crown

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Karl IV’s journey to Rome

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

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with that, back to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Karl IV’s great plans for his capital city

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Support the Show – Become a PAtron

And with that – back to the show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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