Rudolf

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The beginnings of the Swiss Confederation

“They had grown somewhat thoughtful; then without warning it began again, horrible, as though the thing had sprouted wings and was riding toward them on the backs of fiery monsters, flaming and shrieking, a long, drawn-out cry: Here we come! It truly seemed as if an underworld were suddenly seized with the desire to break out through the hard earth. The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as through from a hell, not the heavens.

The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; . . . lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding–just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage.

There’ll never be anything to equal the battering with which these light mountain and valley men, driven and elevated by their fury, now battered their way into the clumsy, despicable wall, smashing and ripping it apart like tigers ripping apart a defenceless herd of cows. . . . Those on horseback were flung down like cardboard, with a crack like that of a paper bag blown up and burst between one’s hands. . . . Heads were scuffed by blows, appeared only grazed, yet proved to be bashed in. Blow followed blow, horses were knocked down, the fighting grew more and more frenzied, more violent, the duke was slain; it would have been a miracle had he not been. Those striking accompanied their blows with shrieks, as though these were only right, as though killing alone was not enough, a mere half-measure. End quote

That is how the Swiss writer Robert Walser described the battle of Sempach on July 9th, 1386, the battle that broke Habsburg power in their ancient homeland and paved the way for Switzerland to come together.

What we will do in this episode is look at how it came to pass that an army of Swiss militia defeated Archduke Leopold III, one of the most accomplished military men of his time, a man willing to make his knights fight on foot, with lances, rather than run mindlessly into a wall of arrows, and how he still lost.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 205 – Sempach – the death of a Duke and the Birth of a Nation, also episode 3 of Season 11 – The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

“They had grown somewhat thoughtful; then without warning it began again, horrible, as though the thing had sprouted wings and was riding toward them on the backs of fiery monsters, flaming and shrieking, a long, drawn-out cry: Here we come! It truly seemed as if an underworld were suddenly seized with the desire to break out through the hard earth. The sound was like a black, gaping abyss, and the sun now appeared to be shining from a darkened sky, glaring down more dazzling than ever, but as through from a hell, not the heavens.

The rushing crowd, apparently full of passion, drew closer. And the knights stood their ground; suddenly they seemed fused together. Iron men held out their lances; . . . lance upon lance stuck out so mindlessly, firm and unyielding–just the thing, you might think, for such an impetuous, raging human breast to impale itself on. Here, an idiotic wall of spikes; there, people half-covered with shirts. Here, the art of war, the most prejudiced there is; there, people seized with helpless rage.

There’ll never be anything to equal the battering with which these light mountain and valley men, driven and elevated by their fury, now battered their way into the clumsy, despicable wall, smashing and ripping it apart like tigers ripping apart a defenceless herd of cows. . . . Those on horseback were flung down like cardboard, with a crack like that of a paper bag blown up and burst between one’s hands. . . . Heads were scuffed by blows, appeared only grazed, yet proved to be bashed in. Blow followed blow, horses were knocked down, the fighting grew more and more frenzied, more violent, the duke was slain; it would have been a miracle had he not been. Those striking accompanied their blows with shrieks, as though these were only right, as though killing alone was not enough, a mere half-measure. End quote

That is how the Swiss writer Robert Walser described the battle of Sempach on July 9th, 1386, the battle that broke Habsburg power in their ancient homeland and paved the way for Switzerland to come together.

What we will do in this episode is look at how it came to pass that an army of Swiss militia defeated Archduke Leopold III, one of the most accomplished military men of his time, a man willing to make his knights fight on foot, with lances, rather than run mindlessly into a wall of arrows, and how he still lost.

But before we start a quick reminder that this show is advertising free. No really, you will not hear me singing the praises of some product carefully curated for just your specific needs, or more likely not useful to you at all. Such luxury is ultimately a function of the generosity of a small but much appreciated band of patrons who have signed up on historyofthegermans.com/support.

This week our special thanks go to Chris O., Alexi G., the always supportive Mike F., Walter E., Stewart Walker, Sergey S. and Simona who have already signed up.

Support the Show – Become a PAtron

And with that, back to the show.

This season is entitled the Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg. And since here the fall comes before the rise, it is the fall that we start with. If one tries to understand why the Habsburgs were able to keep a multicultural and multilingual empire together for 400 years, an empire that had not one but two capitals in Vienna and Madrid plus several smaller centres in Naples, Milan, Prague, Budapest and Brussels. An empire that at its height, spanned the globe and surrounded its greatest rival, the kingdom of France.

And all that these disparate territories, from Lima to Lwow had in common was not one individual king or emperor but the unflinching grip of a family that ruled them well into the 19th century when nationalist movement had long declared their existence obsolete.

To understand what made the Habsburg capable of such an unprecedented feat, it may help to understand the 150 years they spent in the wilderness, far from thrones and the vertiginous heights of European policy.

When we talk about the fall of empires and dynasties, it is very rarely a case of wile-e-coyote speeding over the cliff and crashing down. Great power blocks do not collapse straight into insignificance, they skid down the mountainside, occasionally grabbing hold of a boulder to rise up for a moment, before the next avalanche dislodges them again, until after decades or generations and after innumerable attempts at stabilisation, they hit rock bottom. We will see when rock bottom is for the Habsburgs, my best guess at this stage of my research is 1471, when Friedrich III sees his duchy of Austria overrun by his enemies and has to seek refuge in the empire, an empire that had largely forgotten about him and that he had not visited for 28 long years.

We have already watched the Habsburgs losing their footing for the first time, when king Albrecht I was murdered by his nephew John Parricida. One moment they were en-route to become the de facto hereditary rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and the next, they were just another ambitious family in the game of musical chairs that were the imperial elections in the 14th century. But they were still one of the most powerful of these families. In season 8 when we talked about the period between the Interregnum and the Golden Bull, I described it as a three-body problem where the Luxemburgs, the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs were roughly of equal power and influence, constantly ganging up two against one.

But that three-body problem went away with the rise of Karl IV to the imperial throne and his ruthless expansion of the Luxemburg powerbase from Bohemia westwards into Brandenburg and the Upper Palatinate whilst collecting options on Hungary and Poland. Neither Habsburg nor Wittelsbach could compete with that any longer.

A further relegation was the exclusion of the Habsburgs from the Seven Electors in the Golden Bull of 1356. Much has been made of this, though it is important to remember that neither the dukes of Austria nor the counts of Habsburgp had ever been part of the college of electors that had formed since around 1273. So not adding them was maybe not that much of a snub as it might look. Still we know that Rudolf the founder, the head of the family in 1356 took umbrage and forged the Privilegium Maius that claimed and – thanks to confirmation by the emperor – established a unique rank for the Habsburgs as Archdukes with wide ranging privileges in their own lands, privileges that made them more like kings then feudal vassals.

So, when Rudolf IV passed away prematurely in 1365, the House of Habsburg was certainly not what it was in 1308, but by no means down and out. They were a major force in the empire, holders of most august titles and – most importantly – united. They ruled Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, the Tyrol and their ancestral lands along both shores of the upper Rhine from Schaffhausen to north of Freiburg im Breisgau as well as much of German speaking Switzerland.

Rudolf’s death had come at an inopportune moment. He had been just 27 years old and his marriage to the daughter of emperor Karl IV had remained childless. Hence the duchy went to his brothers, Albrecht, aged 16 and Leopold, aged 14 at the time. The Wittelsbachs used this to make a bid for the Tyrol they had ruled until fairly recently. But the brothers defeated duke Stephen of Lower Bavaria and Tyrol stayed in the family.

Between the brothers a clear division of responsibilities emerged. Albrecht, called “with the plaid” was the elder and interested in administration and finance. Leopold was the military man. So, it was Leopold, the younger one, who achieved the victory in Tyrol at the ripe old age of 17.

Albrecht (with the Plaid)

Such a division of responsibilities could be a recipe for astonishing success, think Augustus and Agrippa or Bismarck and von Moltke (the elder). But it did not work that well in this case. Leopold believed his military prowess demanded a higher status than that of junior co-ruler.

Leopold III

So, contrary to the clear provisions left by Rudolf the Founder and his predecessors, Albrecht and Leopold agreed to divide up the Habsburg lands. Leopold received the periphery, that means Carinthia, Carniola, bits of Frioul as well as the Tyrol and the ancestral lands along the Upper Rhine. Albrecht took Austria and Styria. Still, the break was not designed to be permanent. The brothers swore to act in unison. Every member of the family was allowed to use all the family titles, including that of archduke and in case one branch died out, the other would inherit their lands before any other claimant.

Whilst Albrecht focused on consolidating his power over Austria and Styria, Leopold went off conquering. And he was moderately successful, expanding in two directions. He moved southwards and acquired Trieste. The city actually submitted voluntarily to his rule in order to get rid of the oppressive Venetians. Trieste gave the Habsburgs access to the sea and became the homeport of the Austrian navy – seriously, such a thing existed.

But his main objective was to build a connection between the two main Habsburg possessions, Austria in the East and the Swabian ancestral lands in the West. One important first step had been done by his brother Rudolf who had established a hold over Tyrol.

The next important acquisition was the county of Feldkirch, better known as Vorarlberg, an important road connection to lake Constance before it became a vehicle to extract large sums of money from thrill-seeking German and English skiers. Given Salzburg too had come under indirect Austrian rule as per the Privilegium Maius, the Habsburgs now possessed a land bridge all the way from Vienna to the eastern shore of Lake Constance. And with their Ancestral lands starting around the western shore of the lake, the grand strategic objective of a contiguous territory was within reach.

All that was needed to be brought in now were the lands south of Lake Constance and the left bank of the Rhine. And to save you scrambling for a map, let me tell you what the land south of lake Constance and the left bank of the Rhine is called today: The Swiss Confederation.

In 1379 when Leopold was put in charge the Habsburgs already had extensive possessions in this region. After all, the family had come from the Aargau near Brugg in the first place. They had replaced the former major players in the region, the Kyburgs and Zaehringer, they held castles and advocacies all throughout these lands. There were two free imperial cities here, Zurich and Berne, but even within those, the family had certain rights and supporters.

But recent generations of the family had let things slip. They had lost the position as imperial reeve over the cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden. The defeat of an Austrian force at Morgarten in 1315 had further undermined their position. The cities, including Lucerne and Zug which they owned outright were less and less willing to yield to the Habsburg administrators’ demands.

Our man, archduke Leopold’s job was hence to defend the existing rights and reclaim those lost in the previous decades. And that meant specifically to take charge of the main cities in the region, Zurich, Basel, Lucerne, Solothurn and maybe even the mighty Berne. Each of these cities had a faction that supported the Habsburgs, usually made up of the long-distance traders who believed a mighty lord was better able to ensure the safety of the roads and the Alpine passes.

As one can imagine, Leopold’s expansionist policy did not remain unopposed. To understand this opposition, we have to take a closer look at this thing that would become known as the Swiss Confederation.

And I am afraid much, if not all the stories about the founding of the Swiss confederation are made up. Wilhelm Tell, did not exist, the Rütlischwur, did not take place, at least not in the way and at the time it is usually reported, the Bundesbrief may be a backdated, Arnold von Winkelried, also not a real person.

I personally think this is a pity. I would have loved to go on about

“One people will we be, — a band of brothers;
No danger, no distress shall sunder us.
We will be free men as our fathers were,
And sooner welcome death than live as slaves.
We will rely on God‘s almighty arm,
And never quail before the power of man.”

And to then go on to “Through this narrow pass he must come”.

But sadly, every single history of Switzerland I have read is adamant, that none of this ever happened. But that does not mean that the emergence of the Swiss confederation, which very much does exist, is not a great story. Only that the crucial moments weren’t 1291 or 1315, but 1386 and 1393.

But I am racing ahead.

We did already have a brief look into the beginnings of the Swiss confederation in episode 150 – Morgarten and Mühldorf” but let me just briefly recap.

When the Gotthard pass opened up in the 13th century, life for the people living in the alpine valleys on both sides of the pass changed fundamentally. Having been a forgotten land of subsistence farmers and herders, far from the centres of commerce and politics, they found themselves suddenly in close communication with Italy and southern Germany.

Recognising the strategic importance of the new route, the emperor Frederick II granted the lands immediately to the north of the pass, the cantons of Schwyz and Uri, possibly also Nidwalden, immediacy. In other words, these lands became part of the imperial demesne and were administrated by an imperial governor, a Vogt in German. This Vogt was initially a member of the House of Habsburg.

The inhabitants of these cantons were in the main peasants. There was a local aristocracy, though less numerous than in other parts of the empire. Village communities were close knit and enjoyed a high degree of autonomy due to the specific conditions of life in the mountains. This hostile environment required building paths and bridges, maintaining forests to protect against avalanches and required holding a food reserve for the harsh winters. All this was provided by the local community, not by a feudal lord.

Once the pass became a major thoroughfare, the locals found additional sources of income in transporting wares across and offering hospitality to travellers. And they were introduced to lucrative job opportunities far away.

Travellers told them about the incessant wars between the cities and lords in Northern Italy, wars that were fought mainly by hired mercenaries. The great condottiere were constantly on the lookout for sturdy young men, willing to have a go at anyone they told them to hack at. And these men from the alpine valleys were ideal for the job. They were used to physical exertion and violence, like almost everyone in the Late Middle Ages. But what made them so great was that they had no allegiance to any of the parties involved in the wars in Northern Italy. They did not care particularly for any of the cities; they had no link to the emperor and not even worry much about the pope and his excommunications.

The historian Volker Reinhard places the beginnings of the Swiss Confederation into this context. According to him the first compact amongst the tree cantons, the Bundesbrief of 1291 was actually produced 20 years later in 1308, and it wasn’t initiated by the people of the cantons, but by the emperor and his Vogt.

The key event according to him was the journey of emperor Henry VII to Rome. Henry VII was keen to have access to the famous fighting men from the mountains to cut his way south. Which is why he appointed one of his generals, Wernher von Homberg as imperial reeve for the three cantons. Von Homberg did indeed exist and was one of the Condottiere who made their living in the perennial Italian wars. Reinhard then goes on to say that Homberg was interested in a permanent arrangement between the three territories that would make it easier him to raise large contingents of soldiers. He therefore not only allowed them to draft the Bundesbrief but actually encouraged it. And as we heard last week, forging and predating documents was commonplace at the time. So, it is quite possible that they changed the date of the agreement in order to give the document added weight and credibility.

Werner von Homberg

Irrespective of when and why the arrangement was made, it is apparent that from the 14th century onwards the three cantons coordinated their actions and entered into further alliances jointly.

This alliance was first tested when a Habsburg army came up to the valleys to avenge an attack of the men of Schwyz against the Abbey of Einsiedeln. The Habsburg expeditionary force found itself defeated at the battle of Morgarten in 1315. This was certainly a crucial event in as much as a chivalric army of knights was beaten by a force that comprised mostly of peasants. What made this possible was in large part the topography, as the armoured riders travelled along a narrow road along a lake whilst the Swiss threw rocks and logs at them from the cliffs above. It is also possible that they used halberds for the first time, a weapon that would become a very effective tool to dislodge and then incapacitate armoured riders.

Battle of Morgarten

In the years after Morgarten, the Habsburgs were preoccupied with their war against Ludwig the Bavarian over the succession in the empire, leaving little room for revenge against these rebellious mountain people.

By the old notion that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, Ludwig the Bavarian supported the three cantons against the Habsburgs. He showered them lavishly with all sorts of freedoms, and, crucially, when their reeve, Wernher von Homberg died, Ludwig did not appoint a new reeve. As a consequence, the three cantons became de facto free to organise themselves as they wished with only the emperor as their overlord. And so, they did. They gradually removed what existed in terms of noble privileges and dues, so that by 1380 these three cantons consisted almost entirely of free men and women.

But the cantons weren’t really in anyone’s focus, unless one was trying to recruit soldiers. Where the Habsburgs and in particular duke Leopold III spent their energy was in the cities. These were a lot richer and a lot easier to control than the wild men and women of the valleys.

The Swiss cities differed in structure quite considerably from the cities in the other parts of the empire. As we discussed in episode 160 “the Golden Bull of 1356”, one of the basic rules of the Holy Roman Empire was that the cities were banned from inviting local lords to become citizens. The point of this prohibition was to stop cities from acquiring large territories. This is what had happened in Northern Italy in the 11th and 12th century and had made the communes powerful enough to defy and ultimately defeat the emperors.

The way these Italian cities had acquired their territories, the Contado, was by co-opting the local lords as citizens. The lord would hand over political control of his lands and in exchange was given a position on the city council, whilst keeping the income from his estates.

The Swiss cities defied the ban on co-opting local lords, the so-called Pfahlbürger. Which is how in particular Bern and Zurich could become veritable city states with territories that rivalled many principalities.

We should not believe though that this process was all polite and gentlemanly. It wasn’t quite the case that the city council would send a gold-rimmed invitation card to the local knight who would be so delighted, he immediately signed up. What preceded these takeovers was either that the local lord had run out of cash and had pawned his castle to the city, or the city had marched its militia before the castle gates.

These city militias were often well equipped and well trained. In 1375 the French lord Enguerrand de Coucy, the key protagonist in Barbara Tuchmann’s Distant Mirror, led a strong force of hardened French and Gascon mercenaries into the territory of the city of Berne. On Christmas day the city militia attacked them and slaughtered 800 of these veterans of the Hundred Year’s war. These city armies were not to be underestimated.

Guglerkrieg – the berne militia destroys the army of Enguerrand de Coucy

And these militias existed not only in the free Imperial cities of Bern and Zurich. Even those who were not, like Lucerne, Fribourg, and Solothurn embarked on a similar expansion policy and established sizeable military forces.

This expansion policy brought them into conflict with a) the powerful families of the region, in particular the Habsburgs and, on their western flank, the counts of Savoy, and, b) the nobles of Swabia who had formed associations to push back against the threat of being slowly but surely dragged under by the cities.

As we go through the 14th century these two developments, the expansion of the cities at the expense of the Habsburgs and the Habsburg efforts to connect their lands into one contiguous territory from Vienna to Basel headed for an inevitable clash.

It could have kicked off already at the Basel’s Ugly carnival of 1376. Basel lies exactly at one of the connection points between the Habsburg territories in Alsace, Breisgau and Switzerland. Hence one of Leopold’s objectives was to extend his control of the city. In that he had to deal with the opposition not just of the city council, but also of the bishop of Basel.

The bishop was comparatively easy, as he was broke and so Leopold was able to buy him out. Through this arrangement he acquired Kleinbasel, the part of the city on the opposite side of the river. In February 1376 Leopold invited his noble friends to Basel for a grand tournament. And since he needed the space, he demanded to use the main square in the city itself. The council, which comprised a large pro-Habsburg faction, permitted the tournament to go ahead.

But things went pear shaped quite quickly. The tournament took place as part of the carnival celebrations. Carnival for those who are not familiar is the massive party that takes place in catholic countries on the last few days before lent. Given the prospect of 40 days of restricted food choices and moderation in alcohol, carnival tends to be an exceedingly debauched affair. This is a medieval carnival, not carnival in Venice with masks and baroque music, or Brasilian Samba floats. This is – depending on stamina – a four-to-six-day bacchanal of drinking, dancing, mor drinking, more dancing, and – should there still be some energy left – doing some naughty stuff.

It isn’t hard to imagine what happened when a drunk crowd is confronted with dukes and knights prancing about on their horses in the market square as if they owned it. The mob stormed the enclosures and the drinking halls of the nobles. Duke Leopold barely escaped on a barge across the river and many of his guests were apprehended and locked up in the city hall for their protection. Still dozens of knights and their retainers lay dead.

The city council blamed the whole incident on bridge and tunnel people and hanged two of them to show its contrition. Nevertheless, duke Leopold procured an imperial ban over the city, which he then leveraged into a full takeover of the place.

In the meantime, the cities and the cantons had moved ever closer together in order to protect themselves against external forces, namely Leopold, but also the counts of Savoy. Ever since Morgarten, the different cities and cantons have signed agreements and alliances. This again, is nothing unusual. Similar things happened amongst the cities and territorial princes of southern Germany as well.

In 1370, one of these arrangements, the so-called Pfaffenbrief, took on a different quality. In it the three cantons, Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden as well as the cities of Zurich, Lucerne, and Zug agreed a permanent alliance that was to bind them above and beyond other existing obligations. Previous arrangements had always been made for a fixed period and subject to pre-existing third party arrangement. Under the Pfaffenbrief, Lucerne, which was nominally a Habsburg city, shed its obligations to the Austrians in their entirety and instead aligned the exercise of political power with the other signatories.

This was a new type of arrangement. It was permanent and it took priority over all other agreements. Its participants were no longer just allies, but small c confederates. The Swiss constitutional lawyers regard this document as the foundational step towards the Swiss Confederation.

Surprisingly the Habsburgs did not react to this move. They had lost control of Lucerne and also Zug, where their position had been stronger, but still, they did not budge. That was in part due to the death of Rudolf the Founder in 1365 and the subsequent wars over the Tyrol and the squabbling between the brothers.

When these conflicts had been resolved It became time for Leopold III to bring this conflict to a resolution. Basel had been a major success which he followed up in the early 1380s with the acquisition of two counties near Berne.

It was now clear to everyone where this train was heading. In response Berne, Solothurn, Zurich and Zug entered into an alliance of the traditional temporary and limited kind with a number of southern German cities, promising each other support in case of attack. Leopold in turn firmed up his links with the Swabian nobility on both banks of the Rhine.

The signing of the Konstance accord with the German cities encouraged the Swiss to strike first. Zurich attacked Rappertswil, Zug the city of St. Andreas. Lucerne co-opted the city of Sempach. All of these had been Habsburg possessions.  Now the war was on.

Leopold III called upon all his vassals, from Tyrol, from Alsace and the Breisgau, he wrote to his allies, the knightly associations in Swabia and the Alps and hired crossbowmen from Italy and Flanders. They were all to gather in his city of Brugg in the shadow of the ancient family home, the Habichtsburg. As always numbers are unreliable, but the most likely figure is about 3,000 men, all rearing to teach these peasants and townsfolk a lesson they should never forget.

The first town to be educated in the ways of the feudal world, was Lucerne.

Lucerne immediately called on the men of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden to come to their aid. Which they did. It seems the other cities who had signed the recent alliance did not appear on the battlefield, or in the case of the German cities, only as observers and mitigators.

There are two ways to describe the battle that followed. The first one is from the contemporary sources. These say that a battle had taken place and note who won. That, I am afraid is not suitable podcast material.

Therefore, here comes the more entertaining, but maybe less accurate version:

Once Leopold had spotted the enemy in an open field near the town of Sempach, he asked the gros of his knights to dismount and form a strong square, protected by a wall of lances. Within the square the crossbowmen were to release their bolts into the mass of enemies. Meanwhile two detachments of heavy cavalry positioned themselves on the flanks and, once the enemy had engaged the centre, were to attack the Swiss from the sides. Dismounting the knights and integrating infantry into the strategy was a major move away from the gung-ho approach at Crecy, Poitiers and Mühldorf. But then the Habsburgs owed much of their success to their willingness to bend the rules of chivalry when necessary. Plus, this was a tactic that had led French forces to victory over another army of townspeople, those of Flanders, just four years earlier.

And initially the plan worked. The Swiss fierce attacks of the Habsburg line ran again and again into the unyielding wall of lances. And out of the square the crossbowmen sent their deadly bolts into the lightly armoured forces of Lucerne and his allies. The story goes that when wave after wave had been broken by the Habsburg resolve, a bear of a man stepped forward, Arnold von Winkelried.  Entrusting his wife and children to his comrades he rushes forward and grabbed a dozen or more of the enemy spikes, impaling himself. And as he fell, so did the spears buried in his chest. Over the hero’s body stepped his comrades, cutting deep in the duke’s phalanx.

Their line broken, the square formation fell apart. The Habsburg lion went down with his standard-bearer. Duke Leopold who had been in the centre of the square seized the flag from the dying hand of his vassal to once more rally his troops, but it was too late. His forces turning, he was offered the opportunity to flee, but refused uttering: “shall I, Leopold, look on from afar as my brave knights fight and die. Here in my country, and with my people, I will either conquer or perish”. His dead body was found the next morning, together with 400 noble knights whose names the victors carefully recorded on the walls of a chapel they erected over the battlefield.

Whether or not this was the way it unfolded, we will never know. The earliest detailed descriptions of the battle date from 1480, almost a century later. Arnold von Winkelried existence is even less likely, since his deed bears suspicious resemblance to much older Germanic folktales and a man of this name appeared in the 16th century as a hero of the Swiss guards.

But what is fact is that the forces of Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden defeated the army of duke Leopold of Austria, and devastatingly so. In its wake the nobility in the south was much diminished. Many families found their sons and heirs did not come back and lost their lands to territorial princes, including most cynically, the Habsburgs themselves.

Habsburg power in what is today Switzerland was largely wiped out. Not immediately, but the cities, Zurich, Berne, Lucerne, Zug, and Solothurn continued their expansionist policy. Basel shook off Habsburg control. The local lords, who could no longer hope for meaningful Habsburg assistance caved, handed over political control and became citizens. In 1388 there was one more battle between the Swiss and the Habsburgs, which the Habsburgs again lost.  In 1393 the existing union of Uri, Schwyz, Nidwalden, Lucerne, Zug and Zurich added Berne, Solothurn and Glarus. This “Old Federation” would last until 1481 and in that period would push back Habsburg influence all the way to the Rhine River, taking even their ancestral seat, the Habsburg itself.

Leopold III’s body was brought to the grand abbey of Königsfelden, originally built as a memorial to the murdered king Albrecht I. Whilst the Swiss regard Sempach as one of the greatest battles in their history, the Habsburgs developed a very different narrative. As they saw it the great general, brave fighter and chivalric knight had been murdered through treachery by an uncouth rabble. His heroic refusal to be rescued from the battlefield made him into a martial idol. Over time the memory of Leopold III got mashed up with that of saint Leopold, the 12th century Babenberger duke the Habsburgs had already incorporated into their made-up family history.

But apart from expanding the family lore, the death of Leopold III was a catastrophe. He left behind four sons, four sons who did not get on with each other. Nor did they get on with their uncle and later their cousin from the other branch of the family. So next week we will meet a whole bunch of new Austrian archdukes, William the Courteous, Leopold the Fat, Ernest the iron-willed and Frederick with the empty pockets. A further division of the territory was at hand. The Habsburgs were heading downhill at speed. As I said, in this family it is the fall that comes before the rise.

I hope you come along for the tumble. And if you want to go back to some of the wider background of this story, check out episodes 150 about Morgarten, 152 about Margarete Maultasch and the acquisition of Carinthia and Tyrol, 166 about the Great Schism which overlaid all that went on at the time and 165 on king Wenceslaus the Lazy who was at least formally in charge of the empire at that time.

And if you find all of this worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support, where you can find various options to keep this show on the road and advertising free.

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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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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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The Beginnings of the Habsburg Dynasty

In the small town of Muri, about halfway between Zurich and Lucerne stands a grand baroque abbey. And when I say grand, I mean seriously grand, St. Blasien kind of grand. Its central dome is to this day the largest such structure in Switzerland and its interior, created between 1743 and 1750 is a perfect example of the Rococo style. If, like me, you always associated Switzerland with Calvinism and its abhorrence of decoration, such a structure may come as a surprise.  An interior thronging with naked putto’s holding up coats of arms whilst playing wind instruments is something you are more likely to associate with Bavaria or Austria.

And with Austria, you may not be so far off the mark.

To the right of the main altar, facing the chancel you see two kneeling figures, a man and a woman. Above it reads – obviously in Latin quote: “In this basilica lies Radebot, the first count of Habsburg and his wife Ita, the duchess of Lorraine and founder of this monastery, as well es their son Adalbert, their daughter Richeza” and several others.

As always with the Habsburgs, there is a debate whether these people were indeed buried here, whether it was Ita or Radebot’s brother Werner who had founded the monastery, whether Ita was indeed a daughter of  the duke of Lorraine and so forth. What is fact is that Radobot built a castle, known as the castle of the Hawk above the nearby city of Brugg in around 1030. Hawk, in German is Habicht and the Habichtsburg became abbreviated to Habsburg and that became the family name. Who Radobot’s father was and how he acquired his lands and castles is ultimately unknown, making him the oldest known ancestor of Europe’s most enduring dynasty.

If you leave the main church at Muri and turn left you find a small chapel dedicated to our Mother of Loreto. The cult of Loreto is based on the belief that the house where Maria was visited by the archangel Gabriel and where Jesus grew, up was transported to Loreto in Italy by angels in 1291 when the crusader state in the Holy Land had collapsed. Quickly a basilica sprung up where the modest brick building had miraculously appeared on day. Soon thousands of pilgrims came hoping for healing or forgiveness available on such a holy site. Loreto inspired dozens of replicas across Europe. I saw one in Prague this summer which I very much enjoyed. And the grand abbey of Muri did not want to miss out. In 1698 the monks built their own Holy House. Like most Loreto chapels it is divided into two rooms, the virgin’s living room with an altar at its end and then behind the altar, the holy kitchen with the holy chimney.

And if you were allowed to go behind the altar and look through the metal grille into the chimney you find two vessels. One says: CAROLI AVSTRIAE IMPERATORIS AC HVNGARIAE REGIS COR IN DEO QVJESCAT and the other ZITAE AVSTRIAE IMPERATRICIS HVNGARIAE REGINAE COR INSEPERABILITER CONIVGIS CORDI IVNGATVR. Brief translation: the first says: “The heart of Charles, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, may it rest in God”. And the second “The heart of Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, be inseparably joined to the heart of her spouse.” One heart belongs to Charles I, the last of the reigning Habsburg monarchs, who abdicated in 1918 and whose body was never allowed to return to Austria, and the other to Zita, his wife, who was put to rest in the Imperial crypt in Vienna with 145 other members of the family. Only their hearts are still together.

Two couples, marking the beginning and the end of the remarkable political career of a family that ruled half of europe and a lot more for centuries. And at the same time, two couples who were deeply rooted in their religious convictions. Two very typical Habsburg couples, connected across 900 years.

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Transcript

In the small town of Muri, about halfway between Zurich and Lucerne stands a grand baroque abbey. And when I say grand, I mean seriously grand, St. Blasien kind of grand. Its central dome is to this day the largest such structure in Switzerland and its interior, created between 1743 and 1750 is a perfect example of the Rococo style. If, like me, you always associated Switzerland with Calvinism and its abhorrence of decoration, such a structure may come as a surprise.  An interior thronging with naked putto’s holding up coats of arms whilst playing wind instruments is something you are more likely to associate with Bavaria or Austria.

And with Austria, you may not be so far off the mark.

To the right of the main altar, facing the chancel you see two kneeling figures, a man and a woman. Above it reads – obviously in Latin quote: “In this basilica lies Radebot, the first count of Habsburg and his wife Ita, the duchess of Lorraine and founder of this monastery, as well es their son Adalbert, their daughter Richeza” and several others.

As always with the Habsburgs, there is a debate whether these people were indeed buried here, whether it was Ita or Radebot’s brother Werner who had founded the monastery, whether Ita was indeed a daughter of  the duke of Lorraine and so forth. What is fact is that Radobot built a castle, known as the castle of the Hawk above the nearby city of Brugg in around 1030. Hawk, in German is Habicht and the Habichtsburg became abbreviated to Habsburg and that became the family name. Who Radobot’s father was and how he acquired his lands and castles is ultimately unknown, making him the oldest known ancestor of Europe’s most enduring dynasty.

If you leave the main church at Muri and turn left you find a small chapel dedicated to our Mother of Loreto. The cult of Loreto is based on the belief that the house where Maria was visited by the archangel Gabriel and where Jesus grew, up was transported to Loreto in Italy by angels in 1291 when the crusader state in the Holy Land had collapsed. Quickly a basilica sprung up where the modest brick building had miraculously appeared on day. Soon thousands of pilgrims came hoping for healing or forgiveness available on such a holy site. Loreto inspired dozens of replicas across Europe. I saw one in Prague this summer which I very much enjoyed. And the grand abbey of Muri did not want to miss out. In 1698 the monks built their own Holy House. Like most Loreto chapels it is divided into two rooms, the virgin’s living room with an altar at its end and then behind the altar, the holy kitchen with the holy chimney.

And if you were allowed to go behind the altar and look through the metal grille into the chimney you find two vessels. One says: CAROLI AVSTRIAE IMPERATORIS AC HVNGARIAE REGIS COR IN DEO QVJESCAT and the other ZITAE AVSTRIAE IMPERATRICIS HVNGARIAE REGINAE COR INSEPERABILITER CONIVGIS CORDI IVNGATVR. Brief translation: the first says: “The heart of Charles, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, may it rest in God”. And the second “The heart of Zita, Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, be inseparably joined to the heart of her spouse.” One heart belongs to Charles I, the last of the reigning Habsburg monarchs, who abdicated in 1918 and whose body was never allowed to return to Austria, and the other to Zita, his wife, who was put to rest in the Imperial crypt in Vienna with 145 other members of the family. Only their hearts are still together.

Two couples, marking the beginning and the end of the remarkable political career of a family that ruled half of europe and a lot more for centuries. And at the same time, two couples who were deeply rooted in their religious convictions. Two very typical Habsburg couples, connected across 900 years.

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The Habsburgs make their first appearance at the top table of the European political scene more than 200 years after Radebot and Ita had founded or had not founded the great abbey at Muri. One of their descendants, Rudolf von Habsburg was elected King of the Romans in 1273. Later on Habsburg mythology will describe him as a poor count who rose to kingship on the back of merit and Christian humility. It is said that he once handed over his horse to a priest so that he could reach the dying in time for the last sacrament, an act of enormous generosity since a fully trained warhorse cost a fortune and not every priest could be trusted to bring such a valuable item back. And Rudolf, we are told, could not afford such generosity. He was a man of modest means whose simple coat drew the derision of the imperial princes draped in robes made from cloth of gold.

But these are just tales, tales told to emphasize the family’s piety and sobriety, manufactured in the great PR machine they kept humming along from their earliest days. In reality the Habsburgs were very rich, rich enough to be amongst the most significant backers of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II when he cut is way to the imperial throne in 1212. Radebot’s descendants had gained significant territories in Alsace, the Breisgau and what is today German speaking Switzerland through the usual combination of ruthlessness, smart political maneuvering and fecundity. But what had turbocharged their wealth was a bridge. This bridge across the Schöllenen Gorge was built around 1230 and opened up the Gotthard pass, then and now one of the most important and shortest Alpine crossings. The Habsburgs controlled several of the cities at the foot of the mountain, including Lucerne, and acted as vicars over the Swiss cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden which covered the northern side of the pass. Tolls from this road allowed the family to fund further conquests across the former duchy of Swabia and the kingdom of Burgundy.

Rudolf came into his inheritance when he was 22. Though the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II is still around, the whole structure is coming apart. Popes and emperors were at daggers drawn. In 1246 an antiking was elected and imperial power was fading away. This was the Interregnum and it was dog eat dog time.

Inheritances that in the past would have gone to the crown to be enfeoffed to a loyal vassal of the emperor, were now divided up amongst the most aggressive of their relatives. And Rudolf was very good and very lucky at that particular game. He did benefit from the unusual fecundity of his family which had placed sons and daughters into the bloodlines of practically anyone who was anyone in the south west of the empire. Which meant that when other families, less blessed with powerful loins, expired, there was always a Habsburg claim in the mix. During his career as a serial heir, several important families were dying out or weakened. One was a lateral branch of the Habsburgs whose possessions he managed to consolidate. The Lenzburgs, then the Kiburgs and finally the mighty dukes of Zaehringen disappeared from natural causes. Whenever that happened, Rudolf of Habsburg was there, holding the marriage contract in on hand and the sword in the other, demanding his share of the spoils, until he had become the most powerful lord in Swabia.

This kind of life is one of perennial warfare. The annals of Basel record that in 1268 he conquered Utzenberg and some other castles, in 1269 he takes Reichenstein, in 1270 he besieges the city of Basel for 3 days, in 1271 he burns down the monastery at Granfelden and several villages and that same year he also destroys the castle at Tiefenstein, in 1272 he goes after Freiburg and destroys the surroundings of the city, and so forth and so forth.

Bishops were sort of a speciality of his. He made his name in a feud against the bishop of Strasburg who had refused to hand over another one of these inheritances. His retaliation was relentless. He did not stop until he had the bishop stripped of all his strongholds and cities, including Strasburg itself.

Once the bishop had been replaced and his successor had recognised Rudolf’s victory, all Rudolf asked for was his original demand. The cities and strongholds he handed back, allegedly without even asking for a ransom payment. According to the chronicler he did this to turn a foe into a friend and ally.

That kind of behaviour was extremely unusual in the Middle Ages. And it hints at a more general observation – that Rudolf was a strategic thinker well ahead of his time.  Outwardly he was warm and affable. But his engaging friendliness and outward humility covered a steely determination to win, and to win at all cost. Conventions of chivalry that ruled the behaviour of Europe’s elites to him were just that, conventions, guidelines to be observed in normal times but that could be broken if the occasion demanded it.

Rudolf von Habsburg was a very competent war entrepreneur and politician and quite wealthy. But that does not make you a candidate for the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. There were dozens of such counts around and more importantly, there were the imperial princes who sported lineages that included kings and emperors going all the way back to Charlemagne or even Clovis. Compared to that Rudolf’ descent from count Radebot made him distinctly nouveau riche.

Making Rudolf King of the Romans was an unusual choice, and such an unusual choice required an unusual set of circumstances.

For 23 years there had been no effective King of the Romans, let alone emperor. Instead there were two competing claimants, neither of whom spent much or any time in the Reich. This -amongst other things – prevented the largest and most populous state in Europe from providing meaningful assistance to the rapidly disappearing kingdom of Jerusalem. Hence the papacy – which had created this chaos in the first place – now demanded that a proactive new emperor was elected, who could then make his way to Jerusalem forthwith.

There was no shortage of proactive men with vast fortunes in gold and men willing to take up the burden of kingship. But the wealth in men and material was also their problem. The most eminent imperial princes, like the duke of Bavaria, the count palatine on the Rhine, the landgrave of Thuringia and the duke of Saxony were all keen. But they realized that for one reason or another they might not get the vote. So they could live with someone else becoming king, but only as long as that someone wasn’t one of their peers. And there was one they definitely would not allow to sit the throne of Charlemagne, and that was the richest of the princes, king Ottokar II the Golden King of Bohemia. Electing him would lead to a strengthening of imperial power, which in turn meant a loss of their freedoms.

And the other thing they did not want to lose were the lands they had pilfered from the now defunct Hohenstaufen family. Some of these had been personal property of the emperors, which could be taken on the basis of descent from some second cousin twice removed. But the crown lands were a different kettle of fish. These were technically unalienable and would have to be handed back should the new emperor have enough power to force their return.

These were the unusual circumstances that turned a gruff old warrior from Swabia into a perfect gracious lord.

Rudolf was a rich count but still a fraction as powerful as any of the great imperial prices. He at least pretended to be a godson of the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II, bringing him the votes of those yearning for a return of the good old days.  And at the same time he had been one of the most rapacious plunderers of the Hohenstaufen inheritance, making him acceptable to the other princes who were reluctant to disgorge the properties they had stolen from the royal purse. And he was a pious man with a track record as a crusader. Best of all, he was 55 years old, so should not be around for much longer.

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In a truly astounding twist of fate, the man who brokered the deal that led to Rudolfs elevation, was Friedrichof Hohenzollern, ancestor of the kings of Prussia who worked so hard to erode Habsburg power in the 18th and 19th century.

Surprise, surprise, Rudolf turned out to be the exact opposite of what the electors wanted. Not only did he have the temerity to live for almost another 20 years, he used this time to rebuild the financial and political infrastructure of the imperial crown. He appointed powerful local aristocrats as vogts or imperial vicars in the regions and tasked them with recapturing the crown lands. Peter Wilson estimates that Rudolf managed to bring 2/3rds of the Hohenstaufen lands back under royal control.

Rebuilding the royal demesne was however not Rudolf’s most momentous achievement.  That was a bit more self-serving. Rudolf managed to secure the duchies of Austria and Styria for his family, to which his successors would later add Carinthia and Carniola, the nucleus of the Habsburg empire.

When Rudolf ascended the throne, these duchies had been held by king Ottokar of Bohemia for over 20 years and he had the pieces of paper to prove it. If Ottokar had done the right thing and just smiled and waved, the Habsburg would never had a chance. But smile and wave was not his way.

The Bohemian king literally owned a gold mine and had acquired a huge territory that stretched from Bohemia to the Mediterranean. He was so rich and powerful, he thought, he should have become king. But that was exactly the reason the imperial princes did not want him to be king. He did not understand. How could they prefer this poor count over him, the Golden King  whose great deeds of chivalry outshone his rival’s petty squabbles on the Upper Rhine. Ottokar was sulking. When he was invited to come to Rudolf’s first imperial diet, he refused to come and certainly would not swear allegiance to the new king.

Rudolf – the smart politician he was – twisted that not as disrespecting him, but as an insult to the empire and to all the grand princes who had elected him. He raised an imperial army amongst the princes and without encountering much resistance threw Ottokar out of Austria.

Being king, he could now enfeoff his sons with the duchies of Austria and Styria, whilst Carinthia and Carniola were given to his son in law. And with that began the 650-year long rule of the Habsburgs in Austria.

Once Rudolf had added and then defended Austria against Ottokar’s attempt at revenge, the Habsburgs had become imperial princes and one of the most powerful families. But that was only step one.

Rudolf’s political plan from then on out was to create a new imperial dynasty, replicating the Hohenstaufen, or even the Salians or Ottonians. But that is where he hit a snag. The response from the Pope and from the imperial princes was clear: dream on mate. The very last thing anyone, well apart from Rudolf obviously, wanted, was a powerful emperor who could balance out the papacy and force the imperial princes back into submission. So the pope denied him the coronation as emperor and the princes an election of his son as king and successor.

Instead, when Rudolf died, they elected another “minor count”, Adolf von Nassau. Nassau tried the same trick and made a play for the Landgraviate of Thuringia which ended in a disastrous war that sucked in one prince after another. This made things so uncomfortable that the electors turned to the only imperial prince rich and powerful enough to rid them of the pesky Adolf von Nassau, and that prince was Albrecht von Habsburg, Rudolf’s son and heir. So they reluctantly deposed Adolf and elevated Albrecht, who promptly did the honors and killed Adolf – most honorably in a battle obviously.

Now that the Habsburgs were back in play, the apotheosis of the new dynasty was written high up in the skies. And initially everything was going swimmingly.

We are hitting one of those points in European history where feeble loins destroy kingdoms and let new empires emerge. Over the course of a few years, Austria’s neighbors, the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary lost their original royal families. Hungary in 1301 and Bohemia in 1306. From that point onwards these lands oscillated between short periods of glorious victories and long periods as pawns in European politics.

Given the strategic position of Austria, bordering both Hungary and Bohemia, and being geographically, demographically and financially weaker than either of them, the Habsburgs were from the getgo hugely interested in these lands. Which is why Albrecht I made a bid for both Bohemia and Hungary when their thrones became vacant.

But these efforts experienced a major setback. In April 1308 Albrecht was mustering an army in Swabia to have another go at Prague. But he never got there. At a dinner his nephew John had asked for the n-th time whether he would at some point receive the inheritance his uncle so kindly managed on his behalf. Apparently John was not happy with the response, since when Albrecht ended the dinner by handing out floral wreaths to his guests, John threw the table decorations in the face of the king and said, he was tired of being fobbed off with worthless baubles.

The next day, the first of May 1308, the king was riding back to his ancestral home on the Castle of the Hawk accompanied by only one attendant. That was when his nephew John and four co-conspirators appeared. John raised his sword and brought it down on the royal skull, making him John Parricida, John the Murderer and bringing him a life on the run. What it also brought down were the Habsburg’s chances to create a new dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors for another 200 years.

The imperial princes were in no mood to elect another Habsburg. They quite rightly feared that the next one would use his elevated position as leverage into Bohemia and/or Hungary, at which point the dynasty would become permanent. They would be even more powerful that Ottokar II had been. Hence they sought out another poor count, Henry of Luxemburg as king, later emperor Henry VII. Henry did them two favors, one was to disappear down to Italy in a madcap attempt at reliving the heyday of the Hohenstaufen, and, much closer to home, by furnishing the Bohemians with a new king who wasn’t a Habsburg.

When Henry VII died in 1313, the Habsburgs had another go at the imperial crown. This ended up in a split election between Friedrich the Handsome, the son of Albrecht I, and a Wittelsbach, Ludwig the Bavarian. The Habsburgs lost the war of succession. Still Ludwig elevated his cousin Friedrich the Handsome to co-king as a way to pacify the empire. Friedrich, despite his formal title, did not gain much influence and shuffled off his mortal coil in 1330. Friedrich the Handsome, was so insignificant, he is not even counted in the list of Kings of the Romans. And he turned out to be the last Habsburg on the throne for a 100 years.

Friedrich’s successor as head of the House of Habsburg was his brother Albrecht, called “the Wise”. That sounds promising!

And it was. Albrecht was somewhat unusual for a Habsburg in as much as he had originally been destined for the church. The Habsburgs were almost all extremely, if not fanatically pious. That however did not compel them to give up potential spares to the church. Right from the start a big part of the Habsburg success lay in placing their sons and daughters into promising positions to inherit even more territory.

Maybe there was an opening here since Albrecht was the fifth son of King Albrecht I and he had a younger brother, Otto, bringing the total to six. But against all the odds, his elder brothers all passed away, the last, King Friedrich the Handsome in 1330 as we just heard. All these guys had been fit and healthy, one of them seemingly even handsome. Albrecht was none of the above. He suffered from terrible arthritis that left him in almost constant pain, unable to walk, let alone ride. Nevertheless he was regarded as one of the most successful early Habsburgs.

Albrecht gave up on the ambitions of his elder brothers and submitted to emperor Ludwig the Bavarian properly. And he was amply rewarded for this. In 1335 emperor Ludwig the Bavarian enfeoffed Albrecht with Carinthia and Carniola, setting aside the claims of the previous duke’s daughter, the famous Margarete Maultasch. I did a whole episode about her remarkable life, so I will not go on about the shenanigans that went on there again.

The rest of his near 25 year old rule was taken up with consolidating his power within the duchies and scheming to deprive Margarete Maultasch of her other, much richer possession, the county of Tyrol. It is during this period that the family is shifting its focus away from their ancestral homeland in the duchy of Swabia to their new territories in Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola. The Habsburgs moved into the Hofburg in Vienna and became Austrian.

But still this otherwise so sedate and sensible reign was built on feet of clay. By 1338, Albrecht and his wife Joan had five sons in 15 years of marriage, but none of them survived childhood. His younger brother Otto  had now died as well, followed by Otto’s two teenage sons. And none of his elder brothers had ever produced a son that lived.

The House of Habsburg, famed for its fecundity, was about to expire. And if it had, fierce wars of succession between the Wittelsbachs and Luxemburgs would have destroyed the land. It goes to show how fragile these dynasties were, when the six sons of Albrecht I, each one married and attempting to procreate could find themselves out of heirs within a generation. And if Albert II had not undertaken a pilgrimage to Aachen, and the lord’s swaddling clothes had not done their thing, the Habsburgs would have ended up as just a footnote in history.

But the miracle happened and Joan gave birth to a son, Rudolf in November 1339, and then three more, Friedrich in 1347, Albrecht in 1349 and Leopold in 1351.  And talking about miracles, at the birth of Leopold, she was 51 years old.

These three boys, minus Friedrich who succumbed to a riding accident, continued the line of the family. And not just that. Rudolf, the eldest, would go on to forge the ideological and political foundations of the casa di Austria that would go on to rule the world. But that is something we will look into 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. So from next week I will again name individual patrons. If you are a patron or 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 in this episode 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 138 to 143 about Rudolf I and Albrecht I, 150 about Friedrich the Handsome and 152 about Margarete Maultasch.

And with that, saddle up and lets get going with the Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

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Albrecht I von Habsburg

The late 13th century was the sniper’s alley for many a powerful family. The disappearance of great dynasties, the Arpads of Hungary, the Premyslids of Bohemia, the Zaehringer, Babenbergs, the counts of Holland to name just a few wasn’t down to lack of fertility but down to violence. Murder became so common, even those who did not have swords sticking out of their chest were presumed poisoned. To save them, some were suspended from the ceiling to flush out harmful substances. Violence was not limited to temporal princes, even the pope was getting slapped down for declaring that every Christian ruler was subject to the Roman Pontiff.

The fact that Albrecht I von Habsburg the new King of the Romans is murdered is therefore not the most interesting thing about him. What is astonishing is how far this man “with only one eye and a look that made you sick” got in his ambitions. Pressured from all sides, the Prince Electors, his own vassals in Austria, the Pope, the Bohemians, still he ploughed on, picking up principalities like others picking daisies. And a wrath of daisies is what did for him in the end…

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 143 – The Murder of a King – Albrecht I von Habsburg.

The late 13th century was the sniper’s alley for many a powerful family. The disappearance of great dynasties, the Arpads of Hungary, the Premyslids of Bohemia, the Zaehringer, Babenbergs, the counts of Holland to name just a few wasn’t down to lack of fertility but down to violence. Murder became so common, even those who did not have swords sticking out of their chest were presumed poisoned. To save them, some were suspended from the ceiling to flush out harmful substances. Violence was not limited to temporal princes, even the pope was getting slapped down for declaring that every Christian ruler was subject to the Roman Pontiff.

The fact that Albrecht I von Habsburg the new King of the Romans is murdered is therefore not the most interesting thing about him. What is astonishing is how far this man “with only one eye and a look that made you sick” got in his ambitions. Pressured from all sides, the Prince Electors, his own vassals in Austria, the Pope, the Bohemians, still he ploughed on, picking up principalities like others picking daisies. And a wrath of daisies is what did for him in the end…

Before we start the story proper I want to thank not only the patrons who keep this show on the road by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or by making a one-time donation at historyofthegermans.com/support, but I want to break a lance for all of you who keep supporting the show by telling friends and family about it, by posting on social media, in particular Facebook and Twitter, or by reading and commenting on my website. A podcast like the History of the Germans experiences some serious levels of attrition. Of the 70,000 people who have listened to the first episode, only about half are still on board by episode 4 and by episode 17 that has halved again to 20,000. In the long run, less than 17% stick around.  That is about 11,000 people now. And of those an estimated 20% drop out every 6 months. That means, just to stay level, the show needs to bring in 4,000 new listeners per year, which means we need almost 30,000 people trying the History of the Germans for the first time every year. I do my very best to drum up listeners by posting on Facebook @HotgPOd and on twitter @germanshistory but I am struggling to find new audiences there. I tried the other platforms, but had little success so far. Cross-promotion with other podcasters helps a bit, but is sporadic and limited by the fact that I only recommend podcasts I listen to myself.

In other words, I need your help. If every one of you gets 3 people to try the History of the Germans, that would translate into 4,000 new permanent listeners, enough to cover the ongoing attrition.  As a special inducement, in two episodes time I will call out the five fans who send me the longest list of friends, family, acquaintances and random people of the street they have asked to listen to the show. If you do take part, let me know whether I should call out your full name or just name and initial.

Talking about calling out names, I want to say special thanks to my patrons, Larry A., Paul Caldwell, Miriam A., Matt H., Emily P and Ben S. who have already signed up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans

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Now, finally, back to the show.

Last week we ended with the battle of Göllheim on July 2nd, 1298. The deposed king Adolf von Nassau was dead. Albrecht I, oldest son of king Rudolf von Habsburg was finally elected King of the Romans. 6 weeks later he was crowned in Aachen by the archbishop of Cologne.

Albrecht was supposed to become king seven years earlier, upon the death of his father, king Rudolf. But that did not happen, in part because the prince electors, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier and the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg and the Count Palatinate on the Rhine had entered into a new mode of operation, where the son of a king was not to become king, full stop.

But in 1298 they had no option to deny Albrecht the crown any longer. It was either that or leaving Adolf of Nassau in charge. And Adolf had become unacceptable to the electors. Adolf had broken all the promises he had made to them in the runup to his election, promises that tied him down to be nothing but a tool in the hands of the Electors. Not only that, his successful campaigns in Thuringia and Meissen had made it likely that he too would elevate his family to become imperial princes – and where would that end.

So Albrecht became the electors champion in removing Adolf von Nassau.

Their champion he may have been, but whether they really liked, or actually supported him was a different question.

Past historians had often ascribed Albrecht’s difficulty first to be elected and then to gather support for his policies to his appearance and personality. He was described as “a boorish man with only one eye and a look that made you sick…a miser who kept his money and gave nothing to the empire, except for children of which he had many.”

He indeed had only one eye. In 1295 his physicians had taken an illness for poisoning and had suspended him upside down from the ceiling to flush out the concerning substance. As it happened, Albrecht had not been poisoned, and even more miraculously, he survived the treatment. At least most of him. The compression to the skull popped out an eyeball – so key learning from history: do not suspend yourself from the ceiling for extended periods of time unless you are certain you have been poisoned.

Apart from the loss of an eye, the time he was suspended from the ceiling had also been one of the politically most difficult periods for Albrecht. Why that was, we have to go back to his relative youth, when his father still sat on the throne.

Albrecht had become duke of Austria and Styria in 1282, initially jointly with his brother Rudolf and from 1283 on his own. Even though he was the eldest son of the reigning monarch, he pursued the same territorial strategy, many other imperial princes engaged in. His policy was to centralize ducal power. That meant removing all these special rights and privileges, the towns, cities and nobles held independently from the duke, either due to full unencumbered ownership or by grant from the emperor. And like every other prince, he faced some serious opposition to his efforts. Neither the cities, nor the nobles were prepared to hand back their hard earned rights.

The first to stand up to Albrecht were the citizens of Vienna. Hey had demanded that Albrecht confirms their ancient privileges and threatened to declare themselves as an free imperial city if he failed to do so.

Albrecht did not yield. Instead he had his soldiers close the bridges across the Danube, effectively closing the city off from trade and supply of food. The economy of Vienna took a severe hit. The artisans, blacksmiths, bowyers, locksmiths, goldsmiths, harness makers and knifemakers, saddlers, shoemakers, needle makers, butchers, bakers, furriers, tailors, wood turners, weavers, wool and loden cloth makers, parchment makers and tanners, hatters, tailers, shield makers and binders, silk spinners, tinkers and bell founders, carpenters and stonemasons, brick makers, glaziers and mirror makers, carpenters and barrel makers, belt makers and white tanners, glovemakers, producers of horn and bone goods, coin makers, stove makers and basket weavers, they all suffered from rising prices for materials and declining demand from the impoverished citizens.

As the blockade continued the price for wood and coal increased and finally food prices exploded. Hungry and losing faith in the patrician leadership, the lower classes took to the streets, demanding an end to the hardship. The local clergy negotiated a compromise. The patricians were to go and negotiate with the duke and unless they found a compromise within 6 days, the plebs would hand them over to the ducal soldiers.

There was nothing to negotiate here. Albrecht dictated the terms. He took the ancient charters and cut out all the passages he did not like with a knife and confirmed the rest. The city walls were breached at strategic points and the city returned under the now even firmer control of the duke.

Another uprising occurred in 1291/92 following king Rudolf’s death, which Albrecht was again able to put down.

A further challenge to his rule came at the election of the new king, Adolf of Nassau. King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia had been one of the electors of Adolf of Nassau. And his father had held the duchies of Austria and Styria until Albrecht’s father had ousted him from there. Wenceslaus wanted the duchies back. So, in exchange for his vote, Wenceslaus demanded that Adolf would declare the elevation of Albrecht to duke of Austria illegal and return the duchies to Wenceslaus II. Adolf’s key skill in the run-up to his election had been his ability to sign any piece of paper the electors put before him and so he committed to Wenceslaus that he would get rid of Albrecht.

Albrecht managed that latter curveball well. He met with the new king Adolf, handed over the imperial regalia Adolf needed to make his coronation valid and in exchange, Adolf suspended any action against Albrecht. But still his situation remained precarious.

The real crisis happened in 1295 during the illness that would cost him an eye. Many believed that Albrecht was at death’s door. King Adolf von Nassau thought that this was the moment to finally honor his promise to king Wenceslaus of Bohemia and ordered Austria and Styria to be returned to the crown, presumably to then pass it on to Wenceslaus II. Wenceslaus II then funded another uprising of the nobility in preparation of his return to Vienna.

But Albrecht was finally lowered from the ceiling, got into and then rose from his sickbed. He gathered his forces and put down the uprising. In his victory he was however magnanimous. He left the rebellious nobles in possession of most of their wealth and privileges in exchange for a vow of support in the now inevitable military conflict with King Adolf von Nassau.

It was this policy of stick and carrot that allowed Albrecht to remain in control of the newly acquired duchies of Austria and Styria and to finally overcome the opposition from the electors, the king of the Romans and the King of Bohemia.

So, in respect of strategy and political nous, Albrecht was very much his father’s son. I have not found a reference to him playing chess, but even if he didn’t, he was still always a few steps ahead of his adversaries. But what he lacked was Rudolf’s interpersonal skills. Contemporaries praised Rudolf’s friendliness, his affable manner and humility that camouflaged his ruthlessness. In Albrecht, his ambition and severity were very much out in the open. Maybe his lack of attractive features even before the loss of his eye had made it difficult for him to relate to others, or reports of his tight rule in Austria shaped the views of his contemporaries, but it is quite clear that nobody very much liked him. Maybe his wife liked him. She gave him 21 children, though on second thoughts, she may have had even more reason to resent him than the Austrian nobles.

But whether they liked him or not, the Austrians and other Habsburg forces did follow him in his pursuit of King Adolf that ended in his victory at Göllheim. And the Electors too got over their reservations and elected him king just before the battle.

But astute politician that he was, he did not insist on that this election made under duress and in the presence of only some of the electors was the final one. A second election took place on July 27th, 1298 now in the presence of all electors, minus the Bohemian king. Albrecht was unanimously chosen, and like his predecessor, he had signed all sorts of commitments to each of the electors promising support in lawsuits, imperial lands, money and just general compliance. And like his predecessor, he believed that paper was patient.

Who was not very patient was pope Boniface VIII back in, well not Rome, but in Anagni. The pope had to – as was now regularly the case – flee from the eternal city and established his court in the small but gorgeous town of Anagni.

These rather reduced circumstances did not stop Boniface VIII to drive the concept of the imperial papacy to its absolute zenith. In his bull Unam Sanctam he stated that quote “it is necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff”. And that meant he yielded not just the spiritual sword, but also the temporal. Kings are to be subordinates to the Holy Father and  in fact an emperor was no longer needed.

For Boniface to depose Adolf von Nassau and elect Albrecht von Habsburg was an affront. Not that he had a particular fondness for Adolf or an animosity towards Albrecht. It was a question of rank and protocol. The electors should have first asked for papal permission before making the move. When Albrecht’s ambassadors humbly asked for confirmation of his new honor, Boniface responded quote: “I am the king of the Romans, I am Emperor”.

Albrecht, the actual King of the Roman did not have either the resources or the political capital to refute the pope’s claims. He was dependent on the pope, because only the pope could crown him emperor, and only as emperor could he get his son elected and thereby ensure the continuation of his dynasty on the imperial throne.

So, he sent another set of ambassadors asking most humbly what would appease his holiness. And the answer was simple, the whole of Tuscany. The famous inheritance of the great countess Matilda was still in dispute. And the pope thought now was the time to put this one to bed. A high price indeed.

Being bullied by the pope was only one of Albrecht’s preoccupations at this time. Albrecht was very much his father’s son and he was constantly on the lookout for opportunities to expand his and his family’s lands. And this was a time where long standing dynasties had a habit of dying out or falling apart, creating opportunities for an ambitious Habsburg to pick up some more lands.

The first opportunity was up in the far north. In 1296 Count Floris V of Holland, the son of one of the previous Kings of the Romans, William of Holland, was murdered by the nobles of his county. Floris’ support for the peasants and his opposition to the aristocracy made him a folk hero, but also a dead folk hero. His son, John died just 3 years later, aged just 15 allegedly from dysentery. The county of Holland together with Seeland and Friesland were now vacant fiefs. Instead of handing them to the closest relatives of the young count, Albrecht decided to take them all for himself.

Then there was still the whole Thuringia affair. Albrecht’s predecessor Adolf von Nassau had called in the margraviate of Meissen and had bought the Landgraviate of Thuringia from a guy aptly named Albrecht the Degenerate who had been at war with all his relatives. Albrecht had not much of a legal claim in that game, but still went for it, demanding the whole of the Wettiner lands for himself.

None of that made him popular with the electors. And he also now had to deal with a new archbishop of Trier who happened to be the brother of the deposed king Adolf of Nassau, who had died in a battle against Albrecht.

Mounting opposition from the Electors and outlandish demands from the pope meant Albrecht needed an ally. And that ally was the king Philipp the Fair of France. Abrecht had become close to the handsome Philipp at the time king Adolf of Nassau had allied with king Edward of England to attack the French. The initial, my enemy’s enemy is my friend relationship warmed further when Albrecht became king.

The two kings met on the border between their realms and agreed an alliance and Albrecht’s son Rudolf who we will call Rudolf III to distinguish him from his uncle and grandfather, was to marry Blanche, the daughter of king Philipp. Now normally the bride was to bring the dowry, but the relative power between the two monarchs meant, it was the groom’s father who had to put up the goods. The Landgraviate of upper Alsace and the county of Fribourg in modern day Switzerland were to be given to Blanche as an apanage. And the county of Burgundy, the Franche Comte was to become French. That was a major concession. The county of Burgundy had been part of the empire since the days of Konrad II and the county had become imperial land when Barbarossa married Beatrix of Burgundy. Giving this up was not exactly a way to be a Semper Augustus, an always augmentor of the realm as his title proclaimed. Moreover, a new border between France and the Empire was agreed which followed the Maas river, which again handed over some imperial territory to France.

Albrecht had brought the electors along for the negotiations to legitimise this transfer of imperial territory. But he failed to get them on board. They left the conference in protest, claiming Albrecht was throwing away imperial lands for his own purposes.

Albrecht still went ahead and ratified the treaty with or without electors.

At which point another war between king and electors was unavoidable. But this time the electors did not depose the king and elect a new challenger. As it happened, they could not muster much resistance after all. Albrecht quickly mobilised his imperial forces and most importantly the free and imperial cities who became more and more the key to royal power.

Ironically the reason the Electors could not muster much resistance was because their resources had been depleted during the fight against Adolf von Nassau that had brought Albrecht to power.

And the French alliance worked out like a dream as well.

Pope Boniface’ assertion that all power lay with the papacy and every king was to bow to him did go down like a lead balloon with king Philip the Fair of France. And other than Albrecht, he was able to do something about it. He sent 2,000 mercenaries under the command of his close advisor Guillaume de Nogent to Italy. His troops stormed the papal palace at Anagni and arrested the pope. In some accounts the mercenary commander Sciarra Colonna slapped the pope, though this is not confirmed. What is true is that the pope was made a prisoner and only came free when the citizens of Anagni put pressure on the French garrison. The French withdrew.

But Boniface VIII and the imperial church were shaken to the core. Boniface VIII died a few months later from the aftershock. A few years later the papacy moved to Avignon to spend the next century under the watchful eye of a French garrison in the opposite shore of the Rhone river.

And Boniface VIII relented on the question of the imperial succession. He confirmed Albrecht’s election and coronation as valid and promised to have him crowned, should he make it to Rome.

As it happened, that never happened.

Albrecht was instead occupied with another set of opportunities. And these were really big opportunities, far larger than the county of Holland or the margraviate of Meissen.  

The first was the kingdom of Hungary. The dynasty that had started with Arpad who led the Hungarians into the Pannonian basin in the 9th century had finally gone extinct. Royal power in Hungary had been eroded for some time and the last two kings, Ladislaus IV and Anrew III had lived a peripatetic life whilst the great noble clans controlled the kingdom. Still Hungary was a rich and historically, a hugely powerful kingdom.

Albrecht had been involved in Hungarian affairs for decades already as he captured castles and territories along the Austro-Hungarian border from rebellious nobles. In the civil war that followed the death of the last descendant of Arpad, Albrecht was initially a contender alongside the Anjou of Sicily and our old friend, Wenceslaus II, the king of Bohemia. However, he had to realize that he was unlikely to ever capture Hungary against the opposition of both of them. So he sided with the Anjou, almost certainly in the hope of being rewarded should his side ultimately win.

Whilst Hungary became less of an opportunity, another prospect appeared due to a series of freak events.

King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia has been looming large over imperial politics since the death of Rudolf I. But the empire was only one of his areas of interest. Another one was Hungary, as we have just heard. And finally there was Poland. In Poland the Piast dynasty had fragmented into a dozen duchies under a purely formal overlordship of the ruler of Krakow. Wenceslaus like his father Ottokar took a strong interest in Polish affairs. I will not even try to untangle the immensely complex political maneuvers amongst the various Piast dukes here, I did some of it in episode 134 if you are interested.

What matters here is that Wenceslaus had managed to build a dominant position inside Poland, which included the duchy of Krakow. He also married the daughter of the previous Polish king Premysl II, which allowed him to get crowned king of Poland in 1300.

He also achieved the coronation of his son, the future Wenceslaus III as king of Hungary, though he only controlled part of that country..

Still, by 1303 the power of the Bohemian ruler had become deeply uncomfortable not just for Albrecht, but also for some of the imperial princes and the Pope. Boniface declared for the house of Anjou as kings of Hungary. And even though Boniface died shortly afterwards, papal support for the Anjou as kings of Hungary remained firm.

Albrecht then attacked Wenceslaus in Moravia with Hungarian support. This campaign was unsuccessful, allegedly because the miners of Kutna Hora poisoned the water with silver dust. Still Wenceslaus II needed to open negotiations with Albrecht to break him out of the coalition with the pope and the Anjou. Albrecht entered the negotiations with excessive demands, but still ended with the return of the region around Eger, Cheb in Czech and the Pleissenland. Not exactly a crown, but not a bad addition to his bulging property portfolio.

Wenceslaus II did not see the final signing of the peace agreement. He died after a prolonged illness in June 1305.

His crowns went to his son, Wenceslaus III. Wenceslaus III immediately gave up on Hungary and focused on Poland. There he faced opposition of Wladyslaw the Elbow-High, one of the Piast dukes and the man who, together with his son Casimir III would reunite Poland. So a mighty foe.

Wenceslaus was also a sort of party prince who surrounded himself with young men of a similar disposition whilst leaving the management of the kingdom to his brother-in-law, the duke Henry of Carinthia.

And on August 4, 1306 a mystery took place. King Wenceslaus III of Bohemia and Poland was stabbed by an unknown assassin at Olomouc. The assassin was never found. And with this freak event the Premyslid dynasty that had ruled Bohemia for more than 400 years was no more.

Nobody had counted on this to happen. The Premyslid kings of Bohemia had been a huge force in imperial politics for centuries and none more so than in the time of Ottokar II and Wenceslaus II. Bohemia was an immeasurably rich and tightly run political entity. No question, whichever clan was to gain possession of it would dominate imperial politics from this point forward.

The first to seize the opportunity was a man we have not yet heard of at all. How is that possible? 143 episodes with names after names. And you tell me there is a new one? Well there is.

Henry duke of Carinthia. The reason you have not heard of him so far is that up until now, Henry of Carinthia was a sort of appendage to the Habsburgs. He was born the younger son of the counts of Tyrol who controlled the Brenner pass from their castles in Innsbruck and Meran. Henry’s  sister was married to, yes, to Albrecht I of Habsburg. And that came in very handy when in 1286 the decision about the duchy of Carinthia came up.  As you may remember, Carinthia had come under the control of Rudolf von Habsburg after his victory at Dürnkrut. Rudolf would have loved to pass Carinthia to his sons as he had done with Austria and Syria, but found strong opposition amongst the electors. So he gave it to this young guy Henry on the proviso that he would do whatever the Habsburgs wanted him to do. And that Henry did. He fought with Albrecht at Gollheim and just generally made himself useful around the house.

But then he was given the opportunity of a lifetime. He got to marry Anne, the daughter of king Wenceslaus II of Bohemia. And with it came the governorship of Bohemia on behalf of the dissolute Wenceslaus III. And then the most unlikely thing happened, Wenceslaus III was murdered by an unknown assassin.

Henry just happened to be the right man in the right place. There are no male members of the royal line left. He is married to one of the female members of the family, and he is in Prague and already in charge of the place. So the Bohemian nobles elect him to be the new king.

This royal bliss lasted only a few months though.  His brother-in-law and former friend Albrecht of Habsburg invades Bohemia, besieges Henry and he and his wife flee back to Carinthia.

Albrecht now forces the Bohemians to elect his son Rudolf III to be king of Bohemia. To add to the  rather flimsy legitimacy of his ascension, young Rudolf married the widow of old king Wenceslaus III. But things did not go smoothly. Some of the Bohemian nobles were reluctant to accept Rudolph who they called king Porridge for his sensitive digestive system. They denied him access to the silver mines of Kutna Hora and forced him into a siege. And it was at the siege that Rudolf III’s stomach finally burst and with it ended the first attempt of the Habsburgs to capture the Bohemian crown.

Henry of Carinthia was recalled and this time was better prepared to repel the subsequent attack by Albrecht I.

At that point Albrecht’s forces were stretched mightily thin. Whilst his son was trying to gain control of Bohemia, the Wettins back up in Thuringia had regained their fighting spirit and inflicted a severe defeat on Albrecht’s forces.

But Albrecht was only 53, younger than his father when he took the throne. He may not have been pretty or charming, but he has been a very successful ruler in the chaotic context of his times, ruthlessly expanding the Habsburg lands. Give him another 10 years and the Habsburgs are in charge of all territory between Strasburg, Vienna, Dresden and Frankfurt plus Holland, more territory than any of his predecessors held and containing the largest known reserves of precious metal in Europe.

But as we know Albrecht wasn’t given another 10 years. I think I did say a few episodes back that part of the success of the Habsburgs was that they would act as a unit. Everyone, not just the ruler, but all the archdukes and archduchesses were working on the great project of Habsburg power. But I also said that there were exceptions, where rivalry and mistrust blew out into violent conflict. And that is what happened on May 1st, 1308.

You remember that Albrecht had a brother called Rudolf. Rudolf was their father’s preferred son. It was Rudolf who initially was to become King of the Romans, not Albrecht. And his father had tried to make him a duke, ideally the duke of Swabia. But both projects failed, mainly since Rudolf died in 1290.

Rudolf had initially been made joint duke of Austria and Styria but in 1283 the two duchies became Albrecht’s sole possessions. And with Rudolf’s death, so did the original Habsburg Possessions in Swabia.

Now this Rudolf had a son, called Johann. Johann was born shortly before his father’s death and so by 1308 he is 18 years old. And he has neither a title nor land. His mother had been the daughter of king Ottokar II of Bohemia, so if anyone in the Habsburg family had a legitimate claim on the Bohemian crown it was Johann, not Albrecht’s son Rudolf III, he of the frail stomach.

Johann was not happy about how things were taking shape. Albrecht still had five surviving sons. That meant, there was one last cane for Johann, and that was if Albrecht would make him his Bohemian candidate, now that Rudolph III was dead.

On April 30th, 1308 Albrecht came to Winterthur in the Habsburg lands. A great banquet was held and to honor his nephew, Albrecht offered Johann a floral wrath. That tipped Johann over the edge. He was expecting a crown of silver, gold and precious stones and instead all he got was some daisies. He rose up and declared he would not be fobbed off with some flowers and ran out.

The next day, when Albrecht was on his way home he crossed the river Reuss near Windisch. There Johann and his friends attacked. Johann rode up to the king and split his head without saying a word. The murderers escaped and Johann, now known as Johann Parricida was never heard of again. He made appearances in literature, even gets to meet Wilhelm Tell in Schiller’s play, but for history he is lost.

And so is Albrecht I von Habsburg, King of the Romans. He had never become emperor, which meant he had not been able to ensure the continuation of his dynasty. the electors were free to do what they now always did, deny the succession to the son of the latest incumbent. Instead, they chose another impecunious count. Will they ever learn?

I hope you will tune in again next week.

And I also hope you can find me these three friends or family members, acquaintances or just people on the street you can turn into fans of the History of the Germans. Ideally send them to the main podcast, but if they are only interested in some parts of the story, I have sperate playlists about the Ottonians, the Hanseatic League, the Teutonic Knights and for the current series, all released as separate podcasts. The links are in the shownotes.

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A Shadow of a King

After the death of Rudolf von Habsburg the electors chose another, now truly impecunious count, Adolf von Nassau to be king. They chose him over Rudolf’s son Albrecht and over the overwhelmingly most powerful prince in the empire, King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia.

This cultured and competent man became known to German history as a Schattenkönig, a shadow of a king, unable to wiggle out of his ties to the overbearing electors. Acting as mercenary in the pay of king Edward of England and failing to create his own Hausmacht in Thuringia, many history books skip over his six years on the throne.

Nevertheless, the events of his election and deposition form another crossroads in the history of the German lands that set the Holy Roman empire further down the path to become neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 142: Adolf von Nassau – A shadow of a King. This is also Episode 5 of Season 8: the Holy Roman Empire 1250-1356 .

After the death of Rudolf von Habsburg the electors chose another, now truly impecunious count, Adolf von Nassau to be king. They chose him over Rudolf’s son Albrecht and over the overwhelmingly most powerful prince in the empire, King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia.

This cultured and competent man became known to German history as a Schattenkönig, a shadow of a king, unable to wiggle out of his ties to the overbearing electors. Acting as mercenary in the pay of king Edward of England and failing to create his own Hausmacht in Thuringia, many history books skip over his six years on the throne.

Nevertheless, the events of his election and deposition form another crossroads in the history of the German lands that set the Holy Roman empire further down the path to become neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire.

Before we start I have a tip for you. If you are a fan of University Challenge, and quite frankly who would listen to 140 episodes of obscure German history and isn’t, tune in on April 8th at 8:30 GMT on BBC 2 for the final. For those of you not based in the UK, university challenge is a quiz show running since 1962 where university teams compete with each other. Many former contestants became leading intellectuals, actors and politicians. The questions are such that most people feel incredibly smug if they get 2 or three right per show.  One of your fellow listeners, Justin Lee is on the team of Imperial college and my god, he and his team are smashing it. They are now in the final. Last week Justin even got a question on Frederick II which he obviously aced. The final will be epic since their likely opponents are no slouches. Go tune in on BBC iplayer on April 8th at 8:30 GMT. If you are abroad you can watch via a VPN.  

And as always I want to give special thanks to our patrons, Mike R, Carl S., Wayne D., Katherine E. Grant M. and Bobby K. who have kindly signed up at patreon.com/historyofthegermans

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Now, back to the show

On July 15th, 1291 king Rudolf I of Habsburg went on his last journey, to Speyer, the burial place of kings and emperors since the days of the great Salians, Konrad II and Henry III. One would expect that once the magnificent gravestone was placed over the mortal remains of the man who had ruled the realm for 18 years, the immediate next step would be to call the electors to Frankfurt to choose a new king.

But for months nothing happens. Finally, in November 1291, 5 moths after Rudolf’s death does the archbishop of Mainz as archchancellor in charge of elections invites the other electors to an imperial diet in Frankfurt on May 2nd, 1292.

Why did that take so long?

Since the election of Henry the Fowler in 919, the imperial crown was formally an elective monarchy, though in practice, as long as there was a son, and the son was not a minor or obviously incompetent, the son had followed the father on the throne.

And Rudolf von Habsburg had a son, Albrecht, the duke of Austria. Albrecht was born in 1255, so 36 years of age, a competent, though not particularly likeable ruler of an imperial principality. Plus he had 12 children, more than enough to ensure the continuation of the dynasty.

So by tradition, the electors should elect Albrecht von Habsburg. But they did not. We talked last week about Rudolf’s efforts to ensure Albrecht’s election during his lifetime and the unwillingness of the electors to support his candidature. Once his father had died, Albrecht seemingly tried to gain support amongst the electors. One of them, Ludwig, who was duke of Bavaria and count Palatinate on the Rhine was however the only elector he could bring over to his side. Attempts to get close to the archbishop of Cologne seemingly went nowhere

We know practically nothing about the early stages of the negotiations, so it is hard to gage whether Albrecht had made any advances to the other electors and whether they had any chance of success. The earliest documents date from the spring of 1292 when the discussion must have been going on for 6 months already.

We can get a glimpse of what the thinking of these guys was from a letter one of the electors, the duke of Saxony wrote to king Wenceslaus of Bohemia. There he pledged his vote to whoever Wenceslaus chose in exchange for 4,500 mark of silver plus a guarantee for the payment of 800 mark of silver Rudolf owed him and the support in a case he was fighting against the archbishop of Magdeburg.

But money was not everything. This was also about power. Last time the electors had elevated a man of some standing, largely because the pope insisted on having a functioning imperial ruler able to help shore up the sore remains of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

But in 1291 the city of Accre, the last outpost in the Holy Land itself had fallen to the Muslims. That was not the end of the crusades, but the crusades that followed were odd attempts on the flanks of Muslim power or in the Baltics. The great project to take Jerusalem was over. And that meant the papacy had less interest in the empire than before. Hence the electors were allowed to do as they pleased.

And what pleased them was to assert the elective nature of the royal and imperial title by denying the son the father’s crown. And this had become a lot easier thanks to the increasing formalisation of the voting process. In the past an ambitious candidate could get himself elected through tactical bribery and intelligent scheduling that kept hostiles away from the electoral diet. Konrad III did that and to a degree Frederick Barbarossa. We could even count Henry II amongst those that engineered their election.

Now these ruses no longer worked. A valid election required the votes of all seven electors, whether they were present at the diet or not. And thanks to Rudolf’s insistence, these seven were now set. So even if Albrecht would have rustled up 2 or three votes plus a smattering of minor lords and bishops the election would not be as easily accepted as Konrad III’s or Frederick Barbarossa’s. In all likelihood the other electors would have elected their own man, bringing the realm into a civil war.

From this point forward for the next roughly hundred plus years the electors will consistently deny the succession from father to son. The crown will shift between major princely families interspersed with the occasional poor count. Every time this happened, the incoming ruler will have to make far reaching concessions, pay out massive bribes and pass on more of the dwindling imperial possessions to the electors. And even that does not assure the safety of the newly acquired status. 2 of the upcoming 10 rulers will be deposed, one murdered, one killed in battle and one of them considered so poor he was known as Ruprecht “with the empty pocket”.

This strengthening of the electoral nature of the empire stands in stark contrast to the hereditary monarchies in the rest of Europe at the time. West Francia, the kingdom that would ultimately become France had started out as an elective monarchy and had remained at least formally elective until king Philipp Augustus in the 12th century.

But by the end of the 13th century the French monarchy was not just in practice but also formally hereditary, its king was given the epithet of “Most Christian King” and had achieved the status of sacred monarch, able to heal the sick purely by his touch.

Hereditary kingship incentivises the ruler to consolidate powers under the crown, rather than in the hands of his family. If a ruler can be sure that his son will become the next ruler it is sensible to seize vacant fiefs for the crown and invest in a bureaucracy that supports a centralising monarchy.

If the ruler can be sure that his son will not become king, as had been established at the election following the death of Rudolf of Habsburg, the incentive model shifts. Building up royal powers as Rudolf had done with his revindication policy did no longer make sense. All the fruits of these efforts would go to someone else, most likely one of the king’s rivals. And worse, the more powerful the role of king, the more likely the next king would go after his predecessor’s recent gains. So the rational move was to use the temporary position as ruler to expand the family fortunes, so that the clan would be powerful enough to field a candidate in a later election.

Historians in the 19th century have censored the electors for their decision to break the dynastic chain. Their actions had condemned royal power to be hollowed out further and further until the famous Voltaire quip about neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire had become a reality.

But is that justified. Could we have expected the electors to choose Albrecht of Habsburg as king in 1291? Should they have given the Habsburgs the opportunity to build out royal power in the Empire, first in Swabia and Franconia and then reaching out into Saxony and further North and East? Could they be expected to sacrifice their interests so that the regnum Teutonicum could go down the same path as the French and English kingdoms, just with a 100 to 200 year delay.

The French monarchy which was in an equally dire situation in the mid 11th century was allowed to build up its power base over time. The mighty dukes and counts surrounding the Ile de France did not care much about the royal title because it led so little actual power. And even if one of them had developed an interest, they were so deeply disunited, that they would have found it very difficult to agree on one amongst their own. So the kings were left alone, passing the crown from father to son and patiently building themselves up to a point where they could challenge and take down the mighty dukes and lords, one by one.

In the empire the situation was different. Royal power, weak as it was, was not irrelevant, in particular in the areas that were close to the king, in Swabia and Franconia. But even in the north and in Italy, some of the old prestige of the emperors was still there. And as we have seen with Rudolf of Habsburg, that position could be leveraged to propel a family into the rank of imperial prince. So the electors cared about who was king. And, other than the French nobles in the 11th century, they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats. They did co-ordinate their voting behaviour, often forming voting blocks going into an election.

So the electors could choose to make someone a powerful ruler which would be the best solution for the empire. But for each of them individually that wasn’t the ideal outcome. Unless one became the powerful monarch himself, the increased power of the king would come at the expense of their own position. Acting in your own interest in this situation is what economists call a prisoner’s dilemma, not a moral failing.

And so we find that from now on the choice of a powerful ruler required special circumstances, be that war and other threats, lavish bribery and firm commitment to respect the elector’s rights which in turn reduced royal power further.

In 1292 there was no threat of war or otherwise, no coercion by the pope, no overwhelming bribery. The electors could avoid choosing Albrecht.

This also explains why the electors did not choose Wenceslaus II of Bohemia to become king in 1292. When his father Ottokar was already a hugely impressive ruler, his son Wenceslaus II exceeding him. He gained his family the Polish and the Hungarian crowns, at least temproray. It was under his rule that silver was found in Kutna Hora, adding even further to the wealth of Bohemia.  We will no doubt hear more about him as we go along.

I think it is at this point that I need to correct something I said in episode 140 that the king of Bohemia was king in name only and that his title was purely honorific. Some of our Czech listeners contested this notion, some quite vehemently. I guess as always there are two perspectives on this.

If you take the perspective of the emperors and the imperial princes, they did see the Bohemian crown as a vassal of the emperor. The rulers of Bohemia were originally only awarded the title to each king individually and it wasn’t until 1198 that the title became hereditary. It was hence a title awarded to a vassal and as such could be removed in case the vassal broke his commitments, not a theoretically eternal grant by the grace of god like for instance the king of France.

If you look at it from the Czech perspective, the Bohemian ruler was his own master in his kingdom. No emperor could demand to come to Prague without being invited. Emperors did not exert influence in domestic affairs within Bohemia and the king of Bohemia could not be summoned to imperial diets unless they happened near the Bohemian border. Hence the kings of Bohemia may have regarded the vassalage relationship as a formality worth accepting in exchange for the influence on the politics of its closest and largest neighbour. And they had used the term “by the grace of god” before.

So, both of these perspectives are factually correct. When I described the fall-out of the diet in Nurnberg at 1274, I focused on the imperial perspective to highlight the audacity of Ottokar when he claimed to be an independent king, no longer bound by vassalage. I admit I should have been more nuanced on this and I will try to do better next time.

Now going back to Ottokar’s son Wenceslaus II,he not only amassed various crowns,  but also surpassed him in the world of diplomacy. As the election of Rudolf’s successor was approaching,  he had lined up two other electors, the duke of Saxony and the margrave of Brandenburg to vote in a block with him. They did not agree yet who to vote for except that they would not be voting for Albrecht of Habsburg. What makes that particularly salient was that both Wenceslaus and the duke of Saxony were married to Albrecht’s sisters and the Margrave of Brandenburg’s co-ruler was too.

So, that puts Albrecht out of the game.

What about Wenceslaus. He has three votes already, his own plus Saxony and Brandenburg. Historians argue that part of the arrangement between the three princes had been that Wenceslaus could use their votes only to elect a third party, not to elect himself. There was then also the question whether the three archbishops could be convinced to vote for Wenceslaus given his enormous wealth and power. In any event, there is no indication in the documents that Wenceslaus at any point even contemplated putting himself up for election.

If we are taking stock, we have the count Palatinate on the Rhine who is voting for Albrecht and the other three secular electors are going to vote for whoever Wenceslaus decides should be king, but not Albrecht.

At which point it is in the hands of the three archbishops to select a new king. Mainz and Cologne take the lead and they chose someone broadly linked to both their families, count Adolf of Nassau.

Adolf von Nassau was really a poor count, unlike Rudolf of Habsburg who had been a wealthy count. The county of Nassau had been divided and he was only count of Nassau-Weilburg which included the bustling metropolises of Weilburg and Idstein, all in the Taunus mountains north of Frankfurt.

Adolf wasn’t only poor and from a comital family, so definitely second division, if not regionals, which as far as the electors are concerned was great. He had also fought with the Archbishop of Cologne at the battle of Worringen we mentioned last week, so a loyal supporter of the bishops. But what qualified him beyond all other poor counts with loyalty to important churchmen was his willingness to sign practically any piece of paper any of the electors put to him.

Adolf promised the archbishop of Cologne to pay him 25,000 mark of silver, return castles and towns lost during the war of the Limburg succession, coerce the city of Cologne to do penance before the archbishop, never to let Cologne become a free imperial city, never to admit any of the archbishop’s enemies or their representative to his council etc., etc., pp. Similar arrangements were signed with the archbishop of Mainz who was given two cities in Thuringia, the representatives of the king of Bohemia received the imperial lands around Eger and Pleissen as well as the promise of a favourable decision should Wenceslaus claim the return of Austria, Styria and Carinthia from the Habsburgs and so on and so on.

The electors had their perfect king. Tied down by arrangements, all safeguarded by collateral, that meant he could barely go to the outhouse with a written permit from the archbishop of Cologne.

Take a wild guess why Adolf von Nassau took the job and signed all these papers. Well, he had seen how count Rudolf von Habsburg raised his family to become imperial princes and he wanted to do the same thing.

So he began a two pronged approach. On the one hand he started a diplomatic dance aimed at getting himself out of all these agreements he had signed at the start of his reign. And he was a cunning little count. He became very active in the areas a king was expected to deliver on, peace and justice. He travelled relentlessly around the parts of the kingdom accessible to him and wherever he went he heard cases as a judge and renewed the Mainzer Landfrieden. His court attracted minnesaenger and many nobles out for a good time. That gave him enough standing in the land to gradually slip out of the political ties to the archbishop. He entrusted the role of Vogt for the lower Rhine to John of Brabant, the enemy of the archbishop of Cologne. And he managed to marry his daughter to the new Count Palatinate on the Rhine who he then tied to himself through various treaties. He reconciled with Albrecht of Habsburg which meant disregarding the Bohemian king’s demands for Austria.

All that is great but does not make one an imperial prince. That opportunity arose when the House of Wettin collapsed into one of its customary internecine feuds. If you want more detail, check out episode 107 – the House of Wettin. In broad brushes, the Landgrave Albrecht, called the degenerate, had been at war with his entire family for a solid 25 years. He had fought his father, his sons, had rejected his wife, the sole surviving legitimate child of emperor Frederick II and chose to pass all his vast possessions, the margraviate of Meissen, the Landgraviate of Thuringia and the land of Pleissen to his illegitimate son. The wars that this policy engendered were vicious and destroyed the immensely wealthy Wettiner lands.

When Albrecht the Degenerate was defeated by his sons, he fled to the court of king Adolf. Adolf treated him kindly and offered to buy his rights on the Wettiner inheritance. The price, a mere 12,000 mark of silver, a ridiculous sum given that these lands included the mines of Freiberg, one of Europe’s richest sources of silver.

The reason for the discount was that Albrecht the Degenerate did not possess any of the lands he sold to Adolf. They were held by his sons, Frederick the Bitten and Diezmann. Adolf invaded at the head of a royal army in 1294 and pushed Frederick and Diezmann out.

This could have been Adolf’s great moment. The Landgraviate and the margraviate were each imperial principalities and though for the moment devastated, but inherently incredibly rich.

But it was not. There were a couple of problems.

As I mentioned, Adolf wasn’t a rich man. As king he now had the revenue from the royal domain that Rudolf had kindly assembled for him, but that was never enough to fund a military expedition into Thuringia. Nor could he count on the electors to support him in an endeavour that was exactly the kind of thing they had wanted to avoid with all these endless contracts.

The source of funds came from abroad. King Edward I of England had begun hostilities with France in alliance with Flanders and Burgundy. And he was looking for a diversion that would bind French forces whilst he attacked from the North. Adolf was to provide that diversion. The official treaty was all royal alliance and high politics, but underneath was a pretty simple deal, money for swords. Adolf had no particular reason to attack France, certainly not in the middle of his Thuringian operation. But the money came in handy and he actually never attacked the French. It all stayed hush, hush, until some clergyman found out and the pope castigated him for acting not like a king but like a mere sell sword. Things weren’t helped when it later surfaced that he had also taken money from the king of France as well, this time for not attacking.

Meanwhile in Thuringia, Adolf’s policy began to ruffle feathers with the electors. Meissen and the Pleissenland were areas that Wenceslaus of Bohemia regarded as part of his zone of influence. Like his father, he was not too keen having a king of the Romans, now augmented to imperial prince on his doorstep. The Archbishop of Mainz had important interests in Thuringia around his city of Erfurt. He also got a bit miffed when Adolf replaced him as Landvogt of Thuringia with one of his supporters.

Adolf might have got away with it had several of the electors not come together in 1297 for Wenceslaus’ much delayed coronation in Prague. This may have been where they first floated the idea, but by 1298 it went from mere chatter to serious talk about deposing the king.

The archbishop of Mainz had invited Albrecht of Habsburg to voice some grievances he had against Adolf in front of the electors. Though this meeting in Frankfurt did not happen as such, a month later the archbishop plus the duke of saxony and the margraves of Brandenburg got together to open a case against the king. Mainz soon after received authorisation from Cologne and Bohemia to act on their behalf and even the count palatinate, son in law of Adolf joined in.

Once opened and the legitimacy of the court established, the result was a foregone conclusion. Adolf was convicted for breaking the peace, breach of the agreements made at his election, the extraction of funds from the church and for good measure, desecration of the Host.

Upon conviction Adolf was deposed and replaced with – drumroll- Albrecht von Habsburg.

This time a impecunious count was not an option. Adolf von Nassau was not going to lay down his crown without a fight. And he was in charge if an army. The electors needed to select someone who could lead forces against Adolf and win. And that man was Albrecht von Habsburg.

Albrecht had already been fighting Adolf for some weeks by the time the electors had made their decision. He had set off from Austria in early march 1298 and has been playing cat and mouse with Adolf’s army, marching all across Swabia, between Ulm and Breisach. In June Albrecht decided to take his troops further north along the Rhine river, whilst Adolf followed him on the opposite shore.

The whole game of marching here and there continued around Alzey and Worms until news reached both camps  that Adolf was definitely deposed and Albrecht elected the new king. That meant the electors could now officially get involved in the fighting and with Mainz and Cologne not far, Adolf von Nassau needed to strike before support for his enemy arrived.

On July 2nd, 1298 Albrecht lined his army up on top of a hill near the village of Göllheim. Adolf von Nassau who came from the North had to attack uphill and into the sun. For Albrecht the key was to hold out and inflict as much damage on his opponent as possible. He knew help would arrive in the end. Adolf on the other hand needed an immediate and comprehensive victory. So he fought ferociously, leading his troops from the front, as any good medieval monarch should. Albrecht allegedly kept his cool on top of his little hill.  

And he was right to do so. The odds were stacked too far against Adolf. In one of the rolling attacks he was pushed of his horse. Heavily wounded he got onto another steed, but he was unable to put his helmet back on, the sun was blinding him and he was felled by one of Albrecht’s men.

Adolf’s body was taken to a Cistercian monastery. Albrecht did not permit the dead king to be buried in Speyer cathedral, as Adolf had requested. But the next emperor Henry VII allowed the transfer and that is where he still lies. One of his descendant had his funerary monument remade in 1824 and it now shows him life size praying in the vestibule of the cathedral.

The counts of Nassau-Weilburg never became kings again. Their lands, much enlarged later became a duchy with its centre in Wiesbaden. And in 1890 they became the grand dukes of Luxemburg where they still rule to this day

The cousins of our king Adolf of Nassau rose even higher. One of them was William of Nassau-Dillenburg born in 1533. As a child William inherited vast estates in the low countries as well as the principality of Orange from a French cousin. That principality was named not after the fruit, but after a lovely little town in Provence that features one the best preserved Roman theatres in the world and is well worth a visit. William took on the name William of Orange and became also known as William the Silent when he led the Dutch protestant rebellion against the Spanish. The house of Orange still reigns over the Netherlands and as a mark of respect the Dutch national teams play in an orange strip.

But for our narrative, these greatest moments for the house of Nassau lie in the far future. Our preoccupation is now Albrecht of Habsburg, finally king, seven years after his father’s death. We will find out how he gets on next time. I hope you will join us again. And do not forget to tune in on BBC iplayer on April 8th at 8:30 GMT for the final of University Challenge and watch Justin Lee do his thing!

by on

Allezeit Mehrer des reiches

Martin Rady in his highly amusing and exceptionally well written book on the Habsburg said quote “The remainder of Rudolf’s reign up to his death in 1291 was a failure. He did not manage to have himself crowned emperor by the pope and had to make do with the title of king…it was a false dawn, both for the Holy Roman empire and for the Habsburgs” end quote.

I most humbly disagree. The 13 years following the battle of Durnkrut are some of the most transformative for the Empire and the fledgling concept of German and Germany. This episode will try to make the case for Rudolf I, founder of the house of Habsburg and one of the most impactful medieval rulers of the empire.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans: Episode 141 – Rudolf I  Semper Augustus Allezeit Mehrer des Reiches.

Martin Rady in his highly amusing and exceptionally well written book on the Habsburg said quote “The remainder of Rudolf’s reign up to his death in 1291 was a failure. He did not manage to have himself crowned emperor by the pope and had to make do with the title of king…it was a false dawn, both for the Holy Roman empire and for the Habsburgs” end quote.

I most humbly disagree. The 13 years following the battle of Durnkrut are some of the most transformative for the Empire and the fledgling concept of German and Germany. This episode will try to make the case for Rudolf I, founder of the house of Habsburg and one of the most impactful medieval rulers of the empire.

Before we go into the story and the respective arguments, just a few words about the way the History of the Germans is run. This show is advertising free which means the only way I can get compensated is by the generosity of patrons. And I must say, your willingness to keep this show on the road is overwhelming – so thank you so much. And it is worth it. I recently listened to a podcast I hugely respect and that is with a network that had approached me to join a few months ago. This podcast was now featuring cryptocurrency advertising, something I personally would not want to be seen endorsing in any form. So a specially heartfelt thanks to William Schmidt, Jantje B., Donka P., Brian A., Moritz L. and Randy F. who have already signed up, saving your host from shame and embarrassment.

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Talking about shame and embarrassment, I have to make a correction. In the last episode I described the beginning of the battle of Durnkrut stating that Rudolf’s Flemish slingers hurled their stones at the Bohemians whose Cumans and Sarmatians responded with clouds of arrows. It was the other way around. The Flemish slingers fought for Ottokar whilst the Cumans and Sarmatians had joined Rudolf’s forces from Hungary. Apologies for that.

So now back to the show.

On 26th of August 1278 the body of Ottokar II, king of Bohemia is lies almost naked on the battlefield of Dürnkrut. Scavengers have stripped off his precious armor. The great golden king is no more.

His seven year old son, Wenceslaus comes to king Rudolf to sue for peace and the return of the body of his father that had been displayed in the Minoritenkirche in Vienna, a church Ottokar himself had founded in his heyday when he was duke of Austria. Wenceslaus was allowed to take his predecessor’s remains home and not only that. He was betrothed to Judith, the youngest of Rudolf’s surviving children. The marriage would take place seven years later when bride and groom had grown up to be at least teenagers.

Rudolf was on top of the world. His enemy and only serious rival for the crown was defeated and dead. He was in control of not just one, but three duchies, Austria, Styria and Carinthia. His policies to rebuild royal power in the empire were gaining traction and lands and rights lost to the crown during the interregnum were gradually returned.

For many in the German parts of the empire it seemed as if the golden days of the Hohenstaufen were about to return. For the cities in the south Rudolf’s reforms were of particular importance.

As we have seen in the series about the Hanseatic League, the 13th and14th century was a time during which new and extremely profitable trade routes opened up. Merchants handling these wares grew rich, artisans gained access to new customers and the city’s population found employment in the various workshops. Trade fairs, events that would attract merchants and dealers from across europe are flourishing. The Leipziger Messe can claim to be the oldest recorded trade fair still in operation, dating back to 1165. Frankfurt Messe was founded in 1240 and is also still going strong. Cities like Nördlingen, Donauwörth, Eichstätt, Regensburg, Schaffhausen, Worms, Speyer and Naumburg and further north, Cologne, Duisburg Aachen and Utrecht were connecting points in a pan-European trading system.

All of these cities had overlords. Some dated back to Roman times and were seats of bishops, others had been founded by emperors, dukes or counts. These overlords became increasingly a problem. For one, they regularly demanded some form of tax of other financial contribution. Moreover, these high and mighty lord and not so saintly bishops did not understand much about trade and the importance of reliable currencies, open transportation routes and the rule of law.

The rift between the city councils and the overlords deepened over time. The cities seized their opportunity during the interregnum when central authority weakened and several of the important principalities fragmented. Many threw off the yoke of their overlords. Having gained independence was certainly a great source of pride and joy, but also left them with a problem once things settled down again. How could they protect themselves against the new territorial lordships that were forming again all around them.

That is where Rudolf saw a way to further strengthen royal power. If he took some of these cities under his protection, he himself or his vogt could fend off rapacious lords and in return the cities would pay compensation for these efforts in the form of taxes. That is how in the late 13th century many cities, in particular in the south west of Germany became imperial cities. This alliance between the Imperial cities and the emperors became a building block of the Holy Roman empire.

Not all imperial cities paid though. Some were free cities, in particular large ones like Cologne, Mainz, Lubeck, Basel and Strasburg. A free city would not pay tax thanks to privileges they had obtained over the centuries. But it wasn’t just the paper that mattered here.  A great free city like Cologne simply did not need the protection of the vogt against some rapacious count in the neighborhood. Smaller places like Nördlingen or Memmingen did.

That also explains why there are so many more  imperial cities in the former lands of the Hohenstaufen, in Franconia and Swabia. That is where the royal power was more significant and where the Vogt could indeed command sufficient forces to ride to the rescue of a city under siege. In the north, the king had little influence and hence few cities were counting on a royal officer for protection. Only the largest and most powerful gained that status, Lubeck, Hamburg and Bremen for example. But still important places like Rostock, Wismar or Stralsund, never obtained the status of a free or imperial city. The king or emperor was simply too far away…

The city taxes added a neat 8000 marks of silver to the royal budget, which was more than the Habsburg lands in Switzerland and Alsace provided. So nothing to be sniffed at.

During his remaining 13 years Rudolf expanded his system of Vogts covering large areas and working hard to regain royal possessions. South of the Main river that involved recruiting members of the local aristocracy and putting them in charge. They were deliberately chosen amongst the barons and counts and not amongst the Ministeriales or knightly class as they were increasingly called. Rudolf wanted to avoid the situation where the senior lords felt he was building up a bureaucracy of men tied to him be bonds of servitude as the Hohenstaufen and Salians had done. It was all part of the First amongst Equals approach.

When he looked to the northern part of his empire, this model did not quite work though. First, there were far fewer imperial possessions in what used to be the stem duchy of Saxony. And the territorial lords there were more powerful than in the South West. So instead of barons and counts, he appointed the dukes of Saxony and of Brunswick as the representatives of royal power in the north. These men could not be made to collect taxes, return royal lands or protect imperial cities against themselves, but they could, and would take on the role of judges under the Mainzer Landfrieden. That way Rudolf was able to curb some of the worst excesses in feuding even in the parts of the empire where his actual influence was modest.

One very significant feud he could however not prevent, the war of the Limburg succession. Limburg was a duchy roughly between Liege and Aachen. It was one of the successor principalities of the old duchy of Lothringia that played such an important role under the Ottonians and Salians but had gradually shifted out of the orbit of imperial policy under the Hohenstaufens. Being outside imperial direct control, several local powers dominated the region. These were the archbishops of Cologne, the dukes of Brabant and the House of Ardenne, the counts of Luxemburg. On the eastern side of the Rhine the counts of Berg had interest there as well.

When the last duke of Limburg passed away, these powers got into conflict over who should take over the territory. I spare you the genealogy but it ended up as a conflict between two sides, the count of Guelders who was supported by the archbishop of Cologne and the counts of Luxemburg on one hand. On the other side was count Adolf VII of Berg who could count on the duke of Brabant, the counts of Mark and Julich and importantly, the city of Cologne that had risen up against their archbishop.

This conflict culminated in the battle of Worringen on June 5, 1288. That was a pretty sizeable affair with about 4,000 men lining up on each side. It ended in a complete defeat of the archbishop of Cologne and his allies, the counts of Luxemburg as well as a minor count, Adolf von Nassau. In particular the Luxembourg suffered horrible losses, including several of the count’s brothers. It also re-arranged the whole regional politics. The city of Cologne shook off its archepiscopal overlord. The counts of Berg hugely expanded their territory which would later comprise Julich and Cleves as well, bringing them up into the rank of imperial princes and would even get them to furnish one of Henry VIII’s wives.

And – spoiler alert – the  battle of Worringen also featured some of the key protagonists in upcoming episodes, Adolf von Nassau, the archbishop of Cologne and the counts of Luxemburg.

Most importantly though the count of Berg rewarded some of his supporters, the inhabitants of a village where a brook, the Dussel flows into the Rhine with city rights. And because it was a village, a Dorf as it is in German on the Dussel, he called it Dusseldorf. Who ever claimed that medieval rulers lacked creativity?

It is said that the citizens and in particular the children of Düsseldorf were so excited about the count’s generosity, they spontaneously went on to do cartwheels on the presumably still muddy streets. Doing cartwheels became a symbol of the city of Düsseldorf and since I grew up there, I too learned to do cartwheels as a child, a skill I have now long lost. But my niece and nephew who still live there are impressive cartwheelers. You see, weird German customs are not confined to Bavaria. 

If you listened carefully you may notice that I use the words German and Germany much more regularly in this and the last two episodes. And that is deliberate. Unti the time of the Hohenstaufen, the history had been very much one of the empire and the empire in that era was perceived by its rulers and even by many in Europe as a universal empire. Its language was Latin and its politics were heavily focused on the papacy and Italy. Most of its rulers came from the German lands, but their ambitions went well beyond Germany. The reason this period is part of German history has more to do with the 19th and 20th century historians that incorporated it into the national narrative than the actual reality on the ground.

The story we are going through now, though still very much involved with the rest of europe, is more centered on the lands north of the alps, including what is today Germany. Its rulers were seeking their fortunes no longer in the south but within North and Eastern Europe – with exceptions obviously. And they became a lot more German. Frederick II preferred to write and speak Sicilian dialect and his chancery excelled in courtly Latin. Rudolf on the other hand spoke German and  changed the language of the royal administration to German. The culture of the royal court and the courts of the territorial princes culminated in the Minnesang, the German language version of courtly love. We are in a period of transition. I came across a book by Len Scales, professor for medieval history at the university of Durham talking about how the German identity was forged in the late Middle Ages between 1245 and 1414. I have listed it under the book recommendations for this season on the website. I am still working through it but what I have read so far resonates strongly with my own understanding, so expect more of that ilk as we go along.

But before we go there, we need to talk a bit more about cold hard power politics. And that is going through a transition as well. Though Rudolf heavily emphasizes the return of imperial lands and rights to the crown, he is also a ruler in the new mould. No longer is kingship or imperial power a function of the role alone, but it now rests more and more on the resources the ruler controls as his own fiefs or outright property. That concept is known as Hausmacht, probably best translated as the power of the imperial House.

Having started out as a powerful count in Swabia, but not as imperial princes and with an income that was dwarfed not just by Ottokar II but even by the archbishop of Cologne, Rudolf needed to elevate his and his a family’s  wealth if they wanted to hold on to the throne.

The first set of lands and rights he was eying up were the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia he had wrestled from Ottokar II. After the battle of Durnkrut he stayed there for another 3 years, bringing his whole stay in Vienna to five years, a very long time for a medieval king who was supposed to be peripatetic showing himself all over the empire.

The reason for the long stay was that he wasn’t yet duke of Austria, Styria and Carinthia. Yes he controlled them, but only in his role as king of the Romans, not as his own or his family’s fief. And that makes a huge difference. The difference being that if a new king of the Romans was elected upon his death, the duchies would go to him, not to his sons.

So what he needed to do was to enfeoff the duchies either to himself or to one of his sons. That should be easy, after all, Rudolf is the king of the Romans and as such should be able to grant fiefs to whoever he liked. That is how things worked in England or France or Poland or Hungary. But there was a problem, a problem he had created himself, at least to a degree.

When Rudolf set up the revindication policy, that is the program to return former imperial lands back to the royal purse, he stated that all lands have to be returned that had not been enfeoffed by the king and the electors acting together.

That requirement of having the electors signing off to the transfer was needed to overcome all those awards granted by the weak kings of the interregnum. For instance king Richard of Cornwall had confirmed Ottokar as duke of Austria in 1269. If that award had been valid, there would not have been grounds enough to throw Ottokar off the land.

The explicit proviso that the electors needed to sign off wasn’t entirely Rudolf’s invention. In the past most large scale enfeoffments, in particular the award of whole duchies happened at imperial diets which allowed for an involvement of the imperial princes in the decision. So it was an established process that the king could not just enfeoff someone all by himself. But up until Rudolf, the involvement of the imperial princes was not formalized. In particular there wasn’t a list of princes who needed to be consulted. An imperial diet was able to act even if some imperial lords had failed to attend. But now, Rudolf said that was not enough. All seven electors had have signed off.

To make clear what he meant, he also firmed up who these electors were. And these were the seven electors we know today, the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of Brandenburg and the Count Palatinate on the Rhine. Why those? Well, apart from the archbishops, they had all married daughters of Rudolf.

So what is the problem. Well the problem is that if all awards of lands and titles in the past are invalid without signatures from all seven electors, well then all future awards also require these signatures.

And so for Rudolf to become duke of Austria or at least one of his sons to get the title, Rudolf needed the consent of all seven electors. And that wasn’t so easy any more. As we heard last time, the imperial princes had initially supported Rudolf’s attack on Ottokar II. But once they realized that they had made the “poor count” into a powerful magnates, their enthusiasm waned. And so might have the lure of Rudolf’s daughters.

Negotiations dragged on until 1282 before he could cajole the electors into enfeoffing Austria, Styria and Carinthia to his two sons, Albert and Rudolf who were to hold the duchies in common. That was a somewhat unusual construct and probably came about because king Rudolf did not want to go through the process twice should one of his sons die in the still incessant warfare. But it also hints at a Habsburg specialty. The Habsburgs throughout their history acted as a clan. Yes, there was always an individual in charge, the emperor or the king of Spain etc. but all these archdukes and archduchesses kept working on supporting the success of the dynasty. Sure they had their squabbles and some will be extremely violent. But overall, they operated as a block. That was certainly a contributing factor in their success but also explains the need to bring the meandering branches of the family back together by marrying the cousins, which had some well known implications. This acting as one dynasty goes back to before Rudolf, but manifests itself on the imperial stage for the first time here.

Though Rudolf had been confident that Austria was in the bag after his victory over Ottokar, he did not believe this was enough. The electors had made it clear that he could not take Bohemia from Ottokar’s heir, so he started looking for alternative options.

His first target was the almost forgotten kingdom of the Arelat, the theoretical successor to the kingdom of Burgundy. The last emperor to have been crowned king of Burgundy had been Barbarossa who had received the crown in the city of Arles in Provence, hence the name of the kingdom, the Arelat. Rudolfs plan was to make his son Hartmann the king of Arelat. That would not require the agreement of the electors, which made it easier. What made it harder was that the Arelat was the property of Charles of Anjou, the king of Sicily, one of the most powerful men in Europe. But Rudolf had obtained the support of Pope Gregory X for this adventure as an inducement for him to go on crusade. That effort did end with 18-year old Hartmann being run through by a Savoyard nobleman in his attempt to get south. Rudolf was much aggrieved by the loss of this, his favorite son and intended successor.

Meanwhile He had opened up another frontier in Swabia where he tried to gain his son Rudolf the duchy of Swabia that was vacant since the fall of the Hohenstaufen and its lands had been distributed amongst whoever had been quickest with the sword. So to achieve the elevation of young Rudolf to duke of Swabia, some noble lords needed to be relieved from their properties. Egon, count of Freiburg was one of the targets, amongst others. But this effort ran into stiff resistance from another important Swabian lord, Count Eberhard of Württemberg. The Württemberg’s had been counts palatinate of Swabia since time immemorial and held a strong position controlled from their home in Tübingen. They gathered a coalition of Swabian lords unwilling to be expropriated in the interest of the House of Habsburg and after a half-decade of war, the two Rudolfs gave up on that project.

The other main objective for Rudolf and his sons was to obtain the imperial crown. And initially the chances were pretty good. After all it had been Pope Gregory X who had demanded that the electors choose a strong leader who would mount the much prophesied imperial crusade to the holy land. Pope and king met in Lausanne and agreed All Saints Day of 1275 as the date for the coronation in Rome. It was Rudolf who did not make it as he was tied up with the conflict over Austria. Pope Gregory X died in 1276.

Gregory’s successor, Innocent V was a lot less accommodating. He demanded that Rudolf gave up all imperial rights in the Romagna. That was a largely theoretical demand since the empire had very limited if any influence in Northern Italy at this stage. But Rudolf had just recently added the title Semper Augustus to the title of king of Rome. That refers back to the ancient titles of the Roman emperors and translates literally as “ever exalted”. But Rudolfs Chancery mistranslated it into German as “allezeit Mehrer des Reiches” which would be “forever augmentor of the realm” in English. Therefore giving away imperial rights felt hard to square with the claim to forever increasing the size of the empire.

Pope Innocent V died before negotiations could be concluded. The next two popes also lasted barely a few months, one of them, John XXI, the only Portuguese ever to become pope, was killed when the roof of his medical laboratory collapsed.

The next one, Nicolas III was of a more robust constitution. He lasted 2. ½ years, which seemed a lot compared to his predecessors. It was enough for Pope and king conclude their negotiations and even set another date, but then Nicolas III unexpectedly lost consciousness and died.

Entering stage left pope Martin IV who was another upgrade in the longevity stakes. He lasted 5 years. But that was no use to Rudolf since he was a strong supporter of Charles of Anjou, the king of Sicily who did not want any German ruler coming south and challenge his control of Italy.  Charles of Anjou and Martin IV died in 1285, which re-opened the possibility of an imperial coronation. Another date was set for 1287, but this time the roadblocks were up in Germany. The bishops refused to raise the funds for an Italian campaign, punishing Rudolf for his implicit support for the cities who were wriggling out of episcopal control.

Rudolf had survived 8 popes, who with only one exceptions were willing to crown him, but he still did not manage to get to Rome and become emperor.

The implications of that failure went well beyond having to live with the diminished prestige of being just a King of the Romans.

Under the previous three great dynasties, succession from father to son was usually achieved by having the son elected king of the Romans whilst the father was still alive. That allowed the ruling family to formally recognise the right of princes to elect the emperor whilst at the same time ensuring the succession.

But to be able to have the son elected king, the father has to first be upgraded to emperor. There has not been a precedent in the empire of having two Kings of the Romans in parallel. And even in France where such arrangements had been more typical, dual kingship had not been practiced since the 11th century.

So without an imperial coronation, the only way Rudolf could hope to ensure the continuation of his dynasty on the throne was by receiving firm commitments from the electors that they would choose one of his sons.

At which point there is the question, which of his three sons should be put forward. Albert was his eldest son and should have been the natural candidate. But two things made his candidature difficult. Albert had taken on the administration of the Austrian lands whilst his father and brothers pursued all these projects in the Arelat and in Swabia. And whilst a competent manager, he was also a harsh taskmaster who instilled little sympathy amongst the electors. And there was the problem that Austria was the immediate neighbour of the most important secular elector, the king of Bohemia which had historically been a source of constant conflict.

So king Rudolf tried to push his younger sons. First Hartmann who however died very young in 1281 and then the other, Rudolf. Rudolfs candidature was going reasonably well and king Wenceslaus II of Bohemia agreed to support young Rudolf in 1290, which would have brought the votes from Brandenburg and Saxony along. That was no mean feat given that king Rudolf had defeated Wenceslaus father in a battle where he had also perished.

But the premature death of young Rudolf in 1290 stopped this plan in its tracks. Albert, the duke of Austria was the only son left and the one nobody liked.

Sons wasn’t the only thing Rudolf was running out of, he was also running out of time. He had already been 55 years of age when he was elected in 1273. If the electors had hoped he would only last a few years, they must have been quite thoroughly disappointed. Rudolf stayed on for a full 18 years. But by 1291 he was seriously old. Medieval rulers who spent most of their life on horseback, interspersed with the occasional battle did not last to be 73. Even Frederick Barbarossa who contemporaries regarded as exceptionally long lived, expired aged 67 in a shallow river in Anatolia.

On July 14th, 1291 was the end of the road for Rudolf von Habsburg. Seeing his end approaching he had travelled to Speyer, the burial place of the great Salian emperors to die. 2 days later he was entombed next to Philipp of Swabia in Speyer Cathedral. His gravestone features an incredibly lifelike portrait of the King of the Romans holding his sceptre in his right hand and wearing a mantle featuring the imperial eagle and the Habsburg lion. You can see an image of it in this episode’s artwork though you have to be aware that the rather prominent nose had been added in the 19th century based on a chronicler who had described it as so large, it cast its own shadow.

So, was Rudolf’s reign a disappointment as Martin Rady stated?

I am not in the habit of evaluating or ranking medieval rulers, but what I find surprising is that Rudolf did not get anywhere as much airtime in the German national narrative as he may warrant.

Not only is he the founder of the House of Habsburg, arguably the most significant European dynasty. But he also made major contributions to the political structure of the Holy roman empire that would last for another 500plus years. He settled the list of electors, he established the system of the Landvogte that later transitioned into the imperial circles, he revived the Mainzer Landfriede that became one of the constitutional bases of the empire. He transitioned royal power into the Hausmacht model, where the emperor relied more on his personal possessions than the royal domain and he fostered the network of imperial cities that is the reason Germany today has multiple commercial, cultural and political centres, rather than being all focused on a capital city. 

For someone who had such a significant impact on history, he does get very little recognition in the national narrative and the school curriculum.

I think this may have happened not despite his achievements, but because of them.

When the historians of the 19th and early 20th century surveyed German history, Rudolf’s efforts to stabilise the realm were actions that had led to the structure of the Holy Roman empire of hundreds of principalities only loosely connected by weak institutions, a structure they blamed for the delayed formation of a nation state. Plus a Prussian-led Germany regarded the Habsburgs if not necessary as enemies, but still a force that led Germany towards a catholic, multinational historic cul-de-sac.

After the war when the narrative moved away from the nationalistic storyline and historians sought to frame the medieval empire as a European endeavour foreshadowing the European Union, Rudolf’s inward focus and fostering of a German identity did not resonate.

We will see whether Rudolf will gain more recognition in the future as a fundamental re-evaluation of the Holy Roman Empire gets under way.

The other thing we will see is whether Rudolf’s son Albert, the one nobody likes will become king and prolong the time of the Habsburgs on the throne. I hope you will join us again next week.

by on

From Revindication to the Battle of Dürnkrut

This week we will look at what the poor count Rudolf of Habsburg does once he had been elected King of the Romans. This is not the first time the electors have chosen a man of much more modest means than themselves. William of Holland and Hermann von Salm had failed to leverage their elevated status into tangible gains. But Rudolf is different. Through a combination of charm, cunning and fecundity he managed to wrestle the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia from its current owner, the immeasurably rich and profoundly vain king Ottokar II of Bohemia. A story of political acumen, personal bravery and dishonourable tactics.

Ep. 140 – Rudolf von Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II of Bohemia
Ep. 140 – Rudolf von Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II of Bohemia

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 140 – Rudolf von Habsburg and the Golden King Ottokar II of Bohemia

This week we will look at what the poor count Rudolf of Habsburg does once he had been elected King of the Romans. This is not the first time the electors have chosen a man of much more modest means than themselves. William of Holland and Hermann von Salm had failed to leverage their elevated status into tangible gains. But Rudolf is different. Through a combination of charm, cunning and fecundity he managed to wrestle the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia from its current owner, the immeasurably rich and profoundly vain king Ottokar II of Bohemia. A story of political acumen, personal bravery and dishonourable tactics.

But before we start, let me thank our patrons one more time. They are the ones who keep this show on the road. And they get mentioned  at the start of the podcast. As you may have noticed, I normally just read out first name and initial, but some have asked to have their full name read out. So I asked the whole Patreon community how you want me to proceed. That was a genuine question not just me fishing for compliments, but I must say I am bit overwhelmed by the nice things you guys had to say about the podcast. On the subject it seems views are very divided, some like the anonymised version, others really want me to read out their full name. So I have concluded to read out the names of those of you who really want me to and stick with the previous version for everyone else. I hope that works for you. So, if you want to hear your full name here and you are a patron or one-time donor above £20, message me, and if you are not yet, you can sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans and on historyofthegermans.com/support and your name will be heard of to eternity, or at least as long as there are podcast hosting platforms. And special thanks to Rory H-J,  Simon W., Melissa G., Brad and Barry M.

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And then just one more thing. As you know I do not do advertising here at the History of the Germans. However I occasionally highlight other history podcasters who make shows that I enjoy and believe you may enjoy as well. One of these is The Cold War Conversations Podcast by Ian Sanders. His show does exactly what it says in the title, he interviews people about the cold war. And, other than me, he is a gifted interviewer who gets his guests to truly open up, sometimes about very difficult subjects. He has talked to former Stasi officers, east German tank commanders, Mormon missionaries in Cottbus, a US soldier who defected to the GDR, various spies undertaking clandestine operations but also just regular people like Sabine who was 13 when the wall came down. They are all sharing their experiences, some for the very first time. The Cold War Conversations podcast has a solid 300 plus episodes under its belt and some are grouped in playlists, including one on the former GDR. You can find it on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and wherever you get your podcasts from or on his website: coldwarconversations.com

Now let us get going.

Last week we ended on Rudolf von Habsburg being elected King of the Romans and future emperor. But apart from some basic biographical markers, we haven’t heard much about him.

So let’s dig into his background. The gigantic Habsburg propaganda machine had done its best to portray Rudolf as a poor count wearing a modest grey coat who rose up from humble beginnings to the crown, which can only have been down to divine providence rewarding his humility.

Well, that was not quite true.

Rudolf was born in 1218 the son of Albert, called the Wise of Habsburg. The Habsburgs were nobles based in the Aargau, which is today a region in the North of Switzerland. They were named after their ancestral castle, the Habichtsburg or castle of the hawk that still stands near the market town of Brugg.

At the time this was part of the duchy of Swabia and the Hohenstaufen had been the dukes of Swabia. As vassals of the emperors, the early Habsburgs were involved in many of Frederick Barbarossa’s and Frederick II’s campaigns.  One ancestor had been at the fateful siege of Rome in 1167 when the imperial army and with it all of Barbarossa’s political capital vanished. Episode 57 – The Hand of God if you are interested. During the civil war between Otto IV and Philipp of Schwaben, the Habsburgs were backing up their Hohenstaufen side. And in 1212 Rudolfs grandfather made an audacious and ultimately very profitable move. He joined the young king Frederick of Sicily who had come up to Germany on a desperate mission to oust his enemy the emperor Otto IV. That endeavour, despite papal support, was by no means a guaranteed success. Only by a stroke of luck did Frederick get into the city of Constance on time. That was in Episode 75 – Wet Pants and other Miracles.

Rudolf’s grandfather not only supported the future emperor Frederick II with his sword and his advice, he also provided some much needed funds. The Habsburgs contributed 1000 marks of silver to the subsequent campaigns of Frederick II more than the bishops of Worms and Mainz and the other four much more magnificent princes stumped up.

So not quite that poor a count after all. All these decades as loyal supporters to the house of Hohenstaufen had paid off quite handsomely. The family had been enfeoffed with various estates in the Alsace, the Black Forest and in the Aargau. Other bits were added by the usual combination of matrimony and murder. But what made the really rich was a much more mundane source, the construction of a bridge across the Schoellenen Gorge which opened up the Gotthard Pass. This provided a new route for goods from Northern Italy to come north and the Gotthard quickly became one of the busiest connections. And the Habsburgs by various means controlled the whole section from where the road comes down into the valleys of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden to the Rhine at Bad Saeckingen. The tolls on the bridges was what made the Habsburgs rich.

Later the Habsburgs will claim an even closer relationship with the Hohenstaufen, including asserting that Rudolf’s grandmother was a certain Agnes von Staufen and that Frederick II had stood godparent to Rudolf von Habsburg, all of which may or may not be true.

Rudolf comes into his inheritance when he was 22 and his father, Alber the Wise had died. Whilst his ancestors were mainly courtiers looking to progress by the generosity of their masters, Rudolf took a different approach. In his time there was no longer a powerful emperor to cosy up to. This was the Interregnum and it was dog eat dog time.

With imperial power waning, inheritances that in the past would have gone to the crown to be enfeoffed to a loyal vassal of the emperor were now divided up amongst the most aggressive of their relatives. And Rudolf was very good and very lucky at that game. He did benefit from the unusual fecundity of his family which had placed sons and daughters into the bloodlines of practically anyone who was anyone in the south west of the empire. Which meant that as other families, less blessed with powerful loins, expired, there is always a Habsburg claim in the mix. During his career as a serial heir, several important families were dying out or weakened. One was a lateral branch of the Habsburgs whose possessions he managed to consolidate. Then a number of neighbours suffered from extinction, The Lenzburgs, then the Kiburgs whose ancestor Werner von Kiburg was the friend of duke Ernst of Swabia from episode 23 and finally the mighty dukes of Zaehringen disappeared from natural causes. Whenever that happened, Rudolf of Habsburg was there, holding the marriage contract in on hand and the sword in the other, demanding his share of the spoils, until he was the most powerful lord in Swabia.

This kind of life is one of perennial warfare. The annals of Basel record that in 1268 he conquered Utzenberg and some other castles, in 1269 he takes Reichenstein, in 1270 he besieges the city of Basel for 3 days, in 1271 he burns down the monastery at Granfelden and several villages and that same year he also destroys the castle at Tiefenstein, in 1272 he goes after Freiburg and destroys the surroundings of the city, and so forth and so forth.

When the negotiations over the election of 1273 drew to a close and Frederick of Nurnberg thought it expedient to bring Rudolf up to Frankfurt for the formal election, he found him in the midst of a siege of the city of Basel where he conducted a feud against the bishop. Bishops were sort of a speciality of his. He made his name in a feud against the bishop of Strasburg who had refused to hand over another one of these inheritances. His retaliation was relentless. He did not stop until he had the bishop stripped of all his strongholds and cities, including Strasburg itself.

Once the bishop had been replaced and his successor had recognised Rudolf’s victory, all Rudolf asked for was his original demand. The cities and strongholds he handed back, allegedly without even asking for a ransom payment. According to the chronicler he did this to turn a foe into a friend and ally.

That kind of behaviour was extremely unusual in the Middle Ages. And it hints to a more general observation that Rudolf was a strategic thinker well ahead of his time.  Outwardly he was warm and affable. But his engaging friendliness and outward humility covered a steely determination  to win, and to win at all cost. Conventions of chivalry that ruled the behaviour of Europe’s elites to him were just that, conventions, guidelines to be observed in normal times but that could be broken if the occasion demanded it. The rules of feuding as laid down by the Mainzer Landfrieden he disregarded on several occasion, once by burning down a nunnery. It was for that that he was excommunicated and had to do penance by fighting with the Teutonic knights in Prussia.

His favourite pastime beyond stabbing people was chess, a game in which he gained something of a reputation. And like a good chess player, he was able to think several moves ahead, much further than his adversaries.

And the first move he made upon being elected was to reassure the electors that his days as an insatiable warrior – his own word – were now over. Shortly after his coronation he addressed the princes, nobles and the people saying: quote “Today I forgive all those wrongs that have been done to me, release the prisoners who are suffering in my gaols, and I promise from now on to be a defender of peace in the land, just as I was before a rapacious man of war” end quote.

We will see whether peace and justice were his main motivation to take the job, but he made the resurrection of the admittedly rickety but only available conflict resolution system, the Mainzer Landfriede the core of his political program. The Mainzer Landfried had determined that before any feud could be declared parties were to consult a judge who would be given time to find a compromise. And there was a code of conduct to be observed. Breaking the code was to be sanctioned by the imperial ban. A banned man was ostracised, could no longer own property and could be killed by anyone passing by.

The way Rudolf revived the old order was by appointing Landvogte, protectors of the land each looking after a district. There they were to resolve the disputes between feuding parties and enforce the limitations set by the Mainzer Landfriede. Whether this was successful or not is as always hard to determine. But the system of Landvogtes remained and their bailiwicks would later become the imperial circles.

Though the Landvogte were usually members of the local aristocracy, they pursued the role of Vogt on behalf of the king. Therefore they had to be remunerated. That remuneration was to come from two sources. One was a general tax levied twice during the Rudolf’s 17 year reign. The other, and more significant one was the income from the imperial lands.

But the imperial lands were all lost, weren’t they. Yes, they had been, at least in large parts. But part of the Landvogt’s job was to recover these lands. This process was called the revindication and formed Rudolf’s second most important policy.

It appeared that many of the lords and bishops recognised that the pendulum had swung too far away from central authority and were prepared to hand back at last some of the properties that had been lost. And so one by one towns and castles returned to the king. And that just shows the smart way Rudolf went about his program. By starting slowly and roping in local lords as Vogts, he created acceptance for his policy. Once established, it developed its own dynamic and the Vogts demanded more restitutions that became more difficult to resist as the central authority became stronger.

Peter Wilson has calculated that Rudolfs policy brought 66% of the imperial church fiefs back into royal control, 73% of the crown lands and even 68% of the Hohenstaufen family possessions. That is a truly remarkable success given that the family lands had been entirely lost. And just for the avoidance of doubt, the vast majority of these lands were in Franconia and Swabia. The north that used to be the stem duchy of Saxony remained distant from the king. Only 3% of all of Rudolf’s charters relate to the North.

The next thing that was needed was a flagship campaign that made it plain to see that times have changed and a new king is in charge. And that campaign was the cleaning out of the robber barons in the Rhine valley. The cities along the Rhine, Mainz, Worms, Cologne, Strasburg etc. had pooled their military forces and had tried to dislodge this menace to their trade in 1256 but had failed. Now, in 1273, Rudolf von Habsburg gathers an army, joins up with the city forces and takes and burns Soonegg and had the robber knights of Reichenstein hanged. Allegedly he then used the wood from their gallows to build a chapel.

In November 1274, about a year and a half into his rule, he takes another step to re-assert royal power. He calls an imperial diet in Nurenberg where he requires all the imperial princes who hold their fiefs directly from the emperor to renew their vows of allegiance. This had been a standard procedure under the Hohenstaufen. The feudal system in the empire perceived vassalage as a personal agreement between lord and vassal. Hence if either lord or vassal dies, the successor has to renew the arrangement. This ritual had however fallen into disuse during the ineffectual kings of the last 2 decades.

And in November 1274 all imperial princes gather or at least send emissaries who renew the vows as required. By now Rudolf had generously distributed five of his six daughters to various important princes, which made the whole thing a bit of a family affair.

Only one did not show, did not want a marriage alliance with Rudolf and was impervious to his charm, and that was Ottokar II of Bohemia, the richest and most powerful of the imperial princes. Ottokar had been a very strong contender for the crown but found himself outmanoeuvred by the princes, the archbishop of Mainz and the burgrave of Nurnberg for which he bore a grudge against all of them. And he had a point in as much that he was supposed to have been one of the seven electors but had been removed at the last minute for dubious reasons.

Otokar II not only failed to show, he also made clear that he did not recognise Rudolf as the true king. Instead he began to style himself as an independent king. We need to remember that the title of the king of Bohemia wasn’t a real royal title. It was purely honorific and other than a real king, Ottokar was the vassal of a another king, and that king was Rudolf of Habsburg, the king of the Romans. Or at least that is how things used to be.

Ottokar II added the imperial eagle to his coat of arms and issued charters in the style of the imperial chancellery referring to himself as king by the grace of god. No way was he to bow down before that little count.

This may depict Wenceslaus, the son of Ottokar II

When Rudolf called that diet in Nurnberg he must have known that Ottokar would not come. And he must have known that this would force a confrontation. And that this confrontation would be challenging because of a minor delta in income and hence ability to raise troops.

Rudolf’s own lands produced about 7,000 mark of silver a year. The imperial lands a further 8,000. Sounds like a lot, but you have to look at it in context. The archbishop of Cologne for instance enjoys an annual income of 50,000 mark of silver, three times that of his king.

But it pales into complete insignificance in comparison with Ottokar. Ottojar isn’t called the golden king for nothing. His homeland of Bohemia had struck gold, quite literally. The mines in the Ore mountains were rammed full of mainly silver, but also copper and other metals whilst there were gold mines in Jilove just outside Prague. Ottokar kept about 200,000 mark silver and 800 mark gold in four heavily fortified castles. His annual income from Bohemia alone was another 100,000 mark silver.

On top of that he had the income from his acquired duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia as well as adjacent lands in North West Italy and Slovenia, which might have been another 100,000 mark of silver.

No way that the little Habsburg count could ever successfully stand up or even attack king Ottokar II, the golden king in all his pomp and splendour. Or so Ottokar thought. And Rudolf probably knew that Ottokar would think that way and that was exactly why he staged that event at Nurnberg and why he had demanded Ottokar to come and swear allegiance.

Rudolf could not be an effective king with the Bohemian sniping from the sidelines, and how long would Ottokar be content with just sniping and when would he stage his own election and try to oust him. The conflict was inevitable and the only way Rudolf could win the conflict was if he gets the imperial princes to line up behind him.

And that is not easy. The imperial princes may not like Ottokar very much, but that is not the same as going out and fight him. Rudolf needed to create an incident that triggered them into action. Ottokar’s refusal to bow to him was that incident. It was not just an insult to him, but also to all the other imperial princes who had elected him and supported him. The honour of the empire, Barbarossa’s old war cry, is back in play.

And there is another dimension. When I talked about the borders of the empire, two episodes ago, I pointed out that whilst empire is universal and comprises all of Christendom, it also has an inner core which comprises those territories who accept the emperor as their direct overlord. The kings of Poland and Hungary no longer did that. If Ottokar II declared himself as a king by the grace of god, he thereby also declared his and his kingdom’s exit from the empire. And that was not acceptable, not to the king and not the princes.

Rudolf had his incident and the incident had created the support he needed. He mustered his armies, both secular and spiritual. The archbishop of Mainz kindly excommunicated Ottokar and issued an interdict that brought religious worship there to a standstill, which was a catastrophe in the eyes of the general population.

An imperial diet declared Ottokar’s acquisition of Austria, Styria and Carinthia illegal. The duchy of Austria had been ruled by the house of Babenberg  since the 10th century and when the last Babenberger duke, Frederick the Quarrelsome had died a prolonged war of succession ensued that involved the king of Bohemia, the Austrian nobles and nieces and sisters of the dead duke. The war ended when Ottokar had gained the support of the Austrian nobles and had married the sister of the last duke. Whether that gives him a legal right to the duchy is at least disputed and almost certainly  disappeared entirely when he divorced the much older woman that he had snatched from a monastery in the first place.

So when the imperial diet declared Ottokar’s rule in Austria unlawful, they had good arguments, but that does not make it any less of a political decision. And they not only called in the fiefs, they went one further and placed him under the imperial ban, making him an outlaw.

Otokar II is now excommunicated and banned, which isn’t comfortable for anyone. But even more uncomfortable must have been the realisation that he has been outmanoeuvred by the little count. And then he gets outmanoeuvred one more time. Ottokar had expected Rudolf to come after him personally in Prague and that is where he concentrated his forces. But he did not. Rudolf went instead to the barely defended Vienna and within the shortest time cleared the duchies from Ottokar’s supporters.

Ottokar then found himself unable to retaliate. His people did not like the interdict placed on them by the archbishop of Mainz. Rumours were going round the pope was to confirm the excommunication, that Ottokar had put his daughter away in a nunnery to stop her from marrying Rudolf’s son, that a hermit has seen a Sphinx who predicted his immediate defeat etc., etc.. Ah, and there is the fact that whilst abroad everybody called him the golden king, back home in Bohemia they called him the iron king for his tyrannical role. These 100s of marks of silver had to come from somewhere and best guess it were the aching backs of the miners and peasants.

Facing rebellion, Ottokar II gave up. He came to Rudolf to swear his allegiance. This image of the bejewelled golden king in all his pomp and splendour having to bow to Rudolf von Habsburg who had chosen his most humble coat for contrast has been retold and reproduced infinite times. As was Rudolf’s comment quote: “Often has he mocked my simple grey coat, let him mock it now” end quote.

Such humiliation cried out for revenge. No way is Ottokar, the golden king, the crusading hero of Prussia, going to let this stand. There will have to be a second round. And that second round came quite quickly, merely a year and a half later, in the summer of 1278.

This time Ottokar played his political cards a lot better. The key to Rudolf’s previous success had been the imperial princes. If he could split them away from Rudolf, his chances would improve immeasurably. That wasn’t particularly easy since Rudolf had formed a number of alliances with the main imperial princely houses backed up by marriages to 5 of his six daughters.

But on the other hand, Rudolfs revindication policy started to discomfort some powerful people who saw rights and lands being brought back into royal control. And then there was the issue about Austria and the other duchies. The princes were all for taking them away from Ottokar. But that does not mean they wanted it all to go to the Habsburgs. And where the princes would draw a firm line in the sand would be if Rudolf would take over the rest of Ottokar’s kingdom, Bohemia. If that happened, Rudolf would be as powerful as Ottokar had been in 1273 and the whole point of electing Rudolf was not to have a powerful Bohemian king in charge.

Playing on these cracks in the Rudolf’s alliances, Ottokar ensured that the rematch would take place without the imperial princes.

That was an improvement to last time, but the flipside was that Rudolf was now not just a lot, but an awful lot richer. Austria added a cool 100,000 marks of silver annually to his previous income of 15,000. Not quite as much as the king of Bohemia could raise, but a lot more balanced than last time.

As the two sides worked their way to the decisive battle, Rudolf managed to find a new ally, the king of Hungary. Ottokar had been in conflict with Hungary for most of his reign and for the Hungarians supporting Rudolf was a no-brainer.

Ottokar made the first move on July 20th 1278 and invaded Austria. Rudolf led his troops out of Vienna to confront him. However, his army was not yet fully assembled. The soldiers he had recruited in Alsace and the Aargau had to come a long way. The Hungarian allies too were delayed. All in it took three weeks before Rudolfs army could march on Ottokar’s position.

Ottokar had chosen the terrain, a large plain outside the market town of Dürnkrut, about 50km north-east from Vienna. He had chosen his position well. The battlefield was bordered on its eastern flank by the river March and on its western side by some hills forcing the battle to take place in the centre.

Rudolf had a slight numerical advantage, but a large part of his army was infantry and lightly armoured Hungarians. They were less effective in a heavy cavalry battle where two blocks of armoured knights crash into each other.

So Ottokar may be a touch more confident, but both kings knew that the outcome of a medieval battle was highly unpredictable and that the risk was not just political and military but intensely personal. Both were experienced warriors, veterans of dozens of battles and their men expected them to lead from the front.

On the morning of August 26, 1278. The two sides, separated by a small stretch of water were trading insults and chants not dissimilar to the crowds at a football match. The bohemian war cry of Praha, Praha was countered by Rudolfs armies reply Roma, Roma and Christ, Christ. There was a lot of rattling of shields and singing of songs as the knights mounted their steeds to form their line of attack.

Rudolf’s Flemish slingers hurled their stones at the Bohemians whose Cumans and Sarmatians responded with clouds of arrows. But the impatient knights weren’t prepared to leave the fighting to the great unwashed infantrymen. After barely a few minutes the armoured cavalry troops crashed into each other, and from then onwards the slingers, archers and bowmen could no longer distinguish between friend and foe and retreated to the grassy banks of the river to watch the spectacle unfold. They were fortunate that the great nobles hadn’t decided to just steamroll them under their horses as the French famously did at Poitiers.

What followed was a typical battle during the times of high chivalry. It was man against man and the two leaders, easily identifiable one by his crowned helmet and the red Lion of Habsburg and the other clad in the most splendid armour and flying S. Wenceslaus flaming eagle were found in the centre of the melee.

Knights on both sides vied for the opportunity to unseat the enemy king. Several knights got close to Rudolf but he fought them off, piercing one under the helmet with his lance. Then a gigantic Thuringian knight pushed his way to the king’s side and speared his horse in the shoulder. Rudolf fell to the ground. Contrary to the general trope, medieval armour wasn’t too heavy for a man to stand up again, even a 60-year old like Rudolf. But still, he was on the ground in the midst of fighting men on enormous horses and with his enemy in pursuit. His rescue came in the form of an Austrian knight who had seen him fall and charged his adversary and pulled his master up onto another horse.

Soon after Rudolf had fallen and recovered, the battle was decided. And it was decided, as ever so often with Rudolf of Habsburg, not by fair contest within the rules of chivalry, but by cunningly bending them. The chivalric code demanded that combatant fight fair and square. No hidden reserves in the woods or sudden flank attacks, that was dishonourable. Rudolf wasn’t a chivalric knight, but a wildly ambitious Swabian chess player who cared more about winning than honour.

He had kept a sizeable contingent of knights in reserve behind one of the hills. On his command, these knights appeared and charged the Bohemians who were now static and caught in fighting their opponents. The momentum of the assault broke the Bohemian lines and they fled.

King Ottokar who had been fighting on the front line was suddenly confronted by some of his personal enemies, a man whose family he had had executed. And that man did not do what would normally have happened at this stage, i.e., take the king hostage and demand an epically large ransom. No, this man wanted revenge and he killed King Ottokar II, the great golden king of Bohemia, crusader in Prussia and dominant figure in European politics for decades. Ottokar was striped of his rich armour and his body was left naked on the battlefield.

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Rudolf had the body eviscerated to prevent putrefaction and then displayed in Vienna for six months to make sure no fake Ottokars appeared. Only after that was his body brought to Prague and buried in St. Vitus’s cathedral where he still lies.

Rudolf used the victory to confirm the Habsburg rule of Austria, but he did not take over Bohemia. Bohemia was left to Ottokar’s son, Wenceslaus who married Rudolf’s last available daughter turning again a foe into a friend. Again the little count had prevailed and can move on to his next ambition, the imperial crown. How this pans out we will find out next week. I hope you will join us again.

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The Election of rudolf von Habsburg in 1273

On October 1, 1273 seven princes elected a new king of the Romans. Their choice was a momentous one that set European history further down its path away from a universal empire to separate kingdoms and principalities. The pope had demanded that they come to a unanimous decision so that the empire could again participate in a crusade to stop the remains of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to be swept away for good. So why did  they chose a modest count from what is now Northern Switzerland and not any of the kings, dukes and princes who had been vying for the job and who could count on support from Naples, Rome, Prague and Paris is what we will look into in this episode, the first of our new season “from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull – the Holy Roman empire 1250-1273.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 139 – The end of the Interregnum

On October 1, 1273 seven princes elected a new king of the Romans. Their choice was a momentous one that set European history further down its path away from a universal empire to separate kingdoms and principalities. The pope had demanded that they come to a unanimous decision so that the empire could again participate in a crusade to stop the remains of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to be swept away for good. So why did  they chose a modest count from what is now Northern Switzerland and not any of the kings, dukes and princes who had been vying for the job and who could count on support from Naples, Rome, Prague and Paris is what we will look into in this episode, the first of our new season “from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull – the Holy Roman empire 1250-1273.

But before we start let me run through the usual Spiel about the History of the Germans being advertising free. It matters. I guess you have seen the recent news about Google being fined §2.6bn  for market abuse as they pushed customers towards their own shopping platform. This used to be such an elegant machine providing super fast, uncluttered access to the information one wanted. Now it is like a shopping mall where you have to squeeze past shrieking billboard to find the little independent bookshop in the far corner. Since I am short a few billions to spend on fines, I rely on Patrons and one time supporters who can sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans and historyofthegermans.com/support. And thanks so much to Michael P., Krystian N., Sarah R., Steve M and geweinstein who have already signed up.

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On December 13, 1250 in Castel Fiorentino, near the small town of Torremaggiore in the northern part of his beloved Puglia, the emperor Frederick II, the Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World breathed his last. The official cause of death was dysentery, but at the time of his death he had been exhausted from decades of conflict with the Lombard cities, rebellious Sicilian nobles, the crusaders in the Holy Land, and above all, the papacy.  Whilst not defeated, his position was precarious, he had lost the crucial battle of Parma and with it his war chest. Most of his friends and advisers who had been by his side since he first set out to Germany to gain his imperial crown at the age of 16 were now dead, some by his own paranoia.

His death marked not just the end of the era of the Hohenstaufen as a major European dynasty but also the end of the high medieval empire that had begun with the coronation of Otto the Great in 962. What followed was a century of chaos and convulsions until a new political structure settles in, the Holy Roman empire with its electors, its prince-bishops, free imperial cities and its diets and courts as set out in the Golden Bull of 1356.

Or that is how the story is commonly told. But as we all know, history does not tip on the pin of a single event. Many of the structural pillars of the Holy Roman Empire date back long before the death of Frederick II and the ideal of a universal emperor crowned by the pope in Rome continued for several centuries after the light of the Stupor Mundi was extinguished.

The death of the last of the Hohenstaufen emperors created two separate sequences of events. One of those were the various attempts of the descendants of Frederick II to hold on to and then regain the kingdom of Sicily. We covered this in Episode 91 “Hohenstaufen epilogue” which is one of the most epic stories in German medieval history, but one that had limited repercussions for the narrative we want to follow here.

What we will focus on now is what happened North of the Alps.

In 1245 Pope Innocent IV had excommunicated and deposed Frederick II. In the wake of that decision some of the German princes elected anti-kings, first Heinrich Raspe, the Landgrave of Thuringia and once he had died, William Count of Holland. These anti-kings stood against Konrad IV, the son of Frederick II who had been elected King of the Romans way back in 1237, but had never been crowned. This civil war ended when Konrad IV decided to seek his fortunes in Sicily in 1251 where he died in 1254.

William of Holland was therefore King at least from 1251 to the day in the winter of 1256 when his horse broke through the Ice of a Frisian lake and his enemies clubbed him to death and concealed his body under the foundations of a house, not to found for 26 years.

William of Holland had two successors, in the loosest meaning of the word. One was Alfonso X, the Wise of Castile, a thoroughly well-educated man with some Hohenstaufen blood who took the crown proposed by the cities of Pisa and Marseille for reasons even his biographers cannot quite figure out. Alfonso never travelled north and remained very much a footnote in the History of the Empire. At the same time some of the electors raised Richard of Cornwall, the brother of king Henry III of England to be the future emperor. Richard was a bit more proactive than Alfonso, traveled to Aachen to be crowned king and visited the empire a subsequent three times, before he became so embroiled in English politics, his already modest role in German politics vanished completely.

Now here is the thing. None of these kings had much impact. They were absentee landlords who had taken the title to pursue narrow personal objectives. It was more vanity than a sincere ambition to take on the mantle of a universal emperor defending Christianity against its foes. And even more importantly, they were either unable or unwilling to assume their role in the emerging constitution of the realm as the provider of peace and justice.

The Mainzer Landfriede that formalized the relationship between the princes and the emperor and established rules for conflict resolution had been agreed upon in 1235. Under these rules the emperor had precious little left of the regalia, the fundamental expressions of medieval sovereignty which included the right to raise taxes, demand tolls, administer justice, mint coins, found cities, build castles and so on and so on.

Rather than being a monarch who could call upon all free men of the empire to go to war on his behalf, the emperor was an arbiter between the diverging interests of the princes. He was to resolve differences by offering compromises both parties could agree upon. And if one of the parties rejected the compromise, the resolution was to be found by force of arms. All the emperor could do at that point was to set the rules of feuding, demanding a 3 day cooling-off period and putting limits to the level of violence. For instance the parties were prohibited from burning down castles, houses and barns and should protect widows and orphans. It was apparently ok to produce widows and orphans, just not harm them beyond massacring their husbands and fathers.

Combatants who breached these limitations could be subjected to an imperial ban. An imperial ban strips a person of all their rights, namely the right to property and even to his or her own life. A person under the ban was “vogelfrei”, which translates as “free as a bird” but has a very different meaning. Like a wild bird that belongs to no one, anyone can trap it and kill it, or more precisely could at the time since this was before the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds was established in 1889.

This level of imperial power is indeed a long way away from the crowned figure on the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan that carried the quote from the book of Job: “There is no power on earth to be compared to him.”

But despite the narrowness of the imperial mandate, the absence of an effective King of the Romans during the period from 1245 to 1273 did have a major impact. Sure, during the time of the Hohenstaufen and even the previous dynasty, the Salians, emperors had been absent for extended periods of time. But they usually left behind some form of regency council or a caretaker to perform the duties to maintain peace and justice. And the emperors had influence far beyond their formal rights due to two things, their personal prestige and the resources coming from the combination of their family possessions and the imperial lands and estates.

When it comes to prestige Frederick II and his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa were hard to beat. Impressive personalities both, able to display imperial grandeur through elaborate displays combined with military prowess made their voices heard. It is always important to remember that the medieval political system was built on personal relationships, not the monopoly of power of the state. Hence a ruler who can impress his vassals has a huge room to maneuver, even if his formal powers are limited. On the flipside a ruler like William of Holland who ever so often had to remind his subjects that he “was appointed by the pope” quickly finds himself isolated and unable to drive policy.

As Theodore Roosevelt quibbed many centuries later, effective politics means to: “speak softly and carry a big stick”. And in the case of the emperors in the High Middle Ages, that big stick were the financial and military resources they commanded directly. The Hohenstaufen had accumulated quite a lot of those sticks. They had been the dukes of Swabia and hence held large sways of lands in what is now Alsace, the Palatinate and Wurttemberg. They had taken over the Welf lands in Swabia that was once a almost a duchy in its own right. They had taken possession of the Salian inheritance that stretched along the Main river and then further north into the Harz mountains, including Goslar. By their imperial role they controlled parts of Franconia, including the rapidly expanding city of Nurnberg. And then south of the Alps Frederick II possessed many a castle, some on the back of the inheritance of the countess Matilda of Tuscany, some thanks to his son in law, Ezzelino da Romano’s conquests. And then most importantly, there was the fantastically rich kingdom of Sicily. Few, if any princes could ignore an imperial order backed up by so much wealth and power.

Which gets us to the period from 1245 to 1273. None of the kings and anti-kings had enough personal standing or wealth or power to tell the princes what to do. Some, like Richard of Cornwall tried to bring their weight as great military leader and wealthiest man in England to bear, but he rarely stayed long enough to follow through with his decisions.

The conflict resolution process collapsed and imperial bans, if issued at all, were widely ignored. The traditional view is that the empire descended into chaos during this period. But modern historians like the great Peter H. Wilson dispute this, claiming that to be Habsburg propaganda.

When I look at what we have seen so far, some of the fiercest feuds were taking place during this period, such as the conflict between the Landgrave of Meissen, Albrecht the degenerate and his sons, namely Friedrich der Gebissene (Frederick the Bitten). We also have the rapid expansion of king Ottokar II into Austria, Styria, Friuli and Salzburg, most of which on the back of cold hard steel rather than marriage contracts. But then feuds and illicit acquisition of lands wasn’t anything new and the days of Henry VI and Frederick II had seen similar rough play.

But those large feuds of the previous century had taken place in the north where imperial power was already much weaker than it was in Swabia and Franconia. What was new and what brought about contemporary fears of the end of days was that this kind of violence had now engulfed the south as well.

One particular menace is now one of Germany’s most popular tourist attractions, the castles along the Rhine. Many of them like Rheinfels, Sooneck and Reichenstein had been built by actual robber barons who harassed trade along the river. Given the vital importance of the Rhine as a conveyer belt of goods from the south to the north, including supplying thirsty Englishmen with copious quantities of white wine, the cities along the river tried to bring the situation under control. In 1254, led by the cities of Mainz and Worms a league of Rhenish cities was founded. The purpose was to keep the trading channel open, smoke out the barons and protect the merchants. The league quickly attracted all the other major cities on the Rhine, Cologne, Oppenheim, Bingen, Speyer, Strasburg and Basel. They established a fleet of armored ships and besieged the Rheinfels. But they failed militarily, by 1257 the league dissolved and the Rhine trade kept suffering.

The other main event was the dismemberment of the Hohenstaufen and the imperial possessions. Once Konrad IV had disappeared down south in 1251, local lords began nibbling at the edges and when he died in 1254 the contest became ever more intense. When the last Hohenstaufen, Konradin, was executed in Naples in 1268, the final feeding frenzy set in.

Some of these properties had been imperial fiefs, others had been the private property of the Hohenstaufen family. But all of them were up for grabs. Imperial princes and lesser lords occupied castles and towns waving dubious charters and double handed swords. Within just a few years all of it was redistributed. Some may have believed they took it for safekeeping should a real emperor finally appear, some, like the landgrave of Thuringia claimed to be the true heir of the House of Hohenstaufen, but many just took it for themselves.

The regnum Teutonicum was not the only kingdom that was in trouble in the second half of the 13th century. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was on its last leg. The city of Jerusalem that Frederick II had regained for the crusaders was lost and had been sacked in 1244. A crusade led by Saint Louis into Egypt ended in another unmitigated catastrophe. The Mamluks of Egypt had now taken over Syria and the crusaders were again pushed back to a long strip of land along the coast. Baibars, the new sultan of Egypt picked off the great strongholds, the Krak des Chevaliers of the Hospitallers and Montfort of the Teutonic Knight in 1270. In 1272 another crusading effort fizzled out, leaving Accre as the very last outpost.

This impending collapse of the crusader states did occupy most of Europe but nobody more than the pope. As papal policy saw it, only a concerted effort of the whole of Western Christendom could turn things around. Experience of the preceding three decades had shown that efforts by just the French and the English weren’t enough. What was needed was a major contribution from the empire. These considerations weren’t just purely political and military. Mystics and holy men had been predicting for a century that only an emperor would be able to conquer Jerusalem and initiated the 1000 years of bliss, whilst the fall of the empire would bring about the collapse of the world.

The current king of the Romans and hence emperor in waiting, Richard of Cornwall could not lead the imperial forces to victory in the Holy land, in part because he was stuck with baronial insurrections and Simon de Montfort’s push for a proper parliament in England, but more crucially, because he had died on April 2, 1272.

Therefore, despite all the misgivings about overbearing emperors, Pope Gregory X demanded that the next King of the Romans should be elected unanimously and should be someone who could lead a crusade. And the man to make this happen was Werner von Eppstein, the archbishop of Mainz.

Werner’s first question that needed answering was, what does unanimous mean? In the early days of the empire, all elections had been unanimous, not because everyone agreed, but because all those who did not agree left the election diet and had to be convinced, aka bribed, one by one as the new emperor made his progress across his new realm.

That model began to fall apart with the election of Lothar III in 1125 where the Hohenstaufen brothers stormed out and went to war with the newly elected emperor. After that we had a whole string of contested elections where frustrated contenders claimed the election to be invalid on the grounds that not enough or not the right people had been at the election diet.

Who were the right people to elect a king of the Romans and future emperor?

When things kicked off in 919 at the election of Henry the Fowler, the idea was that the king was elected by the stem duchies, i.e., by the Swabians, Bavarians, Saxons and Franconians. These duchies were to be represented by their dukes and senior lords, which made sense when there were dukes for each of the duchies. But as the duchies fragmented, Franconia into lots and lots of little princes, Swabia into Swabia, Zaehringen and the Welfish lands, Saxony into Westphalia, Brunswick and Saxony and Bavaria into Austria, Andechs-Meranien and Bavaria that system had to be abandoned.

In 1152 at Barbarossa’s election, the general view was still that all lords, ecclesiastic and secular were allowed to participate, but that narrowed down rapidly. At Frederick II election in 1196 counts were excluded and in 1198 the abbots. Participation still fluctuated. In 1208, 1212 and 1220 elections were large gatherings whilst those of 1211, 1237, 1246 and 1247 were much smaller events.

At Konrad IV’s election, the last one that had been universally recognised as valid, only 11 electors were present. These were the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Salzburg, the bishops of Bamberg, Regensburg, Freising and Passau and amongst the secular lords, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine, the king of Bohemia, the landgrave of Thuringia and the duke of Carinthia. That election was described as unanimous, even though some important imperial princes like the dukes of Saxony, Zaehringen and Andechs-Meranien, the archbishop of Cologne and the margraves of Meissen and Brandenburg had not attended.

So this does not help. What we do know is that in 1273 when this momentous election happened it was broadly acknowledged that there were seven electors. But nobody has yet found a constitutional document that sets out when and why this was decided nor a logic that explains who was in and who was out.

The first legal text that states the election rights of the seven electors, the Schwabenspiegel of 1273 unhelpfully claims that it had always been thus, ever since Charlemagne had decreed it so.

This is a conundrum that has baffled medievalists for centuries now and I am afraid there is still no consensus. There are several competing theories.

The first one is the arch-offices theory. That theory says that the electors are those who hold the great offices of state, the three archchancellors of Germany, Italy and Burgundy, which are the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier. Then the Grand Marshall, which was the duke of Saxony, the High Stewart who was the Count Palatinate on the Rhine, the High Chamberlain, the margrave of Brandenburg and Grand Cup Bearer, the king of Bohemia. That sounds sensible. Princes who take a major role in managing the empire should also be in charge of selecting the new emperor. The problem with that theory is that it just shifts the debate. These great offices of state for the secular princes come about around the same time the role of the electors is established, so it remains unclear why it was seven and why these seven.

Then we have the canon law theory which says that the legal framework of the electors was modelled on the college of cardinals who had the exclusive right to elect the pope since the 11th century. That too makes sense and explains why the number of electors was narrowed down, but again fails to explain why it was seven and why these seven. Eike von Repgow in his Sachsenspiegel had stated that there were 6 electors as early as 1237, but again nobody knows where he got that from.

Then recent elaborate studies were trying to prove that the underlying principle was that the seven electors are the direct descendants of the Ottonian family through the female line. Now I do not want to  offend anyone, but given the analysis identifies 3,400 descendants of the Ottonians alive in 1273 I am profoundly at a loss how this narrows it down in any meaningful way.

Call me a cynic, but if I had been in the position of archbishop Werner of Mainz and had been under strict instruction by my boss in Rome to organise an election that results in giving the empire a viable monarch, I would go and make sure I get all the most powerful people in the empire into a room and make them agree. And as it happened, nature had helped narrowing down the list of powerful princely families in the empire.  The Babenberger dukes of Austria, the Zaehringer, the dukes of Meranien and the Ludolfinger landgraves of Thuringia had all died out.

Which meant that if we go through the major clans, there is first and foremost the king of Bohemia, Ottokar II, the by far richest and most powerful of the imperial princes. He definitely deserves a seat. Then we have the Wittelsbachs who hold two major principalities, the duchy of Bavaria and the Palatinate. At least one of them should be on the list. Then there is the house of Anhalt who were dukes of Saxony and margraves of Brandenburg, no question, they should be there.

Then we get to the more difficult ones. The House of Wettin had inherited the Landgraviate of Thuringia but was in the middle of the feud and Frederick the Bitten was the grandson of emperor Frederick II which would be a good enough reason for the papal authorities to want him kept out. The house of Welf, dukes of Brunswick too were squabbling plus were far away so NFI.

And to represent the church the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier were materially richer than Hamburg and Magdeburg. Only Salzburg could compete but was outmanoeuvred by the other three.

There we have it. Seven votes are needed for a unanimous vote.

Now let’s go to the runners and riders, which is what made the election of 1273 one of these very rare events that could indeed have put European history on very different path.

The first one to put his hat in the ring was King Alfonco X of Castile. In fact he had been in the ring all this time since 1257 since he was elected at the same time as Richard of Cornwall. He just hadn’t done anything about it. He wrote to the pope asking for endorsement. That was immediately rebuffed. Pope Gregory X knew that Alfonso had no backing in Germany whatsoever plus he was another Hohenstaufen descendant in the female line which made him suspect.

Alfonso out, the next one bringing his weight to bear was King Ottokar II of Bohemia. Ottokar II commanded the resources not just of Bohemia with its rich silver mines and fertile lands. He also had taken over the duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia, had put one of his followers on the seat of the archbishopric of Salzburg and expanded further south into Frioul and Aquilea.  Even more importantly, he had been a crusader up in the Baltic. We had met him in episode 131 when he rescued and then expanded the Teutonic Knight’s position in Prussia and had the city of Koenigsberg named after him in gratitude. His friends and his foes called him the Golden King for all the splendour of his dress, his castles and his entourage.

Ottokar was a perfect candidate as far as the papacy was concerned. Powerful and committed enough to lead the rescue of the Holy Land.

Though he looks like a shoe-in, there is a few small issue here.

Before Ottokar had decided to go after the imperial diadem, he had been very close to Frederick the Bitten, the landgrave of Thuringia and margrave of Meissen. Frederick’s mother had been the daughter of emperor Frederick II and – now that all the male Hohenstaufen were dead, he, Frederick saw himself as the true heir to the crowns of Sicily and Jerusalem, the duchy of Swabia and all the rest. The Ghibelline faction in Italy saw him as Frederick III, the promised emperor who would expel the Guelfs and bring back imperial order.

By the time old king Richard had died, Ottokar was still engaged to Frederick’s daughter and there had been rumours of Frederick and Ottokar would break into Northern Italian and ride all the way to Naples.

Though Ottokar had quickly ditched Frederick and all these plans to go south once he sensed he was in with a chance to gain papal support, but there was still a whiff of imperial overreach around him.

And that whiff was what the German princes felt in their nostrils too. They – quite rightly – worried that such a rich, powerful and ambitious prince could turn into an emperor who would curtail their rights and – shock horror – force them to hand back all the formerly imperial lands and castles they had so recently acquired.

And then a third international player registers an interest – Charles of Anjou, king of Sicily and count of Provence. Charles is the man who had wrestled Sicily from the heirs of Frederick II and just five years earlier had Konradin, the last Hohenstaufen prince executed on the market square of Naples. He did not want an emperor to come down and contest his rule claiming some imperial overlordship of Sicily as had happened several times before.

Charles could not stand himself as the blood of the teenage hero of the Ghibelline cause was still not dry on his hands, but he had a nephew, king Philipp III of France he decided to champion. Philipp, son of Saint Louis and inveterate crusader should again please the pope.  His nickname, le Hardi, the bold spoke to his determination to expand the royal domain which gained Toulouse and Alencon and to eradicate feuding in his kingdom.  He was by all accounts a great medieval ruler. And he was very keen on the imperial crown. As France had gained in standing, its rulers positioned themselves more and more as the true heirs to Charlemagne. Why, they asked with some justification, should the imperial crown be in the gift of the Germans with their fragmented kingdom and ineffectual rulers.

All good arguments though again from the papal perspective there was some fear that a linkup between Sicily and the empire was again on the cards, meaning the papacy could again be encircled by a powerful ruler which in turn would lead to a re-run of the epic battle between pope and emperor that had only just been brought to a close.

Then we have the homegrown princes. Federick the Bitten was obviously out as the Hohenstaufen continuity candidate. The Wittelsbach duke of Bavaria had his eye on the throne, but he would have to convince his brother, the Count Palatinate to endorse him, but that was impossible. The duke of Saxony briefly considered a candidature but gave up quickly being the poorest and most remote of the electors.

That was it. The pope had said he wanted a unanimous vote. He wanted the empire united so that the urgently needed crusade could get under way. He did have a preference for Ottokar, but in the end he left the decision to the electors.

Spoiler alert, the electorss did not choose Ottokar. Nor did they choose Philipp of France, nor did they choose anyone amongst their own number. They did choose a count from the Aargau who had become wealthy, if not rich on the disintegration of the Hohenstaufen and the demise of the Kiburgs and Zaehringer. A man 55 years of age, a renowned warrior, tall and manly, a name you may have heard before, Rudolf of Habsburg.

Before we get to how they arrived at this decision, let us just take a few moments and think about how European history had panned out if they had chosen either Ottokar or Philipp of France.

A king and later emperor Ottokar would have shifted the centre of gravity of the empire eastwards. His interests lay in Poland, Hungary and North-east Italy. He would in all likelihood have regained the Hohenstaufen possessions in Franconia and maybe Swabia. Bavaria and the Palatinate would have  become satellites of the Bohemian king.  In other words the Habsburg empire a two hundred years before it was actually created. And this could have been enough time to assert a more powerful central authority across the empire. It would also have given the Slavic components of the empire much more weight whilst the three archbishops of Cologne, Trier and Mainz would have ended up in the periphery.

Had Philipp III of France gained the crown, a quite different scenario would have emerged. The French monarchy was a lot more streamlined and focused on consolidating power and establishing a functioning royal bureaucracy. If gradually applied to the westernmost regions of the empire, France would have had more resources to rebuff the English in the 100 years war. From 1303 they also dominated the papacy and, in conjunction with the Anjou in Sicily could have dominated the wealth of Italy.  The empire would thus become again the universal empire of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, the central authority for the whole of western Europe. We may even had re-consolidated Germany, France, Burgundy and Italy and thereby sidestepped the nationalist wars of the 19th century. Ok. This is maybe pushing it a bit too far, but one fact is undeniable. Without this election, the counts of Habsburg would have remained in the second division as important princes in Swabia, and after the loss of Switzerland could have even faced relegation into the regionals.

Which gets us to the million dollar question, why Rudolf von Habsburg?

Usually this is all about friends in high places, but sometimes, rarely, but sometimes it is about just friends. And Rudolf’s friend was another Frederick, Frederick the burgrave of Nurnberg. This Frederick was not in contention for the crown but he was seen as an honest broker. Someone who had the ear of all the important people. And he convinced the electors, that Rudolf,a count from the Aargau with possessions in Alsace and the Black Forest was the perfect candidate. He was already old by the standards of the time and should hence not last for very long. He was rich but not so rich as to be a genuine threat. He was a warrior of some renown, someone who could lead an army on crusade. And he was already a crusader having fought with the Teutonic Knights alongside Ottokar. And he had been one of the great winners in the dismemberment of the Hohenstaufen lands which meant he was unlikely to force the other princes to hand back their gains. He had a brace of daughters he could marry to the remaining bachelors amongst the electors tying him to them and vice versa. He had been a supporter of the Staufers in the past, may even be the godson of the old emperor Frederick II, but was also loyal to the papacy. He was all around the solution to the problem.

And Fr4edrick Burggrave of Nurnberg convinced them. Ottokar II protested but the other electors removed him from the list and replaced him with duke of Bavaria. And so, after negotiations that had lasted 18 months from April 1272 to the 1st of October 1273 finally a unanimous decision was arrived on. Rudolf von Habsburg was to be king.

And here is the irony. Frederick, burgrave of Nurnberg who held the stirrups for the ascent of the House of Habsburg to become rulers of an empire where the sun never sets had been a member of the house of Hohenzollern, an ancestor to Frederick the great and Wilhelm I who would break the power of the Habsburgs almost exactly 600 years later. Now what is that for a coincidence!

Being elected to kingship of an empire that barely exists any more is not a straight road to world domination though. Many things Rudolf and his descendants will still have to do to get there. The very first step on this journey was the confrontation with Ottokar II, the golden king who is, as the English would say, a bit miffed about the outcome of the election. But that is a story for another time, next time to be precise. I hope you will come along again.

And before I go let me thank all the patrons and one-time supporters who have been so generous by signing up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans and on historyofthegermans.com/support. Your help is really, really appreciated.

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