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. 179 – Meanwhile in the Empire – Kicking off Imperial Reform

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 179 – Meanwhile in the Empire

Come and find out

Before we start a little story about the world of podcasting. Every year we get to hear that the number of podcast listeners has gone up. I just saw a report that said that the percentage of Americans listen to podcasts at least once a month has risen to 44%. But then the next news item is that podcast networks left right and center are cutting their workforce, that platforms shut down and long established shows give up. Why is that? One element is the shift from traditional podcast platforms like Apple, Pocket cast and Podbean, to YouTube and Spotify video. The difference is that monetization through advertising on traditional platforms leaves a lot more on the table then at the video platforms. The video platforms control the adverts you see and pass through pittance to creators, whilst in traditional RSS feeds a 100% of the advertiser’s fees go to the creators and their networks. As listeners migrate across to YouTube and Spotify video, podcaster advertising revenues decline. So in order to make ends meet, they put ever more advertising slots in. Many shows I love and listen to have now 3 minutes at the beginning and 4 minutes in the middle. That is 7 minutes per show. I am listening to maybe 2 episodes per day, which makes it 14 minutes or three and a half days per year. Imagine what you could do with all that time – listen to the entire back catalogue of the History of the Germans for instance!

Which is why we should be so thankful to all of you who keep this show advertising free. In particular Finbar G., Gilman L., Casper H., Gerry C., Charles M., David and William. And if you want to join this august group, you can do so on my website at historyofthegermans.com/support.

And an apology for getting Jan Hus and Jan Zizka mixed up last episode. To clarify Jan Hus is not the kind of person carrying a military flail.

And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended on the battle of Vitkov Hill. This was an encounter between the crusading army of emperor Sigismund and the Hussite defenders of the city of Prague on July 14^th, 1420.

The defenders did win and 500 years later work began on the Vitkov Hill memorial that towers above the city of Prague boasting a 22m high statue of Jan Zizka weighing 16.5 tons. I have not been there yet but will come to Prague this summer and will look for any monument for the 2 women and the one girl that according to Lawrence of Brezova had fought thousands of Saxon and Thuringian Knights with their bare hands. Let’s say, I am not hopeful.

Such a massive memorial suggests it had been a huge battle, but I am afraid it wasn’t. The stated number of casualties of about 500 would not be a huge loss for an army of allegedly 150,000. If we scale this down by the average degree of exaggeration, we are looking at maybe 50 to 100 casualties on the imperial side and far fewer amongst the Hussites. Basically an average Tuesday night in Glasgow.

Still it was a hugely important battle. By defending the Vitkov Hill, Prague was able to keep its supply lines open. With supplies coming in, Sigismund’s plan to starve the city out was doomed. And he was – as usual – running out of money. So the great crusading army disappeared back home, leaving Sigismund with just his own troops from Hungary and the forces of the catholic barons and cities.

But he did not give up that quickly. The catholic lords of Bohemia told him that they were in touch with moderate and conservative forces amongst the Hussites. Conflict was rife amongst the various factions, they said and soon almost all of Bohemia would recognize him as king, they said and so let’s just elect and crown you, they said. And so the crown of St. Wenceslaus was taken out of the beautiful chapel his father had built and placed on Sigismund’s head, whilst in the city below the Hussites were still celebrating their victory.

After that Sigismund returned to Kutna Hora and patiently waited for the inevitable surrender of his enemies.

The Catholic barons weren’t entirely wrong about the rifts between the various factions inside the movement. The Hussites weren’t by any means a monolithic religion. What they agreed on were the 4 articles of Prague, i.e., the right to receive communion as bread and wine, the freedom to preach the gospel, the poverty of the church and the eradication of sin. But for the moderates these were maximum demands and for the radicals this was the bare minimum.

The Taborite radicals produced a more detailed program, comprising 12 articles. Therin they demanded the destruction of all monasteries, the stripping out of all gold and imagery from the churches, the closing of brothels and expulsion of prostitutes, a ban on fancy clothing and all the other things that would become popular in England in the 1640s. They probably wanted to ban Christmas as well.

And then there were different factions amongst the radicals as well. Some of them went seriously off the reservation claiming that the third age had arrived, after the age of God ruled by the Old testament and the age of Christ dominated by the New testament it was now the Age of the Holy Spirit where there was no testament, just direct communication between the godhead and the leaders of the community. There was no longer any sin and any action that had been regarded as sin in previous ages was therefore no longer sin. Sounds like a great party for some but was absolutely abhorrent to the puritanical mainstream Taborites.

These internal divisions were suppressed when Sigismund’s great army was lying before the gates, but came back out with a vengeance when he withdrew. Jan Zizka was smart enough to take his forces back to Tabor before things got dicey, but the radicals in the New Town went on a rampage. In one famous instance Wenceslaus Koranda, our friend and end of Days preacher from Pilsen took a mob out to the monastery of Aula Regia, the greatest of the many splendid Cistercian monasteries in Bohemia, and place of burial of king Wenceslaus. They pulled the dead kings body out of his grave and destroyed this medieval masterpiece. Its greatest treasure, an image of the Madonna was covered by rubble and only found again, 200 years later. These hooligans celebrated their achievement in a distinctly unpuritanical way when they went through the sizeable wine cellar of the monastery followed by a drunken attack on the castle of the Vyšehrad, where at least some came to a sticky end.

Cisterciácký klášter a chrám Nanebevzetí Panny Marie na Zbraslavi – stav k roku 1420 | Historie v modelech

These antics shocked the moderates who now had to protect their churches from the vandalism of their alleged co-religionists.

But despite these internal frictions, the Hussites were unaware that the only solution would be unconditional surrender to the man they held responsible for the death of Jan Hus.

It took a few months for Sigismund to realise that his situation was a lot worse than he had imagined. No letter of surrender, the crusaders gone and the catholic barons promises of imminent victory sounded increasingly hollow. According to Sigismund’s biographer he accused them of having contrived a vicious plan to thwart his ambitions, that they were all closeted Hussites and that there “were no four lords in the whole of Bohemia and Moravia who could be trusted.

But things were getting worse. During the course of the autumn the Prague forces intensified the siege of the Vyšehrad. This strategically important fortress was still occupied by a sizeable and well led royal garrison. They had held out for 3 months but supplies were running low, the inhabitants of the fortress were walking around pale like corpses.

Sigismund had to come to the aid of the Vyšehrad, unless he was prepared to lose both face and a crucial stronghold. His initial plan was to lure the castle’s besiegers away from the fortress by attacking Hussite towns in the surrounding countryside. But the Hussite commander, this time not Jan Zizka but the baron Krusina of Lichtenberg did not fall for it and continued the siege.

On October 28^th the commander of the garrison, himself a catholic bohemian baron met his counterpart under a flag of truce. He agreed that if by nightfall on the 31^st of October no effective help had arrived, he would surrender the castle with all its heavy weapons at 09:00 the next morning. In exchange he and his soldiers would be allowed to withdraw honorably and with all their small weapons.

In the meantime Sigismund had given up on is clever plan. His army was now camped just across the river in Prague castle. All that was holding him back from going out to relieve the Vyšehrad was the need for more reinforcements. He was waiting for an army of 2,000 Moravians to top up the 16,000 men he already had. The minor snag was that these Moravians did not arrive until the evening of the 31^st , exactly the moment the garrison commander became bound by oath to hand over the castle. But neither Sigismund nor his generals knew anything about this agreement. The only way they could communicate with the castle had been through the burning of nearby villages to announce their arrival. Not subtle enough to convey complex terms of surrender.

What also did not help was that the Hussites captured the messengers Sigismund had tried to send into the Vyšehrad with his battleplan.

When Sigismund mustered his troops on the morning of the 1^st of November to attack the Hussite siege positions that surrounded the castle, they found the enemy well entrenched. The leader of the Moravians counselled the king to halt the attack. Sigismund responded that it was “wholly fitting that he would fight these peasants today”. But the Moravians kept warning him that any action would risk the destruction of the army and that they feared the flails of these peasants. At which point Sigismund accused them of cowardice and disloyalty. To prove they were neither the Moravians then agreed to take the most dangerous position on the battlefield where they were fighting uphill on to the enemy positions.

The battleplan was comparatively simple. Sigismund’s forces would attack the Hussite positions from the front and the Vyšehrad garrison would fall into their back, then, squeezed between the two sides the Hussites would be unable to move and had to surrender.

But it failed miserably, for one because the garrison commander of the Vyšehrad stuck by his agreement and blocked the gates so that even those soldiers who wanted to fight could not exit. Secondly, because the Hussite defenders held their positions firing their guns and crossbows at the knights who had to cross an open field. The advance halted and then turned back. That retreat turned into an uncoordinated flight as the besiegers chased after them and the peasants cruelly killed many with their flails. No quarter was given even to those who surrendered and promised to convert. The Moravians took the biggest losses. Lawrence of Brezova lists dozens of barons and knights whose names I will not recount out respect for the Czech language. These “gentlemanly and rugged warriors, these handsome and curly haired young men” were “butchered like pigs” and “immediately stripped of all their armour as well as their clothing down to their underwear”.

The chronicler of the life of emperor Sigismund blames the sudden retreat on our not friend of the podcast, Nicholas of Jemniste, the butcher of Kutna Hora, who turned his horse around in the height of the battle.

Sigismund himself observed the fighting from the top of a hill in order to coordinate between this attack and a parallel equally disastrous attempt to retake the Charles Bridge for the nth time. When he saw the destruction of his men he “was struck with terror and fled in tears with is retinue”.

The Vyšehrad garrison surrendered the castle as agreed and the common people violently entered [..] and invaded the churches and with great ruckus broke and dashed to pieces pictures, altars, organs, chairs and other decorations”. This begins a process of dismantling the ancient royal residence that lasted centuries and left little of this once great castle.

The rest of Sigismund’s campaign of 1420/21 is short and sad. Following the success at the Vyšehrad the Hussites were riding high. The Taborites under Jan Zizka defeated the baron Rosenberg, the richest and most powerful Bohemian baron and loyal catholic. Rosenberg had to recognize the four articles of Prague and allow Hussite religious practice in all his lands. That brought almost the entirety of Southern Bohemia under Hussite control.

Then Jan Zizka turned against the Pilsener Landfrieden, an alliance of royalist cities in western Bohemia. He took several fortresses and laid siege to the town of Tachov. Tachov was a predominantly German speaking town and lies just 7 miles from the border to Bavaria and Franconia. That rang alarm bells everywhere from Nurnberg to Landshut. What if these fanatic heretics who were putting monasteries to the torch and burned every catholic priest descended from the Boehmerwald and infested the land with their erroneous ideas.

So when the citizens of Tachov sent for help to Sigismund and the duke of Bavaria and the city of Nurnberg, an army of 12,000 gathered quickly to relieve the stricken town. Sigismund brought his remaining forces from Kutna Hora, at which point Jan Zizka raised the siege of Tachov, garrisoned the three towns he had conquered earlier and returned to Tabor to gather fresh forces.

Sigismund’s army then laid siege to one of these fortresses, Kladbury where one of Zizka’s paladins was holed up with about a thousand men. Despite outnumbering the garrison 12 to one, Sigismund made scant progress in taking Kladbury.

Meanwhile Zizka was on his way back with a Taborite force of a few thousand men. Given the size of Sigismund’s army that appeared not enough. So he asked the Praguer for help. And despite the ever deepening religious and political differences between the moderates in Prague and the radicals, they did answer the call. 7,000 men and 320 war wagons joined the Taborites.

Now both forces were roughly equal. The stage is set for the decisive battle. But seeing a Taborite force of roughly equal size approaching, far larger than he had expected, Sigismund lost heart. He sent the Bavarians and Franconians back home, took himself down to Kutna Hora and left Tachov and all the royalist towns in western Bohemia to their destiny. Soon thereafter he left Bohemia altogether and returned to Hungary. Prague castle surrendered to the Hussites in July 1421. The campaign that started with an invasion by the great Christian lords from dozens of countries allegedly 150,000 men strong had been defeated by peasants, townsfolk and some barons from a medium sized kingdom on the eastern edge of the empire.

And what was even worse than the military defeats was the complete loss of political authority in Bohemia. The Moderates who had for various reasons tried again and again to reconcile with the heir to the crown had comprehensively come off the idea that Sigismund could ever be their gracious king. Not only had he pushed back all their attempts to make peace, his armies had run amok across Bohemia on their return journeys. As far as his Bohemian subjects were concerned he was the man who had Jan Hus killed, had gone through with a coronation not sanctioned by the majority of barons and cities and had at every opportunity shown no respect for their sincere desire to follow the Holy Scripture. So at an assembly of the Bohemian estates in the summer of 1421 they decided to offer the Bohemian crown to Wladyslaw Jogaila, victor of Tannenberg and ruler of Poland-Lithuania. The court in Krakov was already sympathetic to the Hussite ideas and an alliance with eastern Eastern Europe’s most powerful ruler would be a counterweight to the crusaders. Jogaila turned the offer down but his nephew Zygmund Korybutowics was game. Seriously, are they having these names just so I can make a fool of myself. Anyway Polish Zygmunt shows up in Bohemia and Sigismund lost another political lever.

These events will obviously have a major impact on Bohemia and we will look into that in an upcoming episode. This show is however is called the History of the Germans and it is high time we look at the impact all these events, the rise of the Ottomans, the Hussite revolution and the Council of Constance had on the German lands.

And these German lands are in a dreadful state. Though they had not seen a major war since the wars of succession between Karl IV and Ludwig the Bavarian way back in 1345-49. In HotGPod time, that was episode 156, 6 months ago. That sounds pretty good given that France was caught up in the hundred years war all throughout this time and in Italy the rivalry between Milan, Florence, Venice and dozens of other cities and their lords resulted in a near permanent state of war. What the German Lands had instead was a never ending sequence of feuds. Feuds between barons but also between cities and the princes, princes and barons, even peasants were feuding.

Feuds are in some way even more destructive than outright war. A feud was rarely fought by breaking each other’s castles or city walls, let alone trying to kill the opponent. The latter would have defeated the purpose of the feud, which was to force him to admit publicly that he was wrong. Feuds focused more on intimidation, arson, looting, cattle rustling and kidnapping with a sideline in burning villages and manors, uprooting vineyards and putting fields to the torch. One famous never ending feud was that between the archbishop of Mainz and the Count Palatinate on the Rhine. These two electors held territories in close proximity and had important roles in the empire, creating great opportunities to knock each other out. In particular the very fragmented areas of Southern Germany and the Rhineland were prone to ambitious lords and princes seeking a few villages or towns here and there on the grounds that great aunt Elenor was the second cousin of the duke of Anderswo who had once owned them. To get a scale of the devastation, according to the historian Peter H. Wilson 1200 villages in the Rhineland were devastated during the first half of the 15^th century, almost as many as were destroyed in Bohemia during the Hussite wars where large armies crisscrossed the country every year.

One of the reason for the collapse of law and order can be laid at the feet of the largely ineffectual rulers of the empire since 1378. After King Wenceslaus’ attempts at pushing through a general peace, a Landfrieden had ceased around 1388 no further serious effort was undertaken to bring things under control. When Wenceslaus reign in the empire came to its ignominious end, Ruprecht of the Empty Pocket made a few half-hearted efforts to assert his position and then retreated to his gorgeous castle above Heidelberg, founded a university and just generally forgot about the empire. Sigismund who had taken over by 1410 stayed back in Hungary for the first 4 years of his reign, then spent most of his energy and political capital on the Council of Constance and was now pre-occupied with Bohemian affairs. Bottom line, there was even more interregnum during these forty years than there was during the actual Interregnum. As an anonymous writer stated a few years later quote

“We behave like sheep without shepherds. We stray in the pasture without permission.

Obedience is dead,

justice is afflicted,

nothing is in good order. end quote

Though there is surely never a time when organizational near collapse is a good thing, but this time, the early 15^th century is a particularly bad time to be bad at the job. As I mentioned at the beginning of this season, for centuries there had not been an existential external threat for the empire. The last one may have been the Mongols, but they never got deep into the heartlands and had disappeard very quickly. Hence this constant feuding and disunity could be sustained. But now some serious challenges are coming up. The Ottomans now stand at the Hungarian border. That is still 800km away, but fifty years ago they were 1,600 km away. The Hussite ideas were a fundamental challenge to the existing order as anyone could see as Bohemian towns and villages went up in flames. France is still in agony but Henry V of England, the victor of Agincourt died in 1422 leaving his kingdom to a baby, Joan of Arc will seek her audience with the king in 1428 and the inexorable expansion of the French monarchy begins.

Strong leadership and fundamental reform is what is needed.

When Sigismund left Bohemia in the spring of 1421 utterly defeated and utterly broke, the elites of the empire, the electors, the princes and the city councilors knew that their ruler would not be able to spare much time on bringing peace and security to their land. Nor quite frankly did his military record impress much, Nikopol had been a disaster, then Vitkov, Vyšehrad and now running away from the decisive battle. Not a good look.

Talking about looks, the whole affair had left a bit of a sour aftertaste in the mouths of the crusading German princes. They struggled to understand why their king gave up so quickly after the comparatively minor skirmish on Vitkov Hill. Why did he not make another attempt at going up there? And then this whole business with the catholic barons promising him the crown without bloodshed. How was that supposed to work unless Sigismund made concessions to the Hussites. Sure he had turned them down several times before, but still, how was that supposed to work. And now the withdrawal from Tachov. They were all there, ready and good to go and then he simply walked. He was either a coward or he had made some sort of deal with the Hussites. It all smelled a bit fishy.

But it was not just disappointment with Sigismund as an individual. The structure, institutions and processes that had developed throughout the Middle Ages were simply no longer fit for purpose. A fundamental reform of the empire was needed.

The first step in that direction happened at the end of May 1421 when the princes and cities of the empire got together without the emperor’s knowledge or involvement and declared an imperial war against the Hussites. An army of the princes and estates was to meet in Eger on August 23^rd and then march into Bohemia. When Sigismund heard about it he had to support the initiative. Though it wasn’t his army, at least it was an army that would go up against the Hussites.

Whilst this is going on, he sets up his own initiative to deal with Hussites. As usual he cannot move that fast due to the lack of cash. The solution was to marry his only child, his daughter Elisabeth to Albrecht, the Habsburg duke of Austria. This made Albrecht in one fell swoop the heir of Hungary, Bohemia and puts him into pole position for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. And Elizabeth came with a decent dowry, the whole of Moravia, a land that Sigismund actually controlled. In exchange Sigismund gets about 400,000 florins, enough to muster an army of 12,000 to go to Bohemia.

But all that marriage contract negotiation took time. The army that had been created outside of his control had already gone off to Bohemia and had begun the siege of one of the Hussite towns. But when Zizka’s soldiers, their war wagons, flails and guns appeared over the hill, the crusaders panicked and ran back home. Within just 2 years the Hussite armies had built up a reputation of efficiency and terrible cruelty, the mere appearance of their flags left these veterans of a hundred feuds tremble in their boots.

Sigismund’s efforts got under way a month later. His army of again 15,000 or so entered Bohemia. This time he could not bottle it again and so when Zizka and his terrifying army caught up with him, he had to take a stand. Well, he shouldn’t have. This was the huge and very decisive defeat we were all expecting. We will take a closer look at this battle and the subsequent ones in one of the next episodes. For now, all we need to know is that the flower of the Hungarian and Bohemian chivalry was lying dead in the ice cold Sazawa river, squashed by Zizka’s war wagons. Sigismund barely escaped with his life and ran back to Hungary.

At this point Sigismund who after all had reunited the church after 40 years of schism had lost all credibility and support. A certain Andreas Of Regensburg says about him around that time quote:

“Domitian and Diocletian were the most cruel men, Dacian and Maximian the most wicked men, Africanus and Julian the Apostate the most desperate men, Herod, Nero, and Hadrian the most corrupt men—yet none of them committed as many and such destructive acts [..], as this man. His name is great not in goodness, but in deceit; he does not spare the saints, he does not fear God, he does not respect men, he does not hesitate to exterminate holy virgins, he is not ashamed to commit sacrilege, to profane sacred places, or to defile the burial sites of his ancestors. He fears offending his idol, which he carries with him, more than he dreads despising God, his Creator.” End quote. Not a good look at all.

The natural next step from here would be for the imperial leadership to get together, depose the incumbent and select a new one. That is what the electors had done with Sigismund’s brother Wenceslaus. And indeed they did get together and they did discuss deposing Sigismund, but they didn’t go through with it.

There was nobody who wanted the job, or more precisely could afford the job. As the author of the Reformation of emperor Sigismund would write a few years after that quote: “an emperor or a king of the Empire cannot establish or maintain his position when so much has been taken from him by the electors and others that things have become very miserable indeed.” End quote.

What kind of a kingdom, let alone empire is this where nobody wants to sit on the throne?

Even though the electors and princes were the main beneficiaries of this state of affairs, they also realised that this complete absence of a co-ordination mechanism was not, or no longer viable. It was the Hussite revolt and the fear that it could spread intellectually and militarily to the empire that forced them to act. This is the very beginning of a hundred year long process of imperial reform that will reshape the empire into its early modern incarnation as a mixed monarchy.

The first item on the agenda was finance. You have already heard me going on and on about the importance of taxes. But indulge me again. By 1422 the great monarchies of France and England as well as the great Italian states all collected taxes. There was no other way to finance the ever increasing cost of warfare. Armies had become larger and weapons more sophisticated and expensive. Emperor Henry VII had attempted to regain Italy with 5,000 men. By now armies of 10-15,000 were common and by the end of the century 50,000 men would be the standard size. By the early sixteenth century one year of campaigning on the ottoman front cost between 1.8 and 3.6 million florins and by 1550 this doubled again to 5.4 million Florins. The existing system of financing imperial war out of the emperor’s private purse supplemented with some voluntary contingents from the princes and cities was woefully inadequate to defend the country.

So in July 1422 the imperial diet, one called by the electors rather than by Sigismund, decided on the first imperial tax, the common penny. This tax was calculated as 1% of the wealth of each of the imperial princes and cities. It was a system of taxation that would really catch on. The reasons were simple, firstly the information about how much anyone owned in monetary terms was simply not available but even more importantly, the cities did not want to disclose their wealth. They feared, quite rightly, that if the local princes knew how rich they actually were, the territorial lords would double their efforts to bring the cities under their control. This process of integrating once free cities into princely territories had already been under way for a long time and was only going to accelerate.

To avoid the issue of disclosure of wealth, the common penny was replaced with the matricular system. In this system each of the members of the empire was obliged to provide a fixed number of soldiers, or at a later stage, the cash equivalent. That meant cities did not have to disclose their wealth, just negotiate a suitable level of contribution. Those who provided more soldiers under the matricular system were given more say in where they would be deployed. It became a give and take that mirrored elements of the ancient system of voluntary contribution and the obligatory nature of a taxation system.

Another tax that was easier to get agreement on was a 3% tax on Jewish property. This came on top of a now long period of oppression of the Jewish population who were banned from many attractive occupations, including high finance and were reduced to menial work and payday lending. There were regular waves of expulsion of Jewish populations, though due to the fragmented nature of the empire, there wasn’t a blanket ban on Jewish life, as had been the case in England from 1290 to 1655. One should therefore not expect much from this tax on the jews, apart from further emigration eastwards where the Polish rulers welcomed them with open arms.

The other great reform complex was the judiciary. Way back in the 13^th century, Rudolf of Habsburg had created regional entities, the Kreise. The Kreise were designed to maintain the peace within a certain area, were led by a captain who could use imperial resources to enforce his judgements. This infrastructure had largely been dismantled by subsequent rulers, but Sigismund tried to revive it, admittedly with limited success. However, the Kreise would become a key element of imperial reform.

With his Kreise being stuck, Sigismund tried another tack. He proposed the free and imperial cities form one huge alliance, not just amongst themselves, but also with the imperial knights. This alliance would police themselves, have their own courts and enforcement mechanism. It would mean a lot of feuds between these smaller entities could be dealt with on the regional level. It also meant that the territorial princes would have to think twice before attempting to snatch a few villages from their neighbouring city or lordship, if there was a major alliance protecting said city or lord. This was a big step away from his father’s Golden Bull that prevented the formation of city leagues. But this initiative too got stuck.

Like his father, Sigismund had a knack for generating physical manifestations of political ideas. Crowns tend to be great for that purpose. In 1423 he had the imperial regalia, the crown, the Holy lance, the purse of St. Stephen, socks, coronation mantle and so forth brought over from Karlstein castle to Nurnberg. Up until this moment these regalia had always been kept in the possession of whoever held the imperial title. They were often a pawn in the negotiations over succession and as we know were essential part of any coronation ceremony. Which is why up until now every emperor had kept them in whichever was his best defended castle.

Sigismund put an end to it. He had the regalia taken from his castle in Hungary to the hospital of the Holy Spirit in Nurnberg. The transport was organised by Nurnberg patricians who hid these priceless treasures in a wagonload of fish for the journey.

Nurnberg was one of the three spiritual capitals of the empire along with Frankfurt where the emperors were elected and Aachen where they were crowned. By keeping the crown and the other regalia in Nurnberg, and displaying them once a year for two weeks, Sigismund separated the institution of the empire from the person of the emperor. The logic behind that was that It was easier for the princes of the empire to rally around the crown than around an emperor who like himself had some reputational issues. It is similar to a soldier swearing allegiance to the flag, though he may not support the government of the day. His father had done the same thing with the Crown of St. Wenceslaus, which was kept in Prague cathedral, not in a royal castle.

Despite all of Sigismund’s and the electors’ efforts, imperial reform still took almost a century to come to fruition. But it did start during the reign of Sigismund and it was a reaction to, amongst other things, the Hussite revolution.

And there is one more way in which Sigismund had a lasting impact on the empire. And that was the final allocation of the electoral roles.

We have already heard that in 1415 he granted the electorate of Brandenburg to Frederick of Hohenzollern, a position his descendants would hold until the end of the empire, amongst other titles acquired alongside.

By marrying his daughter and sole heir to Abrecht of Austria in 1421 the electoral vote of Bohemia would finally end up with the House of Habsburg, though it took a little while.

The other electoral title that was reallocated during his reign was the electorate of Saxony. This title had been held by the Ascanian dukes of Wittenberg, descendants of Albrecht the Baer. In November 1422 the last of this line died without offspring. Sigismund very rapidly decided to award the title and electoral rights to Fredrick the Belligerent, the margrave of Meissen.

Sigismund was deep in debt to Frederick, which may account for his decision to elevate him. The house of Wettin that Frederick belonged to held the electoral title until the end of the empire. They too became a huge force, not just on account of their wealth, but also on account of their support for the Reformation and later as kings of Poland and turning Dresden into the epitome of baroque splendour.

These three join the House of Wittelsbach that had held the electorate as counts palatinate on the Rhine since the beginning and will hold it all the way to the end.

As the secular electors rise in prominence, the ecclesiastical ones, the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier gradually diminish.

And even below the Electors, the main princely power blocks are also settling down.

Of the very old houses, the Welf in Brunswick are still around and will become kings of Hannover and England, the Reginars hold Hesse, and the Zaehringer rule in Baden. Then there are the newer houses. The counts of Wurrtemberg are now well established in the South West, the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania holding their lands in the North, whilst the house of Oldenburg will add the Danish throne in 1448.

And, like on the electoral level, the bishoprics and archbishoprics gradually come under the sway of these princely houses, either directly, because one of the family occupies the seat or through simple exertion of force.

The empire is assembled, the process of imperial reform has kicked off, just our friend Sigismund looks a bit down in the dumps. Next week we will see how he claws his way back by hook and by crook to finally become king of Bohemia, a country barely recognisable from the days of his father Karl IV. I hope you will join us again.

And just a quick thanks to professor Duncan Hardy whose excellent translations of key documents help enormously. Ah, and as always, historyofthegermans.com/support is where you can deposit you imperial common penny with the Podcast and receive the immense gratitude of your fellow members of the empire.

Episode 162 – Schisms and Deals

by History of the Germans Podcast on 5th September 202417th December 2025

International policies of Emperor Karl IV

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

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

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 161 – A Luxemburg Empire

by History of the Germans Podcast on 29th August 202417th December 2025

Karl IV’s Hausmacht

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All is well in the empire. The Golden Bull had been debated, agreed, sealed and then celebrated at the great diet in Metz in 1357.

The first time in decades that all the Prince Electors had come together and performed the ancient duties of their offices. Even the Dauphin of France had come to do homage to Karl IV for the lands he held inside the empire.

As always:

Homepage with maps, photos, transcripts and blog: www.historyofthegermans.com

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 160 – The Golden Bull of 1356

by History of the Germans Podcast on 22nd August 202417th December 2025

The Basic Law of the Holy Roman Empire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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TRANSCRIPT

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

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And with that, back to the show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 159 – The rise to Imperial Power

by History of the Germans Podcast on 15th August 202417th December 2025

Karl IV’s journey to Rome

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

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

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Ep. 159 – The Rise to Imperial Power, Charles IV journey to Rome

TRANSCRIPT

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

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