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. 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.

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 4^th 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 10^th, 11^th and 12^thcentury, 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 14^th 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 14^th 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 9^th and 10^th 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 5^thof 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.

Episode 158 – Prague – A new Rome

by History of the Germans Podcast on 8th August 202417th December 2025

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 19^th century than the 14^th. 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.

“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 labours nor expenses, we have decided to extend, expand, and newly delineate the city of Prague, recently elevated to metropolitan status at our insistence 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….

As always:

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Ep. 158 – Prague – The New Rome? Karl IV’s great plans for his capital city

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 [ ]

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

And with that – back to the show

Last week was a bit tough, but then the 14^th 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 14^th 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 14^th 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 10^th 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 13^th 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 19^th 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 14^th century standards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 157 – The Black Death and other Calamities

by History of the Germans Podcast on 1st August 202417th December 2025

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

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

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

The siege lifted grain transports from Caffa to Italy resumed. The disease reached Messina in Sicily in 1347. In 1348 it had enveloped most of Italy. 1349 it crossed the alps, by 1350 people died in their thousands in Northern Germany and Scandinavia. It took until 1353 before this wave of the plague petered out, leaving between 20 and 60% of the population of Europe dead. The disease returned in 1361-1363, 1369-71, 1374-75, 1390 and 1400. After that intervals became longer but the plague never went away completely and still today a couple of 100 people die worldwide of Plague every year.

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

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Ep. 157 – The Black Death and other Calamities

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

Now back to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

And then comes the big one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 156 – What price for a crown

by History of the Germans Podcast on 1st August 202417th December 2025

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

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

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

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Ep. 156 – What Price a Crown – Karl IV fight for the throne

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 155– The Youth of Emperor Karl IV

by History of the Germans Podcast on 18th July 202417th December 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, here he describes what he called the most seminal moment of his youth:

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

Holding us in the air above the line, he said to us, “Look and see.” And behold, another angel ascending from the sky, holding a fiery sword in his hand, struck one in the middle of the line and cut off his genital member with the same sword, and he, as if mortally wounded, agonized while sitting on his horse.

Then the angel holding us by the hair said, “Do you recognize him who was struck by the angel and mortally wounded?” We said, “Lord, I do not know him, nor do I recognize the place.”

He said, “You should know that this is the Dauphin of Vienne, who, because of the sin of lust, has been struck by God in this way; therefore, beware and tell your father to beware of similar sins, or worse things will happen to you.” [..]”

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

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Ep. 155: The Youth of the Emperor Karl IV

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

And now back to the story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 154– The Blind King John of Bohemia

by History of the Germans Podcast on 11th July 202417th December 2025

“The noble and gallant King of Bohemia, also known as John of Luxemburg because he was the son of the Emperor Henry of Luxemburg, was told by his people that the battle had begun. Although he was in full armour and equipped for combat, he could see nothing because he was blind. He asked his knights what the situation was and they described the rout of the Genoese and the confusion which followed King Philip’s order to kill them. Ha,’ replied the King of Bohemia. ‘That is a signal for us.’ […] ‘My lords, you are my men, my friends and my companions-in-arms. Today I have a special request to make of you. Take me far enough forward for me to strike a blow with my sword.

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

There also was Lord Charles of Bohemia, who bore the title and arms of King of Germany, and who brought his men in good order to the battlefield. But when he saw that things were going badly for his side, he turned and left. I do not know which way he went.

Not so the good King his father, for he came so close to the enemy that he was able to use his sword several times and fought most bravely, as did the knights with him. They advanced so far forward that they all remained on the field, not one escaping alive. They were found the next day lying round their leader, with their horses still fastened together.“

Anyone with even a passing interest in late medieval history will remember this scene from Froissart’s description of the Battle of Crecy on August 26^th, 1346. The Blind King of Bohemia, the epitome of chivalric culture riding into the midst of a battle striking at an enemy he cannot see, relying on his comrades to guide him.

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

But this death, call it heroic or foolish, was only the end of an astounding life. John Of Bohemia, very much against his own intentions, played a crucial role in the establishment of the key counterweight to French hegemony in Europe. No, not England, but a power centred on Prague, Vienna, Buda and Pest.

Let’s dive into this story…

The noble and gallant King of Bohemia, also known as John of Luxemburg because he was the son of the Emperor Henry of Luxemburg, was told by his people that the battle had begun. Although he was in full armour and equipped for combat, he could see nothing because he was blind. He asked his knights what the situation was and they described the rout of the Genoese and the confusion which followed King Philip’s order to kill them. Ha,’ replied the King of Bohemia. ‘That is a signal for us.’ […] ‘My lords, you are my men, my friends and my companions-in-arms. Today I have a special request to make of you. Take me far enough forward for me to strike a blow with my sword.

Anyone with even a passing interest in late medieval history will remember this scene from Froissart’s description of the Battle of Crecy on August 26th, 1346. The Blind King of Bohemia, the epitome of chivalric culture riding into the midst of a battle striking at an enemy he cannot see, relying on his comrades to guide him.

Let’s dive into this story…

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Ep. 154 – The Blind King John of Bohemia

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

Let’s dive into this story…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 153– The Rise of Nürnberg

by History of the Germans Podcast on 27th June 202417th December 2025

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

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

Let’s find out

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So far I have:

Ep. 153 – The Rise of the city of Nürnberg

TRANSCRIPT

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

Let’s find out

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 152 – The (not so) Ugly Duchess

by History of the Germans Podcast on 13th June 202417th December 2025

Margarete Maultasch

“The twelve-year-old Margarete, Princess of Carinthia and Tyrol, was travelling from her seat near Meran to Innsbruck for her wedding with the ten-year old Prince Johann of Bohemia. [..]

Still and serious she sat, in ceremonial pomp. Her bodice was so tight that she had had to be laced into it; her sleeves of heavy green satin, in the very extreme of fashion, fell to her feet ; she wore one of the new jeweled hair-nets which an express courier had had to bring from Flanders, where they had recently appeared. A heavy necklace sparkled on her bosom, and large rings on her fingers. So she sat, serious and perspiring, weighed down with magnificence, between the peevish, grumbling women.

She looked older than her twelve years. Her thick-set body with its short limbs supported a massive misshapen head. The forehead, indeed, was clear and candid, the eyes quick and shrewd, penetrating and sagacious ; but below the small flat nose an ape-like mouth thrust forward its enormous jaws and pendulous underlip. Her copper colored hair was coarse, wiry and dull, her skin patchy and of a dull greyish pallor.”

That is how the author Lion Feuchtwanger described Margarete, the countess of Tirol who is better known as Margarete Maultasch, the ugly duchess. This historic novel that became a huge bestseller in the 1920s describes how a bright and ambitious, but monstrously ugly woman is crushed by society’s habit to judge the inside of a person by its appearance.

I still have a copy of this book from the 1980s when I first read it, and on its cover is the same image I used for this episode’s artwork. The picture was painted by Quentin Matsys in 1513 and according to the National Gallery’s catalogue is called a Grotesque Old Woman.

It is not a portrait of Margarete Maultasch who had died 150 years earlier. The identification of the sitter as Margarete Maultasch goes back the idea of a postcard seller in Meran in the 1920s. Matsys picture also made its way into the depiction of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland.

But it is all hokum. Chroniclers who knew Margarete personally, like Johann von Viktring either do not mention her appearance at all, or call her beautiful, if not extremely beautiful. So, as much as I love Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel, which btw. is available in an English translation, it’s premise is simply false.

The truth is much more interesting. Her actions to defend her inherited county of Tyrol were the changes that tilted the complex equilibrium between the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the House of Luxemburg out of kilter with unpredictable, violent results.

So, let’s find out why and how and what…

“The twelve-year-old Margarete, Princess of Carinthia and Tyrol, was travelling from her seat near Meran to Innsbruck for her wedding with the ten-year old Prince Johann of Bohemia. [..]

So she sat, serious and perspiring, weighed down with magnificence, between the peevish, grumbling women. She looked older than her twelve years. Her thick-set body with its short limbs supported a massive misshapen head. The forehead, indeed, was clear and candid, the eyes quick and shrewd, penetrating and sagacious ; but below the small flat nose an ape-like mouth thrust forward its enormous jaws and pendulous underlip. Her copper colored hair was coarse, wiry and dull, her skin patchy and of a dull greyish pallor.”

So, let’s find out why and how and what…

As always:

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Ep.152 – The (not so) Ugly Duchess Margarete Maultasch

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans, Episode 152: The not so ugly duchess Margarete Maultasch, also episode 15 of season 8 from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull, 1250-1356.

“The twelve-year-old Margarete, Princess of Carinthia and Tyrol, was travelling from her seat near Meran to Innsbruck for her wedding with the ten-year old Prince Johann of Bohemia. [..]

So, let’s find out why and how and what…

But before we start a quick reminder that the History of the Germans is still advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans. And special thanks to Carsten D., Karen H., Matias G., Matthew G., Douglas S. and Duane S. who have already signed up.

Last week we talked about how Ludwig the Bavarian extracted the Holy Roman Empire from the overlordship of the papacy and made the election by the Prince Electors the constituent event that elevated an individual to the throne. Many things had to come together to make that happen, namely a misguided papal policy that created rifts inside the church and a group of innovative thinkers including William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua who could provide the intellectual underpinnings of this new construct of the secular state.

But another component was needed to bring about the Kurverein zu Rhens, and that was the masterful diplomacy of Ludwig and his advisors that kept the fragile domestic politics stable.

Domestic politics in the empire were so fragile because power was split amongst three roughly equal-sized blocks. It was a three body problem, a conundrum that had baffled mathematicians since Newton and laymen since the release of the recent Netflix series. Calculating gravitational forces between two objects is apparently quite straightforward, but once you add a third one, even minor changes in the conditions drive dramatic, often violent outcomes. The competition between the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Luxemburgers was a three-body problem.

It was a three-body problem Ludwig of Bavaria had kept in balance for 8 long years until in 1330 the 12-year old Margarete, princess of Tyrol and Carinthia, called the Maultasch married Johann-Heinrich of Luxemburg, the younger son of king John of Bohemia.

Margarete was the only surviving child of Henry duke of Carinthia. We have met Henry of Carinthia several times before, but let me just recap. Henry had inherited the county of Tyrol from his father. Carinthia you may remember had been taken by king Rudolf of Habsburg from king Ottokar of Bohemia alongside Austria and Styria. Rudolf wanted to give Carinthia to his sons, as he had done with Austria and Styria, but faced strong opposition from the princes, so he gave it to his brother-in-law, Henry the count of Tyrol who thereby became Henry of Carinthia.

Henry remained a close ally of the Habsburgs until king Wenceslaus III of Bohemia was murdered in 1306. Henry happened to be the right man in the right place, i.e., he happened to be in Prague at the time and was married to Wenceslaus III’s sister. He was made king of Bohemia, which he remained for about 3 months before the Habsburgs moved on Prague, threw Henry out and elected one of their own as king of Bohemia. This Habsburg was called king porridge by the Czechs on account of his sensitive stomach, a stomach that put an end to his reign after another couple of months, making Henry king again. This time he lasted 3 years, though that was mostly on paper. Henry was a pretty ineffective ruler, a bit sloppy and just a bit of a pushover. By 1310 the Bohemians had enough of Henry of Carinthia and petitioned emperor Henry VII to give them a new king, at which point Henry VII’s son king John of Bohemia took over.

The next couple of years things quietened down for Henry of Carinthia until 1314 when he was dug up as “king of Bohemia” to provide a vote for Frederick the Handsome. That alliance did not last long and Henry of Carinthia did what many other territorial princes did during the civil war, playing one side against the other two and -most importantly- avoiding getting sucked into the conflict.

In the 1320s he got closer to the Luxemburgs, and specifically hoped to marry the famously gorgeous sister of john of Bohemia, Marie. But, in defiance of tradition and etiquette, Marie aged 16 outright refused to marry the duke of Carinthia who was not only older than her grandfather but had seriously got out of shape. After Marie’s refusal John offered him one of his nieces, adding in some cash to sweeten the deal, but that bride went to another, more promising lord. Things kept being stretched out until 1327 when Henry finally married Beatrice of Savoy, another distant relative of John of Bohemia. By then Henry was 62 and, as it turned out, no longer able to produce an heir. And with that Margarete became one of the most desirable heiresses of her day.

Henry of Carinthia’s lands were of enormous strategic importance. Tyrol and Carinthia controlled many of the Alpine passes, most importantly the Brenner pass, the by far the quickest and most comfortable route across the Alps, a crucial consideration for emperor Ludwig who needed to support the imperial vicars in Lombardy. Tyrol and Carinthia was of even more importance to the Habsburgs since their lands were still divided between Austria in the east and their Alsatian and Swiss domains in the west. If they could get hold of Tyrol and Carinthia, they could connect their currently still disparate land holdings into one contiguous territory. The Luxemburgs had no natural interest in Tyrol but hat did not mean they did not want it.

Tyrol was by no means the only territory the three powers coveted and clashed over. When emperor Ludwig granted Brandenburg to his son shortly after the battle of Mühldorf, the Luxemburgs were so irritated, they ended their long standing support for Ludwig’s kingship, forcing him into the alliance with the Habsburgs that resulted in Frederick the Handsome becoming co-king. That meant that again it was 2 against one, Wittelsbach and Habsburg against Luxemburg.

All parties knew that outright war was expensive and in the end, unwinnable. And it was also unnecessary as long as there were so many principalities in the empire whose current princely families may die out. So the three parties came to a tacit understanding that each should be left alone to pursue their expansion projects and that Ludwig would basically sign off on whatever the other two could gain. The only one who had to show restraint was Ludwig himself who had already picked up Brandenburg.

The biggest winners of this policy were the Luxemburgs. During the 1330s John of Bohemia expanded into Silesia, added to the county of Luxemburg and even managed to bring the duke of Lower Bavaria, Ludwig’s cousin and former godchild under his control. Meanwhile John’s uncle, the archbishop Balduin of Trier became archbishop of Mainz as well as bishop of Worms and Speyer.

This expansion of Luxemburg power was making Ludwig uncomfortable. And the Habsburgs felt seriously left behind. None of their schemes had worked out so far.

Into this already tense situation dropped the announcement that young Margaret was to marry the son of the king John of Bohemia. Which meant that if Henry of Carinthia died without a male heir, Luxemburg would gain control of another strategically important asset. And that prospect became increasingly likely as Henry of Carinthia’s health deteriorated and his marriage remained childless,

Ludwig sat down with the new head of the House of Luxemburg, duke Albrecht the Lame and they concluded a secret pact. Upon the death of Henry of Carinthia the emperor will declare the two fiefs of Carinthia and Tyrol to be forfeit and would then enfeoff Carinthia and southern Tyrol to the Habsburgs and the rest to himself.

Both parties were well aware that this meant the war that they had tried to avoid for so long would finally happen. Whether they gave any thought to Margarete and her feelings on the matter is unknown and also extremely unlikely.

Henry of Carinthia died in 1335.

Margarete is 17 at that point and her husband, Johann-Heinrich of Luxemburg just 13. The two children sent messages to all and sundry, informing them of the death of Henry of Carinthia and asked for recognition as the new duke and duchess of Carinthia and Tyrol. When they got little to no response, they got nervous. Something was not right.

They sent urgent messages to king John of Bohemia, asking him to come and protect them. The king responded that he would love to come, but unfortunately he was in Paris and had been injured during one of these hundreds of tournaments he took part in. And this was no trifle, it was the injury that would ultimately cause him to go blind.

In their desperation the young couple sent their advisor who also happened to be the main chronicler, Johann von Viktring to Vienna to ask for help from – guess who – the dukes of Habsburg. Viktring found Duke Albrecht the Lame somewhat evasive and clearly a bit embarrassed by his presence.

Soon thereafter the emperor Ludwig arrived in nearby Linz. Viktring went to see him and asked him for help on behalf of the young ducal couple. Ludwig wasn’t as cagey as his allies and laid it out to Viktring in no uncertain terms. Carinthia was going to Habsburg and the Tyrol would be divided up, the two kids would be given a nice pension and should please quietly exit stage left.

Next the court proceeded to an open field, the imperial standard was raised and Ludwig formally enfeoffed the dukes Albrecht and Otto of Habsburg with the duchy of Carinthia and the southern part of the county of Tyrol. Meanwhile the oldest son of John of Bohemia, Charles and some other Luxemburg allies had also arrived in Linz and realized what had happened. They called the Habsburgs scammers, cheaters and swindler, but absent an army ready to strike, there was nothing to do. Charles of Bohemia and his allies left, swearing revenge. The war was on.

There is a brilliant story that Johann von Viktring tells us about the way 14^th century politicians thought. Remember, he is Margarete’s envoy representing the legal heirs of Henry of Carinthia who have just been ripped off by the Habsburgs and the emperor. Still, instead of shouting obscenities and leaving with the Luxemburg party, Viktring goes before the Habsburg dukes and begs them to treat him and his monastery kindly, meaning leaving him in post and with all his profitable sinecures. They said, sure, if you tell us a bit about how the duchy is run, who is who, what to be carful about and how to organize the administration. To the latter he responded that once upon a time the emperor Tiberius had been asked why he left all these corrupt officials in post. And Tiberius is supposed to have answered that there was once a soldier who had received a wound that refused to heal and was covered in bloodsucking insects. When a caring soul saw that and chased the flies away, the injured soldier got angry. Why did you do that. This is only going to make it worse. You have now chased away the flies that had already become fat from sucking my blood. Now you have opened the wound for new hungry flies who will suck out even more blood.

The moral of the story, better to leave the current parasites, including himself, in place.

In the weeks that followed, Habsburg troops occupied Carinthia experiencing very little resistance. However, in Tyrol, the local lords rallied around Margarete and her husband and refused the Habsburg and Wittelsbach troops entry. That might possibly have been due to the oath of loyalty they had sworn to Margarete’s father, but it is more likely that it was because they believed that it would be easier to enrich themselves in an administration run by minors than in one run by the competent Habsburg dukes, who may not believe the story about the flies.

And their resistance frustrated the Habsburg invasion. Tyrol straddles both sides of the Alps and is a country of deep valleys, ravines and craggy summits, of castles built into the sides of soaring mountains, a place a comparatively small but determined force could easily defend against even large invading armies.

Whilst the Tyrol held out against the Habsburg attack, king John of Bohemia raised an army to go after the Habsburgs in their homeland of Austria. At their first encounter he achieved a significant victory when duke Otto of Habsburg, called the Merry fled the battlefield before even the first arrow had been shot. The Habsburg army watched with complete confusion that their commander was making for Vienna and followed him at pace. At which point John of Bohemia should have gone after them, but for some inexplicable reason did not. The war continued into next year, this time Ludwig himself took the field alongside the Habsburgs. It nearly came to a battle near Landau, but this time John ran away. After that the king of Bohemia, as so often, became distracted by other chivalric adventures, more exciting than a long and arduous campaign taking one castle or town after another. John of Bohemia made a deal with the Habsburgs. Not a great one I must say. All he got was that the Habsburgs would pay his expenses and let the young couple to keep Tyrol, but they would retain Carinthia. Ausser Spesen nix gewesen as the Germans would say.

Margarete was incensed about her father-in-law’s betrayal. She gathered her boy husband and her senior lords and vowed never to give up Carinthia. And then added a few choice words about her useless guardian and protector. As if he cared.

Margarete was still an adolescent, but at that time people grew up quickly. Though she had managed to defend Tyrol with the help of her nobles, she had lost Carinthia, effectively more than halving the territory she should have inherited. And she also realized that her alliance with the House of Luxemburg wasn’t worth much. If the Habsburgs found a way into Tyrol, the chances were slim that the great chivalric knight John of Bohemia would come to her rescue.

And the probability that the Habsburgs would find a way to break the resistance of her vassals was increasing by the late 1330s thanks to the erratic behavior of her young husband. Johann Heinrich of Luxemburg was clashing with the local aristocracy, razing one nobleman’s castle to the ground for alleged cowardice in the defense of Carinthia. As the nobles got restless he began fearing conspiracies everywhere. He did uncover what he believed was such a conspiracy and he had the ringleaders beheaded and their lands confiscated.

Margarete needed a new supporter if she wanted to defend her lands against the Habsburgs. And using the process of elimination, that defender had to be emperor Ludwig IV, the Bavarian.

Ludwig’s stature had strengthened since his return from Italy. His thoughtful policies that broadly maintained peace in the empire, his support for the cities that increased prosperity and an unexpected gain of Lower Bavaria after the death of its last duke had maybe not completely outweighed his excommunication, but made him the recognized, legitimate ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. It was thanks to this general esteem and the perception that he wasn’t unduly greedy for land and titles that had allowed him to bring the prince electors and many of the imperial princes to sign the declaration of Rhens.

Ludwig clearly had the power to defend her, but there were a few problems with the plan. First and foremost the fact that she was married to Johann-Heinrich of Luxemburg. An alliance with Wittelsbach would require some form of marriage agreement that would provide a Wittelsbach the opportunity to ultimately inherit the Tyrol. But Margarete had no daughter to marry off. Nor was thee much hope for offspring given the couple now despised each other. So the person who had to marry was Margarete herself. Which means she needed to be divorced first.

Divorce in the Middle Ages was possible for two reasons and two reasons only, inability to procreate, namely the husbands impotence, or consanguinity, i.e., the couple being too closely related.

So Margarete went for option one and began to complain loudly that her husband was unable or unwilling to share her bed. As for option two, being too closely related, well, that applied to literally every member of the princely houses in europe. Whether or not that led to the annulment of a marriage was entirely in the hand of the church, which in the case of Margarete meant in the hands of the pope.

Problem was that the chances of the pope granting an annulment or Margaret’s marriage to the son of the pope’s key ally in the empire in order to marry the son of an excommunicated emperor who denied the authority of the vicar of Christ was precisely 0.000000%. Still, if Margarete lets thing run as they currently were going, she would lose Tyrol to the Habsburgs. It was only a question of time.

So she decided to take it one step at a time. And the most important step was to get rid of Johann Heinrich and his murderous paranoia. In 1341 the young duke had been out hunting near Schloss Tirol. When he returned home, he found the gates of castle closed. Angry, but not particularly concerned, did he ride to the next castle. Again, nobody opened the gate. For the next several days, the duke of Carinthia and count of Tyrol rode from castle to castle, from city to city, but nobody would let him in. Finally, he left the county and sought refuge with the patriarch of Aquilea.

That removed the imminent risk of loss of Tyrol, but Margarete still needed the protection of the emperor, which meant she needed to marry the emperor’s son, Ludwig, the Margrave of Brandenburg.

Margarete asked the pope for an annulment on the grounds of impotence and consanguinity. The process started, but then pope Benedict died. A successor was found quite quickly, Clement VI, but he had little time for the petition from the countess of Tyrol, assuming he had any interest in support it in the first place, which he did not have.

Time was rapidly running out.

The emperor Ludwig travelled to Tyrol in 1342 together with his son. He brought with him three bishops who had been prepared to declare Margaret divorced. But one fell down a ravine on the journey and the other two got scared and refused to grant the divorce.

Plan B was to go back to the Franciscan intellectuals. Marsilius of Padua prepared a document whereby Ludwig granted Margaret her divorce declaring that the pope had no business granting divorces, this, Marsilius concluded, was the right of the emperor. That went to far, even for Ludwig IV. He went with a proposal of William of Ockham who stated that in special situations when the interest of the state demanded it, the emperor was able to grant divorces, and that this was one such case.

And so on Shrove Tuesday 1342 emperor Ludwig IV granted the first civil divorce in the empire and Margarete, countess of Tyrol married Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg.

This was a scandal of truly epic proportions. Whilst public opinion in Germany could buy into the theories about the secular state and the independence of the empire from the papacy, the idea that the emperor could override “till death us do part”, that was a step too far. And Ludwig had not done it for some lofty ambition the whole empire would share in, but solely for his dynastic benefit.

That is when the three-body problem raised its ugly head. In a system of three roughly equal powers, small changes in the conditions could elicit violent reactions. And they did.

Margaret’s divorce pushed the new pope, Clement VI over the edge. Clement VI was already fed up with the unrepentant excommunicate in Munich who kept sending negotiators but never moved an inch on his positions. Sometimes he had made proposals that included his resignation but always in such a way that it remained unacceptable to the papacy. This civil divorce thing was the last straw.

Equally the Luxemburgs were irate about the treatment of Johann-Heinrich. Even archbishop Balduin of trier who had joined the emperor at the Kurverein zu Rhens and had developed a good working relationship with him, was turned off. The Habsburgs, fearing, quite rightly that if Margarete and her new husband would have offspring they might never get hold of the Tyrol and hence would never be able to link up their territories. Even the princes who normally took only moderate interest in imperial affairs, the dukes of Saxony, of Brunswick, the counts of Holstein and the dukes of Mecklenburg kept a weary eye on their sovereign.

Ludwig doubled down and when his brother-in-law the count of Holland and Hennegau died, he incorporated that county into his possessions as well.

That last move pushed the princes over the edge. They accepted Pope Clement VI call on the Prince Electors to choose a new King of the Romans. Headed by a 20-year old prelate that pope Clement VI had just placed on the seat of the archbishopric of Mainz despite its current postholder still being alive plus some serious bribes paid to the duke of saxony and the archbishop of Cologne allowed the two Luxemburg electors, Balduin of Trier and John of Bohemia to elect John’s oldest son, Charles, margrave of Moravia as king. Charles the fourth emperor carrying the name of the great Charlemagne would become a towering figure in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.

But for the moment he was just an anti king against an emperor who had ruled more or less successfully for 32 years. Sure Ludwig had lost a lot of sympathies, but he was by no means an easy target. Charles IV and his allies decided that instead of open warfare, the best course of action was to simply wait and let nature takes its course. The emperor was 64 years old, how much longer was he going to hold on?

One campaign did Charles undertake though, not against Ludwig himself, but against Margarete in Tyrol. Margarete’s new husband, Ludwig the margrave of Brandenburg was away in Prussia. The bishops of Trient and Bozen and some of the nobles had taken against the Wittelsbach regime and had called on Charles to come down. And he did. The forces of the bishops quickly rolled up castles and towns until they reached Schloss Tirol, the great fortress above the city of Meran, the key to the county. Margarete’s advisors suggested for her to either flee or submit to the powerful force led by the eminently competent Charles. But she refused. For several weeks did her troops hold out in Schloss Tirol until Ludwig of Brandenburg arrived with a strong army and relieved his wife. Tyrol was again saved from the Luxemburgs.

But the emperor was not. On October, 11 1347 the aging but still active emperor died from a stroke during a bear hunt outside Munich.

I must admit that before is tarted this podcast I knew next to nothing about Ludwig IV, the Bavarian but the more I read about him, the more fascinating I found him. A political and military genius who, if he had been in charge of a large and consolidated kingdom like England and France would surely have been remembered in books, plays and statues. A man who despite his modest education embraced some of the most innovative ideas of his time and sheltered those who developed them.

We are not completely rid of him though, since next time we will have a look at economic developments during Ludwig’s reign, in particular the rise of the cities, specifically the city of Nurnberg.

But before we do that, we need to bring the story of Margarete Maultasch to its end.

In the years that followed, nobody challenged Margarete and Ludwig’s ownership of Tyrol. Margarete had three children, two daughters and a son. The girls died in the black death, but her son Meinhard grew up to adulthood. Ludwig of Brandenburg died in 1361 and Meinhard succeeded him. But Margarete’s son lived only for a further 2 years. Once Meinhard had gone and Margaret now beyond child-bearing age, it was clear that the Tyrol had to go to someone else. In this contest it was the house of Habsburg that won. Margaret named Rudolf of Habsburg, son of Albrecht the Lame as her heir. Exhausted by a long life of strife, she retired to Vienna where she died in 1369. The Tyrol remained part of Austria until 1919 when the part south of the Brenner pass was annexed by Italy.

That leaves one last question, why did people believe Margarete was so famously ugly. In part this seem to have come from the nickname, Maultasch, which means something like mouth bag. This could be a reference to a physical deformity, but it was also used as a term for promiscuous women. And the latter explanation is more probable.

The church, which regarded her as a bigamist had issued propaganda branding her a harlot, unable to contain her urges. That she had married Ludwig to satisfy her unnatural desires something Johann-Heinrich was unwilling to do. These stories than mushroomed into ever more outlandish tales of unsatiable sexual appetites that rival those told about Messalina and Theodora. The twist of the story was however the idea that she was also monstrously ugly, something that – as I said before – we have no contemporary evidence for, specifically not from people who had known her personally. It was most likely a combination of her nickname Maultasch and the already brutal propaganda that created this image. And when Matsys painting of an extremely ugly person came up for auction at Christies in 1920, a smart postcard seller in Meran made copies and sold it as portraits of Margarete Maultasch. That is where Lion Feuchtwanger picked up the story to create his tale of the fight between the clever, well meaning but ugly Margarete Maultasch and the beautiful but vacuous and destructive Agnes of Flavon. I love the book for all the evocative scenes from the 14^th century, but I afraid the whole of its basic premise is fictional.

Margarete was just another one of these women whose political ambitions ran up against the social standards of the time. And since her enemies could not break her militarily and politically, they broke her memory.

So, as I said, we are still not yet done with the live and times of emperor Ludwig IV, the Bavarian. Next time we will talk about the growth of the great German trading cities, in particular about Nuremberg. And then we probably should have an episode about the blind king John of Bohemia who has been moving in and out of focus not just for these least five episodes, but also featured in season 7 on the Teutonic Knights. And as a sort of a brit I need to talk about the coat of arms the motto of the prince of Wales at some point, and that time will have to be soon.

I am however under a bit of time pressure since I will be sailing my boat over to the Baltic for the summer. That means I will have to put the podcast on a bi-weekly schedule. I hope you do not mind too much and will see you next time.

Episode 151 – Kurverein zu Rhens

by History of the Germans Podcast on 6th June 202417th December 2025

featuring Pope John XXII and William of Ockham

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

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

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

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Ep. 151 – The Kurverein zu Rhens – featuring William of Ockham

TRANSCRIPT

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

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