dazzled the world with his prints, Hartmann Schedel produced the Nuremberg chronicle that for the first time allowed people to get an idea what at least some cities looked like, it was the city where Martin Behaim produced the very first terrestrial globe and Kopernikus published his astronomical works claiming the sun and, not the earth sits at the centre of the solar system, etc., etc.

One of the reasons Nurnberg remained innovative for such a long time might have to do with the fact that the city uniquely had no guilds. The guilds of Nurnberg had rebelled against the elite of long distance merchants and upon the suppression of the revolt the emperor banned guilds from Nurnberg for good. Without guilds, intrepid inventors were able to pursue their ideas without constantly running up against rules designed to maintain a monopoly of the existing artisans.

The other advantage the absence of guilds had was to allow the creation of something they called the Verlagswesen. What that meant was that entrepreneurs could hire competent workmen or even trained artisans to produce goods on his behalf. The entrepreneur would provide the raw materials, the designs and would later sell the finished goods. The workman would be paid by the piece. This allowed for the rapid scaling up of production to an almost pre-industrial level. So by 1363 the city already contained 1,216 master artisans, a huge number relative to an overall size of about 20,000.

As for the cash that all this trading activity generated, it was mostly reinvested in the ever expanding projects and sometime lent to the rulers of the day. It was again our friend Ludwig IV who relied on the financial muscle of the Nurnberg patricians. His banker, Konrad Gross became indispensable in the various adventures of the Bavarian.

Banking and complex international finance required proper bookkeeping and this is again an area where the Nurnberg trading houses excelled. One of the oldest complete book of accounts in Germany comes from Nurnberg, dating back to 1304-1307 and the first one using Arab numerals dates back from 1389. Double bookkeeping was brought in from Italy and quickly took hold.

It is under Ludwig IV that Nurnberg rebuilds its link to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. The city had hosted various diets during the Interregnum, but the Bavarian really put it on the map. He stayed in Nürnberg an astonishing 72 times and held a plethora of imperial diets there.

This close relationship with the rulers of the empire continued with Ludwig’s successor, Charles IV. Charles made Nurnberg one of the central locations of the empire when he issued his golden bull in the city and also established the rule that the very first imperial diet of a newly elected emperor was to be held in Nürnberg. The emperor Sigismund then entrusted the imperial regalia to the city of Nurnberg where they remained until the end of the Holy Roman Empire when they were brought to Vienna.

With all this enthusiasm for the city of Nurnberg, I have to mention a dark side to the story as well. Its success had attracted a large Jewish community. Jewish moneylenders were the only serious competition to the Nurnberg bankers since the Lombards had been kept out of most of Southern Germany thanks to imperial support. Moreover, the Jewish community had settled in an area of the city that was initially quite unattractive but by the middle of the 14^th century had become extremely desirable. The desire for this land, the wish to get rid of competition, together with the general European trend to persecute Jewish communities led to a number of pogroms, the first as part of the notorious Rintfleisch massacres of 1298 but then most severely during the mass murders in the wake of the black death.

The fact that Nurnberg did go through with these is particularly unexpected since jews were under the explicit protection of the emperor who had declared them his domestic servants, which meant any attack on a Jew was also an attack on the emperor himself. Nurnberg as a city particularly close to the emperor should have headed to this rule, but seemingly got away with breaking it.

I will not go through the rest of Nurnberg’s history, its decline in the 17^th and 18^th century, its resurrection as an emblem of Romanticism, the Nurnberg rallies, the destruction in world war II and the Nuremberg trials. This is a far too big chunk of history to deal with in the maximum 10 minutes left plus these topics will show up in the course of the show anyway.

One last thing though. Did Nurnberg indeed rival Florence, Venice or Milan, as Enea Silvio Piccolomini had claimed. I would love to be able to say yes, but then where is the duomo, the Uffizi and the doge’s palace. And there is also a kink in the future pope Pius II’s comment. He made it in the context of several German cities refusing to pay their dues to Rome, claiming poverty. So, I am afraid, it was just another case where the desire for cash made the church come up with claims that are at least subject to debate….

Now next time, which will again be unfortunately in two weeks, we will look at the opposite of the city of Nurnberg. Where Nurnberg is innovative and focused on the future, on money, industry and growth, the subject of our next podcast is looking towards the chivalric virtues of bravery, courtly love, crusades and haughty nobility. Yes, we will be talking about John, the blind king of Bohemia, the greatest chivalric hero of the 14^th century and holder of the title, most admired death of the middle ages. I hope you will join us again. And before we go, just a quick reminder that the History of the Germans podcast is advertising free thanks to your kind support. If you think this show is worth it, you can become a patron at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or at historyofthegermans.com

Episode 151 – Kurverein zu Rhens

by History of the Germans Podcast on 6th June 202426th February 2026

featuring Pope John XXII and William of Ockham

This week we look at the central intellectual debate of the 14^th century, did Jesus own property? If yes, then it was right and proper that the church owned land, privileges, entire counties and duchies, yes that the pope was not just the spiritual but also the secular ruler of all of Christianity. And if not, then the pope as a successor to the apostles should rescind all worldly possessions and all political power. The follow-on question from there was even more hair raising: if indeed power does not come from the grace of god as determined by the Holy church, then where does it come from. One thinker, Marsilius of Padua goes as far as stating the obvious, power comes from election by the people…

This is what pope John XXII, Michael of Cesena, William of Ockham and the cast of Umberto Eco’s the Name of the Rose discuss. But there was also a politician, Ludwig IV, elected emperor who took these ideas – and put them into actions….let’s find out just how radical this ruler they call “the Bavarian” really was.

This week we look at the central intellectual debate of the 14th century, did Jesus own property? If yes, then it was right and proper that the church owned land, privileges, entire counties and duchies, yes that the pope was not just the spiritual but also the secular ruler of all of Christianity. And if not, then the pope as a successor to the apostles should rescind all worldly possessions and all political power. The follow-on question from there was even more hair raising: if indeed power does not come from the grace of god as determined by the Holy church, then where does it come from. One thinker, Marsilius of Padua goes as far as stating the obvious, power comes from election by the people…

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Ep. 151: Ludwig the Bavarian (1314-1347) – The Kurverein zu Rhens

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 151 – The Kurverein zu Rhens – featuring William of Ockham, also episode 14 of season 8 # From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull, 1250-1356.

But before we start let me remind you that the history of the Germans is advertising free, and with good reason. Regular reminders to use online mental health services or invest in crypto currencies is the #1 irritation for many listeners and causes moral dilemmas for many podcasters. Being advertising free means this show is entirely dependent upon people sustaining it financially, either through one-time donations on historyofthegermans.com/support or as ongoing patreon sponsors on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. And special thanks to Michael K., Linda A., Robert B., Kevin Scott M., Chris Gesell, Tristan Benzing and Carsten D. who have already signed up. BTW., if you want your full name read out, please send me a message on patreon so I can make sure I get this right.

And with that, back to the show.

When we left the king of the Romans and emperor elect Ludwig IV last week, he had just won the battle of Mühldorf against his cousin and rival Frederick the Handsome from the house of Habsburg. He was now the uncontested ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, or at least he should be.

We have been here so many times that if you now say “to Rome, to Rome”, that would not give you the 10 points to Griffindor you were hoping for. Obviously, a coronation journey had to be the next step. And, again, same procedure as last time, Ludwig sought a papal invitation to be crowned above the grave of St. Peter.

Which gets us to the first of the key protagonists of this episode, the man who was to grant this invitation, the new pope, John XXII.

Pope John XXII was born Jacques Duèze in the city of Cahors, the son of a long distance merchant and banker. He studied law in Montpellier and became a lecturer in canon law and an advisor to the bishop of Toulouse. His career took quite some time to get going properly. He was well into his fifties before he caught the eye of king Charles II of Naples who made him his chancellor. In 1310 he became bishop of Avignon, part of the county of Provence which in turn was owned by his sponsor the king of Naples and at the time pretty much a provincial backwater.

His career got a further boost when the papal court appeared on his home turf, i.e., when pope Clement V set up shop in his city, the city of Avignon. In 1312 he was elevated to become a cardinal, just in time to get involved in the election of Clement’s successor when the old pope died in 1314.

By 1314 the composition of the college of cardinals looked quite unfamiliar. There were only 7 Italian cardinals left, who were broken down into various factions. The Italians had to contend with 10 gascons, most of them relatives of the excessively nepotistic Clement V and sympathetic to their duke, who happened to be king Edward II of England. Then there were a further 6 French cardinals supportive of the Capetian kings of France.

All this already made electing a new pope hard, but things got even more difficult when the heirs of king Philip the Fair died in quick succession, one of them a newborn who survived just four days.

The first conclave in Carpentras ended when a mob of Gascons attacked their fellow cardinals shouting, “death to the Italians” and “we want a pope”. The Italian cardinals ran for their lives and hid, whilst the nephew of pope Clement V raided the papal treasury and then disappeared. For 2 years there was no head to the church, no administration, just cardinals wandering around in southern France avoiding each other.

Finally, the younger son of Philipp the Fair had enough, rounded the cardinals up and locked them into a monastery in Lyon and starved them until they had selected a new pope. And that pope was Jacques Duèze, son of a moneylender from Cahors. The reason he was chosen had nothing to do with his considerable talents as a lawyer, but was purely a function of his advanced age, he was over seventy and his sickly appearance. Jacques took the papal name John XXII and would reign as pope for another 18 years, far longer than anyone had expected.

John XXII was a gifted administrator who massively expanded the papal government. He brought the church organizations across europe under tight central control and restored papal finances. Most of these funds were then ploughed back into the papal organization or were used to pay alms. John XXII personally lived a frugal lifestyle, though when he needed to represent the power of the papacy he did. At the wedding of his great niece he threw a banquet where guests consumed 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 580 partridges and lots more foodstuff. He established a working relationship with the French king that granted him significantly more independence than his predecessor Clement V had enjoyed.

That would net, net be maybe not a perfect but a pretty decent papacy. It definitely beats that of Clement V which included leaving Rome, becoming a plaything of the French king and suppressing, torturing and burning the Templars. Still, John XXII left such a black mark on the church, it would take until 1958 before a pope dared to again take the name John, the most common of papal names ever. In contrast, there were 9 more Clements after the Clement V.

What was it that pope John XXII did that made him so despised? Those of you who have read the Name of the Rose may remember the passage where the character William of Baskerville said about John XXII: “You must realize that for centuries a greedier man has never ascended the papal throne. The whore of Babylon against whom our Ubertino used to fulminate, the corrupt popes described by the poets of your country, like that Alighieri, were meek lambs and sober compared to John. He is a thieving magpie, a Jewish usurer; in Avignon there is more trafficking than in Florence!” end quote.

The reason John XXII ended up as “he who shall not be named” of the church was not just for allowing the monetary excesses of his cardinals, bishops and abbots to run out of control, but because he tried to justify their behaviour on legal and theological grounds. Basically before John XXII the church in general and the popes in particular were at least embarrassed about the fact that they were amassing vast fortunes for themselves and their families by exploiting the faithful. John XXII took the view that there was no need to be embarrassed since Jesus and the apostles owned property and so could the church. From there it is only a short hop to pope Leo X famous quote: “God gave us the papacy, now let us enjoy it”, which btw he did not thanks to the actions of a professor of bible studies at the university of Wittenberg called M. Luther.

Now this debate about whether the church and the pope should be poor had been going on for centuries. Wave after wave of reformers had demanded that priests, bishops and popes should live by the example of the apostles, meaning living a modest life without material possessions and dedicated to prayer. Most of these reformers ended up being condemned as heretics but those very few who did not became doctors of the church or founders of religious orders. Which one it was, burnt at the stake or sainthood was pretty much pot luck given the programs were at least initially quite similar.

Amongst those reformers who were co-opted by the church and were made saints, nobody embraced the idea of the poverty of the church as stringently as St. Francis. He laid it down in the rule of the Franciscans No Franciscan friar was to own anything, nor would the order itself hold property. Franciscan friars were allowed just one poor habit with a hood and a second one without a hood if they needed it. No shoes unless strictly necessary, no books, just a breviary. Certainly no coins or monies either directly or indirectly. And so on and so, St. Francis was pretty clear, Franciscans were supposed not to own anything more than the clothes on their backs, nothing at all.

But that ideal rapidly collided with reality. Rich donors believed that the prayers of these holy men would be an effective way to speed up the journey through the potentially millions of years of waiting in purgatory. Very soon the Franciscan were receiving gifts of lands and treasure from devout Christian and great Franciscan monasteries rose up all across europe, starting with the Sacro Convento in Assisi, that miracle of 13^th and 14^th century art. And now the question arose, how can the Franciscans have these monasteries when the whole order was banned from owning anything, except for their two habits.

To square this circle the church had devised the concept that all donations made to the Franciscans were automatically passed on to the pope who would then allow the Franciscans to use these assets on the basis of a legal concept called usufruct, basically a form of unpaid lease.

And this legal construct of the usufruct was the lever John XXII used to break the Franciscan doctrine of the poverty of Christ. Under roman and still modern law, usufruct gives a person the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property, short of the destruction or waste of its substance. John XXII argued that if for example a Franciscan received a loaf of bread from a parishioner and ate it, this could not be a form of usufruct since by eating it, he destroyed the loaf. If he held the bread without owning it, eating the loaf would be theft or willful destruction of property. The only way out of that conundrum was for the Franciscan to accept ownership of the donations they received, which meant the church as a whole was allowed to own things and that in turn meant that all the excessive display of wealth going on in Avignon was therefore fine.

Did I say that John XXII was an accomplished canon lawyer? Lawyers, and I can say that being one myself, come in three flavors, incompetent, clever or good. A good lawyer is someone who understands the spirit of the law and uses this to construct an equitable solution. A clever lawyer is one who uses the wording of the law to bend the spirit of the law to his benefit.

John XXII wasn’t a good lawyer, he was a clever lawyer. And that is why he took a concept from the law of property conveyancing to make a point about the moral standards of a religious institution. Perfectly convincing when one looks at the words on the page, complete nonsense if you look at the moral choices involved.

The Franciscans, led by their minister general, Michael of Cesena refused to breach the rule of St. Francis and end up in hell just in order to comply with the civil code. They wanted to live the life of the apostles as they saw it, caring for the sick and poor, praying and renouncing all worldly possessions. And if that made the pope and his filthy rich cardinals look bad, so be it.

This argument began as an exchange of learned treatises between the pope and the Franciscans before getting increasingly heated. And it drew in more and more of the medieval scholars, including the great English thinker, William of Ockham of razor’s fame. William was asked by Michael of Cesena to review the various statements made by pope John XXII about the subject. William of Ockham concluded the following (quote): “a great many things that were heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane, and defamatory, contrary and likewise plainly adverse to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain experience, and fraternal charity.” End quote. So much for balance. These accusations made the pope a heretic, and a heretic was automatically no longer pope. That was a pretty bold move by William and Michael, followed by the somewhat less bold move of running away from Avignon immediately after posting the report to the papal palace.

The Franciscan leadership, including Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham were now, in 1327, on the run and needed a protector, and they met this protector in Pisa, and that protector was none other than our friend, the survivor of monkey abductions and chivalric battles, Ludwig IV, called the Bavarian.

Ludwig took these learned and holy men in with great joy, because he too had a run-in with pope John XXII.

The problem had been that pope John XXII was not only intensely relaxed about bishops, abbots, cardinals and papal nephews getting filthy rich, he also believed that Boniface VIII had been right when he had declared that quote: “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff”. And specifically that nobody could be ruler of the Holy Roman Empire who had not been approved by the pope.

I will not go into the question whether previous emperors have or have not sought explicit approval for their elections from the pope. Answering that requires Latin language skills and patience I simply do not possess. The important point is that John XXII believed it was a requirement. And Ludwig did not. Ludwig had just fought for eight long years with his cousins, stretched his resources to breaking point to win the crown. He pointed at the dead and wounded at Mühldorf and asked, on what basis am I not the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

Ludwig and John XXII fell out properly over Northern Italy, and specifically Milan. John XXII believed that in the absence of papal approval of a King of the Romans, the throne was vacant. And during this vacancy it fell to the pope to keep order and specifically appoint the imperial vicars. So he relieved the Visconti of Milan, the Della Scala of Verona and the Este of Ferrara from their position as imperial vicars in Northern Italy that they had held since Henry VII’s fateful journey. When the city lords refused to bow down, the pope placed Milan under interdict and put together a crusade against the Visconti, which however failed. The Visconti appealed to the now established Ludwig the Bavarian who confirmed them as imperial vicar.

At that point John XXII did what every self-respecting pope thwarted in his political ambitions did and excommunicated Ludwig of Bavaria for disobedience. The excommunication revived the hopes of the Habsburgs, specifically duke Leopold that they could still gain the throne after all. What further strengthened the Habsburg case was that Ludwig had angered his main ally, king John of Bohemia when he had made his son the new margrave of Brandenburg, a story we will talk more about next week.

Bottom line is that 2 years after his great success at Mühldorf, king Ludwig IV was again in trouble. There are two stories about how he resolved it, a nice, heroic and chivalric version and a more sober, analytical version.

The chivalric version goes as follows: While Ludwig’s rival for the crown, Frederick the Handsome was held in honorable captivity at Schloss Trausnitz, the two cousins who had grown up together renewed their friendship. Negotiating long into the night they agreed that Frederick would give up any claim on the imperial crown and would return some of the imperial lands he had seized. In exchange, he would not have to pay a ransom and was allowed to return home. Once back in Vienna he should obtain the support of his brothers and his main allies to this agreement. Should he fail to get these signatures, he was to return to his jail in Bavaria.

Frederick did go back to Vienna and tried to convince his brothers that the game was up. Leopold however saw things differently. He argued that Ludwig was excommunicated and hence any promise made to him could be broken. Moreover, they received letters from pope John XXII to that effect as well as financial support from the king of France to continue the war.

Still, Frederick, a man of his word, having failed in his mission, returned to captivity in Bavaria. Ludwig, deeply moved by his cousin’s integrity, offered him what he always wanted, the crown. Ludwig and Frederick should rule jointly. If one were to go to Italy to become emperor, the other would keep things on an even keel back home in Germany and vice versa. Hearing that generous offer, the grateful Frederick embraced his cousin, became co-king and they remained firm friends until the Habsburg’s death.

The other, more constitutional perspective looks like that: This was the third time that the succession of the empire had to be decided by force of arms, Dürnkrut, Göllheim and now Mühldorf. This was not a sustainable model, in particular now when there were three roughly equal sized political blocks. And it was completely untenable if the pope in Avignon, which means the king of France, actually decided who rules or whether there was a ruler at all.

For the empire to survive, it had to go further down the road of becoming the collective responsibility of the princes instead of a traditional monarchy. This process had begun long ago with Barbarossa and his concept of being the capstone, the first amongst equals of the princes. By the 14^th century the central authority had diminished so much and the power of the territorial lords consolidated so far, a command and control monarchy had become impossible. But nobody wanted for the empire to dissolve. The empire provided legitimacy and a level of coordination and legal framework that kept the overall system stable and the princes in charge of their territories.

So a period of experimentation followed that lasted through the 14^th, 15^th and 16^th century, trying out various ways how the imperial princes could collaborate in the interest of the empire whilst still pursuing their individual interests. The joint rule of Ludwig and Frederick was such an experiment.

Though it was never repeated, it was a successful experiment. The joint rule reconciled two of the three great families and it reassured the other princes that Ludwig would not be able to seize any more lands and territories for himself or his family. And it gave a focal point for the rising anger at the papacy.

Pope John XXII’s claim that he had the ultimate authority over who would become emperor threatened the role of the Prince-Electors. The Prince electors saw themselves as the ultimate deciders, not as a some sort of pre-selection committee. This common interest in preserving their constitutional role took precedence over their territorial differences.

And another constituency shared the dislike of the Avignon pope and that was the German clergy. Pope John XXII had insisted that the selection of bishops and increasingly abbots and even lower clergy had to be the preserve of the pope, not the decision of the cathedral canons or monks. The reason for that was in part organizational, giving the pope more control over the quality of local church leaders. It also had a monetary element. Every time a new bishop or abbot was appointed by the pope, a third of the first year income was to be sent to Avignon, for lower clergy it was 100% of the income. That wasn’t new. John XXII’s new idea was to constantly shift bishops and abbots between positions. So the bishop of Basel becomes archbishop of Mainz, so a new bishop of Basel had to be found, well that post goes to the previous bishop of Lavant, meaning we need a new bishop of Lavanat, that one was previously abbot of Einsiedeln and so on and so on. Every time a post is filled, a chunk of the first year income is sent to Avignon.

That was not only irritating for the post holder, but also for the people at his court. These incomes weren’t salaries, they were monies needed to fund the functioning of the bishopric or abbey, paying servants and granting special bonuses etc. All that went away, plus local clergy saw their careers taken over by foreign prelates.

These disaffected imperial princes and the German church founded a coalition strong enough to withstand the excommunication, even the interdict that in principle prevented the reading of mass across the whole empire. And the coalition was strong enough that Ludwig could dare to journey to Rome for his coronation without having to be concerned about coups back home.

In December 1326 he travelled to Trient and then to Milan, accompanied by just 200 knights. This was no longer an attempt to assert genuine political control over Northern Italy as Henry VII’s campaign had been. It was more of a visit to the imperial vicars who needed Ludwig to legitimize their rule. And he obliged most generously. He confirmed the Visconti of Milan, the della Scala of Verona and all the others and in exchange the Italians staged a lovely coronation as king of Italy for Ludwig and his new wife Margarete of Holland.

From there he proceeded to Pisa which resisted initially, but could be made to open its gates. By the way, this moment in the autumn of 1327 where the story of the Name of the Rose begins. In the spring of 1328 Ludwig reached Rome.

At which point the question is, what will he be doing there? He is still excommunicated. Pope John XXII has not agreed for him to be crowned emperor. He does not have any cardinals with him who could perform the ceremony as Henry VII had. So, who would be crowning him?

What happens next just shows how far and how radical Ludwig IV was. He did not even bother to go to St. Peters or dig up some malleable archbishop to place the crown on his head whilst gently poked by a spear. No, he accepted the imperial crown from the Senate and the People of Rome, the way the emperors of old had been elevated. The coronation was performed by the now superannuated Sciarra Colonna, the same man who had apprehended and allegedly slapped pope Boniface VIII with it bringing down the imperial papacy, a man so thoroughly antipapal as one could imagine. And he performed the ceremony in his role as the head of the Roman Senate. There was a mass afterwards, but that was purely decorative.

This bold act was to make visible that the empire was no longer beholden to the papacy. He, Ludwig had become emperor by the election of the Prince Electors and his coronation was a secular act, confirming what had already happened, not a religious event, constituting his position as ruler.

Now before you conclude that it was some German provincial baron who had come up with the concept of secular rule and the division between church and state almost exactly a 1000 years after the last pagan Roman emperor had breathed his last. That would be pushing it.

No, a lot of the intellectual underpinning of his rule and the idea of a secular emperor came from the court of intellectuals like William of Ockham and Michael of Cesena who had joined him after they had fled from Avignon. The most radical of those was a man called Marsilius of Padua who had been at Ludwig’s court since 1323. His main work the Defensor Pacis, the Defender of peace makes the case that all power comes from the people, that the people elect and depose the ruler and that the ruler’s purpose was to provide peace and justice. The church on the other hand had no right to temporal power, in fact Jesus had refused the offer of temporal power outright. He was the son of god after all, so power over all men was entirely at his disposal. Marsilius of Padua stated quote: “The elective principality or other office derives its authority from the election of the body having the right to elect, and not from the confirmation or approval of any other power”, and “The prince who rules by the authority of the “legislator” (aka the elector) has jurisdiction over the persons and possessions of every single mortal of every station, whether lay or clerical, and over every body of laymen or clergy”. (end quote)

That is the definition of the secular state carrying a monopoly of violence. This is written 200 years before Machiavelli and 500 years before Hobbes, Montesquieu and the French Revolution. And it wasn’t just something some weird professor had dreamed up in a remote corner of europe. No, this was doctrine at the heart of one of the most consequential rulers of the age.

So much for “Intellectuals in the Middle Ages only debated how many angels can fit on the head of a pin”.

I would have loved for Ludwig to leave it at this, pack up his gear and return to Germany, be consistent. But history is messy and never quite fits with theory. So Ludwig did not have the strength of his convictions to just rely on a secular coronation. A few days after his first coronation he became old school again and deposed pope John XXII for papal overreach and heresy. In his stead he elevated a radical Franciscan to become pope as antipope Nicolas V who crowned him with full regalia in St. Peter.

A bit irritating but what can we do.

Being crowned twice and spring with its usual risks of death and disease approaching, Ludwig packed up and went home. He reached Munich around Christmas 1330, by which time his antipope had already caved to John XXII.

For the next 8 years he focused on stabilising his regime, supporting the growth of trade and cities and passing laws.

As for his conflict with the papacy, things fell into a bit of a lull. Pope John XXII refused to lift the excommunication of the emperor and all of his supporters. The empire remained under interdict, meaning in principle no mass could be sung and no sacraments administered, which would be an epic catastrophe in the medieval perception of the world. But the German clergy largely ignored the ban coming from what they believed was a heretic pope and, as William of Ockham kept telling them, a heretic pope ceased to be pope the moment he became a heretic without any further constituent act being needed. So the German clergy continued saying mass and things kept running smoothly.

In fact John XXII in his later years, he lived all the way to 90, did indeed develop some unorthodox, possibly heretic views. Specifically he concluded that all souls, saints included, would end in purgatory and would only be brought before god on the day of judgement. When he came out with that, pretty much all the prelates in Avignon issued a collective groan. Irrespective of what the bible said, this notion would wipe out the value propositions of pilgrimages, crusades, relics, the reading of mass for the dead, donations to religious houses etc., etc., pp. everything the church of Avignon stood for.

The reason is obvious. The church had invented the concept of purgatory, a sort of waiting room for the souls before they would allowed to enter heaven. The amount of time one had to spend in purgatory depended on how sinful their individual life had been. And purgatory was quite uncomfortable. But there was a way to shorten this waiting time. The intercession of saints, in particular the virgin Mary could appease the gatekeepers and mean you get up to cloud 9 in a couple of weeks instead of millions of years. To gain that intercession was possible by doing good works, for instance donating funds to build a new church, decorate a chapel, give land to a religious house in exchange for mass being sung for the dead or going on crusade. That concept paid for quite a lot of medieval and renaissance art.

Now if John’s idea that even saints had to wait in purgatory with everyone else, all these donations were useless. What is the point of worshipping the big toe of St. Cuthbert if Saint Cuthbert is only a few places places ahead in the queue. John XXII’s great theological breakthrough was quickly dismissed and he admitted that he may have erred, something as we know isn’t possible for a pope to do.

John XXII died in 1334 and his successors took a more conciliatory approach towards the empire. But still, Ludwig was unable to get the excommunication and the interdict lifted. The pope kept insisting that he had the right to approve or reject imperial elections and Ludwig was unwilling to give in.

For Ludwig, this conundrum needed to be resolved and if the pope wasn’t willing to compromise, then the empire had to take a stance. Throughout the year 1338 the Prince-Electors, the bishops and abbots, the cities and the emperor himself wrote to the pope asserting that it was the right of the people, represented by the seven electors to choose the emperor and that “the one who is elected by the majority of the electors is the true king and emperor”.

In a meeting at Rhens on July 16^th, 1338 the Prince Electors, minus King John of Bohemia came together and solemnly swore to defend their right to elect the king and emperor against all external interference, and to submit to the majority decisions of the college of electors. This agreement was then opened up to all other princes as well as vassals, Ministeriales and even the burghers of the cities.

Then they declared a law that the election automatically confers all the rights over the empire to the elected king without the need for any approbation, not even the need for a coronation.

This, the so-called Kurverein zu Rhens was the beginning of the constitution of the empire that will go through many more iterations and reforms until the end of the Reich in the 19^th century. But the fundamental point that the elected monarch was automatically king and emperor was established. The pope could no longer withhold coronations or even make the elevation dependent on their approbation.

There will still be coronations in Aachen and journeys to Rome, but they were purely ceremonial, they do no longer effect a transfer of power. The long fight that began with Henry IV in the snow of Canossa and dominated the reigns of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II was over.

It is ironic that Ludwig IV is still known by his derogatory nickname “the Bavarian” given to him by pope John XXII. John’s moniker was meant to say that his legitimacy ended on the borders of Upper Bavaria, but in reality he shaped much of what we know as the Holy Roman Empire. As for the intellectuals who helped him develop and defend these political concepts, William of Ockham, Michael of Cesena and Marsilius of Padua, they stayed in Munich and died there and their graves are still in the city.

Next week we will try something new. We will still follow the life of Ludwig the Bavarian. But we will look at it through the eyes of someone else, a woman, called Margarete Maultasch, countess of Tirol, best known from Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel the ugly duchess. I hope you will join us again.

And just a final reminder that the history of the Germans is advertising free and that if you want to hear the sound of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major, performed and arranged by Michael Rondeau, rather than me espousing mattresses, sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 150 – The Last Chivalric Battles

by History of the Germans Podcast on 30th May 202426th February 2026

Morgarten and Mühldorf

The 14^th century is a time of epic change in practically all areas of social, political and economic life. It is a time when the certainties of the Middle Ages are replaced by a process of trial and error, sometimes successful, but almost always violent. New frameworks of how society and in particular the religious authorities should operate, how political power should be distributed and how economic growth could be preserved at a time when the climatic benefits of the medieval warming period has come to an end. Ah, and then there was the Black Death.

In this episode we will talk about the political dimension of this change. First how the conflict between the three dominating houses, the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Luxemburg pans out, though whilst the mighty lords believe it is all about marriage alliances and knights dominating the battlefield, the ground on which their mighty warhorses are galloping is shifting….

The 14th century is a time of fundamental change in practically all areas of social, political and economic life. It is a time when the certainties of the Middle Ages are replaced by a process of trial and error, sometimes successful, but almost always violent. We see new frameworks of how society and in particular the religious authorities should operate, how political power should be distributed and how economic growth could be preserved at a time when the climatic benefits of the medieval warming period has come to an end. Ah, and then there was the Black Death.

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So far I have:

Ep. 150: Ludwig the Bavarian (1314-1347) – The Last Chivalric Battles – Morgarten and Mühldorf

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 150 – The Last Chivalric Battles – Morgarten and Mühldorf, also episode 13 of Season 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

But before we start a couple of housekeeping things. We have now reached episode 150, which means if you have listened to every episode you would have listened for 311,361 seconds, 5,189 minutes, 86.5 hours or 3 days,14 hours and 29 minutes. I salute you.

I also know that for anyone coming to the podcast these figures are intimidating. Therefore I have gone down further in my attempt to break the show up into seasons. That does not lead to any changes on Spotify, Pocket Casts and many other platforms. If you however listen on Apple Podcasts you may have noticed that you get displayed just one of the seasons, so to listen to previous seasons you will have to go to the seasons tap and select another one. And you may have noticed that I have changed the episode art. The images that accompany the individual episodes now prominently display the name of the season to make it easier to find out where you are on the timeline. The episode art now also feature the HotGPod colours, namely the rather distinctive gold I have taken from the image of the German flag in the main podcast icon. I hope you like these changes, however, if you feel these are a distraction or make life more difficult for you, or any other reason you do not like them, let me know.

And with that, all that is left to do is to say thanks to our patrons who keep the History of the Germans advertising free. This week I would like to recognize KeithF67, Matt L., ANDREAS OLIVER B., Brian Earl, Ronald H. and Gabe C. who have kindly signed up to the show. Last and final reminder, if you want your full name read out in the episodes, please let me know through the email function at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.

But now, back to the show.

Last week we ended with a brief exploitation of the triangle of power at the death of emperor Henry VII. Three families have emerged from the Interregnum that had begun with the death of Frederick II in 1250. These were the House of Habsburg, dukes of Austria as well as major territorial lords in what is today South West Germany. Switzerland and Alsace. The House of Luxemburg whose youngest scion, John had risen to King of Bohemia whilst his uncle, Balduin was archbishop of Trier aka an elector as well. And finally the House of Wittelsbach that controlled Bavaria and the Palatinate.

This is a new constellation. Up until now we had the situation that there had been one all-powerful candidate, that the electors could unanimously reject by electing a comparatively minor territorial prince instead. Having three more or less equally powerful blocks provides the first test of the system of the seven electors, and I am afraid, it failed miserably.

And that despite a reasonably promising start. The arguably most powerful block were the House of Luxemburg that controlled two votes directly, Trier and Bohemia and worked hand in glove with a third elector, Peter von Aspelt, the archbishop of Mainz.

But Balduin of Trier one of the most astute politicians of the age realized fairly soon that finding that fourth vote necessary for a majority was hard to come by. Either electors feared an even more powerful Luxemburg clan, or they objected to the Luxemburg candidate, the 17-year old king John of Bohemia who was already a bit of a loose cannon. Actually there were no cannon yet in 1314, that will take another 12 years before we see the first one of those, but loose he definitely was.

If they could not put their own man on the throne, they were still insisting that the throne would not go the Habsburgs. A Habsburg king, they feared, would put their only recently acquired kingdom of Bohemia at risk. Remember that the Habsburgs had held Bohemia for a very brief moment until the murder of King Albrecht I and have never completely given up their claim

The solution to Balduin’s problem was obvious. An alliance with the Wittelsbachs would give them a 2:1 advantage over the Habsburgs. And by some amazing coincidence, there was a Wittelsbach around who not only opposed the Habsburgs, but had beaten Frederick the Handsome in the battle of Gammelsdorf, and that Wittelsbach was Ludwig, he of monkey tower’s fame.

It sure took some effort to convince the young ruler of Bohemia that he would not become king or even emperor, but Balduin and Peter von Aspelt got him to grudgingly accept.

So an election was called for the end of October 1314 in Frankfurt. And as ordered, the electors and many other nobles, bishops and princes gathered on a field called Frankenerde outside Frankfurt where according to all the wise men, all emperors had been elected since time immemorial. In fact, some but not all emperors have been elected in Frankfurt, but by no means all and god knows in which meadow that took place. But perception is reality and by 1314 the one and only place one could be elected was this muddy ground outside the gates of the free and imperial city on the Main River.

Ludwig and his allies were fairly certain of victory. Not only did they have the votes of Trier, Mainz and Bohemia, but the margrave of Brandenburg and the duke of Saxony had agreed to support the Bavarian, making if five votes. As for the remaining two, one was Rudolf of the Palatinate, after all Ludwig’s own brother and the other was the archbishop of Cologne. Tradition would dictate that in case of an overwhelming majority for one candidate, the other electors would fall in line.

That was the tradition, but it wasn’t written down in law. The wholes system of the seven electors was purported to have been thus since time immemorial. The lawbooks of the time, the Sachsenspiegel and the Schwabenspiegel both name the electors and the process referencing ancient lore going back to Charlemagne. But they are not identical and the premise on which they are built is not correct.

In other words, there was a grey area here and into that grey area rode Frederick the Handsome, duke of Austria, son of King Albrecht I and grandson of King Rudolf I. And with him were the archbishop of Cologne, the count Palatinate of the Rhine and surprise, the duke of Saxony and the king of Bohemia. Hang, did I not say the duke of Saxony and the king of Bohemia were in the Luxemburg camp? Well, yes, they were. And since they could not be in two places at once and collect election bribes in both, there must be another explanation.

And that had to do for one with the incredible title inflation in the empire I had already mentioned and for the other with the constantly shifting Bohemian politics. The duke of Saxony in Frederick’s camp was the duke of Sachsen-Wittenberg whilst the dukes in Ludwig’s camp there were three dukes of Sachsen-Lauenburg. All of these dukes were descendants of Albert I of Saxony who had split his lands between his sons, one getting Wittenberg and the other Lauenburg. Then the Lauenburger had three sons, each the having their own duchylet. The two main branches of the family were obviously perennially feuding with each other, and were also in dispute about who had the voting rights in the imperial elections. Hence two ducal votes for Saxony.

Whilst this was an inconvenient but predictable complexity given the feud over the election rights had been going on for a decade and was well publicized, the fourth elector in Frederick’s train was a genuine surprise, Henry, duke of Carinthia, who as you may remember had held the throne of Bohemia for short periods, twice. First he was expelled by the Habsburgs and the second time by the Luxemburgs. And in both cases he was easy to throw out because he had rubbed the Bohemian nobles up the wrong way. But, and that is important here, he had never given up his claim on Bohemia. So Frederick recognized his claim and hey presto he had a fourth elector.

And, without hesitation, these four electors voted for Frederick the Handsome as king of the Romans.

Meanwhile at the other end of town, Ludwig, Balduin and Peter were flabbergasted. The whole idea of the 7 electors had been to avoid having a split vote and two kings. And now we do. What should be done? Give up their claim in the interest of the unity of the empire, or electing Ludwig as planned and starting a civil war.

They clearly did not need much time to come to a conclusion on that one. Ludwig, counted as Ludwig IV was elected the next day.

Excellent, now we have two elected kings. It was clear who had the stronger claim to be properly elected, but election is only the first step to kingship. We may be in the late Middle Ages and much of the theocratic nature of kingship had eroded, in particular in the empire, but rituals still mattered a lot. And the first ritual would be for the city of Frankfurt to open its gates and letting the new elected king in to celebrate mass in St. Bartholomew. At that mass the king would then be placed on the altar of the church by the electors. I am not sure how exactly the physical process took place. In one image we have it looked as if indeed the king was lifted up like a child and then sat down on the altar.

Whichever way this elevation was effected, by the afternoon it was Ludwig the Bavarian who sat on the altar of St. Bartholomew

Next and most importantly was the coronation. Frederick the Handsome had a distinct advantage here. He had the correct archbishop the one of Cologne, and, he had the imperial regalia, the Holy Lance, Imperial Crown, Imperial Cross, Sceptre, the purse of St. Stephen, stockings, shoes, gloves, etc., etc. So all he needed was to get to Aachen and he would have the full set. And if he did, that would have probably offset the rather dodgy nature of his election.

But the citizens of Aachen refused to let him in. Not having brought an army with siege engine to his coronation, Frederick had to turn back. Cologne where the mighty cathedral was going up at that same time turned him down too. He was eventually crowned in Bonn, a small town in Germany as John le Carre called it. Wrong place but right archbishop and right sort of kit.

Meanwhile Ludwig found a much friendlier reception in Aachen. So Ludwig managed to get crowned in the right place, but by the wrong archbishop and with a fake crown.

If you want to keep score, Ludwig is ahead in legal terms 3 to 2. Ludwig has been elected by more and more credible electors, has been admitted and raised to the alter in Frankfurt and had been crowned in Aachen. Frederick has the correct archbishop and the imperial regalia. By the way, nobody seems to know why Frederick had the imperial regalia. Either they were never handed over from Albrecht I to Henry VII or they had somehow been kept by the archbishop of Cologne.

In any event, legal-shmegal, none of this mattered any more. Given the degree to which the empire has come under papal oversight, it would have been the pope or a church council that could have resolved that question, based on the law. But pope Clement V had died in April 1314 and his successor, John XXII wasn’t elected until August 1316. Without a judge there was no trial.

A civil war ensued and whoever wins the fight would be king. Sounds pretty straightforward, so the next thing to talk about should be a great battle, lines of armoured men crashing into each other, foot soldiers sitting on the grass watching the spectacle, lots of dead people, ransom payments and done.

Well, there will be all that, but it took 8 years before that great battle took place. For eight years Frederick the Handsome and Ludwig of Bavaria would raise armies, march about, burn down each other’s villages and occasionally badly defended towns, but no decisive battle. Five times the two forces faced each other across a potential battlefield and five times nothing much happened.

For most of these last 150 episodes, we watched the players marching around in search of the enemy and once they had found him, they attacked. Evading battles did happen, but usually only in cases where the odds were truly overwhelming. This war by walkabout only came into vogue in the late 13^th and early 14^th century. Why was that?

It had much to do with the way armies were recruited in the late Middle Ages.

In the Early and High Middle Ages the military consisted mainly of vassals, i.e., men who were bound by oath to serve a lord or king for a specified period with a specified number of soldiers and arms. In the time of the Ottonians and early Salians, these vassals were predominantly the bishops and abbots who provided 2/3rds of the forces. Under the late Salians and certainly under the Hohenstaufen, armies began to gradually transition. The obligations of the bishops and abbots had been scaled down after the Investiture Controversy, though they still played an important role. Temporal vassals had scaled down their obligations ever further to only one foreign campaign, the Romzug, the coronation journey to Rome, but otherwise served only north of the alps.

That was nowhere near enough for Barbarossa, Henry VI or Frederick II who each led multiple expeditions into Italy. To fill the gap, the emperors increasingly relied on Ministeriales who were technically unfree and hence there was no limit to how often they could be called up and where they could be sent. Another way to motivate fighters from Germany was the promise of loot in the rich Italian lands, but that had some obvious downsides when the idea was to establish a functioning Italian administration. It also did not work when the campaign was going badly – exhibit A: the battle of Legnano.

As we go into the late 13^th and early 14^th century the Ministeriales are shedding their status as unfree men and become the imperial knights, the Reichsritter. These men are very keen on warfare and extremely competent, but they are no longer fighting for free. They had to be paid. War became a business. Successful commanders would build up companies of fighters for hire. This happened all over Europe, in France they were called the Grand Compagnies or Routiers, in Italy the leaders of these companies were called Condottiere and some commanded veritable armies that cities would hire for a season or more to fight against another city, only to find them on the opposing side the next year. The war entrepreneurs in the empire north of the Alps were smaller scale and not as sophisticated, but essentially the same thing.

As businessmen they tried to extract as much cash as possible for as little fighting as necessary. In order not to waste their valuable resources of trained men, armour, weapons, horses, siege engines and the like, they preferred to just wander about in enemy territory, burn and plunder but evade battle. Going into battle for real was something that was done rarely and then mainly for marketing purposes – who would hire a mercenary who runs away every single time.

So, for eight years the Habsburgs and Ludwig and his allies pumped what would be billions into these mercenaries in the hope of forcing a decisive engagement and for eight years that money was effectively wasted. Mostly what it was spent on was the ever more elaborate armour and dress of the knights that makes the 14^th century such a visually arresting period.

This is the time when chivalric fashion goes properly off the reservation. Bunches of peacock feathers on elaborate helmets, whole swans or bears carried like Marie Antoinette’s whigs, horse covers made from the most expensive cloth and that is before we talk about the shiny armour. And once off the horse, the men were sporting these newfangled leg-covers called trousers. Instead of the old tunic and long socks their grandfathers were wearing, the heroes of the 14^th century were dressed in tight leggings, usually the left side in a different colour to the right plus a short, sometimes even a mini skirt. On their feet they wore pointed shoes, the poulaines that grew ever more elaborate until they had to be rolled up and attached to the knee by a piece of string to allow the men to be still able to walk.

The rise of the mercenary armies means a war, in particular a war lasting 8 years is fought by tax collectors, not by generals. And if we look at the ability to raise money, Frederick the Handsome and his Habsburg relatives were in a much stronger position than Ludwig. Ludwig had his own lands in Upper Bavaria but for the rest of the Wittelsbach resources he had to rely on his relatives, his brother Rudolf and his cousins in Lower Bavaria, in particular Henry, called “the Older” of Lower Bavaria.

As a consequence he was heavily dependent upon his allies the Luxemburgs, which was pretty much the kind of set-up Balduin of Trier had aimed for. The problem with the House of Luxemburg and king John of Bohemia in particular was that they were not quite as solidly established, as resourceful and as reliable as Ludwig may have hoped.

John of Bohemia never really settled in Bohemia. He derived his legitimacy from his marriage to Elisabeth, daughter of king Wenceslaus II. That marriage was not going well at all. Elisabeth had grown up during the succession crises following the murder of her brother and on several instances had been the rallying point for one or other faction in Prague. She was not excited about getting married to a man we would today diagnose with extreme ADHD. John could not bear the idea that someone, somewhere was fighting and he was not taking part. No battle, no tournament, no Prussian crusade was complete without the king of Bohemia. There were years where he would squeeze in a melee at the royal court in Paris, a crusade in Prussia and a campaign in Hungary, interspersed with imperial diets in Nurnberg and sieges of Italian communes. And in between the fighting it was courtly love, just without the abstinence bit.

That was all very chivalric and gave him the arguably greatest of all medieval deaths, but it wasn’t a way to run a kingdom. And Elizabeth was very much keen on running a kingdom, specifically hers. The spouse became increasingly estranged and the split encouraged the powerful Bohemian nobles to rebel. So for quite a while John had to interrupt his great vertical and horizontal adventures to fight wars against his barons. And that meant John had often neither men nor money to spare to support Ludwig. In fact at some stage Ludwig had to divert his own forces to bail out John.

Which leaves the question, how did Ludwig survive for 8 long years? One trick was to lure the Habsburgs into over hiring a huge army and then hide behind the walls of the big cities that even these armies could not break.

The other strategy was based on a more fundamental shift. Ludwig might not have been good with his own money, but he did notice that other people were, and these were the people in the cities. The 14^th century was a period of rapid growth for cities in Germany, roughly 2 centuries after the Italian cities had started their meteoric rise. We might do a separate episode on the growth of trade in the 14^th century, but the broad outline is as follows.

In the early and high middle ages, trade operated mainly on the North – South Axis, luxury goods from the mediterranean was shipped north in exchange for textiles from Flanders and silver and gold mined in the Harz mountains, Bohemia and Saxony. In the 13^th century and then even more in the 14^th and 15^th century, East-West trade routes were established that opened up Hungary, Poland, Bohemia and then Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states. Their main exports were agricultural products like wheat and rye as well as fish, furs, metals and beeswax. We had a close look at the Hanseatic League already, but around the same time places like Nurnberg, Ulm, Ravensburg became international centres of trade whilst other, long established cities like Regensburg and Augsburg received boost. The southern cities also established pre-industrial production of goods, which would later make them famous for their armour, silverware, clocks etc.

These trends meant that despite the falling agricultural production across Europe thanks to the beginnings of the little ice age, the cities, specifically the big cities engaged in long distance trade flourished and became very rich. If you visit some of the classic German medieval cities, Nurnberg, Rothenburg, Regensburg, Erfurt, Dinkelsbühl, Nördlingen etc., you find that the majority of the buildings date back to the Late Middle Ages, not the High Middle Ages.

And Ludwig would build his career on being supportive of the cities, specifically his own cities in the lands he controlled and the imperial and free cities. In exchange the cities provided Ludwig with funds and men, seemingly enough for him to sustain the Habsburg attacks. It is another sign that the Middle Ages are waning when the cities tilt the balance in a struggle between the contenders for the imperial crown.

But the – in my eyes – most significant military event took place outside Bavaria and in another conflict. A conflict that involved one of the parties in the imperial civil war, the Habsburgs.

As you may remember, the Habsburgs rise to prominence and wealth was fuelled by the opening of the Gotthard pass when a bridge was constructed over the Schoellenen Gorge in the in the early 13^th century. If you take a look at the map, what you notice is that the Swiss Cantons on the north side of the pass are called Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden. Yes, what we are now going to talk about is the early history of Switzerland. Now, as always with national histories of countries other than Germany, I run the risk of offending people. Let me assure you, this is not my intention. That being said, there are a lot of myths surrounding this story and whilst everyone now agrees that Wilhelm Tell never existed, there are other, more persistent stories that are also largely debunked. And then there is a whole lot of stuff we do not know. So here is what I believe happened based on what I found in the sources:

The people of these three cantons had been living a pretty harsh and difficult life before the Gotthard pass opened up. Society was no different to the rest of europe, meaning that a few noble families lorded it over the local peasant population. The opening of the trade route did change this situation fundamentally. There was now work in helping to transport goods across the mountain, providing food and shelter for travellers and offering “security” in inverted commas. Some peasant families became quite wealthy and the general population saw their living standards improve. That being said, there were no real cities in these three cantons, the first one a traveller reached coming across the Gotthard was and is Lucerne. Nor were the local nobles able to become mighty barons.

That being said, the strategic importance of the region was recognised. The emperor Frederick II granted them immediacy, meaning they were subject of the emperor directly, not of any territorial lord. I cannot find who ruled these lands before and it seems sort of nobody or nominally the dukes of Swabia, aka emperor Frederick II.

The arrangement was broadly accepted, including by the now most powerful local family, the Habsburgs, as the Habsburgs held the role of imperial vicar over these cantons. This remained the case when Rudolf I became king.

Things became more difficult in 1291 when Rudolf of Habsburg died. The commonly held view is that at that point the three cantons signed an agreement of mutual support. The point of this agreement was not necessarily defence against Habsburgs overreach, but more as a way to protect themselves and the Gotthard trade from the upheavals following the death of the king. Such agreements had been fairly common in times when there was no central authority protecting the population.

Whether this agreement was indeed made in 1291, or in 1307 in the form of the Rutli Oath, or even later on 1315, just before the events I will talk about in a moment cannot be confirmed. Nor can it be confirmed when and how the Habsburg reeves were expelled from the three cantons. We do know that Wernher of Homberg, who had become imperial vicar in Italy for Henry VII, had also been an imperial vicar there, possibly even in 1315.

The first conflict between the Swiss and the Habsburgs began when farmers from Schwyz occupied land belonging to the abbey of Einsiedeln. The disagreement intensified and the abbot convinced the bishop of Konstance to excommunicate the canton of Schwyz. The Swiss retaliated by attacking the monastery, taking the monks captive and ransacked the abbey church.

This was a provocation for the Habsburgs as protectors of Einsiedeln. So duke Leopold, the brother of Frederick the Handsome took some of his mercenaries that had again failed to lure Ludwig into battle and led them to Schwyz. Leopold, like every other commander of his day believed that armoured men on warhorses could only be overcome by other armoured men on warhorses. Ever since Otto the Great had routed the Hungarians on the Lechfeld in 955, the knight in its various incarnations had ruled the roost.

Leopold was so confident, he barely scouted the territory he was entering. After all, these are just a bunch of peasants led by a small band of local nobles. They aren’t real fighters. What would they be able to do.

Well quite a lot as it happened. The Swiss had built barricades across all the major roads leading into the canton of Schwyz. Leopold feigned attacks on some of them, but took his main force on a road along a lake called the Ägerisee. The path between the lake on the right and the mountains on their left was narrow and so his army column became stretched. At that point the Swiss attacked, rolling tree trunks down the hill and pelting the horses with rocks. The knights had no room to manoeuvre, many were flung into the lake by their terrified horses and drowned. Others died when the peasants tackled them with a new weapon, the halberd. The Halberd consists of a 1.5 to 1.8 metre long stick with an axe blade and topped by a spike, plus a hook on the other side of the axe blade.

The Halberd was specifically designed for foot soldiers fighting armoured riders. The spike and axe, if expertly administered could cut through the visors and other gaps in a knights armour. The hook was used to pull the rider off his horse, making him much more vulnerable.

It is here at this battle, called the battle on the Morgarten that the Halberd was first recorded and it had a devastating effect. The forces of Leopold of Austria, one of the most highly regarded commanders of his day were almost entirely wiped out. Numbers are as always unreliable, but chronicles talk of 2000 men, 1,500 of whom died, which would make it not an army, but still a sizeable force. Leopold escaped by a hairs breadth.

The battle on the Morgarten did not yet prove that a largely peasant army equipped with halberd could defeat a force of knights. Much of the success was down to the topography and the foolishness of the commander. It was 70 years later, at the battle of Sempach when the Swiss and Habsburgs square up on an open battlefield that the superiority of a Swiss infantry will be proven. The halberd, together with the crossbow and longbow broke the superiority of the knight on the battlefield, even before firearms became ubiquitous. So one can argue that it was here on November 15^th, 1315 in the mountainous lands below the Gotthard pass that another key building block of medieval society had started to crumble.

But before that happened, there will be another battle, the battle we, or at least Ludwig and Frederick had been waiting for, the battle that was to decide who would wear the crown of the empire. And that was a battle very much along the lines of a medieval, chivalric encounters with all the pomp and circumstances that came with it.

The set-up was very similar to Gammelsdorf, only much larger in scale. As last time Frederick the Handsome was bringing a force up from Austria, whilst his brother Leopold came in from the Habsburg ancestral lands in the South West. And the bishops of Salzburg and Lavant were bringing up forces from the south. As before, Ludwig could not afford for all three columns to jopin up.

Frederick’s army consisted of Austrian knights and their supporters as well as Kumans and Hungarians, who were apparently the cheapest option amongst the various mercenary companies. By now even the rich Habsburgs were running out of cash and Frederick was unable to maintain discipline in his ranks. His army, Hungarians and Austrians alike were living off the land, robbing and plundering, not only enemy territory, but the Habsburg lands as well. He joined with the Salzburg forces in Passau.

Ludwig meanwhile had gathered his forces in Bavaria. Apart from his own Bavarians he had hired mercenary knights from the Rhine valley and Franconia, had gathered his main allies, king John of Bohemia with his significant force and duke Henry the Older of Lower Bavaria. And importantly the forces of the Imperial and Bavarian cities.

On September 27^th the two armies met at Mühldorf, roughly halfway between Munich and Passau. Even though his brother Leopold had not yet arrived, probably delayed by Ludwig’s forces, Frederick decided to seek battle and Ludwig accepted. Neither side could face going home again and doing the same thing again next year.

The next morning both sides heard mass, had breakfast, put on their armour and lined up for battle. This, everyone knew, was going to be the real battle. The mercenaries, usually conscious not to waste their resources knew that this was one of the few occasions where it was worth fighting hard to build their reputation. No more playing at war this time.

The commanders made fiery speeches to their men, offered rewards for exceptional bravery or key successes like the capturing of the enemy flag, etc., etc….

And then the heralds blow the trumpets and the lines started moving. No surprise that John of Bohemia was the first out of the box, leading his forces straight at the archbishop of Salzburg. After the first almighty clash it becomes a fight man against man. But this time it is not over after an hour or so. The battle of Mühldorf goes on for eight hours. Eight hours in armour hacking at the enemy sounds almost impossible to me. Most likely there had been breaks in between when both sides retreated so that the dead and wounded could be removed from the battlefield. Once they were cleared away, the two sides got back to the hacking and killing.

For much of the time it looked as if the Habsburgs were winning. King John of Bohemia was unhorsed but, as Austrian sources claim, had been saved by a treacherous Austrian knight. Ludwig himself who was not wearing his royal garb but a modest blue coat with silver crosses also fell but was rescued by the bakers of Munich who were allowed to carry the imperial eagle as their coat of arms in recognition for their bravery.

What decided the encounter were the reserve forces under the Burgrave of Nurnberg, a Hohenzollern, that had spent almost all of these 8 hours patiently waiting for their moment. And once that moment came, these fresh forces easily overwhelmed the now exhausted Austrians. That was it, battle over.

Mühldorf is broadly considered the last European battle fought almost entirely by knights in shining armour. The next major engagement was the battle of Crecy in 1346 that was decided by the English and Welch Longbowmen. The participation of John of Bohemia in both events is the only thing they have in common.

Ludwig and his allies had won and made a huge number of prisoners, including Frederick the Handsome himself and his brother Henry. These prisoners were distributed amongst the various commanders, their ransom acting as the victory bonus promised before the battle.

When Ludwig came to see Frederick in the Bavarian castle he was confined in, he greeted him by saying, cousin, rarely have I been so happy to see you in this place. Frederick allegedly either did not respond or said, rarely have I been so unhappy to see you.

The fight for the imperial crown is over. Ludwig had won, and he had won comprehensively. Leopold of Austria might still be keen to continue the fight, but it is basically over. There is a problem though. What was Ludwig supposed to do with the defeated anti-king? In previous wars over the succession, the defeated opponent had the decency to die either in battle or shortly afterwards. But Frederick the Handsome was still very much alive, in reasonable heath and not particularly old. Keeping him in prison for the next 30 years would be considered inhumane by medieval standards, in particular when both jailor and jailed were both grandsons of king Rudolf.

Moreover, How could Ludwig go down to Rome to be crowned, when his adversary was still alive and could become the focal point of the resistance. Resistance that might be encouraged by the new pope, John XXII, who as we will see becomes Ludwig’s most implacable enemy.

Ludwig will find an unprecedented solution to that problem which was another step away from the medieval world towards the early modern period. And that is before he makes an even bigger move that redefined not just the relationship between pope and emperor but that between church and state in general.

But for that we have to wait until next week. I hope you will join us again.

And do remember that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And if you want to become a patron too, go to patreon.com/historyofthegermans or to historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 149 – The Real Ludwig of Bavaria

by History of the Germans Podcast on 23rd May 202426th February 2026

The youth of an emperor

A few months after emperor Henry VII had died in the Tuscan village of Buonconvento and before a successor had been elected, a young man, Ludwig, second son of the duke of Upper Bavaria made his name defeating a much larger Habsburg force. This success could not have come at a more opportune time as it propelled him into contention for the title of King of the Romans and ultimately, emperor.

His rule, constantly contested but lasting 33 years would become a major turning point in German, if not European history as it triggered the modern notion of the separation of church and state.

I know that I cannot always maintain a completely unbiased position in this podcast, but I rarely succumb to my personal bugbears. But this time I will have to expose you to one of my biggest, and that is the weird romanticization of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the mentally ill recluse who built the three kitsch palaces of Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee and Linderhof in the deluded hope of resurrecting an absolutist regime in a kingdom he had sold to Prussia. Don’t get me wrong. The three palaces are worth visiting, if not for their somewhat morbid charm, but what irritates me is that this politically and artistically inconsequential monarch overshadows the more interesting, more complex and more consequential Bavarian rulers, chief amongst them his namesake, Ludwig IV the Bavarian. Let’s see whether HotGPod cannot right this misconception…..

His rule, constantly contested but lasting 33 years would become a major turning point in German, if not European history as it triggered the modern notion of the separation of church and state.

Let’s see whether HotGPod cannot right this misconception…..

As always:

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Ep. 149: Ludwig the Bavarian (1314-1347) – The Real Ludwig of Bavaria

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 149 – The Real Ludwig of Bavaria, part of Season 8 – From the Interregnum to Golden Bull.

His rule, constantly contested but lasting 33 years would become a major turning point in German, if not European history as it triggered the modern notion of the separation of church and state.

But before we start a big thank you to our one-time donation supporters. I have finally done the proper analysis over all of you and wow, some of you are extremely generous, making multiple donations over time. I want to thank specifically today Gary S., Dodo S., John C., Mary-Jane H, Simon F., Stefan A. and wortbau for their generosity.

Now back to the show

Last week we ended with the untimely death of emperor Henry VII from the House of Luxemburg. Even though he failed in his ambition to bring Italy to heel, his coronation as emperor had brought an end to the long period without emperors that began with the demise of Frederick II in 1250.

A lot had happened in these 63 years and the power structures of europe in general and the empire in particular had changed fundamentally.

The epic struggle between popes and emperors had resulted in a papal triumph. Pope Boniface VIII declared that it was paramount for the salvation of humanity that every monarch became subject to the pope. It was that self-same pope that was brought back down to earth by physical force and his successor Clement V had moved to Avignon under the de facto supervision of the king of France. The Kings of France had not only captured the papacy, they had also consolidated their lands and established a modern (in inverted commas) bureaucracy that gave them access to resources far, far larger than that of their eastern neighbors, the Kings of the Romans. Only the English kings and largest vassals of the king of France could contest their position.

The empire meanwhile had fragmented. The lands north of the Main River had de facto seceded out of the imperial orbit since the days of Henry IV and the Investiture Controversy in the 11th century and by the 14^th century had only scant interest in the goings-on down south. They still fielded two electors, the dukes of Saxony and the Margraves of Brandenburg, but both rarely attended elections and used their right to elect mostly as a way to extract cash from the candidates.

Italy, after Henry VII failed attempt to bring it back under control was now left to its own devices. The emperors still claimed nominal overlordship and would appoint imperial vicars and grant aristocratic titles, often against generous donations. But apart from going to Rome for coronations and the fights on the way down and back, the emperors no longer saw Italy as a land they could or should control.

Within the core imperial territory that comprised modern day Southern Germany, the Rhineland, Austria, Switzerland and Czech republic power had consolidated into three main families, the Habsburgs, the House of Luxemburg and the House of Wittelsbach.

By 1313, duke Frederick the Handsome of Austria, oldest son of king Albrecht I together with his brother Leopold was the head of the Habsburgs. King John of Bohemia, son of emperor Henry VII, together with his uncle Balduin, the archbishop of Trier was the head of the house of Luxemburg . And the house of Wittelsbach was led by two brothers, Rudolph, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and his brother Ludwig, the duke of upper Bavaria.

If things had followed the pattern of the last decades, we should now see one of the archbishops pull a minor unthreatening looking territorial lord out of his miter who would sign all sorts of promises and would then be elected king. But that was no longer the case. For one, the concept of electing poor counts had not exactly worked out. Each of these allegedly malleable rulers had broken all the promises and leveraged their royal position to acquire major imperial fiefs, and two had succeeded, Rudolf von Habsburg captured Austria for his sons and Henry of Luxemburg by gained Bohemia for his. Moreover, the three houses now held 3 of the seven electoral votes between them, Bohemia, Trier and the Palatinate. Hence the time of the election of small counts was over.

If one was to become king, it had to be someone from the three big families. The Habsburgs and the Luxemburgs each had a go already, the Habsburgs even had two. The Wittelsbachs had tried three times and three times had been kicked out in the early rounds. Spoiler alert, in 1313 it was the Bavarians’ turn, though -second spoiler alert – it was not at all smooth.

But before we get to the election itself, it time to get to know the Wittelsbachs, the third of the powerful families a little better, in particular their champion, Ludwig, duke of Upper Bavaria.

Therefore. Let’s start at the beginning.

If you come to Munich today and you look for the seat of the Bavarian dukes and kings, you will be directed to the Residenz, the largest inner city royal palace in Germany comprising 6 major courtyards, theatres, concert halls, an impressive hall of antiquities, a file of rococo state rooms, a treasury, museums etc.,etc., pp.

None of that existed in 1313. At that time the dukes of Upper Bavaria resided in what is today called the Alte Hof, the Old Court, a much more modest affair, tucked away two blocks away from the Residenz. And inside the Old Court you find a small tower, called the Monkey tower that allegedly could have put an end to the story of Ludwig the Bavarian before it had even begun. The story goes that the ducal family kept a pet monkey. That monkey took a liking to baby Ludwig and one day when a negligent servant left the window of the nursery open, the monkey snuck in and took the little prince. Once the nannies and servants realized what had happened, they tried to wrestle the baby away from the monkey. The frightened monkey fled and climbed up to the top of the monkey tower, still holding the precious little prince. It took hours for the ducal household to calm down the terrified animal and coerce it and the baby boy back to the ground. Ludwig was unharmed, the fate of the monkey is unknown, largely because the story is entirely invented and the tower tourist guides point out was built much later. But it is a cute story and I did not want to deprive you guys of it.

In part because up to Ludwig the Bavarian, his family, the house of Wittelsbach had been a touch short of cute stories.

The Wittelsbachs had been an important family in Bavaria since the 11^th century. They made a huge leap forward in 1180 when Otto von Wittelsbach, hero of the battle on the Veroneser Klause and loyal paladin of emperor Frederick Barbarossa was enfeoffed with the duchy of Bavaria recently vacated by Henry the Lion. By then the ducal position mirrored that of the emperor in as much that the duke would generate some modest income from the rights, lands and privileges associated with the ducal title, but was mainly dependent upon his own resources when it came to maintaining his court and fund military adventures. So, when Otto became duke, his circumstances did not change quite as fundamentally as one may think.

It was Otto’s son, Ludwig I, known as the Kelheimer, who laid the foundation of the wealth of the Wittelsbachs. The Kelheimer was a supreme tactician and a very lucky man. For one, he benefitted from the demise of several important Bavarian families whose fiefs he seized on account of his ducal rights and kept hold of on account of his superior military forces. His fortunes improved further when the death of emperor Henry VI flung the empire into a civil war. The Kelheimer played each side against the other very smartly and walked away with the title of Count palatinate on the Rhine which made the House of Wittelsbach one of the Electors. When his cousin, another Otto of Wittelsbach murdered king Philipp of Swabia, far from being accused of collusion, the Kelheimer was able to seize the possessions of the other branch of the family. All that meant that by 1230 the Wittelsbachs had become the most powerful family in southern Germany after the Hohenstaufen and the kings of Bohemia.

1230, as it happened, was also the year the Kelheimer was murdered, weirdly in Kelheim, the place of his birth, by a man of foreign appearance who was unable to give his name, let alone the name of his client on account of being torn to pieces by the enraged crowd. Fingers pointed at emperor Frederick II. One of the Kelheimer’s schemes had upset the emperor who had close links to the Middle East and was rumored to be a friend of the Old man of the Mountain, the head of the Assassins. Whether or not he ordered the hit, we will never know though.

The Kelheimer’s son Otto II became known as the Illustrious. What made him key to this story, apart from his splendid court and another round of territorial acquisitions was called the first Bavarian division of 1255.

One of the most devastating things that could happen to a powerful aristocratic family in the 13^th and 14^th century was to have a lot of male heirs. Because contrary to the perception that all these duchies and territories were states, the holders of these titles regarded them as private property. And since the Salian law applied only in parts of the empire, many families, including the Wittelsbachs would split their lands amongst their surviving sons. And that is what happened in 1255. Otto II had two sons, and so the duchy of Bavaria was divided into two parts, the duchy of Upper Bavaria and the Duchy of Lower Bavaria. The oldest son, another Ludwig got Upper Bavaria and the Palatinate, whilst the younger one received Lower Bavaria.

This Ludwig duke of Upper Bavaria was the father of our Ludwig and the first Bavarian ruler who made Munich their main residence. Ludwig was known as der Strenge, which translates as “the Severe”. This moniker goes back to an event in his youth when he had his beautiful young wife, Marie of Brabant executed because he suspected her of infidelity. It turned out that this was a misunderstanding, but by that time her head was already in the basket. Ludwig – to his credit – became stricken with remorse, founded the monastery of Fürstenfeld and promised never to kill another wife. He stuck to that promise and his next wife died of natural causes after which he married Mechthild von Habsburg. Ludwig and his brother henry had both been candidates at the election of 1273 but had to concede to Rudolf von Habsburg pretty quickly. The marriage to Mechthild was part of Rudolf von Habsburg’s charm offensive that paved the way to his election.

Mechthild gave Ludwig the Severe five children, of which two sons, Rudolf born 1274 and the focus of this episode, Ludwig, born most likely in 1282.

As so often with individuals in this period we know next to nothing about Ludwig’s childhood and upbringing. It is likely that he spent the first 7 years of his life under the supervision of his mother. Once children had reached the age of seven they were considered old enough to begin preparation for their future occupation. Children of burghers would go to school, whilst peasants children would be expected to earn their crust in the fields or as servants in the manor house. The son of a duke would be educated in war, hunting and tournaments and the art of courtly love. By now a man of Ludwig’s status would be expected not only to read and write but also to be familiar with poetry and the chivalric romances. Many of Ludwig’s fellow aristocrats all the way up to the emperor Henry VI even wrote poetry. Hunting and tournaments played a huge role in the social interactions of the territorial lords and their vassals, hence Ludwig was expected to excel in all of these. Since he had not been destined for a role in the church, he did not learn much Latin or theology, but he had enough to recite the main prayers in Latin and probably understand their broad meaning.

So, apart from the dramatic thing with the monkey, Ludwig’s childhood was rather uneventful.

All that changed when his father died in 1294. Ludwig is at that point 12 years old. His brother, Rudolf is 19. As an adult, Rudolf had already set up his own court and had taken on some of the burdens of the ruler alongside his father. Given the Wittelsbach propensity to treat the surviving sons equally, Rudolf and Ludwig were supposed to manage their lands, the Palatinate and Upper Bavaria jointly. And since Ludwig was a minor, Rudolf demanded that he would be made the guardian of his brother, meaning that in effect Rudolf would run the place all by himself.

That attempt fell at the first hurdle which was the mother of the two dukes, Mechthild von Habsburg. Mechthild feared that Rudolf would push Ludwig aside or worse and she was not letting that happen. Mechthild had been appointed young Ludwig’s guardian and co-regent by the old duke and she insisted on having her say.

To protect young Ludwig, she sent him to the court of her brother, Albrecht, then still duke of Austria and on his way to become king of the Romans. In Vienna little Ludwig grew up with Albrecht’s two son’s, Frederick the Handsome and Leopold. I know there are a lot of name in this episode – again, but you may want to remember these two, Frederick the Handsome and Leopold of Austria.

Again, we do not know anything about Ludwig’s time in Vienna, so we can only speculate that he was trained in all chivalric skills. And Vienna was surely a great place to do that, in particular once Albrecht had become king of the Romans in 1298.

Meanwhile relations between Ludwig’s brother Rudolf and the Habsburgs deteriorated rapidly. Rudolf had voted for Adolf von Nassau as king, thereby denying Albrecht von Habsburg the crown at his first attempt. Then Rudolf married the daughter of king Adolf von Nassau, putting him firmly into the anti-Habsburg camp. At the battle of Goellheim where Albrecht defeated king Adolf von Nassau, Rudolf had fought on the losing side of his father-in law. Still Albrecht treated Rudolf with kindness and Rudolf attended Albrecht’s coronation.

But soon afterwards the relationship soured further. Rudolf attempted to overthrow Albrecht together with the Rhenish archbishops. Albrecht besieged and captured Heidelberg and Rudolf had to submit to the king’s mercy – again.

Rudolf is a fascinating personality in as much that literally every single one of his many, many schemes failed. And still he kept going and going.

After his defeat he went into a sulk. That sulk turned into all-out rage when king Albrecht demanded that Rudolf accepted the now 19 year old Ludwig as his co-ruler in the Platinate and Upper Bavarians had been set out in their father’s last will and testament. Being unable to do anything against the royal order, he turned instead on his own mother. Mechthild had been defending Ludwig’s rights these last seven years and Rudolf assumed that it was her who was behind the royal demand to let the little brother get his share of the inheritance.

And for that Rudolf really hated her. He had her and her key advisor, Konrad Oettlinger arrested and brought to Munich. She was accused of interfering in the running of the duchy and was ordered to hand back her morning gift, the lands she had received upon her marriage from her husband. She refused. Rudolf then had her advisor Konrad Oettlinger executed. Mechthild still refused. Rudolf went one further and accused her mother of having had a sexual relationship with Oettlinger. It all turned into a rather unpleasant scandal.

Under this enormous pressure Mechthild agreed to hand over her lands and rights to Rudolf and live out her life on a small pension somewhere in the remote countryside. But – as a frail woman – she would need to get this agreement confirmed by her brother, king Albrecht before she could sign it. Rudolf let her go and once she was safely at her brother’s court, Albrecht turned on Rudolf, declared the agreement null and void, returned everything to Mechthild and gave the scheming Count Palatinate a right old rollicking.

After all we know about Rudolf now, this kind of treatment was neither going to discourage him from pursuing further schemes nor was it going to improve his relationship with the Habsburgs. But things trundled along reasonably well. The two brothers ran the territory jointly though Rudolf probably had more control of the levers of power having been in charge for a decade already.

Things took a dramatic turn when as we know king Albrecht von Habsburg was murdered in 1308. At the election of Henry VII the two brothers had initially harboured a hope it may now finally be their turn, but that vanished rapidly. They did fall in line with everyone else and it was actually Rudolf who declared Henry VII emperor elect.

After this election Rudolf became a strong supporter of the Luxembourgs whilst Ludwig took a more neutral stance. But at the same time he decided that this co-ruler thing did not work any more. He proposed to Rudolf that they should split the Duchy of Upper Bavaria between each other.

The way they did that was quite fascinating. The brothers summoned their friends and relatives, including duke Otto of Lower Bavaria, Frederick the Handsome duke of Austria, Duke Henry of Carinthia, four bishops and brace of Bavarian counts. This commission was to split the duchy into two equal parts and then the two brothers would draw lots who would get which bit.

That whole thing was completely absurd. Let’s start with the fact that Frederick the handsome and the duke of Lower Bavaria were in the middle of a hot war with each other whilst at the same time they worked happily together on this commission. Henry of Carinthia had been expelled as king of Bohemia by his Habsburg cousins and Rudolf supported the Luxembourgs in their scheme to remove him again from Prague, still Henry of Carinthia was on the commission. Suffice to say that the inhabitants of these lands, the city councils and parishes had no say whatsoever in this decision that may cut them off from their neighbours, their trade routes and their longstanding allies. Still these kinds of processes weren’t at all unusual in that period.

The only way to understand what is going on is to look at the alternative. And that alternative was to settle the conflict by feud. And a feud would have a much more painful impact on the local population than a decision by a panel of local magnates who may even have a vested interest in preserving the settlement. And as for the fact that some members of the panel were actually at war with each other, it helps to regard these feuds not as “wars” but as legal disputes. Hence Frederick the Handsome could be in a legal disagreement with the Duke of Lower Bavaria, but that was not a personal vendetta, just a kind of a commercial dispute. And hence these two men could still cooperate with each other on issues like the division of Upper Bavaria. “Nothing personal, just Business”, though the protagonists did quite often harm and sometimes even kill each other in these feuds, but then, so do Mafia dons.

And as you would expect the separation of the duchy into two parts did not lead to a rapprochement between the brothers. The ink was barely dry on the agreement and the two of them were already at odds about the interpretation of this or that. So they gathered their followers and burned each other’s lands in an attempt to force the respective other side to accept their viewpoint.

What brought this feud to an end was the departure of Henry VII to Rome and his son John’s departure for Bohemia. Rudolf as a supporter of Henry VII first joined John and then caught up with the emperor in Pisa. I think last episode I called Rudolf Robert by mistake. So, Rudolph, count palatinate on the rhine and duke of one half of upper Bavaria spent the next 2 years with Henry VII in Italy, gained much praise for his street fighting skills in Rome and cut a fine figure at the farce of a siege of Florence.

Rudolf’s passion for supporting the emperor did however wane a bit when he asked for some sort of compensation for all his efforts. Henry VII, completely broke by this time said, no can do, to which Rudolph responded, nor can I, and returned home.

When Rudolf returned to Munich, he found the landscape quite profoundly changed. His little brother had used his time wisely. For one, he got married. And then he had gotten closer to his cousin and neighbour, duke Otto of Lower Bavaria. Otto and Ludwig had been joint guardians of Otto’s nephews, another set of dukes of lower Bavaria.

Maybe a quick word about this inflation in ducal titles. Since the ducal title no longer referred to an actual office, if a duke would split his lands between his sons, each of these sons would receive the title of duke. Occasionally the ducal title would even pass to all the sons even if they held no land in their own right, And in Bavaria that had meant that by 1312 there were a total of five dukes of Bavaria, 2 dukes of upper Bavaria, Ludwig and Rudolf, and three dukes of Lower Bavaria whose names you really do not need to hear. The same happened in Saxony and Brunswick plus the regular elevation of counts to dukes and you can easily have 100s, some say even a 1000 ducal titles at the same time in the empire. That is a very different situation to England, where there is always only one son who inherits the title, so that there were usually only about a dozen dukes and sometimes just 2 or 3.

Now back to Ludwig and his cousin Otto one of the three dukes of Lower Bavaria. Said Otto really liked Ludwig and made him the guardian of his son should he suddenly and unexpectedly pass away, which he then duly did.

Ludwig was now the guardian of all three dukes of Lower Bavaria, which made him the de facto ruler down there. That, together with his own half of the duchy of Upper Bavaria made him now a lot richer and more powerful than his hated brother Rudolf.

And guess what, Rudolf did not like this one bit and came up with another one of his brilliant schemes. He noticed that there were many in Lower Bavaria who hated the Habsburgs and therefore disliked Ludwig who had been a great friend of the Habsburgs. These Lower Bavarians were easy prey for even the rather modest charms of Rudolf. The growing unrest in Lower Bavaria put Ludwig into an uncomfortable situation.

If he remained an ally of the Habsburg he may lose control of the duchy, and worse, would lose it to his nasty brother Rudolf. The alternative was to break with the Habsburgs, tie the lower Bavarians to him. Since the Habsburgs may retaliate, this option would require a reconciliation with his brother as well.

Surprisingly, Ludwig chose option 2. He kissed and made up with his brother and retained control of Lower Bavaria. He even got a really good deal. The division of Upper Bavaria was reversed, a common administration was established and Rudolf whose main heir had died gave everything over to Ludwig, except for his rank as Elector.

Everything was fine now, right. No, it wasn’t. The Habsburgs had interests in Lower Bavaria for a long time and Ludwig’s U-turn did not go down well with them. They gladhanded the nobility of Lower Bavaria and even got to the mothers of the Ludwig’s wards. These ladies now offered the guardianship over the young dukes and hence control of lower Bavaria to the Habsburgs.

Frederick the Handsome and his cousin Ludwig who had grown up together met on the castle of Landau to resolve the conflict. But as so often in the Middle Ages, one, or both, lost their temper and the negotiations ended in a shouting match. In good old Wittelsbach fashion Ludwig was about to go after Frederick the Handsome with word in hand. The Habsburg and his retinue retreated before serious harm could be done putting an end to negotiations. As soon as he was out of arrowshot, Frederick accepted the guardianship of the Lower Bavarian dukes and war was on between the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs, two of the three most powerful families in the empire.

On the Habsburg side, Frederick the Handsome was the eldest brother but by no means the most competent or impressive. His younger brother Leopold was the brains and the brawns behind the enterprise. And there you can also see the big difference between the Habsburgs and many of the other great German houses. The Habsburgs stuck together, at least most of the time. Leopold was certainly aware that he was the smarter one, but he remained loyal to his brother in the interest of the Habsburg family. No divisions of lands or wars between the two, as we have seen amongst the Wittelsbachs.

And because they did not fight with each other, the Habsburgs had a lot more resources than the Wittelsbach brothers. And they started to bring them to bear. Frederick who ran Austria was assembling an army to lead into Upper Bavaria, whilst Leopold put together a second force that was to come up from the Habsburg possessions in Switzerland and Alsace.

The situation was extremely precarious for the two Wittelsbachs. Ludwig and Rudolf were skint. Rudolf had spent huge amounts of money on Henry VII’s wars in Italy and had received nothing in return. Ludwig was a bit of a profligate anyway, but had spent quite a bit bailing out the dissolute finances of Lower Bavaria.

Still, Ludwig gathered a meaningful force, in part from the cities in Bavaria who – as we will find out – were his greatest supporters, as well as amongst his nobility and other knights and princes who were opposed to the Habsburgs. But still Ludwig’s army was too small to take on a combined forces of Frederick the Handsome and Leopold. So the strategic imperative was to prevent the two enemy armies from joining.

The first column to arrive in Bavaria was the army of Frederick the Handsome which comprised a large number of nobles from lower Bavaria alongside the Austrian and Hungarian forces that had come up from Vienna.

The two armies met at Gammelsdorf, 60km north-east of Munich, near the city of Landshut. What happened next has become part of Bavarian mythology, in particular for the cities of Landshut, Moosbach, Straubing and Ingolstadt who had provided the majority of the infantry in this battle.

It is likely that Ludwig’s forces were much smaller than the Austrian contingent, at least those the Habsburg commanders could see. Some chroniclers tell us that there was fog in the morning which may have helped Ludwig to hide major reinforcements on the flanks of the battlefield.

As so often in these late medieval battles, the build-up to the fighting was an elaborate process governed by the laws of chivalry. Once the two armies were close enough to engage, it was customary for the party that felt superior to send envoys and ask whether the enemy would accept a battle. The opponent was perfectly entitled to decline and then walk off the battlefield, and would often do if they felt their forces were too small or their position unfavourable. If both sides accepted the engagement, either side would be given time to say mass, make their peace with god, put on their armour and line up for battle, which could take several hours. By the 14^th century armour had already become very elaborate, though the classic plate armour you see in castles had not been widely used by the beginning of the 14^th century.

Once both sides were ready and good to go, they lined up across from each other and then rode at full tilt at each other, hoping to break the enemy line. Foot soldiers, Hungarians and Cumans on the Habsburg side and city militia on Ludwigs end were usually only employed at the start of the fighting.

However, some historians have argued that it was here at Gammelsdorf that common soldiers had for the first time a major impact on fully armoured riders using precursors of the halberds.

Whether that is true is hard to ascertain given the paucity of sources, though in Landshut everyone makes a big deal out of it. What is very much clear though is that Ludwig did win the engagement either because of the Halberds or because of the reinforcements that attacked the flanks or both. Archaelogical evidence suggests that it wasn’t a particularly bloody battle and chroniclers mainly talk about a large number of prisoners.

Still the defeat of the mighty Habsburgs by this young and underpowered duke of Bavaria created big waves across the empire. Ludwig’s name was suddenly on everyone’s lips as another case of David versus Goliath.

What impressed them even more was the aftermath. Ludwig met up with his childhood friend Frederick the Handsome and they quickly reestablished their old rapport. In a bout of generosity, Ludwig released all his prisoners without a ransom, an almost unheard of act, in particular for a massively cash strapped duke.

But still, if, as many historians believe today, this had been a significant engagement but not a major battle, Gammelsdorf would have been replaced in the news cycle by other battles within a few months or years.

The reason it was not forgotten had to do with Henry VII having died in Italy just a few months earlier and subsequently the usual painfully protracted election process was now under way.

At the outset it looked like a two-horse race. Who was it to be, Frederick the Handsome, the head of the House of Habsburg or John, the son of the recently deceased emperor Henry VII and the king of Bohemia? Will the electors allow a son to immediately follow his father for the first time in more than a century or will they let the ambitious and acquisitive Habsburgs have a third bite at the cherry?

Let’s take a look at the electors. It all seems pretty promising for John of Bohemia. He has three votes pretty much in the bag, his uncle Balduin, the archbishop of Trier and brother of the unfortunate Henry VII. Then the archbishop of Mainz, Peter von Aspel was a close ally of the Luxemburgs and the man who had brought John onto the throne of Bohemia. And there is John who as King of Bohemia can vote for himself. That makes it three votes for Luxemburg, all they need is a fourth one.

On the Habsburg side, there was the archbishop of Cologne, not because of some sort of family ties, but because he had fallen out with his colleague in Mainz. That is it.

As for the remaining electors, one of whom was Rudolf of Wittelsbach, the question is not so much, which one is the least worst option, but what is the alternative, and maybe even more important, who pays the largest bribes.

And do not forget, there are two powers in the background that had so often had their hand in the elections of these last decades, the king of France and the pope. Who would they like to push? Will the king of France try his own candidate again?

To make things more complicated, there is also the question, who is the elector? Like in Bavaria some of the electoral titles have been split between different lines of the family and either could claim the right to vote. Others, like king John of Bohemia had only recently expelled the previous title holder who may came back on his old ticket.

This will be one of the most complex and convoluted elections in the History of the Holy Roman empire. But by now you know the runners and riders, Ludwig and Rudolf of Bavaria, Frederick the handsome and Leopold of Austria and John Of Bohemia and his uncle Balduin of Trier.

I hope you will join us again next week when we look at the horse trading and watch as two sets of electors elect two kings of the romans at two different ends of the city of Frankfurt. I Hope you will join us again.

Episode 148 – Imperial Swansong

by History of the Germans Podcast on 16th May 202426th February 2026

Henry VII’s Journey to rome

The year is 1312 and Henry VII is finally embarking on his journey to Rome that will bring about the first imperial coronation in almost a century and hence the formal end to the Interregnum, the time without emperors.

Becoming emperor is hard enough, but being emperor is even harder, as the first Luxemburger to ascend the throne of Charlemagne will find out. Hope for an end to the never ending civil wars in Italy lay buried under the rotting corpses before Brescia. Henry VII is no longer a unifying figure in Italy, just simply the leader of the Ghibelline faction. And as such he has to tackle the Guelphs led by the commune of Florence and king Robert of Naples. Doing that triggered a domino effect that not only left him dead but also reopened the ancient struggle between the pope and the emperor, now with a new “je ne sais quoi” mixed in. Sounds ominous – come along and find out..

History of the Germans

A narrative history of the German people from the Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. Episodes are 25-35 min long and drop on Thursday mornings.
“A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad”. Gregory of Tours (539-594)

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

The Interregnum and the early Habsburgs (#138 ff
– Rudolf von Habsburg (#139-141)
– Adolf von Nassau (#142)
– Albrecht von Habsburg (#143)
– Heinrich VII (#144-148)
– Ludwig the Bavarian (#149-153)
– Karl IV (#154-163)
The Reformation before the Reformation
– Wenceslaus the Lazy (#165)
– The Western Schism (#166/167)
– The Ottomans (#168)
– Sigismund (#169-#184
The Empire in the 15th Century
– Mainz & Hessen #186
– Printing #187-#188
– Universities #190
– Wittelsbachs #189, #196-#199
– Baden, Wuerrtemberg, Augsburg, Fugger (#191-195)
– Maps & Arms (#201-#202)
The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg
– Early habsburgs (#203-#207)
– Albrecht II (#208)
-Freidrich III (#209-

Here is the link to Dan and Spencer’s excellent podcast I mentioned: Podcast | Not So Quiet On The Western Front! (battleguide.co.uk)

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So far I have:

Ep. 148: Henry VII (1308-1313) – Imperial Swansong

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 148: Imperial Swansong – the consequences of Henry VII’s campaign in Italy, also Episode 11 of Season 8 The Holy Roman Empire from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

But before we start let me remind you that the history of the Germans podcast is advertising free, a privilege we enjoy thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too either by signing up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. And let me thank Martin B., Stephen Wild, Bree P., BrittaDK, Brian J. R. and Colleen D. who have already signed up.

But now back to the show

Last week we left Henry VII in Genoa, severely shaken by the death of his wife the Queen Margarete who had been his support and council throughout his career. Having lost her, his younger brother, the knightly Walram and two thirds of his army, his campaign is now in a sorry state.

His enemies, the alliance of Guelph cities in Tuscany and Romagna, led by Florence, and king Robert of Naples have blocked all possible land routes to Rome. And to Rome is where he needed to go, to be crowned emperor as pope Clement V had promised he would be.

Still, Genoa received him with all the honors of an emperor. Not only that, they found themselves so riven with conflict that they submitted themselves entirely to the emperor’s control. He was made podesta of the city for 20 years. Henry VII took his mandate of reconciling the warring families of Genoa, the Spinola and the Doria seriously. But however serious one takes these attempts, they are ultimately futile. The conflicts are so deeply entrenched and overlaid with commercial rivalry, they could and did go on for centuries.

Despite his attempts at reconciliation remaining fruitless, he demanded the now customary payment of 60,000 gold coins for the service. Initially the commune agreed, but they soon noticed that there was not much value for money here. Payments came in slowly.

Meanwhile in Lombardy, as one would have expected, the imperial position contracted sharply. Effectively only the della Scala in Verona and the Visconti of Milan stayed loyal to the imperial cause. Henry VII appointed Wernher von Homberg as his representative for Lombardy, gave him as many soldiers as he could spare and asked him to do the impossible and convince the Lombards by whichever means possible to come back into the fold. You may know Wernher von Homberg from the Codex Manesse where he is depicted in one of the most famous images, or you may know him for his role in Swiss history. But in 1312 he works for Henry VII, trying to rustle up some money from the Italian cities. But as it happens whatever funds he managed to extract, he needed to pay his own forces. So, not much money came down to Genoa.

The departure of the count of Homberg reduce the already much diminished imperial army. Those who stayed were far and few between. His brother, archbishop Balduin of Trier, two counts of Flanders, the third had already perished, the bishops of Liege and Geneva and Amadeus of Savoy were his remaining loyal supporters. Many men were still dying from the disease they had picked up during the siege of Brescia. Of the dozens of Lombard noblemen he had ordered to accompany him, only two were still with him, a minor member of the Visconti plus one more, in total adding just a few knights to his forces.

At the same rate as his supporters slipped out of the camp did the creditors filled his hall demanding payment. But money there was none. Moreover the Genoese also noticed that since the arrival of the emperor and his men, mortality had gone through the roof. Whatever that disease was that had bred before Brescia now infected the Genoese. Not only were they dying, they also lost trade as the the Guephs in Tuscany and southern Italy had declared an embargo.

By Christmas 1311, Henry VII had outstayed his welcome. Time to move on..

The only ally that could help him to get to Rome was Pisa. Pisa had been the staunchest supporter of the Hohenstaufen and had remained unwaveringly Ghibeline all the way through the Interregnum. To Pisa he would now head.

In the early 14^th century Pisa found itself in a difficult position. They had always been in close competition with the other maritime republic on Italy’s western shore, Genova. But as the city of Florence went from strength to strength, they now fought a war on two fronts. And it was a war the Pisans were not winning. In 1284 Genoa had inflicted a near fatal defeat on the Pisan fleet. The wars with Florence did not go any better though so far a major defeat had been avoided.

Pisa therefore put all its hopes into the emperor Henry VII who they firmly believed had come to reverse their fortunes and smash their enemies. Hence, they were happy to send galleys to Genova to pick the emperor up and bring him into the city of the already leaning tower.

Henry VII stayed in Pisa until April 1312. His fortunes are brightening up a little bit. His camp is filling up again, this time with the exiles and disaffected of Tuscany who have been thrown out of their cities, either as Ghibellines or as White Guelphs. Even some German nobles, notably Robert duke of Bavaria and Count Palatinate on the Rhine joined. Pisa, sensing that the final struggle was upon them prove willing to bear the taxes and costs of an imperial court in their city much more graciously than the Milanese and the Genovese had been.

This may have been good news for our Luxemburgian hero, news from Rome were however much less promising. Rome, and you must be tired of hearing this by now, but Rome like all the other Italian cities was split between two families, one claiming to be Guelphs and the other to be Ghibellines. The Ghibellines were the Colonna, you remember, Sciarra Colonna, the guy who allegedly slapped pope Boniface VIII. The Guelphs were the Orsini, the bears.

Both families still exist and the Colonna palace in Rome can be visited, something I would advise anyone travelling to the Holy city to do. A complete rabbit warren of room after room filled with art and ancient trinkets. And guess what, not a single reference to Sciarra Colonna or the events we are recounting now. The Colonna did regain their love for the papacy, put one of their own on the seat of St. Peter and forgot about their pope slapping ancestor…honi soit qui mal y pense.

But in 1312 the Colonna were very much in the imperial camp fighting the Orsini whenever an opportunity presented itself.

Initially this rivalry between the Colonna and Orsini would not have been a significant issue for Henry VII’s coronation. After all, Henry VII was travelling with papal blessing and had 3 cardinals in his retinue. So even the Orsini, as Guelphs loyal servants of pope Clement V should be opening the gates of the Holy city to the emperor elect.

But something had happened in the meantime. King Robert of Naples had sent an army under the command of his youngest son into Rome to occupy key strategic positions, including the traditional site of the coronation, St. Peters. Asked what he intended with the move, Robert’s ambassadors said they had only come to show their reverence for the king of the Romans and wanted to make sure everything was shipshape and Bristol Fashion for the great event.

Ha Hmmm….way back when Henry had still been in Genoa, Robert had sent a delegation to negotiate some sort of agreement, if not a marriage alliance with future emperor. But that discussion led nowhere. And as soon as the representatives of Naples had left, a delegation from Frederick, the King of Sicily had shown up in Henry’s camp.

Give us a break, do we not have enough names in this episode? Who is the king of Sicily now? Well, the kingdom of Sicily under the Normans and the Hohenstaufen contained both the island of Sicily and the Southern Italian mainland. But in 1282 Charles of Anjou, the ruthless conqueror of the kingdom and killer of young Konradin of Hohenstaufen lost the island of Sicily in a bloody uprising that came to be known as the Sicilian Vespers (episode 93 if you are interested). Ever since the old Norman kingdom of Sicily was now divided into the kingdom of the island of Sicily, ruled by members of the Spanish dynasty of the House of Aragon and descendants of emperor Frederick II, whilst the mainland became known as the kingdom of Naples even though its rulers also called themselves kings of Sicily. This kingdom of Naples was ruled by Charles’ descendants, the Anjou, cousins of the kings of France. You can imagine that relations between these two kings of Sicily were a touch frosty. So as soon as Frederick of the island of Sicily realized that Henry VII could get friendly with his rival in Naples, he sent him a table made from solid silver and declarations of eternal loyalty to the imperial cause.

A solid silver table is hard to hide and in particular not if Henry VII sold it immediately to pay his creditors. The news of the generous present reached Robert of Naples and his position hardened against Henry VII, hence there are now Neapolitan soldiers in Rome. At which point Henry sent one of his allies to take charge of the senate of Rome and his allies in the city.

Once Herny had reached Pisa and it became clear that the Ghibellines of Tuscany lent him their support, the positions toughened further. The alliance of Naples and the Guelph cities declared in early April that their main objective was now to prevent the coronation of Henry VII in Rome.

To achieve that objective an anti—imperial force began congregating in Rome. Florence sent 200 knights, king Roberts marshal brought a further 300 armored riders plus a 1000 infantry, Lucca sent 300 cavalry and another 1000 foot soldiers, Siena 200 horse and 600 on foot. By May 21^st the Guelph army had assembled in the Holy City and occupied the key strongholds, the Capitoline Hill, the Castel Sant Angelo, St. Peter and the Vatican. In turn the Colonna, the supporters of Henry VII fortified their positions around the Lateran Palace, the Colosseum, Santa Maria Maggiore and Santa Sabina.

Everything was now building up to a final showdown – the battle for the imperial crown was to be fought inside the city of Rome.

Meanwhile Henry VII had followed the coastline down from Pisa until he reached the territory of Siena. The Sienese had sent much of their forces down to Rome and the remaining soldiers inside the city was too disunited to dare an attack. Henry was able to pass through Tuscany with his modest force of just 400 men unopposed. He reached Viterbo on May 1^st, 1312 and shortly afterwards appeared before Rome. He entered the city by fighting his way across the famous Milvian bridge where Constantine fought the famous battle against Maxentius that led to his conversion to Christianity. This initial clash was of a much smaller scale and of much less theological significance.

Henry was now inside Rome and the population of the neighborhoods controlled by the Colonna received him enthusiastically. He took up residence in the Lateran palace and the next day convened a council of war. The imperial position on the left bank of the Tiber was strong and solid, but what he needed was access to Saint Peters on the other side of the River. St. Peter was the coronation church of the emperors and that was the church the cardinals insisted they needed to perform a valid coronation.

The only way to get there was by urban combat to first get to the Tiber bridge and then across the bridge, past Castel Sant Angelo, the former mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian and Rome’s most preeminent defensive structure and then uphill to the Vatican.

Over the next month the skirmishes between the imperial forces and the Guelphs turned the center of Rome into a slaughterhouse. The imperial forces had to break one fortified townhouse after the other. Some, like the Torre delle Milizie the largest medieval tower that stands above Trajan’s forum was taken by hijacking the brother of its defender, others, like the Capitoline Hill had to be broken into by force. Often the soldiers, unfamiliar with the warren of streets in Rome lost contact with the main force and were killed on the spot.

Finally the imperial forces had broken through and stood before the bridge that leads to the Castello di Sant Angelo. The bishop of Liege, Henry’s cousin and a great warrior attacked the bridge defenses and almost got through. What he failed to notice was that the enemy had gathered forces out of the way in the Campo dei Fiori who broke forth attacking his flank. Henry then brought more of his forces to bear to relieve his cousin, as did the Neapolitans and the Orsini. Soon a full on battle involving the entirety of two armies raged inside the densely populated city quarter around the bridge of Sant Angelo. Not a battle in the conventional sense, but a huge fight man against man, as Giorgio Vilani wrote, a combat without a plan or any kind of structure. Everyone hit out at the enemy at whichever spot fate had put him. This melee lasted for hours before Henry VII finally called for a retreat. The bishop of Liege was captured and whilst he was led away unarmed to the Guelph positions, one of the soldiers of the king of Naples who had lost his brother in the fighting plunged his sword into the bishop’s stomach. He was brought into the Castel St. Angelo where he died shortly afterwards.

Henry and his council concluded that despite their success in clearing the Guelphs from their side of the Tiber, taking the Castello di Sant Angelo and the Vatican was simply impossible. The enemy was strong and their defenses even stronger. And the emperor was at a huge strategic disadvantage. For the Guelphs to achieve their objective of preventing an imperial coronation, all they had to do was to block the way to St. Peter and they could do that from their near impregnable castle on the bridge, whilst Henry VII had to attack these fortresses in the open, a process even if it were achievable, incredibly costly in terms of men and material.

The only way to still effect a coronation was therefore to change the venue. If the cardinals were willing to crown the emperor elsewhere, for instance in the Lateran Basilica, a church the emperor Constantine had built for the bishops of Rome around the same as time St. Peters and almost equal in size, that would reduce the enemy’s advantage to nought. Henry’s legal team wrote a learned treatise arguing a coronation in the Lateran church was a viable option under both canon and imperial law. And they presented their proposal to the three cardinals.

The cardinals who had taken residence in the Torre delle Milizie did not concur. They insisted on St. Peter as the only suitable location for a coronation. All they offered was to write to the Orsini and the Neapolitans demanding, in the name of pope Clement V, that they cease hostilities and make St. Peters available for the coronation. Response to that came none. The cardinals then wrote to pope Clement V asking him to tell the Guelphs to please respond to the letter. Even assuming a letter from Clement V would have an effect, that letter would take weeks to get to Avignon and then weeks to come back. When Henry VII demanded what they should do in the meantime, and the answer was, no St. Peters no imperial crown.

Meanwhile the vicious street fighting continued all across Rome, very much to the annoyance of the population. How were they supposed to live a normal life when they risk getting stabbed every time they leave the house.

The people of Rome congregated in the square below the Capitol to ask exactly this question, and one of Henry’s loyal supporter, Niccolo de Buonsignori laid it out for them. The enemy positions are far too strong to be taken by force. The Guelphs, though allegedly loyal to the pope had refused to even answer the demands of the cardinals and therefore the demands of the Holy Father to let the coronation proceed. The cardinals were refusing to crown the emperor anywhere else but St. Peters. This now requires unusual measures, namely that everyone who had so far not declared for the emperor will be called to the eagle standards and those who refuse will experience the wrath of war.

This announcement did not result in either a huge influx of support for Henry or disaffection of the populace with the draconian measure. Instead, the anger of the people was directed against the cardinals. After Henry had made several further attempts at swaying the prelates’ mind, the populace had enough. They gathered under the tower of the Milizii and threatened to kill the cardinals should they continue to refuse the coronation. Afraid for their lives the cardinals relented.

On June 29^th, 1312 finally after 18 months of toiling in Italy did Henry the VII, King of the Romans and duly elected emperor clad in white robes and with long flowing hair proceed from the Aventine to St. John Lateran. During the solemn mass the cardinal bishop of Ostia placed first a white miter and then the imperial diadem on the kneeling king’s head. Before receiving both the orb and the scepter, Henry VII rose up, unsheathed his sword and swung it three times over his head before laying it down on the alter together with his shield as a sign of his commitment to defend the church.

Proceedings completed the now emperor Henry VII and his court sat down for a splendid dinner in the Lateran palace whilst the people of Rome were treated to free drink and food followed by lusty dancing.

But halfway through the festivities, the new emperor was reminded of the fragility of his situation. His enemies had taken the opportunity whilst the imperials were at church to capture the Aventine hill and from there shot arrows and stones at the Lateran palace, forcing everyone indoors.

Over the following days the imperial position in Rome became completely untenable. With the coronation achieved, the German vassals’ service had come to an end. And it was the end of June. Already did the heat and the accompanying diseases affected Henry’s forces. The Guelphs and Neapolitans kept receiving reinforcements whilst his army dwindled.

With many of his German followers leaving, Henry became more and more dependent on his Tuscan supporters, the Ghibelline cities and the exiles from the Guelph cities. His followers in Lombardy, the Visconti and the della Scala are engaged in what is increasingly a war of conquest against Padova, Brescia, Cremona etc. They may occasionally seek support from Wernher of Homberg, the imperial governor of Northern Italy, but they are basically doing their own thing.

Any pretense that he would be reconciling the divisions in Italy is now gone. So it is somewhat unclear what his plans are now. He has gained the imperial crown, the original reason for his journey. So he could take his remaining supporters and return home. And going home would make some sense. His son John has acquired the Bohemian crown but only just. A bit of parental/imperial support would therefore not have gone amiss.

But he did not go home. It may have been a combination of demands from his allies, the lure of the riches of Italy, and/or the sense that his rather underwhelming coronation had left him with an urge to take revenge. Who knows.

As he looked around, the enemy that had thwarted his plans and has been responsible for the stiff resistance in Italy were two, the Black Guelphs who ruled Florence and king Robert of Naples. And its they he wanted to go after now. As it happened, these were the same people his Italian allies were keenest to go after as well.

Going after Robert of Naples was politically difficult. Robert of Naples was a cousin of the French King Philip the Handsome who had initially been one of Henry’s supporters but has cooled considerably towards his former protégé. But more importantly, Robert of Naples was a vassal of pope Clement V and the Holy Father would get into a most unholy rage should Henry head down to Naples. So Florence it was.

Henry VII first retreated to Tivoli to maintain the pretense that he had not cowardly fled Rome as the Orsini, Florentines and Neapolitans were encroaching on his position. But he did not stay long. In August he headed into Tuscany, collecting followers in the fiercely Ghibelline city of Arezzo and on September 19^th began a siege of Florence.

As we said last week, in the Middle Ages, before canons could be used to break walls, an attack on a city could only be successful if the besieging army surprises the defenders and breaks the gates before defenses can be brought in position. And since Henry VII had moved much faster than anyone expected he could have been successful had he maintained more discipline in his ranks. But his largely unpaid soldiers ransacked the farms and villages along the way. The Florentines, seeing the smoke of the burning farmsteads realized that the enemy was on its way, closed the gates and armed themselves. Though a large part of their Army had been attacked and nearly overwhelmed on their way back from Rome they could still muster enough forces to man the gates. Over the subsequent days the Florentine army returned and the other Guelph cities sent reinforcements. In the end the defenders had an army of 4000 knights and several thousand infantry whilst Henry’s force outside the walls counted just 1,800 armored riders. This discrepancy in numbers and the brand new fortifications of Florence turned the siege into a farce. Henry’s army blocked just one gate of the city, whilst the others remained open and trade in and out of the city continued as if there was no war at all.

Whether it was the stress of the preceding months or the climate, Henry VII fell ill. This time he recovered and – realizing that his attack on Florence was futile – withdrew first to San Casciano, then to Poggibonsi. In Poggibonsi he was surrounded by enemies, in Florence and Siena and then two Neapolitan forces, one in San Gimignano and one in Colle di Val d’Elsa. Another blow was that one of the three counts of Flanders, who had been by the side of the emperor since the beginning and who had lost one of his brothers on the campaign had enough, took his remaining vassals and left for home. As the situation went from bad to dire, he abandoned Poggibonsi and his much diminished army fought their way back to Pisa.

In Pisa, loyal to the last did Henry VII get the chance to regroup and to weigh his options.

The attack on Florence had been a failure, but it was noticeable that though the forces inside Florence had been vastly superior, they never mounted a serious attack on the imperial camp. Nor did they rout him when he was stuck in Poggibonsi. The only conceivable reason for that was the inherent fragility of these city governments. Sure the Guelph leadership could gain a majority for a policy of sending Henry back home, but they would have found it difficult to justify defeating and even killing the emperor. That would have been a step too far for the pro-imperial factions that still existed, even in the staunchly Guelph Florence.

Equally, a policy to wipe out the Guelphs in the cities as he had attempted on occasion in Lombardy had failed for the same reasons. Removing the heads of the Guelphs still left a Guelph faction behind in the city that would rise up as soon as the imperial army had left.

So the way out of the stalemate was to finally go after the true dominant power in Italy, king Robert of Naples.

Up until now Henry had hesitated to go after king Robert because he did not want to jeopardize his relationship with pope Clement V. Clemen V had been crucial in him gaining the election as King of the Romans in defiance of king Philip IV of France and his invitation to be crowned in Rome had been a precondition for his journey. Now Clement V might have liked Henry on a personal level, but that had not been the reason he supported Henry VII. What Clement V wanted was to gain some independence from the French crown. Though he no longer resided on French territory but had moved to Avignon, technically outside France and a papal fief, the French army sat on the opposite shore of the Rhone, ready to seize the successor to St. Peter if the need arose.

His ultimate escape route from French control had been a return to Rome. That may explain why the cardinals kept insisting that Henry should take St. Peter. Not so much for some spiritual reasons, but because they wanted Rome to be safe for a papal return. When Henry VII’s attempt to gain control of Rome failed, Clement V had become a de facto prisoner in Avignon.

Clement had already made huge concessions to Philip IV when he allowed him to suppress the order of the templars and seize their property, which after all was church property. But he had still clung to the hope that Henry could gain him Rome and a return ticket. By December 1312 that ticket had expired.

At the same rate as Clement V fell under French control did Henry VII confidence in the pope diminish. He had asked Clement V to excommunicate king Robert for Naples for opposing the coronation, but Clement had refused, or more precisely had not dared to do that to the cousin of the French king.

Therefore when in December 1312, Henry was weighing his options, he no longer felt that he need to make concessions to the pope. Robert of Naples may a papal vassal and an attack on him would be an attack on the pope, but then the pope had been dragged into the enemy camp anyway. Plus, unless he unseated Robert of Naples, there was no chance to ever gain a sustainable position in Italy, and for whatever reason, that is what he wanted.

As a first step Henry VII in his role as emperor formally convicted king Robert of Naples of high treason and seized his imperial fiefs, the kingdom of Naples and the county of Provence. Henry also entered into an alliance with king Frederick of Sicily, the arch enemy of the Anjou and grandson of emperor Frederick II.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1313 he gathered a huge force. Pisa was pulling out all the stops, hiring mercenaries and providing their own men. Genoa sent a fleet. Even from Germany reinforcements arrived, drummed up by Herny’s brother Balduin, the archbishop of Trier who had also gone home. Meanwhile king Frederick of Sicily was putting together an invasion force that would attack the kingdom of Naples from the south.

Historians have been in two minds about the probability of success. The traditional view was that this was utter folly. The force though sizeable, was much smaller than the armies Robert could raise. Plus Naples had a wide network of allies and supporters across Italy that could tie up the imperial troops on their way south. Others argue that the Anjou were seen as hated foreign, aka French, occupiers and that for instance the city of Naples had invited Henry to come south and rid them of this troublesome king.

Whether or not he had a chance we will never know. Because Henry VII, on his way through Tuscany fell ill in the small town of Buonconvento eight miles from Siena, either another bout of the Brescia disease, a heart attack or simple total exhaustion put an end to all his plans.

Hearing about his demise the army dissolved. The king of Sicily abandoned his invasion of Calabria that had already captured Reggio and the Pisan knights brought the body of the first emperor in 60 years back to their city.

It is in Pisa that he still lies, in a magnificent funerary monument. This monument by the sculptor Tino de Camaino is another remarkable work of this period of transition from medieval to renaissance art. If you want to see it and you happen not to get to Pisa any time soon, you can go to see it at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Not the real thing of course, after all the British did not manage to steal everything. But of the stuff they could not steal, like say Trajan’s column, Michelangelo’s David or the Brunswick Lion, they created casts and those are kept in the Cast Court of the V&A which looks like the world’s attic. And there, in a corner behind Giovanni and Nicolo Pisano’s masterful pulpits can you find our friend Herny VII. Few people stop to look at him and even fewer know who he was and what he did.

And despite his ultimate failure, he did play a hugely important role in the European history. His journey to Italy became the catalyst for a whole host of events.

Following his demise, the Italian political landscape consolidated at breakneck speed. The distinction between Guelphs and Ghibellines disappeared. Instead most cities ceased to be republics but came under the explicit or implicit rule of just one family, with notable exceptions like Venice. And some of these rulers like the Visconti, the Della Scala, Este and Gonzaga consolidated the surrounding cities into territorial principalities that would later become duchies, preventing a unification of Italy until the 19^th century.

Whilst this process was almost inevitable given the levels of infighting and fragility in the Italian system, other outcomes were less predictable. One thing I have already mentioned. The papacy becoming a permanent vassal of the French crown.

And that fundamentally changed the relationship between what we call today Germany and France. Up until the late 13^th century France and the empire enjoyed mostly friendly neighborly relations and as you may remember France rarely featured in our narrative so far. The main conflict of the medieval emperors had with the papacy and the Italian cities. Once the popes moved to Avignon and had come under French control, that old conflict was inherited by the French kings. Whilst Italy fades from view for the emperors, the Franco-German relationship, often positive and even more often violent became one of the key axes of German history culminating in the two world wars and then the reconciliation after 1945.

Talking about the world wars, I have another podcast recommendation for you. There is a new World War I podcast out there called “Not so quiet on the Western front”. Yes, there are several of these, but even I, as someone with only tangential interest in military history, have been gripped by Dan and Spence’s tales. Trained military historians both, they know their stuff. Where the rubber hits the road is when they dive into the various technologies of war and the speed of innovation the war forced into being. So far, my favorite episode is the one about Zeppelins. They describe how in 1915 they were almost invincible and rained terror on British cities, before rapid improvements in technology turned them into exploding deathtraps for their crews. For those soldiers who travelled strapped onto the roof of the Zeppelin with their machine guns, there was literally zero chance of survival. Gripping stuff. Not so Quiet on the Western Front is available wherever you get the History of the Germans from. I also have put a link in the show notes.

Next week we will look at another one of these often overlooked emperors, Ludwig the Bavarian, sponsor to William of Ockham of razor’s fame and the background though never mentioned of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. I hope you will join us again.

Episode 147 – Brescia or Bust

by History of the Germans Podcast on 9th May 202426th February 2026

Henry VII’s Big Mistake

Henry VII had gained control of most of Northern Italy in less than three months. It will take him 9 months to lose it all again. How did he go from bringer of peace and justice and all out savior of Italy to brutal conqueror and godless tyrant? Let’s find out.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
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Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

Henry VII had gained control of most of Northern Italy in less than three months. It will take him 9 months to lose it all again. How did he go from bringer of peace and justice and all out saviour of Italy to brutal conqueror and godless tyrant? Let’s find out.

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Ep. 147: Henry VII (1308-1313) – Brescia or Bust

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 147 – Brescia or Bust – Henry VII’s big mistake, part of season 8 of the podcast.

But before we start let me tell you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. And let me thank Harrison HotG, Kenny T., Johnny T., Marco Y., Bill C. who have already signed up. And a special thanks to patron Klaus S. who made my day when he told me he had met a fellow listener at a party and had a full geek out about German medieval history. That is what it is all about! Thank you all.

https://generativeai.pub/knowledge-graph-extraction-visualization-with-local-llm-from-unstructured-text-a-history-example-94c63b366fed

Now back to the show

Last week we left Henry VII at his coronation as King of Italy in Milan. Within mere months he had tamed the fractious Italian peninsula, returned the exiles to their cities and had brought peace and justice. He and his beautiful and clever wife Margarete can now look forward to a triumphal journey to the eternal city where pope Clement V will be eagerly waiting to crown the “Hectorian shepherd who holds the rod of temporal correction” as the always enthusiastic Dante called him.

All that happened and they lived happily ever after – the end.

Nah, I am afraid there will now be 30 minutes of betrayal, gratuitous violence, disease and impossible political conundrums before the “shining roman prince” has become the “mugger who brings ruin to the Italian communes”.

Inauspicious omens had already appeared when the desperate search for the venerable crown of the Lombards turned up empty handed leaving the future emperor wearing a hastily fabricated replacement.

But doom builds up slowly – and so the day after the great coronation feast all the leaders of the Lombards gathered in the presence of their king, praising him. At which point Henry’s right hand man and now imperial vicar of Milan, Niccolo de Buonsignori brings up the topic of a suitable present to be given in honor of the new king. Everyone present knew that what he meant by present wasn’t some jewel encrusted ceremonial sword or robe made from silk or cloth of gold. No, this was one of those cash only presents that involved only a modicum of voluntary giving. Think dark suit, husky voice and dead fish in the post.

The Milanese got the hint and after a brief exchange of views they designated Guglielmo Pusterla to determine the size of a the present. And Guglielmo sets the sum at 50,000 gold florin, a generous offer, but not overly so. Seeking even more favor with the emperor, Matteo Visconti then jumps up and demands a further 10,000 for the empress. All very noble and chivalric. Guido della Torre is not best pleased about the whole process and comments cynically, why not 100,000 Gold florin then? That was clearly a cynical aside, not a serious proposal. Still the imperial notary recorded that the city of Milan was offering a present of 100,000 Gold florin as a present to the emperor.

A gold florin contained 3.5grams of gold, which at today, 7^th of Mai 2024 prices equates to $260, i.e., we are talking about $26 million dollars in today’s money. This was more than the King of Bohemia, the richest of the Imperial princes collected in a year from his lands, which as we know contained some of the most abundant silver and gold mines in Europe. It was also 10 times what the imperial lands in Germany generated for the crown.

In other words, it was a colossal sum, but still not enough. Similar demands were sent to the other Northern Italian cities that had submitted to the emperor. Padova for instance was asked to make a one-time contribution of 60,000 gold coins and an annual tax of 15,000 gold coins plus quarterly 5,000 gold coins to pay for the army of the imperial vicar.

War was and still is the most expensive of human endeavors. And by the 14^th century warfare had become a lot more costly than during the times of the Hihenstaufen. Vassals fighting under feudal obligations had become a smaller and smaller part of the armies. Mercenaries were now the norm, in particular in Italy where the fighting aristocracy was in the decline and the merchants, bankers and artisans had other things to do than spending their time banging swords on the enemy helmets.

Where was this money supposed to come from? 100,000 Gold Florins was far too much for a simple whip-round amongst the great Milanese families. This kind of expenditure required the city council to raise taxes. At that stage, taxation inside the cities was introduced on an ad hoc basis to fund either war or major public works. One of the reasons Henry VII was so enthusiastically received in Italy was his promise to put an end to the endless wars between the various cities. And end of war meant first and foremost no more war taxes to fund these conflicts.

So one can imagine how disappointed the population was when they heard that the longed for reign of peace and justice would kick off with a huge special tax funding not the defense of the city, but an imperial campaign to go god knows where. All across Northern Italy did “one hear people cursing the emperor on the market square, in the churches and in the streets. As the chronicler Albertus Mussatus wrote.

Henry VII tried to calm things down by lowering the total sum owed to 50,000 gold florin. But then he made things worse again when he demanded that 50 of the most senior members of the city elites should accompany him to his imperial coronation in Rome, including Guido della Torre and Matteo Visconto. Now it would be rude to call the imperial hospitality hostage taking, but then the citizens of Milan were saying much ruder things about the policies of king Henry VII.

Rumors of the imperial luster dulling quickly reached the ears of Guido della Torre, the now ex-signore of Milan. But there was nothing to do about it as long as his sworn enemies the dreaded Visconti supported the imperial camp. It was with mixed feelings when he received an invitation for a secret meeting with the Visconti in a monastery outside town. Given the quite justified fear that he may end up dead on the church floor, Guido della Torre sent his son to meet up with the Visconti who were represented by Matteo’s son Galeazzo. Nobody knows what happened at this meeting. According to Vilani, Galeazzo complained to the della Torre that they had enough of the harsh imperial rule and that they would much rather live under the regime of the della Torre. Hence the two families should bury the hatchet, agree a marriage alliance and throw the emperor and his rowdy soldiers out of Milan. That went down like honey with the della Torre and they began planning for a great uprising.

The date was set for the 12^th of February, 1311. The della Torre had been gathering their supporters for several days and as morning broke saddled their horses and put on their armor. Meanwhile the imperial forces, aware that something was going on, had taken to patrolling the streets day and night. One of these patrols noted a gathering of 30 armed men outside the house of the Della Torre. The della Torre instantly set upon the patrol even though they had not finished their preparations. The leader of the patrol, duke Leopold of Austria and his men escaped but were able to alert the rest of the imperial forces. It was quickly established that the epicenter of the uprising was in the della Torre quarter. That is where the forces then attacked and they fairly rapidly overwhelmed the della Torre. The Visconti were nowhere to be seen. Matteo Visconti had gone to see the emperor as soon as the disturbance had begun and offered his help to put down the uprising. His son Galeazzo had finally left his house with some of his retinue to see where the wind was blowing. Upon realization that the della Torre had lost, he and his men participated in hunting down the remaining Guelphs. The della Torres, Guido and his two sons fled from Milan.

This was a failed uprising that could have been dealt with fairly easily. Declare the della Torre a disgruntled bad apple amongst the Guelph and continue with the general plan of appearing as a just and impartial ruler, prince of peace etc. But no. The imperial army was let loose and began a three day long sack of Milan’s Guelphs. They raided and then burned down the houses of prominent Guelph families, including the houses of the della Torre. All the cash they could find was either stolen or contributed to the imperial war chest. Only once the fury of the soldiers had burned out did Henry VII order an end to the violence.

The Visconti’s role in all that was doubtful to say the least, but Henry VII who had initially exiled them called them back shortly after the massacre and made them imperial vicars of Milan. It is from this point forward that the Visconti ruled Milan, eventually rising to dukes of Milan.

But for Henry VII this uprising had a much less beneficial outcome. His public relations image had been severely damaged. The della Torre who had escaped to Cremona reported their ordeal to the broadly Guelph cities of Lombardy. They accused Henry VII. He wasn’t the bringer of peace and justice as he claimed. All that was just a smokescreen hiding a Ghibelline takeover intended to bring about imperial tyranny.

As more and more Guelph refugees arrived from Milan and tales of the Teutonic Fury made the rounds, Crema, Cremona, Lodi, Brecia and Bergamo came round to the della Torre view. They ejected first the Ghibellines who had only recently returned under the imperial reconciliation policy and then also sent the imperial vicars packing.

As news of the breakaway of the Lombard cities spread across Italy, imperial power crumbled. Padova which had just submitted to the emperor now refused his demands for cash. In several of the cities of the Romagna the Ghibellines and the vicars were ousted.

Henry VII needed to do something about that and quickly. He sent out two emissaries. One was Antonio di Fissiraga previously the ruler of Lodi, Crema and Cremona who was supposed to be good cop and promise cities who returned to the imperial fold forgiveness, whilst Amadeus of Savoy was the bad cop, sent out with an army to devastate the lands around the cities.

This policy of harassment and promised mercy did work. Lodi and Crema quickly bowed down and were forgiven. Cremona, the largest of these three hesitated a bit, but when Henry VII approached in person, they threw out their hardcore Guelph leadership and replaced him with moderate Guelphs and Ghibellines. This new city council now came out to submit to the king and accept whatever punishment he would find appropriate.

What happened next would fall into the category of: “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder”.

Henry VII had the burghers of Cremona who had thrown out the rebels and just submitted to the emperor, thrown in jail. Then he entered Cremona and ordered all fortifications as well as all the towers in the city torn down. The city was fined 100,000 Gold florin. All of Cremona’s ancient rights and privileges were rescinded and their Contado, the land surrounding the city was given away to others.

The harsh treatment of Cremona showed the Italians another side of this prince of peace. Could the brutality in Milan be attributed to his lieutenants or be described as a not uncommon loss of control over the soldiers in the army, the suppression of the commune of Cremona was unquestionably an act of the emperor elect himself.

Why he did that is as so often not clear. One reason may have been that he felt that he needed to assert his authority as ruler of the empire. And since he had already brought Crema and Lodi back under control, he felt he now had the leeway to make Cremona an example of what happens to defectors.

Another theory is that Henry VII himself realized that his policy of peace and reconciliation was ultimately flawed. Italian politics were too convoluted and the leading families too focused on the grand prize to actually settle into a co-operative system of government. Therefore he might have reverted to the previous Hohenstaufen policy of leading the Ghibellines in their fight to wipe out the Guelphs.

Whether or not he had changed his overall policy, his heavy handed approach worked, at least initially. Several of the cities that had just broken away returned to the imperial fold. Those that still hesitated like Padova were shown the error of their ways. To subdue Padova, Henry VII handed Vicenza, which at that point was a commune dependent on Padova to CanGrande della Scala, the signore of Verona. Padova immediately changed tack and sent an embassy to Henry, submitting to his mercy and offering to pay vast amounts of money if Vicenza was to be returned to them.

Whilst most cities in Lombardy relented, there was one, Brescia, where the situation was more difficult. Originally a Ghibelline city, the latest incarnation of that party had made themselves unbearable to the populace. Therefore Henry VII had put Tebaldo Brusato, a Guelph in charge of Brescia. The Ghibellines revolted against Tebaldo, failed to overthrow him and their leaders were imprisoned. And once the Milan uprising had begun, Brescia had joined the other Lombard cities in their defection from the imperial cause.

Henry VII now demanded the city returns under his absolute control and that these Ghibelline prisoners are released. As a gesture of goodwill Tebaldo had the prisoners smuggled out of town. But surrender to the imperial mercy wasn’t something the citizens of Brescia were prepared to accept. They had heard what had happened to the Cremonese and they were not keen to be subjected to a similar treatment.

They did offer however to come back under imperial control if the emperor would promise that the Ghibelline Maggi family would never be allowed back in the city and presumably a couple of the things about ancient rights and privileges, city walls, fines and the like.

We are now reaching the crucial juncture in Henry VII’s journey to Rome.

At this point Henry has a very sizeable army made up of troops from Germany and the western, French speaking parts of the empire as well as Lombard supporters from Milan and Verona as well as mercenary troops paid for with all the fines and presents he had received from the various cities. After his initial success many German nobles had come down in the hope of seizing some of the riches of Italy that seem to be so easily obtainable.

Pope Clement V had sent him three cardinals authorized to perform the coronation at any time of his choosing should the pope himself not be around to do it himself. If you remember, this imperial coronation was the whole point of the undertaking in the first place.

On the road to Rome lay Florence, the center of Guelph resistance to his rule. The most powerful of the Tuscan cities had opposed Henry right from the beginning of the campaign. Florence had formed an alliance with Bologna and then with king Robert of Naples to block the imperial army’s progress.

That was a bold move on their part. We know from Giorgio Vilani that at this time the city of Florence had no viable defenses. The city had grown so fast, the original walls were now half way inside the city. A complete new ring of walls and towers needed to be erected should an imperial attack be repelled. Ever since the autumn of 1310 the citizens of Florence had therefore been working day and night digging trenches and building walls and towers around their city. By the time Henry VII had subjugated Cremona and was considering to go after Brescia the work has not yet been finished. There were gaps in the fortifications that his army could break through with comparative ease.

Moreover, Italian politics were so fragile that the Florentines could not be certain that their Tuscan allies, Lucca, Siena, Pistoia, Volterra and the cities of the Romagna would really stand with them should the imperial force appear. There were still Ghibelline factions within each of these cities and even some of the Guelphs may prefer peace with the empire should Florence look as if it was to fall.

Henry VII must choose. Either he could accept Brescia’s conditions of surrender, play the magnanimous emperor and then turn south to face his real opponents. Or he could push on to Brescia, break their resistance and make clear to the Italians that his peace and reconciliation came at the cost of total submission.

Henry VII chose absolute power and therefore he chose Brescia. And that was more than a mistake, it was the compounding of a mistake. As the Florentine Giovanni Vilani reported with huge relief: quote “And indeed, if he had refrained from besieging Brescia at that time and had turned against Tuscany, he would have conquered Bologna, Florence, Lucca, and Siena, and then Rome and the kingdom of Apulia and all the lands hostile with absolute ease, for nowhere was anyone armed and prepared, and the attitude of the people was wavering, for the emperor had the reputation of being a just and gentle ruler. But it pleased God that he should move before the city of Brescia, and the struggle against it, as we shall see, caused him a great loss of men and power by means of great pestilences and deadly diseases. unquote.

Brescia it was and as the great army of the king of the Romans moved towards the city, first signs of what awaited them could be seen all around. Unlike Cremona, Brescia had used the last months to prepare for a siege. Not only had the walls been strengthened, but the defenders had brought in the harvest early to replenish the stores in the city. What could not be harvested had been burned. Even the vines, which take years before their produce is truly delicious had been uprooted. All the surrounding area had been turned into an empty wasteland, unable to feed the besieging army.

Sieges in that period were usually unsuccessful, unless the first attack breaks through. If that initial assault is repelled, as it happened in May 1311, the only way to force a surrender was by starving the defenders out. And as we have just heard, the citizens of Brescia had deployed all possible measures, humane and otherwise to ensure they cannot be starved out.

For months did the imperial army lay before Brescia, waiting for the defenders to fall victim to hunger. But for months little evidence of an imminent fall appeared. In fact most of the action came from the defenders staging raids into imperial positions. On one of these sorties, Tebaldo Brusato, the leader of Brescia captured an outlying tower and proudly raise the Guelph colors. But that turned out to be a massive miscalculation. The imperial forces rapidly shut down his escape route and then systematically slaughtered his smallish force. Tebaldo fought with his men to the very end, but just before he was about to receive the coup de grace one of the attackers recognized him.

Tebaldo was shackled and brought before Herny. Henry by now no longer the prince of peace but at best an avenging angel if not the brutal tyrant the Italians increasingly claimed he was, condemned his erstwhile friend and ally to a most painful death. He was sown into a cowhide and then pulled by wild donkeys through the imperial camp. On account of the cowhide, he was still alive after this ordeal. He was then attached by his limbs to four oxen who pulled him apart. Finally the executioner cut off his head and paraded it on top of a lance before the city walls.

If this horrific spectacle was intended to break the morale of the city, it did have the opposite effect. A few days after the execution of Tebaldo, one of the three cardinals who were to crown Henry VII, was dispatched into Brescia in order to convince the citizens to surrender on honorable terms. The cardinals did the necessary speeches and entreaties, urging the city to surrender and let the emperor go to his destiny in Rome as the Holy Father intended. The Podesta of Brescia, speaking for his people, refused, claiming “they would rather die than submit to a tyrant. Then he leads the prelates to the storerooms of Brescia that are full with all the produce collected. He then goes on to say that they have food for half a year and that once this has run out, they would eat the lower orders of animals, the rats and bats, and then they would devour the women and children and those unable to fight unless they can feast on the giant corpses of these Suedes and vandals and other Germans. All this we will do until Christ puts an end to this and judges this cruel and brutal king.”

Contrary to the Brescians’ hopes it wasn’t the king himself who became the first prominent imperial victim of this siege, but his brother Walram. A crossbow bolt penetrated his armor as he attacked the walls of the city.

Henry took the loss stoically. Others believed it was now time to end the siege. Brescia was clearly well defended and had the necessary food and determination to hold out. Meanwhile the time window for a coronation in Rome was slowly closing. Margarete, his wife and probably his best council too argued for a withdrawal.

But there was no way back. If he negotiated a deal with Brescia now, his position would be fatally undermined. All of Italy was staring at this siege of Brescia and if Brescia could withstand, all the allies of Florence would gain confidence and many Lombard cities would join the resistance. No, Brescia must fall, come what may.

And come it did. A late medieval siege is a messy affair at the best of times. But this one was a particularly messy one. The summer climate of Italy meant camp hygiene was paramount for the survival of the army, in particular an army of men unaccustomed to the diseases prevalent in that country. But Henry’s forces neglected these fairly basic requirements. Horses who had died in the fighting or from lack of food had been dumped not far from the main camp. As summer approached and then arrived the decomposing bodies became hosts for all kinds of pathogens. Which ones exactly is not clear, chroniclers only talk about a foul air that brough great pestilence.

Of the leaders of the imperial army died 71, of the knights and armed men, 7,700 and of the lower classes innumerable men as Mussatus tells us. The dead were piling up so fast, they could not be buried, let alone receive the proper Christian rituals. The corpses were first dropped outside the camp, but later dragged over into the moats underneath the city walls until these were filled to the top with decaying human flesh. Still fighting continued ferociously.

Many noblemen, happy to take on any human opponent without fear, capitulated before the invisible bringers of death and fled. But still died in their litters on their way home. Very few survived, amongst them duke Leopold of Austria who returned home in haste.

The disease did not only affect the imperial army, but also spread across the tightly packed city of Brescia. There too the cemeteries filled up quickly and bodies were buried in the streets, if at all.

All that horror was too much for the cardinals, and one of them cardinal Fieschi went into Brescia and convinced the citizens to surrender on the promise that they could keep their walls except for one small section and their city constitution, privileges etc. basically the same deal they had offered four months earlier. Whatever cardinal Fieschi then told Henry VII we do not know, but Henry VII accepted the surrender. A section of wall where some German prisoners had been hanged was broken down. The emperor and what remained of his once large army entered Brescia. The siege is over. Still Henry is full of vengeance for what had happened and he ordered his soldiers to take down the walls of the city, promise or not.

The siege of Brescia had cost Henry not only two thirds of the army he had brought from Germany and even more of his Italian supporters, but also precious time, time his enemies in Florence, Bologna and Naples have used to strengthen their defenses, to raise funds, gather armies and to ferment revolt in the cities so far loyal to the emperor. It is also time he had needed to get to Rome before either the city fell to his enemies or the pope changed his mind.

Within days of the fall of Brescia we find Henry VII in Cremona. There he summoned all the cities of the kingdom of Lombardy to send him four of their leaders, each named individually to follow him to Rome for his coronation. Some of them show up in Pavia where he had ordered them to go, but not all. Still on October 15^th, 1311, about a year after he first set foot on Italian soil, did he begin his actual journey to Rome. There was no way he could take the land route. The Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome leads via Lucca, Florence and Siena, all cities firmly in the Guelph camp and unwilling to let him and his army pass. And even smaller passes across the spine of Italy are blocked by Bolognese, the Florentines and the king of Naples.

The only way to go is now by ship from Genoa. So to Genoa he goes.

In Genoa he experiences the worst tragedy. His wife, Margarete, still beautiful at the advanced age of 37 succumbed to the disease that had spread before Brescia. Margarete had been his steady companion throughout his meteoric rise from minor count to king of the Romans and then ruler of Northern Italy. She had given him three children, but most importantly, she had been his most honest advisor and thanks to her charity and approachability a huge asset in his campaign for the hearts and minds of the Italians. Mussatus writes that quote “the king bore this loss with manly dignity and never shed a tear in public. But as improbable as it sounds, before this union there had never been a couple that was so serious in love with each other than these two.” end quote.

Margarete was buried in the church of the Franciscans in Genoa and Henry commissioned a splendid funerary monument by Giovanni Pisano. This was a fascinating and intense work of art, one of the most original and free European sculpture of the fourteenth century. There is nothing medieval about this. Henry Moore had called Giovanni Pisano the first modern sculptor. Sadly only parts of the work survive. She is depicted as angels carry her soul up to heaven, her face “enlightened by the hope of the divine”.

Now next week, and I am sorry that I have been so carried away by the events in Milan and in Brescia that there has to be another week of Henry VII, but there will be one. The sorry tale needs to come to its conclusion and we need to talk a little bit about the fallout, both for Italian and for German history. I hope you will join us again.

And just a final reminder that if you want to support the History of the Germans go to patreon.com/historyofthegermans or to historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 146 – The Return of the King

by History of the Germans Podcast on 2nd May 202426th February 2026

Henry VII Crosses the Alps

In the winter of 1310 the emperor elect Henry VII not yet 40 years of age and every inch a king appears in Italy. An Italy torn apart by incessant violence, between and within the cities. Allegedly it is a struggle between the pro-imperial Ghibellines and the pro-papal Guelphs, but 60 years after the last emperor had set foot on Italian soil and seven years after the pope has left for Avignon, these designations have become just names without meaning, monikers hiding the naked ambitions of the powerful families.

The poet Dante Aligheri projects the hopes of many desperate exiles on Henry when he prays that “we, who for so long have passed our nights in the desert, shall behold the gladness for which we have longed, for Titan shall arise pacific, and justice, which had languished without sunshine at the end of the winter’s solstice, shall grow green once more”.

A lot to get done for our Luxemburg count and his army of 5,000 men. Certainty of death, small chance of success, what are we waiting for?

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

A lot to get done for our Luxemburg count and his army of 5,000 men. Certainty of death, small chance of success, what are we waiting for?

Here is the link to Syrom‘s article:

As always:

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Ep. 146: Henry VII (1308-1313) – The Return of the Emperor to Rome

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 146 – The Return of the King – Henry VII’s journey to Rome

A lot to get done for our Luxemburg count and his army of 5,000 men. Certainty of death, small chance of success, what are we waiting for?

But before we start let me remind you that the History of the Germans Podcast is advertising free, thanks to the generosity of our patrons who have signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support.

And this week, as promised, I would like to highlight some of you who have been so kind to promote the show these last few weeks. And that list starts with syrom whose article on Medium about the intersection of history and AI has been hugely interesting and brought so far a staggering 68 new listeners. You can find a link in the show notes. I would also like to thank Zeta of 1, SomeDude, Bloke in North Dorset, Tom Broekel, Mark Greenwald, Gerco Wolfswinkel and Michael P. Borneman for their relentless support on Twitter/X and elsewhere. And on Facebook, the list is even longer so I may miss some people, but let me thank Kent Lindahl, Katherina Russell-Head, Michael Cuffaru, Eric Andersen, Piotr Kaczmarczyk, Simon Wilde and the incredibly generous Nina Bugge-Rigault. Thank you all so much!

Now, back to the show.

Last week we left Henry VII, still only King of the Romans, in Turin, home of his brother in law, Count Amadeus of Savoy. With him is an army of about 5,000 men recruited amongst his friends and family from the western side of the empire. There are his two brothers, Balduin, the young archbishop of Trier and the great chivalric knight Walram, now count of Luxemburg. Of the Prince Electors and other great imperial princes only Leopold, duke of Austria has come along.

A modest force, but by no means the smallest ever for a medieval emperor elect.

Two things were supposed to smooth his way down to Rome.

For one, pope Clement VII, the first pope to have left Rome for good and now residing in Poitiers under the watchful eye of the king of France, in an act of defiance, had promised Henry VII to personally crown him in Rome on February 2, 1312 .

And secondly, the citizens of Italy were tired of the perennial strife between and inside the cities, a struggle often described as the fight between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. News of the arrival of Herny VII in Italy were greeted with great enthusiasm by many. The great poet Dante, at that point a political exile from his hometown of Florence wrote: “Rejoice, therefore, O Italy, thou that art now an object of pity even to the Saracens, for soon shalt thou be the envy of the whole world, seeing that thy bridegroom , the comfort of the nations, and the glory of thy people, the most clement Henry, Elect of God and Augustus and Caesar, is hastening to the wedding. Dry thy tears, and wipe away the stains of thy weeping, most beauteous one ; for he is at hand who shall bring thee forth from the prison of the ungodly, and shall smite the workers of iniquity with the edge of the sword, and shall destroy them.”

Such enthusiasm amongst the oppressed combined with the papal blessing put Henry into a much more attractive position than many of his predecessors had enjoyed in the past; and it presented him with three possible options.

Option 1 would be to just ride hell for leather down to Rome get crowned and get home barely touching the sides. That was the easiest options. Even cities that weren’t excited about the presence of a new emperor on Italian soil would not risk an outright war to stop someone who would be come and gone in a year. That had worked well before, for instance under Henry II, Konrad II an Henry III.

But this option would also mean abandoning any attempt at rebuilding imperial authority in Italy.

If Henry wanted to exercise power in Italy as the great Hohenstaufen had done in the past, he could step up as head of the pro-imperial Ghibelline faction, defeat the Guelphs and establish an imperial administration in each of the cities. That is option 2 and was the way Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II had pursued their policies with to say it mildly, mixed success.

Option 3 was a new option. Henry could establish himself as the bringer of peace, as an impartial judge, neither Guelph nor Ghibelline, who reconciled the warring factions. Submitting to a just imperial ruler could work for both parties, at least in theory. The end of the incessant warfare would bring peace and prosperity to the merchants and artisans who were usually leaning on the Guelph side, whilst imperial projects in the Holy Land and eastern Europe could provide employment and excitement for the warlike Italian aristocracy who were usually supportive of Ghibelline positions.

No brownie points for guessing which option Henry VII preferred. Here is the great man himself, summarising his position; (quote)

“Has God, the supreme teacher of justice and equity, given a holier commandment than that which says: You shall love your neighbour as yourself? But is there any difference to be made between Christians?

Who is my neighbour? Is it the German, the Frenchman, the Vandal, the Swabian, the Lombard or the Tuscan? And who amongst you would like to answer: The Ghibelline? Don’t you dare!

What have I come for, what have I been sent for? That I, as a godless successor to take up the errors of all my predecessors and continue them? That I should reawaken the old divisions?

And Pope Clement, who occupies God’s throne on earth, should he have called forth our army and engraved his mark on lead so that I might subjugate the Guelphs to the Ghibellines or the Ghibellines to the Guelphs?

What has become of our justice and equality? Some have assumed names under the guise of the Empire, others under that of the Church, names which Lucifer the Fallen has given them and which can only generate hatred. I, then, who go forth as the messenger of Pope Clement and under his sign (which is why Christians look to me as to a second light of God), I am to appear here, to please some and betray others? Not so, as I declare to you loud and clear.” end quote.

What a fine speech by a such a fine man. Love thy neighbour, don’t repeat the errors of one’s predecessors and a promise not to betray those who put their faith in him. Very exciting new approach! Let’s see how that works out.

For that we need to dive a little deeper into the political situation in Italy. And if you think that the situation Germany is confusing, you ain’t seen nottin yet. I had a flick through the podcasts, books and history courses in search of a neat storyline that helps me cut through the events on the Italian peninsula between the death of Frederick II in 1250 and the arrival of Henry VII in 1310. What I found can be summarised in the words of the immortal Meryl Streep: “it’s complicated”.

We still have these city communes that had made life a misery for the Hohenstaufens.

But something has quite fundamentally changed. During the days of the Lombard League the cities were each dominated by an aristocratic oligarchy, the consuls or senators. Their structure was copied from the ancient Roman republic where most decisions about war and peace were discussed amongst the city leadership and then brought to the people for approval. These republics were incredibly warlike. If you remember episode 56 where we talked about the tiny city of Crema that resisted the huge army of Frederick Barbarossa for over a year. That is the one where Barbarossa had the prisoners from Crema tied to his siege engines to stop the defenders from shooting at the expensive equipment, but to no avail because the hostages encouraged their friends and family to rain stones and burning arrows on the attacking towers, even if that meant maiming and killing them.

During the 13^th century this fierce spirit waned away in line with a change in the social structure of the cities. The merchants and artisans had become richer than the land-owning city aristocracy. Trade had kept expanding throughout the 13^thand 14^th century in both scope and scale.

One legacy from the crusades was a dense network of trading posts across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea run by the maritime republics of Venice, Genua and Pisa that brought luxury goods from the East to Europe. Marco Polo had returned from his travels to China and Persia in 1295. Already in 1245 a Franciscan monk, Giovanni del Pian del Carmine had travelled to the Mongol Khan’s court as an ambassador of pope Innocent IV. The exchange with the East was not limited to knowledge and luxury goods. To feed the ever growing city states, they needed to import grain, and much of it came from what is today Ukraine, already then the bread basket of europe.

Passing goods through from the east to the west wasn’t the only source of wealth. Artisans in Italian cities produced various goods much in demand across Europe. Florentine red cloth was much en vogue as was Venetian glassware from Murano or Milanese armour.

Other than the Hanse, the Italian merchants formed larger and larger firms that set up their own offices abroad and they competed intensely with each other. They believed in a winner takes all model of capitalism, rather than the supportive network approach favoured in Northern Europe.

Production too was proto industrial in as much that for instance Florentine cloth makers would employ hundreds of workers in their workshops where production was split into multiple stages to increase productivity.

All these activities required a lot of capital. Banking began in the Italian cities well before the 12^th century as crop finance. Farmers would receive a loan against their future crop which allowed them to buy seeds and feed their family until harvest. Mostly run as private operations, in 1282 the Republic of Venice opened the first state bank that accepted deposits and issued crop loans. The crusades lead to material expansion and internationalisation of banking activity that also created many of the financial tools we still use today such as bills of exchange, forwards and futures. As trade expanded, so did banking activity. Most bankers were merchants at the same time. They would fund risky ventures such as transporting a large consignment of silk to Bruges by assembling a consortium of merchants who were sharing the risk. Alongside that they may issue a loan to the junior trader who would lead the expedition. This diversification of risk and provision of finance allowed Italian merchants to expand far faster than their counterparts in the rest of europe, except for those of Flanders.

As time went by these banking houses would find themselves lending to kings, popes, emperors and their cities. These loans were extremely risky as the king, pope, emperor or city council could not be made to pay once the loan was due, as the Bardi and Peruzzi of Florence will find out to their detriment. Hence most of these loans were heavily collateralised giving the bankers the right to collect taxes, to exploit mines or other sources of income, sometimes even castles or whole territories. Interest was very high, reflecting these risks, which meant, a lucky banker ended up being a very, very rich banker.

The usual estimate is that even an average Florentine banker in 1310 had more ready cash than our friend Henry VII. Which meant they had a lot, a lot more money than the aristocrats who were ruling their city. This difference in resources caused frictions, but the bigger issue was that the consuls did not run the city in the interest of the merchants and artisans.

A merchant and artisan may be a able to defend himself if need be with a sword, but that does not mean they wanted to fight wars for war’s sake. But War for war’s sake was very much the aristocratic raison d’etre. The other flashpoint was justice. A functioning system of courts that enforced contractual obligations was a key building block in any successful economy and hence a key concern for the burghers. The city aristocrats regarded justice as a source of income from fees and bribes.

Throughout the 13^th century burghers formed associations or guilds to represent their interests. And as the struggle between the aristocrats and the burghers grew fiercer the city constitutions changed. Many communes had already called people from outside as Podestas to police the city streets and issue justice since the late 12^th century. But now we also find many cities appointing a Capitano del Popolo who was to represent the interest of the people, aka the merchant and artisan classes. This role became ever more powerful as the merchants became ever more wealthy.

These two opposing groups did at some point adopt the names of Ghibellines and Guelphs. The aristocrats would usually become Ghibellines and the burghers tended to be Guelphs. The word Ghibelline refers to the castle of Waiblingen near Stuttgart which was the name of Agnes, the ancestor of the Hohenstaufen and the name they actually used when referring to their own family. So these were in principle the supporters of the emperor. The word Guelph is an Italianate form of the name Welf, the family of Henry the Lion and alleged antagonists of the Hohenstaufen. Though the name referred again to a German family, the Guelphs allegiance lay not with them, but with the pope. Bankers were particularly prone to be Guelph since the papal curia was in constant need of cash and in return appointed the Lombard and Tuscan bankers as tax collectors for the increasingly sophisticated set of church levies.

But like everything else in these convoluted times, this is not 100% the case in each city, but not a bad yardstick.

As we head into the 14^th century a couple of things are happening. Unsurprisingly as the merchants and bankers get richer and richer, they gain the upper hand over the aristocratic oligarchs. More and more cities become Guelph. Most visibly in Tuscany where the hitherto modest settlement of Florence starts to dominate the region. In 1289 Florence and its Guelph allies beat the Ghibelline resistance based in Arezzo comprehensively.

But Guelph or Ghibelline became increasingly hollow slogans. The internal struggles over political allegiances turned into a competition between two dominant factions, each picking one of these names. Or in Florence where the anti-Ghibelline sentiment was strongest the main factions became the White and the Black Guelphs. White and black Guelphs goes back to a fight within the city of Pistoia between the children of the city leader from his first marriage who were older and whose hair had already turned white and the second set of children from a second marriage who were still young and sported some luscious black hair. Seemingly by 1300 hair colour was as relevant a criteria for political affiliation as support for the imperial or papal cause.

These fights for supremacy between two factions, each headed by a clan chief were as disruptive as the previous fights between aristocrats and merchants. One minor improvement was that the party which temporarily gained the upper hand would only execute a small number of their rivals and then exile the other prominent members of the opposing faction. The reason for this leniency is pretty clear. Neither party had a distinctly different program to the other, hence cities were usually split fifty-fifty between the two factions. To be able to run the city the winning side still needed to be able to cooperate with the defeated faction and that meant they could not kill all their brothers, uncles cousins etc. The downside of this policy of casting out your opponents was that there was constantly a government in exile trying to ferment unrest inside the city and gathering support on the outside. This perennial fear of revolt forced the city rulers to spend vast amounts of money and effort to gain favours with the people. In Florence and Milan all the streets, not just the main square were paved, the courts were made impartial and staffed with professional judges trained at the great universities of Bologna and Pavia. And then there were the public works, the cathedrals and churches, the city halls and so on.

There we are. Every city in Italy experienced regular convulsions as one family was trying to overthrow the other, not to implement any particular policy, but solely to gain power. And that meant each city had a large band of exiles roaming the peninsula in search for an ally that would help them oust their opponents.

And these exiles now flocked to the court of Henry VII in their hundreds and thousands, all hoping he would bring them back into their home towns and restore them into their previous positions.

On November 11^th 1310 Henry VII arrived in Asti, the then most powerful city in Piedmont. Today the city is famous for truffles, wine and its Palio a bareback horse race around the triangular piazza Vittorio Alfieri. I only found out about this delightful combination just now and Asti went straight on to my bucket list.

But in the late Middle Ages Asti’s speciality wasn’t wine or truffles, but banking and civil war. The Solari family of bankers had recently taken control of the city and expelled their rivals, the Castelli. And guess who was in the entourage of Henry VII, the Castelli.

The Castelli were Ghibellines, as were the majority of exiles that had joined Henry VII in Turin. That wasn’t because Henry VII favoured the Ghibellines, but it was simply that the Ghibellines were losing almost everywhere and hence the chances of being exiled were a lot higher for a Ghibelline than it was for a Guelph.

Asti now became the prototype of Henry VII’s new policy of peace and reconciliation. Upon arrival he gathered the whole population of the city on the square in front of the cathedral where he received the oath of allegiance of the city council and in return confirmed the city’s ancient rights and privileges and even offered further benefices should they behave well.

But as so often with prototypes, version 1 did not work out so well. It is not clear what happened that evening, but next morning, according to the chronicler of Asti, Henry VII no longer thought this was enough. So he called the whole population back on to the market square. His right hand man, Niccolo de Buonsignori declared that the emperor was not satisfied with just the overlordship of the city. Then a cheese merchant stood up and shouted “I suggest o Lord, that you should receive the unconstrained power over the city and contado of Asti”. The imperial representative shouted back instantly, “Those of you who agree with the words of the cheesemonger shall remain standing, the rest shall sit”. That led to an instant tumult, everybody jumped up, shouting and screaming, some yes, yes, but the majority no, no. Meanwhile the imperial notary concluded quite accurately that, since hardly anyone had sat down, the motion was carried and Henry VII was now the absolute ruler of Asti and its Contado.

Happy with version 2 of his grand project of peace and reconciliation Henry appointed Niccolo de Buonsignori to be the new podesta, capitano del Popolo and just overall bossman of Asti. Niccolo then told the Castelli and Solari to kiss and make up and as punishment for their obstinacy ordered the Solari and other Guelphs to provide funds to replenish the imperial purse.

The imperial purse, smaller as an average Florentine banker’s safe, was rapidly depleting as more and more exiles raced to his banner.

Initially the Italian supporters were more or less impecunious exiles, but after Henry had taken control of Asti, a veritable snowball effect set in. The rulers of Verona, the della Scale, headed by Can Grande, which literally means Big Dog, sent an embassy extolling their long and loyal service to the empire going back to Barbarossa, but which weirdly did not include any tax payments owed under the peace of Constance of 1183. But who cares, he was a big dog and he brought some pretty big men on big horses. The Pisans, most fiercely Ghibelline since time immemorial and sworn enemy of the Guelphs in Florence sent 60,000 ducats and a few hundred knights, promising the same sum should the emperor honour them with a visit.

And then the appeal widened and several Guelph city lords appeared. The rulers of Vercelli, of Pavia and of Lodi came to submit to Henry VII. By doing so these men defied the rulers of Lombardy’s largest and most powerful city, Milan. As the chronicler Albertinus Mussatus speculated they may have done that to please the king or out of fear of their fellow citizens at home who had been enthusiastically celebrating the return of imperial splendour. And they were not the only ones. More and more Guelph leaders came to believe that joining the imperial cause was the best way to preserve their position. And with every powerful family that joined Henry VII’s army, this logic became more and more convincing.

The one who was not yet convinced was Guido della Torre, currently capitano del Popolo and all in big cheese in Milan. The della Torre were Guelphs and had swapped control of Milan with the Ghibelline Visconti family since 1259 roughly every 10 years, culminating in the execution of 53 Visconti supporters by Napoleone della Torre which was followed by the capture, torture and murder of said Napoleone by the archbishop of Milan, Ottone Visconti. In 1302 Matteo Visconti who had taken over from his uncle the archbishop and had been recognised as imperial vicar by Adolf von Nassau was ousted by Guido della Torre who could rely on support in the surrounding cities of Pavia, Lodi, Cremona, Piacenza, Novara, Brescia, Bergamo etc.

Milan was largest city in Northern Italy at the time, the city of Saint Ambrose, a great commercial cnetre and by now the overlord of most of the surrounding cities including Novara, Vercelli, Brescia as well as Monza and Pavia, the traditional coronation sites for a king of the Lombards.

When Henry VII saw the lords of Pavia, Vercelli and Lodi riding into his camp, he realised that the hold of Milan over its neighbouring cities was crumbling and he could now go for the big prize and take his beta-tested reconciliation policy to the capital of Lombardy.

Guido della Torre wanted none of this. No reconciliation, no peace and above all, no return of the hated Visconti into his city. Henry VII therefore opted for a display of strength. He took his now much enlarged force and paraded it below the walls of Milan. And very visible amongst his men were the lords of Vercelli, of Pavia and of Lodi, the cities whose rulers had brought the della Torre back into Milan 9 years earlier and who may now well be able to bring Matteo Visconti back.

Still, della Torre refused. He had begun discussions with Florence whose radical Black Guelph leadership was organising resistance against Henry VII. And there was also king Robert of Naples down south. Ever since they had wiped out the Hohenstaufen the kings of Naples had become the dominant power on the peninsula and the leaders of the Guelphs. Their tentacles reached well into Lombardy and Piedmont where Asti ad Alessandria had once sworn allegiance to the Anjou. King Robert was also papal vicar in Romagna and Tuscany and Florence had once made him their Podesta. And Robert was a cousin of King Philipp IV of France who was increasingly concerned about the shenanigans his former vassal was getting himself into down there in Italy.

But time was pressing. Henry’s army was now camped out in Vercelli, a day and half’s ride from Milan. And worse Guido’s nephew, the archbishop of Milan hated him, hated him a lot and for good reason. Guido had his father thrown in jail to rot for fear of competition. The archbishop and the Visconti were gathering support inside the city of Milan whilst the lords of Pavia, Vercelli and Lodi worked on the remaining loyal cities of Brescia, Cremona, Como etc.

The standoff lasted 30 days. Guido hoped for reinforcement to come from Tuscany and the other Lombard cities, whilst Henry hoped that Guido’s regime would simply collapse under the external and internal pressures.

Finally time ran out for Henry. He needed to make a move if not because he was running out of cash. He took his army from Vercelli west of Milan and marched it towards Pavia which is just south of the great city. Della Torre thought his lucky day had come and the dreaded imperial force would head south to Rome, never to be heard of again. But at the last minute, Henry turned his forces east and marched towards Milan. Della Torre knew that the citizens weren’t prepared to fight a long and painful siege and his enemies inside would find a way to open the gates to the imperial army. He caved and invited Henry VII into the city and accepted the king as his rightful lord.

The conquest of Milan turned the snowball into an avalanche. One city after another swore allegiance to Henry. Brescia, Cremona, Bergamo, Vicenza, Padua as well as the communes of the Emilia Romagna came to hand over the keys to their cities and to receive a new governor chosen by Henry VII. Only the Tuscan allies of Florence and Bologna, largest of the cities in the Romagna refused and instead fortified their walls. Alessandria down in Piedmont also failed to send a delegation as it was occupied by a garrison of king Robert of Naples who is now going from being mildly concerned about the count of Luxemburg playing emperor up in savoy to full on panic stations.

Meanwhile Henry VII went from strength to strength. His entrance into Milan turned into a triumph. Accompanied by Guido della Torre, Matteo Visconti and the archbishop, three men who hated each other from the bottoms of their hearts and whose rivalry had brought untold misery to the population of Milan were now riding side by side guiding the future emperor, the bringer of peace and prosperity into Italy’s foremost city.

To literally crown his success Henry VII planned the next act in this drama, emulating the great Charlemagne and many of his Ottonian, Salian and Hohenstaufen predecessors by putting the iron crown of the Lombards on his head.

He invited all the important families of Italy to come to the church of St. Ambrogio, the venerable house of St. Ambrose on January 6, the festival of Epiphany, 1311 to witness his coronation. Initially there was a bit of confusion since nearby Monza would have been more appropriate or Pavia on account of its early submission to imperial suzerainty. But Henry insisted on St. Ambrogio in Milan.

And so the great festivity took place before an enthusiastic crowd of princes, nobles and common people. Crowned with the iron crown of Lombardy the king and his wife rode out into the crowd on horses clad in scarlet and purple cloth, he carrying a sceptre of gold that end in the shape of a lily in his right hand.

He is every inch the king, tall, with reddish blond hair that reminds the crowds of the Merovingian and Lombard rulers of old. He wears his hair in the gallic style, short in the back as you can see with most UK teenagers today. His perfectly symmetric shoulders sit atop a strong upper body and well proportioned legs and feet. He speaks slowly and rarely, usually in French but he has some mastery of Latin as well.

His wife, albeit already 36 years of age has maintained much of the beauty she was famed for in her youth. She is blond and of pale complexion, beautiful cheekbones, the top of her nose a little reddish, the mouth small, and she seems to be perennially smiling. She gives good council, knows how to put her arguments across and is in no way haughty. Indeed some have complained that her friendliness towards the lower classes goes beyond of what was appropriate for a queen and future empress.

A near perfect royal couple that had subdued Italy in merely 3 months, not by war, but by the promise of peace and prosperity brought to you by the just, the good emperor, the new Marcus Aurelius, Constantine or even Augustus.

There was however a little kink in all this royal splendour. The crown that Henry VII carried so majestically on his graceful head was not the actual iron crown of the Lombards the one that contains a nail of the Holy cross in an iron ring on the inside. That crown was nowhere to be found. The della Torre had pawned it years ago to fund one of their endless wars against the Visconti.

So a Milanese goldsmith was made to create a gilded wreath overnight that could passably be called a crown. And like this crown, the empire that Henry VII had built was a rushed affair, an overnight success, a snowball that had turned into an avalanche. Now summer is approaching when snow turns to water, and the crown’s gilded surface flakes exposing the base metal underneath.

How that will go is what we will talk about next week. I hope you will join us again.

And just before I go, please remember that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons and you can become a patron too by signing up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support

Episode 145 – How to make Friends and Influence People

by History of the Germans Podcast on 18th April 202426th February 2026

The Luxemburgs become Kings of Bohemia

Henry, the new king of the Romans, just 30 years of age, tall and blond, every inch his forebearer the great Charlemagne had a one track mind. There was one thing he wanted and that was the imperial crown.

It is now 60 years since there last had been a crowned emperor. We had such an interregnum before, in the 10^th century between the death of emperor Berengar of Friuli, yes, me neither, and the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. This, even shorter gap, had resulted in the transfers of the imperial honour from the Carolingians to the rulers of the German Lands.

It was high time to go to Rome and be crowned emperor. Otherwise more people will ask as John of Salisbury had: Who appointed the Germans to be judges over the peoples of the earth? Who gave these brutish, unruly people the arbitrary authority to elect a ruler over the heads of the people?

But to get to Rome for a medieval imperial coronation requires more than just picking up a plane ticket. First our new Barbarossa needs to assert his position in the empire, gather followers for the journey and establish peace and justice. He needs to convince the pope to send an invitation and the king of France not to send an army to stop him. Most of all he needs to calm down the Empire sufficiently so that it does not fall into anarchy whilst he is away.

And whilst he is busy making peace between the warring factions, convincing them that all he cares about is being semper Augustus, always augmenting the empire and reassuring everyone that he is not just enriching his family as his predecessors had done, that is when he walks away with the most valuable prize of them all, the kingdom of Bohemia.

History of the Germans

HotGPod is now entering its 9th season. So far we have covered:

Ottonian Emperors (# 1- 21)
– Henry the Fowler (#1)
– Otto I (#2-8)
– Otto II (#9-11)
– Otto II (#11-14)
– Henry II (#15-17)
– Germany in 1000 (#18-21)

Salian Emperors(#22-42)
– Konrad II (#22- 25)
– Henry III (#26-29)
– Henry IV/Canossa (#30-39)
– Henry V (#40-42)
– Concordat of Worms (#42)

Early Hohenstaufen (#43-69)
– Lothar III (#43-46)
– Konrad III (#47-49)
– Frederick Barbarossa (#50-69)

Late Hohenstaufen (#70-94)
– Henry VI (#70-72)
– Philipp of Swabia (#73-74)
– Otto IV (#74-75)
– Frederick II (#75-90)
– Epilogue (#91-94)

Eastern Expansion (#95-108)

The Hanseatic League (#109-127)

The Teutonic Knights (#128-137)

It is now 60 years since there last had been a crowned emperor. We had such an interregnum before, in the 10th century between the death of emperor Berengar of Friuli, yes, me neither, and the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. This, even shorter gap, had resulted in the transfers of the imperial honour from the Carolingians to the rulers of the German Lands.

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So far I have:

Ep. 145: Henry VII (1308-1313) – How to make Friends and Influence People

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, Season 8, Episode 145 – How to make Friends and Influence People – The Luxemburgs become Kings of Bohemia

But before we start let me remind you that the history of the Germans podcast is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support. Today I want to thank Marco M., Pat S., Raphael A., Tim W., Zac D. and Maxime de Hennin who have already signed up.