History of the Germans Podcast

Bluesky: @hotgpod.bsky.social

Instagram: history_of_the_germans

Twitter: @germanshistory

To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.

So far I have:

Ep. 153 – The Rise of the city of Nürnberg

TRANSCRIPT

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

Let’s find out

But before we start let me once again tell you that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. Ad you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/history of the Germans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com/support, And let me thank BJ B., Warren W., Corneliu D., GRAEME T H., James, Felix C. and Duane S. who have already signed up. And now back to the show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 152 – The (not so) Ugly Duchess

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

Margarete Maultasch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always:

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

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

Bluesky: @hotgpod.bsky.social

Instagram: history_of_the_germans

Twitter: @germanshistory

So far I have:

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry of Carinthia died in 1335.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time was rapidly running out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 151 – Kurverein zu Rhens

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

featuring Pope John XXII and William of Ockham

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

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

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

As always:

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

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

Bluesky: @hotgpod.bsky.social

Instagram: history_of_the_germans

Twitter: @germanshistory

So far I have:

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

TRANSCRIPT

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

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

And with that, back to the show.

When we left the king of the Romans and emperor elect Ludwig IV last week, he had just won the battle of Mühldorf against his cousin and rival Frederick the Handsome from the house of Habsburg. He was now the uncontested ruler of the Holy Roman Empire, or at least he should be.

We have been here so many times that if you now say “to Rome, to Rome”, that would not give you the 10 points to Griffindor you were hoping for. Obviously, a coronation journey had to be the next step. And, again, same procedure as last time, Ludwig sought a papal invitation to be crowned above the grave of St. Peter.

Which gets us to the first of the key protagonists of this episode, the man who was to grant this invitation, the new pope, John XXII.

Pope John XXII was born Jacques Duèze in the city of Cahors, the son of a long distance merchant and banker. He studied law in Montpellier and became a lecturer in canon law and an advisor to the bishop of Toulouse. His career took quite some time to get going properly. He was well into his fifties before he caught the eye of king Charles II of Naples who made him his chancellor. In 1310 he became bishop of Avignon, part of the county of Provence which in turn was owned by his sponsor the king of Naples and at the time pretty much a provincial backwater.

His career got a further boost when the papal court appeared on his home turf, i.e., when pope Clement V set up shop in his city, the city of Avignon. In 1312 he was elevated to become a cardinal, just in time to get involved in the election of Clement’s successor when the old pope died in 1314.

By 1314 the composition of the college of cardinals looked quite unfamiliar. There were only 7 Italian cardinals left, who were broken down into various factions. The Italians had to contend with 10 gascons, most of them relatives of the excessively nepotistic Clement V and sympathetic to their duke, who happened to be king Edward II of England. Then there were a further 6 French cardinals supportive of the Capetian kings of France.

All this already made electing a new pope hard, but things got even more difficult when the heirs of king Philip the Fair died in quick succession, one of them a newborn who survived just four days.

The first conclave in Carpentras ended when a mob of Gascons attacked their fellow cardinals shouting, “death to the Italians” and “we want a pope”. The Italian cardinals ran for their lives and hid, whilst the nephew of pope Clement V raided the papal treasury and then disappeared. For 2 years there was no head to the church, no administration, just cardinals wandering around in southern France avoiding each other.

Finally, the younger son of Philipp the Fair had enough, rounded the cardinals up and locked them into a monastery in Lyon and starved them until they had selected a new pope. And that pope was Jacques Duèze, son of a moneylender from Cahors. The reason he was chosen had nothing to do with his considerable talents as a lawyer, but was purely a function of his advanced age, he was over seventy and his sickly appearance. Jacques took the papal name John XXII and would reign as pope for another 18 years, far longer than anyone had expected.

John XXII was a gifted administrator who massively expanded the papal government. He brought the church organizations across europe under tight central control and restored papal finances. Most of these funds were then ploughed back into the papal organization or were used to pay alms. John XXII personally lived a frugal lifestyle, though when he needed to represent the power of the papacy he did. At the wedding of his great niece he threw a banquet where guests consumed 9 oxen, 55 sheep, 8 pigs, 200 capons, 690 chickens, 580 partridges and lots more foodstuff. He established a working relationship with the French king that granted him significantly more independence than his predecessor Clement V had enjoyed.

That would net, net be maybe not a perfect but a pretty decent papacy. It definitely beats that of Clement V which included leaving Rome, becoming a plaything of the French king and suppressing, torturing and burning the Templars. Still, John XXII left such a black mark on the church, it would take until 1958 before a pope dared to again take the name John, the most common of papal names ever. In contrast, there were 9 more Clements after the Clement V.

What was it that pope John XXII did that made him so despised? Those of you who have read the Name of the Rose may remember the passage where the character William of Baskerville said about John XXII: “You must realize that for centuries a greedier man has never ascended the papal throne. The whore of Babylon against whom our Ubertino used to fulminate, the corrupt popes described by the poets of your country, like that Alighieri, were meek lambs and sober compared to John. He is a thieving magpie, a Jewish usurer; in Avignon there is more trafficking than in Florence!” end quote.

The reason John XXII ended up as “he who shall not be named” of the church was not just for allowing the monetary excesses of his cardinals, bishops and abbots to run out of control, but because he tried to justify their behaviour on legal and theological grounds. Basically before John XXII the church in general and the popes in particular were at least embarrassed about the fact that they were amassing vast fortunes for themselves and their families by exploiting the faithful. John XXII took the view that there was no need to be embarrassed since Jesus and the apostles owned property and so could the church. From there it is only a short hop to pope Leo X famous quote: “God gave us the papacy, now let us enjoy it”, which btw he did not thanks to the actions of a professor of bible studies at the university of Wittenberg called M. Luther.

Now this debate about whether the church and the pope should be poor had been going on for centuries. Wave after wave of reformers had demanded that priests, bishops and popes should live by the example of the apostles, meaning living a modest life without material possessions and dedicated to prayer. Most of these reformers ended up being condemned as heretics but those very few who did not became doctors of the church or founders of religious orders. Which one it was, burnt at the stake or sainthood was pretty much pot luck given the programs were at least initially quite similar.

Amongst those reformers who were co-opted by the church and were made saints, nobody embraced the idea of the poverty of the church as stringently as St. Francis. He laid it down in the rule of the Franciscans No Franciscan friar was to own anything, nor would the order itself hold property. Franciscan friars were allowed just one poor habit with a hood and a second one without a hood if they needed it. No shoes unless strictly necessary, no books, just a breviary. Certainly no coins or monies either directly or indirectly. And so on and so, St. Francis was pretty clear, Franciscans were supposed not to own anything more than the clothes on their backs, nothing at all.

But that ideal rapidly collided with reality. Rich donors believed that the prayers of these holy men would be an effective way to speed up the journey through the potentially millions of years of waiting in purgatory. Very soon the Franciscan were receiving gifts of lands and treasure from devout Christian and great Franciscan monasteries rose up all across europe, starting with the Sacro Convento in Assisi, that miracle of 13^th and 14^th century art. And now the question arose, how can the Franciscans have these monasteries when the whole order was banned from owning anything, except for their two habits.

To square this circle the church had devised the concept that all donations made to the Franciscans were automatically passed on to the pope who would then allow the Franciscans to use these assets on the basis of a legal concept called usufruct, basically a form of unpaid lease.

And this legal construct of the usufruct was the lever John XXII used to break the Franciscan doctrine of the poverty of Christ. Under roman and still modern law, usufruct gives a person the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another’s property, short of the destruction or waste of its substance. John XXII argued that if for example a Franciscan received a loaf of bread from a parishioner and ate it, this could not be a form of usufruct since by eating it, he destroyed the loaf. If he held the bread without owning it, eating the loaf would be theft or willful destruction of property. The only way out of that conundrum was for the Franciscan to accept ownership of the donations they received, which meant the church as a whole was allowed to own things and that in turn meant that all the excessive display of wealth going on in Avignon was therefore fine.

Did I say that John XXII was an accomplished canon lawyer? Lawyers, and I can say that being one myself, come in three flavors, incompetent, clever or good. A good lawyer is someone who understands the spirit of the law and uses this to construct an equitable solution. A clever lawyer is one who uses the wording of the law to bend the spirit of the law to his benefit.

John XXII wasn’t a good lawyer, he was a clever lawyer. And that is why he took a concept from the law of property conveyancing to make a point about the moral standards of a religious institution. Perfectly convincing when one looks at the words on the page, complete nonsense if you look at the moral choices involved.

The Franciscans, led by their minister general, Michael of Cesena refused to breach the rule of St. Francis and end up in hell just in order to comply with the civil code. They wanted to live the life of the apostles as they saw it, caring for the sick and poor, praying and renouncing all worldly possessions. And if that made the pope and his filthy rich cardinals look bad, so be it.

This argument began as an exchange of learned treatises between the pope and the Franciscans before getting increasingly heated. And it drew in more and more of the medieval scholars, including the great English thinker, William of Ockham of razor’s fame. William was asked by Michael of Cesena to review the various statements made by pope John XXII about the subject. William of Ockham concluded the following (quote): “a great many things that were heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane, and defamatory, contrary and likewise plainly adverse to orthodox faith, good morals, natural reason, certain experience, and fraternal charity.” End quote. So much for balance. These accusations made the pope a heretic, and a heretic was automatically no longer pope. That was a pretty bold move by William and Michael, followed by the somewhat less bold move of running away from Avignon immediately after posting the report to the papal palace.

The Franciscan leadership, including Michael of Cesena and William of Ockham were now, in 1327, on the run and needed a protector, and they met this protector in Pisa, and that protector was none other than our friend, the survivor of monkey abductions and chivalric battles, Ludwig IV, called the Bavarian.

Ludwig took these learned and holy men in with great joy, because he too had a run-in with pope John XXII.

The problem had been that pope John XXII was not only intensely relaxed about bishops, abbots, cardinals and papal nephews getting filthy rich, he also believed that Boniface VIII had been right when he had declared that quote: “it is absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff”. And specifically that nobody could be ruler of the Holy Roman Empire who had not been approved by the pope.

I will not go into the question whether previous emperors have or have not sought explicit approval for their elections from the pope. Answering that requires Latin language skills and patience I simply do not possess. The important point is that John XXII believed it was a requirement. And Ludwig did not. Ludwig had just fought for eight long years with his cousins, stretched his resources to breaking point to win the crown. He pointed at the dead and wounded at Mühldorf and asked, on what basis am I not the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire.

Ludwig and John XXII fell out properly over Northern Italy, and specifically Milan. John XXII believed that in the absence of papal approval of a King of the Romans, the throne was vacant. And during this vacancy it fell to the pope to keep order and specifically appoint the imperial vicars. So he relieved the Visconti of Milan, the Della Scala of Verona and the Este of Ferrara from their position as imperial vicars in Northern Italy that they had held since Henry VII’s fateful journey. When the city lords refused to bow down, the pope placed Milan under interdict and put together a crusade against the Visconti, which however failed. The Visconti appealed to the now established Ludwig the Bavarian who confirmed them as imperial vicar.

At that point John XXII did what every self-respecting pope thwarted in his political ambitions did and excommunicated Ludwig of Bavaria for disobedience. The excommunication revived the hopes of the Habsburgs, specifically duke Leopold that they could still gain the throne after all. What further strengthened the Habsburg case was that Ludwig had angered his main ally, king John of Bohemia when he had made his son the new margrave of Brandenburg, a story we will talk more about next week.

Bottom line is that 2 years after his great success at Mühldorf, king Ludwig IV was again in trouble. There are two stories about how he resolved it, a nice, heroic and chivalric version and a more sober, analytical version.

The chivalric version goes as follows: While Ludwig’s rival for the crown, Frederick the Handsome was held in honorable captivity at Schloss Trausnitz, the two cousins who had grown up together renewed their friendship. Negotiating long into the night they agreed that Frederick would give up any claim on the imperial crown and would return some of the imperial lands he had seized. In exchange, he would not have to pay a ransom and was allowed to return home. Once back in Vienna he should obtain the support of his brothers and his main allies to this agreement. Should he fail to get these signatures, he was to return to his jail in Bavaria.

Frederick did go back to Vienna and tried to convince his brothers that the game was up. Leopold however saw things differently. He argued that Ludwig was excommunicated and hence any promise made to him could be broken. Moreover, they received letters from pope John XXII to that effect as well as financial support from the king of France to continue the war.

Still, Frederick, a man of his word, having failed in his mission, returned to captivity in Bavaria. Ludwig, deeply moved by his cousin’s integrity, offered him what he always wanted, the crown. Ludwig and Frederick should rule jointly. If one were to go to Italy to become emperor, the other would keep things on an even keel back home in Germany and vice versa. Hearing that generous offer, the grateful Frederick embraced his cousin, became co-king and they remained firm friends until the Habsburg’s death.

The other, more constitutional perspective looks like that: This was the third time that the succession of the empire had to be decided by force of arms, Dürnkrut, Göllheim and now Mühldorf. This was not a sustainable model, in particular now when there were three roughly equal sized political blocks. And it was completely untenable if the pope in Avignon, which means the king of France, actually decided who rules or whether there was a ruler at all.

For the empire to survive, it had to go further down the road of becoming the collective responsibility of the princes instead of a traditional monarchy. This process had begun long ago with Barbarossa and his concept of being the capstone, the first amongst equals of the princes. By the 14^th century the central authority had diminished so much and the power of the territorial lords consolidated so far, a command and control monarchy had become impossible. But nobody wanted for the empire to dissolve. The empire provided legitimacy and a level of coordination and legal framework that kept the overall system stable and the princes in charge of their territories.

So a period of experimentation followed that lasted through the 14^th, 15^th and 16^th century, trying out various ways how the imperial princes could collaborate in the interest of the empire whilst still pursuing their individual interests. The joint rule of Ludwig and Frederick was such an experiment.

Though it was never repeated, it was a successful experiment. The joint rule reconciled two of the three great families and it reassured the other princes that Ludwig would not be able to seize any more lands and territories for himself or his family. And it gave a focal point for the rising anger at the papacy.

Pope John XXII’s claim that he had the ultimate authority over who would become emperor threatened the role of the Prince-Electors. The Prince electors saw themselves as the ultimate deciders, not as a some sort of pre-selection committee. This common interest in preserving their constitutional role took precedence over their territorial differences.

And another constituency shared the dislike of the Avignon pope and that was the German clergy. Pope John XXII had insisted that the selection of bishops and increasingly abbots and even lower clergy had to be the preserve of the pope, not the decision of the cathedral canons or monks. The reason for that was in part organizational, giving the pope more control over the quality of local church leaders. It also had a monetary element. Every time a new bishop or abbot was appointed by the pope, a third of the first year income was to be sent to Avignon, for lower clergy it was 100% of the income. That wasn’t new. John XXII’s new idea was to constantly shift bishops and abbots between positions. So the bishop of Basel becomes archbishop of Mainz, so a new bishop of Basel had to be found, well that post goes to the previous bishop of Lavant, meaning we need a new bishop of Lavanat, that one was previously abbot of Einsiedeln and so on and so on. Every time a post is filled, a chunk of the first year income is sent to Avignon.

That was not only irritating for the post holder, but also for the people at his court. These incomes weren’t salaries, they were monies needed to fund the functioning of the bishopric or abbey, paying servants and granting special bonuses etc. All that went away, plus local clergy saw their careers taken over by foreign prelates.

These disaffected imperial princes and the German church founded a coalition strong enough to withstand the excommunication, even the interdict that in principle prevented the reading of mass across the whole empire. And the coalition was strong enough that Ludwig could dare to journey to Rome for his coronation without having to be concerned about coups back home.

In December 1326 he travelled to Trient and then to Milan, accompanied by just 200 knights. This was no longer an attempt to assert genuine political control over Northern Italy as Henry VII’s campaign had been. It was more of a visit to the imperial vicars who needed Ludwig to legitimize their rule. And he obliged most generously. He confirmed the Visconti of Milan, the della Scala of Verona and all the others and in exchange the Italians staged a lovely coronation as king of Italy for Ludwig and his new wife Margarete of Holland.

From there he proceeded to Pisa which resisted initially, but could be made to open its gates. By the way, this moment in the autumn of 1327 where the story of the Name of the Rose begins. In the spring of 1328 Ludwig reached Rome.

At which point the question is, what will he be doing there? He is still excommunicated. Pope John XXII has not agreed for him to be crowned emperor. He does not have any cardinals with him who could perform the ceremony as Henry VII had. So, who would be crowning him?

What happens next just shows how far and how radical Ludwig IV was. He did not even bother to go to St. Peters or dig up some malleable archbishop to place the crown on his head whilst gently poked by a spear. No, he accepted the imperial crown from the Senate and the People of Rome, the way the emperors of old had been elevated. The coronation was performed by the now superannuated Sciarra Colonna, the same man who had apprehended and allegedly slapped pope Boniface VIII with it bringing down the imperial papacy, a man so thoroughly antipapal as one could imagine. And he performed the ceremony in his role as the head of the Roman Senate. There was a mass afterwards, but that was purely decorative.

This bold act was to make visible that the empire was no longer beholden to the papacy. He, Ludwig had become emperor by the election of the Prince Electors and his coronation was a secular act, confirming what had already happened, not a religious event, constituting his position as ruler.

Now before you conclude that it was some German provincial baron who had come up with the concept of secular rule and the division between church and state almost exactly a 1000 years after the last pagan Roman emperor had breathed his last. That would be pushing it.

No, a lot of the intellectual underpinning of his rule and the idea of a secular emperor came from the court of intellectuals like William of Ockham and Michael of Cesena who had joined him after they had fled from Avignon. The most radical of those was a man called Marsilius of Padua who had been at Ludwig’s court since 1323. His main work the Defensor Pacis, the Defender of peace makes the case that all power comes from the people, that the people elect and depose the ruler and that the ruler’s purpose was to provide peace and justice. The church on the other hand had no right to temporal power, in fact Jesus had refused the offer of temporal power outright. He was the son of god after all, so power over all men was entirely at his disposal. Marsilius of Padua stated quote: “The elective principality or other office derives its authority from the election of the body having the right to elect, and not from the confirmation or approval of any other power”, and “The prince who rules by the authority of the “legislator” (aka the elector) has jurisdiction over the persons and possessions of every single mortal of every station, whether lay or clerical, and over every body of laymen or clergy”. (end quote)

That is the definition of the secular state carrying a monopoly of violence. This is written 200 years before Machiavelli and 500 years before Hobbes, Montesquieu and the French Revolution. And it wasn’t just something some weird professor had dreamed up in a remote corner of europe. No, this was doctrine at the heart of one of the most consequential rulers of the age.

So much for “Intellectuals in the Middle Ages only debated how many angels can fit on the head of a pin”.

I would have loved for Ludwig to leave it at this, pack up his gear and return to Germany, be consistent. But history is messy and never quite fits with theory. So Ludwig did not have the strength of his convictions to just rely on a secular coronation. A few days after his first coronation he became old school again and deposed pope John XXII for papal overreach and heresy. In his stead he elevated a radical Franciscan to become pope as antipope Nicolas V who crowned him with full regalia in St. Peter.

A bit irritating but what can we do.

Being crowned twice and spring with its usual risks of death and disease approaching, Ludwig packed up and went home. He reached Munich around Christmas 1330, by which time his antipope had already caved to John XXII.

For the next 8 years he focused on stabilising his regime, supporting the growth of trade and cities and passing laws.

As for his conflict with the papacy, things fell into a bit of a lull. Pope John XXII refused to lift the excommunication of the emperor and all of his supporters. The empire remained under interdict, meaning in principle no mass could be sung and no sacraments administered, which would be an epic catastrophe in the medieval perception of the world. But the German clergy largely ignored the ban coming from what they believed was a heretic pope and, as William of Ockham kept telling them, a heretic pope ceased to be pope the moment he became a heretic without any further constituent act being needed. So the German clergy continued saying mass and things kept running smoothly.

In fact John XXII in his later years, he lived all the way to 90, did indeed develop some unorthodox, possibly heretic views. Specifically he concluded that all souls, saints included, would end in purgatory and would only be brought before god on the day of judgement. When he came out with that, pretty much all the prelates in Avignon issued a collective groan. Irrespective of what the bible said, this notion would wipe out the value propositions of pilgrimages, crusades, relics, the reading of mass for the dead, donations to religious houses etc., etc., pp. everything the church of Avignon stood for.

The reason is obvious. The church had invented the concept of purgatory, a sort of waiting room for the souls before they would allowed to enter heaven. The amount of time one had to spend in purgatory depended on how sinful their individual life had been. And purgatory was quite uncomfortable. But there was a way to shorten this waiting time. The intercession of saints, in particular the virgin Mary could appease the gatekeepers and mean you get up to cloud 9 in a couple of weeks instead of millions of years. To gain that intercession was possible by doing good works, for instance donating funds to build a new church, decorate a chapel, give land to a religious house in exchange for mass being sung for the dead or going on crusade. That concept paid for quite a lot of medieval and renaissance art.

Now if John’s idea that even saints had to wait in purgatory with everyone else, all these donations were useless. What is the point of worshipping the big toe of St. Cuthbert if Saint Cuthbert is only a few places places ahead in the queue. John XXII’s great theological breakthrough was quickly dismissed and he admitted that he may have erred, something as we know isn’t possible for a pope to do.

John XXII died in 1334 and his successors took a more conciliatory approach towards the empire. But still, Ludwig was unable to get the excommunication and the interdict lifted. The pope kept insisting that he had the right to approve or reject imperial elections and Ludwig was unwilling to give in.

For Ludwig, this conundrum needed to be resolved and if the pope wasn’t willing to compromise, then the empire had to take a stance. Throughout the year 1338 the Prince-Electors, the bishops and abbots, the cities and the emperor himself wrote to the pope asserting that it was the right of the people, represented by the seven electors to choose the emperor and that “the one who is elected by the majority of the electors is the true king and emperor”.

In a meeting at Rhens on July 16^th, 1338 the Prince Electors, minus King John of Bohemia came together and solemnly swore to defend their right to elect the king and emperor against all external interference, and to submit to the majority decisions of the college of electors. This agreement was then opened up to all other princes as well as vassals, Ministeriales and even the burghers of the cities.

Then they declared a law that the election automatically confers all the rights over the empire to the elected king without the need for any approbation, not even the need for a coronation.

This, the so-called Kurverein zu Rhens was the beginning of the constitution of the empire that will go through many more iterations and reforms until the end of the Reich in the 19^th century. But the fundamental point that the elected monarch was automatically king and emperor was established. The pope could no longer withhold coronations or even make the elevation dependent on their approbation.

There will still be coronations in Aachen and journeys to Rome, but they were purely ceremonial, they do no longer effect a transfer of power. The long fight that began with Henry IV in the snow of Canossa and dominated the reigns of Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II was over.

It is ironic that Ludwig IV is still known by his derogatory nickname “the Bavarian” given to him by pope John XXII. John’s moniker was meant to say that his legitimacy ended on the borders of Upper Bavaria, but in reality he shaped much of what we know as the Holy Roman Empire. As for the intellectuals who helped him develop and defend these political concepts, William of Ockham, Michael of Cesena and Marsilius of Padua, they stayed in Munich and died there and their graves are still in the city.

Next week we will try something new. We will still follow the life of Ludwig the Bavarian. But we will look at it through the eyes of someone else, a woman, called Margarete Maultasch, countess of Tirol, best known from Lion Feuchtwanger’s novel the ugly duchess. I hope you will join us again.

And just a final reminder that the history of the Germans is advertising free and that if you want to hear the sound of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major, performed and arranged by Michael Rondeau, rather than me espousing mattresses, sign up on patreon.com/historyofthegermans or on historyofthegermans.com/support.

Episode 150 – The Last Chivalric Battles

by History of the Germans Podcast on 30th May 202417th December 2025

Morgarten and Mühldorf

The 14^th century is a time of epic change in practically all areas of social, political and economic life. It is a time when the certainties of the Middle Ages are replaced by a process of trial and error, sometimes successful, but almost always violent. New frameworks of how society and in particular the religious authorities should operate, how political power should be distributed and how economic growth could be preserved at a time when the climatic benefits of the medieval warming period has come to an end. Ah, and then there was the Black Death.

In this episode we will talk about the political dimension of this change. First how the conflict between the three dominating houses, the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs and the Luxemburg pans out, though whilst the mighty lords believe it is all about marriage alliances and knights dominating the battlefield, the ground on which their mighty warhorses are galloping is shifting….

The 14th century is a time of fundamental change in practically all areas of social, political and economic life. It is a time when the certainties of the Middle Ages are replaced by a process of trial and error, sometimes successful, but almost always violent. We see new frameworks of how society and in particular the religious authorities should operate, how political power should be distributed and how economic growth could be preserved at a time when the climatic benefits of the medieval warming period has come to an end. Ah, and then there was the Black Death.

As always:

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

If you wish to support the show go to: Support • History of the Germans Podcast

Facebook: @HOTGPod

Bluesky: @hotgpod.bsky.social

Instagram: history_of_the_germans

Twitter: @germanshistory

So far I have:

Ep. 150 – The Last Chivalric Battles – Morgarten and Mühldorf

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 150 – The Last Chivalric Battles – Morgarten and Mühldorf, also episode 13 of Season 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.

But before we start a couple of housekeeping things. We have now reached episode 150, which means if you have listened to every episode you would have listened for 311,361 seconds, 5,189 minutes, 86.5 hours or 3 days,14 hours and 29 minutes. I salute you.

I also know that for anyone coming to the podcast these figures are intimidating. Therefore I have gone down further in my attempt to break the show up into seasons. That does not lead to any changes on Spotify, Pocket Casts and many other platforms. If you however listen on Apple Podcasts you may have noticed that you get displayed just one of the seasons, so to listen to previous seasons you will have to go to the seasons tap and select another one. And you may have noticed that I have changed the episode art. The images that accompany the individual episodes now prominently display the name of the season to make it easier to find out where you are on the timeline. The episode art now also feature the HotGPod colours, namely the rather distinctive gold I have taken from the image of the German flag in the main podcast icon. I hope you like these changes, however, if you feel these are a distraction or make life more difficult for you, or any other reason you do not like them, let me know.

And with that, all that is left to do is to say thanks to our patrons who keep the History of the Germans advertising free. This week I would like to recognize KeithF67, Matt L., ANDREAS OLIVER B., Brian Earl, Ronald H. and Gabe C. who have kindly signed up to the show. Last and final reminder, if you want your full name read out in the episodes, please let me know through the email function at patreon.com/historyofthegermans.