Karl IV

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The Privilegium Maius

In a niche to the left of the main altar in the Stephansdom, the great cathedral in the center of Vienna, somewhat hidden by later decorations stands a cenotaph. On its cover you see two figures lying side by side, each nearly two meters long and wearing splendid clothes, their feet resting on two lions. The figures are wearing what looks like crowns, a band surmounted by 12 spikes. A royal couple no doubt.

There is an inscription surrounding them, but you will be unable to read it. It is written in a script I have never seen before, the Alphabetum Kaldeorum. This script, it is said, comes from the ancient Chaldeans, a peoples living in Babylon in biblical times.

We know what it says on the cenotaph, because there is a conversion table from this script into Latin script held in the state library in Munich. The mystery revealed we can now read the text, which merely says: “This is the grave of duke Rudolf the Founder” .

Who was this man who wrote his name and title in a secret script onto his funeral monument, a script, most people believe he had created himself,  and who called himself “the founder”, a name he is still known to us today. What is he the founder of? Why is he wearing a crown when he was only a duke? How come he is one of the most important early Habsburg, yet reigned for merely 7 years?

This is a story of myths and mysteries, of tangible political objectives, elaborate forgeries, a tale that features letters by Julius Caesar and Nero that reveal an unexpected fondness for this land on the edge of the empire. Ah, and Hercules’ son is also making an appearance – in Austria.

Seriously, this is what we are looking at in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 204 – Rudolf IV, the Founder and Forger, which is also episode 2 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

In a niche to the left of the main altar in the Stephansdom, the great cathedral in the center of Vienna, somewhat hidden by later decorations stands a cenotaph. On its cover you see two figures lying side by side, each nearly two meters long and wearing splendid clothes, their feet resting on two lions. The figures are wearing what looks like crowns, a band surmounted by 12 spikes. A royal couple no doubt.

There is an inscription surrounding them, but you will be unable to read it. It is written in a script I have never seen before, the Alphabetum Kaldeorum. This script, it is said, comes from the ancient Chaldeans, a peoples living in Babylon in biblical times.

We know what it says on the cenotaph, because there is a conversion table from this script into Latin script held in the state library in Munich. The mystery revealed we can now read the text, which merely says: “This is the grave of duke Rudolf the Founder” .

Who was this man who wrote his name and title in a secret script onto his funeral monument, a script, most people believe he had created himself,  and who called himself “the founder”, a name he is still known to us today. What is he the founder of? Why is he wearing a crown when he was only a duke? How come he is one of the most important early Habsburg, yet reigned for merely 7 years?

This is a story of myths and mysteries, of tangible political objectives, elaborate forgeries, a tale that features letters by Julius Caesar and Nero that reveal an unexpected fondness for this land on the edge of the empire. Ah, and Hercules’ son is also making an appearance – in Austria.

Seriously, this is what we are looking at in this episode.

But before we start let me pass on some news about the podcasting industry. Last week Wondery closed its doors, one of the leading producers of narrative podcasts. The argument brought forward by Amazon, its parent company, was, that the future was video and audio only was simply no longer enough to keep listeners engaged. On one hand I should be grateful that a competitor has fallen by the wayside, but that would be short sighted. Most media lives of the fact that people are using it. They make it part of their day, like listening to radio or watching television. And once a habit disappears, the industry disappears with it, just look at newspapers. So, if you guys enjoy the kind of audio first product that we and many other podcasters produce, please keep listening and if you feel like supporting the effort either by spreading the word about great shows or helping creators financially, please do so.

And special thanks to Nicholas S., Ruben de G., Anne Hanson, Paul H., Martin, Matthias D., John A., Marian and Felix F. who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support.

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And with that, back to the show

Last week we ended with the birth of Rudolf, the eldest son of duke Albrecht the Wise of Austria, on All Saints day 1339. This event that brought enormous relief not only to his parents, but to all the people in the land.

When he saw the light of day for the first time, the legendary fecundity of the Habsburg family had hit a bad snag. His father did have five brothers, but all of them and all of their sons had died. If Rudolfs mother, at the time already 39 years old, and his father suffering cruelly from rheumatoid arthritis, had not by some miracle conceived him and then three more sons, the Habsburgs would have ended as a footnote in European history, rather than as a whole library. And the lands of Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola would have been torn part in a war of succession, as much of Europe would be when such a snag happened again in 1701 and 1740.

But this time, it didn’t. Rudolf lived and so did his younger brothers Albrecht and Leopold. And what was almost as miraculous was that his father Albrecht the Wise survived until Rudolph was 19 and hence able to take over the political leadership of his duchy.

During the 14th century the Habsburgs pursued two main territorial objectives. The first was to either acquire or at least contain their neighbours, the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary. Acquisition had been the objective in the earlier parts of the century when the original dynasties of these lands, the Premyslids and Arpads had died out. Rudolph’s grandfather, king Albrecht I had made a bid for both, but had his hopes cut short when he was cut short by his nephew.

By the time of Rudolf’s birth, acquisition was no longer an option. Bohemia had gone to the great rivals of the Habsburgs, the counts of Luxemburg, and it was now ruled by one of Europe’s most famous chivalric knights, John, the Blind King of Bohemia, whilst Hungary had gone to the Angevins from Naples whose astute policies and growing wealth would make them the most powerful rulers in Central europe. Therefore containment was the dominant policy. Keeping friendly relations to avoid invasion was the order of the day in Vienna.

With the east sealed off, their main focus turned west. Like all other princely families, the Habsburgs had long realised that the only way to achieve supremacy in the empire required them to hold a large and contiguous territory where they could move soldiers and gold from one end to the other without having to cross someone else’s land. In 1339, when Rudolf was born, the Habsburgs were a long way away from that objective.

Their ancestral lands in the triangle between Basel, Strasburg and Freiburg lies 700 km west of Vienna. In between these two territories lay the duchy of Carinthia, the county of Tyrol, the archbishopric of Salzburg, the county of Feldkirch, the abbey of St. Gallen, the bishopric of Constance and the cities in what is now German speaking Switzerland. All of these had to be brought under Habsburg control if they were to create that contiguous territory stretching all along the Northern side of the Alps.

Carinthia and Tyrol were the first on the shopping list. And the Habsburgs were lucky in as much that Henry, duke of Carinthia and count of Tyrol was on his last leg. All he was leaving behind was a daughter, Margarete. But then the Habsburgs were also unlucky, because Margarete had been married to Johann-Heinrich of Moravia, the son of king John of Bohemia from the House of Luxemburg.

At this time there were three families fighting for supremacy in the empire, the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs who controlled Bavaria and the Palatinate and the Luxemburgers who were kings of Bohemia and counts of Luxemburg. Each of these powers were roughly equal in size. Like in any three body system, politics were extremely fragile. Each side had to balance their desire to add territory against the risk that the other two would gang up on you if you became too greedy.

The inheritance of Henry of Carinthia was the matter that would push this system out of kilter.

As far as law and custom was concerned, Carinthia and Tyrol were to go to Henry’s daughter Margarete and her husband Johann-Heinrich of Luxemburg. But if that happened, Austria would be completely surrounded by its rivals. The Luxemburgs in Bohemia and Carinthia, the Wittelsbachs on their western border and the Hungarians in their back. That was obviously hugely concerning for Albrecht the Wise, but also to the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian. King John of Bohemia had already made some major gains in Silesia and in his homelands on the western border of the empire, so the precarious power balance was already a bit lopsided. Adding Carinthia and Tyrol would seriously upset the apple cart.

So Ludwig and Albrecht made a deal. The Habsburgs were to receive Carinthia, Carniola and the southern part of Tyrol, whilst Ludwig would get the northern part of Tyrol. Margarete and her husband would be shoved out of  the way.

And that is exactly what they did, or tried to do. In 1335, Henry of Carinthia had just died, the emperor Ludwig the Bavarian declared Carinthia and Tyrol vacant fiefs and awarded them to Albrecht and his brother Otto. Margarete, JoIhann-Heinrich and the rest of the Luxemburger clan were flabbergasted by such blatant thievery. A war was now inevitable. The only problem was that king John was back in Paris recovering from a serious injury that would ultimately turn him blind and his son Karl did not have an army at hand.

So it was left to Margarete and her husband to defend her inheritance. 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. The teenagers, helped by the local lords, took advantage of the topography and sent the Habsburgs packing. Carinthia was harder to defend and less loyal, so it became part of Austria, which it still is.

Margarete and Johann-Heinrich were deeply irritated over the loss of Carinthia and lobbied John of Bohemia to take Carinthia back by force. John who never backed out of a fight invaded Austria. The campaign was a roaring success and the Habsburg army fled. But then John of Bohemia just returned home, not making the slightest effort to take back Carinthia.

The next year the Habsburgs attacked Bohemia and John, most unusually, ceded the battlefield. And then everyone went home.

Having been robbed of Carinthia and Carniola and watching her husband’s family standing by without really helping her, made her, as an Englishmen would say, a bit miffed. But then rumours began circulating that the Luxemburgs were prepared to cede the Tyrol to the Habsburgs for some gains elsewhere, Margarete knew the game was up, unless she did something. And so she did something unprecedented, she threw her husband out. Just like that.

She went to emperor Ludwig the Bavarian to protect her against the inevitable retaliation from the Luxemburgs and a potential invasion by the Habsburgs. Ludwig too was keen on the Tyrol, who wouldn’t be. It is gorgeous.

There were a few problems though. Margarete’s marriage to Johann-Heinrich was valid as far as the church was concerned. And incessant philandering, squeezing one’s wife’s land’s dry and paranoid killing of political opponents weren’t recognised reasons for divorce. Only  consanguinity or failure to consume were. The chances that the pope would grant a divorce to help an excommunicated emperor who had just made sure the pope had no more say in imperial elections, was pretty much 0.0000000%.

But Ludwig the Bavarian was an emperor. And as emperor he granted her a civil divorce, the first civil divorce in European history since the Romans. That set Margarete free to marry the son of Ludwig, another Ludwig.

This was not only a massive scandal, but also caused a major shift in imperial politics. As far as the Habsburgs were concerned, working with Ludwig the Bavarians was no longer of any value.  Ludwig had stepped on their toes in Tyrol and hard.

Albrecht changed his allegiance and sought to get closer to the Luxemburgs. And that is why Rudolf, aged five, was put in play to marry Catherine, the daughter of the Karl of Luxemburg, the future king of Bohemia.

Which in turn was the first step in a series of events that would lead to the downfall of emperor Ludwig the Bavarian and the rise Karl to become emperor Karl IV. Ludwigs landgrab in Tyrol had not only alienated the Habsburgs but other princes too. And when Ludwig seized the inheritance of count William of Holland as well, the empire went into revolt.

In 1346, 5 years after Margarete had thrown out Johann-Heinrich  of Luxemburg and 4 years after negotiations about the marriage between Rudolf and Catherine had begun, Karl, heir to Bohemia, was elected king of Romans in opposition to Ludwig the Bavarian. The subsequent war was won by Karl (episode 156), in part because the Habsburgs stayed neutral.

It would still take another 11 years before, in 1357 Rudolf of Habsburg and Catherine of Bohemia were joined in matrimony, but they were. Nevertheless things had changed dramatically by then. When in 1330 the Luxemburgs and Habsburgs were stell on eye level, by 1357 they were no longer. First the blind king John had significantly expanded the Luxemburg territory. Now his son Karl IV was busy to build a territorial connection from his lands in Bohemia all the way to Luxemburg in the West, something the Habsburg at that point could only dream of. And even more importantly, Karl had found a way to mobilise the riches of Bohemia on his behalf.

Meanwhile the Wittelsbach had also declined in stature as various divisions reduced the resources any one of them could mobilise. So even in combination, the Habsburgs and Wittelbachs were no longer able to seriously threaten the Luxemburgs under Karl IV.

Therefore the marriage between Rudolf and Catherine sealed not an alliance of equal partners.

And by how much their power was diminished became obvious when Karl IV promulgated his Golden Bull of 1356, which set the final list of prince electors. Who was missing from that list? The Bavarians and the Habsburgs. Yes, one could argue that the list had been informally agreed since the 1250s, and the Habsburgs were never on it, but still. If the constellation had been as it was 30 years earlier, they should have got on. But it wasn’t and they weren’t.

Despite that snub, the marriage still went ahead. The Habsburgs had become a junior partner in the grand dynastic project of the House of Luxemburg.

We are now in the year 1358 and finally, Albrecht the Wise succumbed to his many ailments. Rudolf took over and he tried desperately to bring the family back up to the status he believed it deserved.

To do that he pursued several avenues.

For one he wanted to elevate the status of Austria and his capital Vienna by establishing a bishopric there. As we know, establishing new bishopric is not easy. It is not as hard as it was in the 11th century when the emperor Henry II had to kneel before his bishops and admit to his own infertility to be allowed to set up Bamberg. But it was still a difficult thing to do. And even though the process had only just begun and the outcome was uncertain, Rudolf kicked off the construction of a magnificent church in Vienna, the Stephansdom. His plan included two towers, as was the prerogative of a cathedral, though that second tower was never built.

In 1365 he founded a university in Vienna, the second oldest in the empire after Prague, again in an attempt to get on eye level with his father-in-law.

And he did get his reward for loyalty, when he acquired the Tyrol. Not by force, but through an agreement with Margarete Maultasch, whose son Meinhard had died and who had fallen out with the Wittelsbachs. The Wittelsbachs were of course unhappy about that, but could not do much since the senior partner, emperor Karl IV, held his hand over his son-in-law.

Then the Habsburg-Luxemburg partnership grew even closer. Karl and Rudolf agreed that in case either of their families were to die out, the other would inherit their lands in their entirety. Whilst at this point either side had at least a few potential male heirs, the probability of such an event was not very high. But when we look back, the average time one family occupied a throne during that period was 150 to 200 years. So this was a long term option that became ever more valuable to either party as time progressed. And as the option gained in value so did the partnership, tying the Habsburgs ever closer to the Luxemburgs.

Beyond these tangible shifts, Rudolf triggered a mental and legal shift for the House of Habsburg that would be even more significant than the Stephansdom, the university and inheritance option.

In 1358 or 1359 Rudolf’s librarians “discovered” some remarkable ancient documents deep in the bowels of the ducal archives. In total these were five documents.

The oldest dates to October 4, 1058. In it the emperor Henry IV confirms the existence of certain privileges that have been awarded to the dukes of Austria by  -drumroll- the emperors Julius Caesar and Nero. And given such letters are of such august provenance, here they are in their entirety (quote):

“We, Julius Caesar, Imperator and Priest of the Gods, we, supreme ruler of the imperial land and Augustus, we, sustainer of the entire world, grant Roman citizenship and our peace to the eastern march, the land and its inhabitants. We command you, by the strength of our triumph, to obey our uncle, the senator, because we have given you to him and his heirs and descendants as a fief to be held in perpetuity [….]

We grant him and his successors all the benefits of the aforementioned Eastern Lands. Furthermore, we appoint our uncle and all his successors as advisors to the most secret Roman council, so that from now on no important business or cause shall be undertaken without his knowledge.

Given at Rome, capital of the world, on Friday, in the first year of our reign and the first year of the gold tax.”

And here is the second letter

“We, Nero, friend of the gods and propagator of their faith, preceptor of the power of Rome, emperor, Caesar, and Augustus. We have agreed with our entire senate that the land of the Eastern March should be held in esteem above all other lands, because it and its inhabitants are praiseworthy above all those who are subjects of the Roman Empire.

 Therefore, we declare that land to be granted our eternal peace and be exempt from all taxes and censuses that have been or will be imposed in the future by imperial power or by us or our successors or by anyone else. We also desire that the same land remain permanently free. We also decree by Roman authority that no adversity shall befall the aforementioned land from anyone. If anyone should act contrary to this, as soon as he has done so, he shall be under the ban of the Roman Empire and shall never be released from it.

Given at Lateran on the day of the great god Mars.” End quote

In the subscript the emperor Henry IV explains that after translating these imperial letters from the pagan language into Latin he was so impressed, he passed control of the archbishopric of Salzburg and ownership of the immensely rich abbey of Lorsch to duke Henry II of Austria.

Right

The next charter dated September 17, 1158 was even more expansive. In it the emperor Barbarossa granted the dukes of Austria in 17 articles the indivisibility of their territory, automatic inheritance of the duchy by the first born, including the right to pass it through the female line, the monopoly over jurisdiction without appeal to imperial courts, no obligation to appear at imperial diets or support the emperor militarily or financially, full control over the church in Austria etc., etc., pp.

Effectively Barbarossa allowed Austria to enjoy all benefits of participation in the empire without any of the obligations. And to mark this special status, the duke of Austria was named a Palatinus Archidux, an imperial paladin and arch duke, who had to have precedence at all official events, sitting to the right of the emperor, wearing a ducal hat adorned with an eastern crown. If you look at the artwork for this episode, you can see Rudolf wearing this very special hat.

The next three documents are dated to the reigns of emperor Frederick II and King Rudolf I and confirmed the previous two after adding some further rights and privileges.

What an amazing find! Final proof that Austria and therefore its rulers were exceptional. Their endorsement, even descent from Caesars uncle gave them a pedigree none of the princely families ion the empire could match. They have been granted not just full autonomy by the great emperors of antiquity but also a permanent seat on the council, and no important decisions could be taken without consulting them.

So astonishing were these far reaching privileges, some people had doubts about the veracity of in particular the letters from Caesar and Nero. When the emperor Karl IV was asked to confirm these privileges, he sent copies to one of the 14th century most learned men, Francesco Petrarca, to check them out. Petrarca zoomed in on the imperial letters. His answer was not very flattering. He called them “such ridiculous forgeries, they must have come from either an “arch-jester, a bellowing ox, or a screaming donkey”. But he did not say that the document itself was a forgery, only that the chancellor of the emperor Henry IV way back in the 11th century who had included them into the charter, had been duped by a tremendously bad hustler.

Petrarch was not only one of the foremost scholars of Roman antiquity, he was also very much attached to his head. And such an important appendix could easily be lost if one accuses the duke, excuse me, palatine archduke of Austria of forgery. Much better and equally effective to claim some long dead scribe had been had by an unknown and equally very dead scoundrel.

When people refer to the privilegium maius, which is the name these documents are known by today, they usually describe it as a reaction to the snub of being left out in the list of Prince electors in Karl IV’s Golden Bull. And there was certainly an element of that here. The insistence on being enfeoffed at home whilst sitting atop a horse rather than kneeling before the emperor, the focus on the seating plan and the title of archduke, complete with special crown, feels a bit like sour grapes.

And I think I did describe it in such terms as well when I first mentioned it in episode 161.

But upon reflection and reading the actual text, it becomes clear that Rudolf pursued some tangible political objectives with this forgery that go well beyond the restoration of his injured pride.

The Privilegium Maius is based on a genuine privilege issued by Barbarossa in 1158, the so-called Privilegium Minus. There the dukes of Austria were already granted far reaching privileges and significant independence from the empire. Rudolf expanded this charter, adding things like primogeniture, full inheritability in the female line, full exemption from imperial courts, sovereign-like autonomy and the right to appoint bishops. And all these privileges were then to be applied to possessions outside Austria as well. As we will see, these provisions would be used by Rudolf and his successors to solidify their control of their territory. It was even used as late as 1740 to legitimize the inheritance of Maria Theresia.

When all these papers were handed to Karl IV for confirmation, he treated them, not as forgeries, but as some sort of shopping list. He granted his son in law some of the privileges he had included, but rejected others. It would be another Habsburg ruler, Friedrich III who would confirm the whole of Privilegium maius and all its components, putting it on the statue book where it remained until 1806. It was only in 1852 that it was officially recognized as a forgery.

So, as far as fakes go, this was probably one of the most consequential forgeries in European history.

That being said, the Privilegium Maius is not just about status and privileges, it is also about the way the Habsburgs saw themselves.

It is not unusual, or arguably even necessary for a ruling family to have an origin myth that lifts them above mere mortals. The more extreme versions of that were the Merovingians who traced themselves to a mythical sea monster, Julius Caesar who claimed descent from Venus and the emperors of Japan tracing themselves to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. In Christian Europe the descent from gods was replaced by emphasizing saints in the family tree, think Saint Louis for the French, Saint Stephen for the Hungarians, Edward the Confessor for the English, St. Olaf for the Norwegians and St. Wenceslaus for the Bohemians. Charlemagne, though not an official saint in the catholic church performed a similar function for the Holy Roman Emperors. Lesser houses did the same if they were lucky to have a suitable ancestor.

The Habsburgs had the problem that they had only recently risen to prominence and none of the their members had yet lived up to the basic standards of sainthood. In fact the only member of the family who got close was the very last Austrian emperor Charles I, the one whose heart lies in the chimney of the Holy House in Muri.

So, in the absence of one of their own, the Habsburgs appropriated Leopold of Babenberg, from the family that had ruled Austria from its inception until 1246. Unfortunately for the Habsburgs, they had zero blood relationship to the Babenbergers. But that did not stop them pretending they had. Many Habsburgs were given Leopold and Friedrich as first names, names that had been dominant in the Babenbergers family and had not appeared in the Habsburg family tree before.

So far, so normal. But then the Habsburgs go several steps further.

It is around the same time that Rudolf’s forgers made up ancient charters that an anonymous writer compiled the “Austrian Chronicle of the 95 Rulers”. In it we hear that Austria was founded, by the Jewish knight Abraham of Temonaria, 810 years after the flood, which equates to roughly 1500 BC. From then on, Austria and its ruling family were at the epicenter of European history. In an unbroken line that included Jewish patriarchs, the roman emperors and the Babenberger dukes of Austria, the right to rule the known world had come down to the House of Habsburg.

Such genealogical romances were not unusual at the time, remember that Barbarossa was seen as a descendant of the kings of Troy, but this tale is unique in its mix of biblical, ancient roman and relatively recent Austrian history. And they do not skip anyone. Austria, which the ancients called Noricum, was allegedly founded by Norix, the son of Hercules. Vienna was called that because Caesar had founded the city and had stayed there for 2 years, a Biennium and so forth and so forth.

This may all look like ridiculous overcompensation by a family that had risen fast, was seen as nouveau riche by its peers, and now found itself in decline.

But there is also another way to look at it. When Rudolf IV died 1365, barely 27 years old, he had laid the foundation for the sense of exceptionalism that will permeate the family from here on out. And he had given them the physical embodiment of that exceptionality, the title and headgear of an archduke, a title that does not exist in any other context and instantly identifies its bearer as a Habsburgs.

It is in this way that Rudolf was right when he called himself “the founder”. He may not have founded the dynasty in the sense of being its ancestor, but he founded the notion that being a Habsburg was something exceptional, something that goes beyond just being an important prince.

Rudolf left no sons, so that the role of the head of the family had to go to his brothers, Albrecht, called “with the plait” and Leopold, called the Just. Both were teenagers at the time and almost immediately quarreled. These facts, their youth and their quarrel sparked a last Wittelsbach attempt to recapture the Tyrol which the brothers just about managed to rebuff. Despite this joint success they kept going at each other, until in 1379 they divided the Habsburg lands amongst themselves. That was in direct violation of the Privilegium Maius, a long list of ordinances issued by previous archdukes and an explicit agreement made between the three brothers. It seems the notion of a common Habsburg mission had not yet had enough time to gestate into a tool that kept the family together.

And like these division often did, it dropped the family down another notch in the European power stakes. The other was the campaign that on July 9th, 1386, brought the younger and more impetuous brother, Leopold, to a hill near the Sempach lake where he would bring about the birth of a nation and the loss of his ancestral homelands. That we will discuss next week.

And before I go, just a big thank you to all of you who are supporting the show. Your encouragement in all its forms, not just financial, is what keeps this podcast going. If you want to become a patron, go to my website, historyofthegermans.com/support and sign up there. And let me know If you wish to have your full name read out to be there for eternity, or if you prefer just first name and initial.

Last thing, if you want to go into more detail on the things I mentioned or hear them in a different context, go to the episode website – the link is in the show notes. I have included hyperlinks to previous episodes where we discussed these topics, namely episodes 152 about Margarete Maultasch, 156 and 159 about the rise of Karl IV, 160/161 about the Golden Bull and 196 to 199 about the decline of the Wittelsbachs.

And with that, lets reconvene next week and go to Switzerland….

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

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

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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Now back to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

And then comes the big one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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