Disputed election to the Empire—Quarrel between Lewis IV. and John XXII.—The Franciscans and the Pope—The Heresy of the Beatific Vision—National feeling in Germany—Causes of the failure of Lewis as Emperor—The Expedition of the Emperor to Italy—Lewis supports the Anti-Pope—His retirement from Italy—His position in 1338—The Succession question in the Tyrol—Election of Charles IV.—Death of Lewis.

The death of the Emperor Henry VII. (1313) gave occasion for one of those disputed elections which were almost inevitable as |Disputed election in the Empire.| long as there was no central power strong enough to control German factions, and as long as the rules or custom of election were uncertain and ill-defined. The Hapsburgs eagerly grasped at the opportunity of recovering the power they had lost by the death of Albert I. Their opponents, headed as before by Baldwin of Trier, passed over John of Bohemia on account of his youth, and put forward as their candidate Lewis, Duke of Upper Bavaria. The rival forces were not ill-balanced. On October 19, 1314, Frederick the Handsome, son of Albert I., was chosen at Sachsenhausen by the Archbishop of Köln, Henry of Carinthia, still claiming the crown of Bohemia (see p. 18), the Elector Palatine, and the Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg. On the following day five electors—the Archbishops of Mainz and Trier, John of Bohemia, Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg—gave their votes at Frankfurt in favour of Lewis the Bavarian. Thus two votes—those of Saxony and Bohemia—were cast by rival claimants upon both sides. On November 25, a double coronation took place: Frederick being crowned at Bonn, and Lewis at Aachen. The dispute could only be settled by arms; and a desultory war, lasting for seven years, was closed in 1322 by the battle of Mühldorf, where the capture of his rival seemed to secure the final victory of Lewis.

But the very completeness of Lewis’s triumph only served to provoke a far more formidable enemy than the Hapsburg duke. As long as the war lasted in Germany, the Pope had been content to pursue his policy of strengthening the Guelf party in Italy, confident that his Ghibelline opponents could receive no assistance from beyond the Alps. Clement V., on hearing of the death of Henry VII., had seized the opportunity to claim the administration, and to grant the office of imperial vicar during the vacancy to his patron and ally, Robert of Naples. John XXII., who succeeded Clement in 1316, after an interregnum of over two years, continued his predecessor’s policy. But Robert of Naples could only just hold his own against the Visconti and other Ghibelline leaders; and the battle of Mühldorf seemed likely to turn the scale decisively against the Guelfs. In his partisanship for the Angevin cause, John XXII. determined to revive the most extreme claims of the mediæval Papacy. On the pretext that he had |Quarrel of Lewis IV. and John XXII.| the right to decide the disputed election, and that neither claimant could assume the imperial office without his sanction, he called upon Lewis to plead his cause before the Roman Curia (1323), and, when he failed to appear, pronounced him contumacious and finally proceeded to issue a bull of excommunication against him. Thus commenced a struggle between the Empire and Papacy which was continued under the pontificates of Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI., and was hardly terminated by the death of Lewis in 1347.

In many ways this struggle looks like a revival of past struggles between Emperors and Popes, and to raise the old questions as to the relations of Church and State. But if it |Peculiarities of the quarrel.| is examined a little closer, it will be found to differ in several important respects from its predecessors, and to present peculiar characteristics of its own. In the first place, the dispute arises from more petty causes, and the combatants are of lesser mould than the protagonists of earlier times. There is no Hildebrand or Innocent III. among the Avignon Popes, and Lewis the Bavarian lacks both the courage and the imposing personality of Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick II. The pretensions of the rival powers are less far-reaching and exalted; and if at times we find the language of the past reproduced in the papal bulls, it sounds unreal and almost ridiculous. No more conclusive illustration of the decline of both Papacy and Empire can be presented than the impression of unreality and insignificance produced on the mind by the records of this long and obstinate contest.

Yet it is hardly probable that this impression was shared by contemporary spectators. To them the struggle must have seemed to involve questions of vital importance. No previous contest between the rival heads of Christendom had produced so much literature, or literature of such merit and significance. Michael of Cesena, the general of the Franciscan Order, John of Jandun, and William of Ockham, ‘The Invincible Doctor,’ exhausted the subtleties of the scholastic philosophy in their championship of the imperial position against papal pretensions. Above all, Marsiglio of Padua, in his great work the Defensor Pacis, examined with equal acuteness and insight the fundamental relations of the spiritual and secular powers, and laid down principles which were destined to find at any rate partial expression in the Reformation.^[7]

This outburst of literary and philosophical activity was due in great part to the fact that for the first time in the long strife between Papacy and Empire, the struggle involved doctrinal differences. Hitherto the contest had been between Church and State, and the Church had been for the most part united. But, on the present occasion, the Church was profoundly divided. The great Franciscan Order had been founded by the professed advocate of clerical poverty. In course of time this original principle |The Franciscans and the Pope.| had been departed from, and the Order had amassed considerable wealth, though it had been found desirable to conceal the change by making the Pope the trustee, and giving the Order the mere usufruct of its property. This lapse from the strictness of the original rules had given rise to a schism within the Order. The Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, maintained that Christ and the Apostles held no individual or corporate property, and that the Church was bound to copy the examples of its founders. This doctrine, which was accepted by a chapter of the Order in 1322, was not likely to find favour with a Pope who was accused, with good reason, of avarice. John XXII., urged on by the Dominicans, denounced the doctrine as heretical, and thereby alienated the Franciscans, who could plead in their favour a bull of Nicolas III., and appealed from the authority of the Pope to a General Council of the Church. In common hostility to John XXII., the Franciscans espoused the cause of Lewis the Bavarian, and it was among them that he found his most enthusiastic champions, and his most influential advisers.

This antagonism of a section of the Church to its own head seemed likely to be increased in John XXII.’s later years, when he was induced to favour the |Heresy of the Beatific Vision.| dogma that the dead are not admitted to the divine presence until after the final day of judgment. This contention struck at the root of the prevalent custom of invoking the mediation of the saints, and provoked a storm of opposition throughout Europe. Even the French king threatened to abandon the cause of so heterodox a Pope, and on his death-bed John found it prudent or necessary to retract his too hasty opinion.

It is obvious that these doctrinal disputes weakened the Papacy, and so far tended to give the Emperor an advantage. But this gain to Lewis was as nothing compared with the strength which he derived from the most noteworthy peculiarity of the struggle. In all previous contests with the Empire, the Popes had been able to command the services of an anti-imperial party within Germany, and this party had included not only the great ecclesiastics, but many of the lay princes. But in the great critical moments of the struggle with Lewis, this was found to be impossible. For the first time in history the German ruler found himself |National sentiment in Germany.| backed up by a vigorous national sentiment among his subjects, a sentiment quite as strong as that which had supported Philip IV. of France against Boniface VIII. The primary cause of this unwonted union among German princes and people was undoubtedly the residence at Avignon and the subservience of the Popes to France. The national revolt against a spiritual authority which allowed itself to become the tool of a hostile state, led in England to the issue of the great statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, and found equally resolute expression in Germany in the famous decrees of 1338. Benedict XII., more moderate and placable than his predecessor, had been on the verge of a reconciliation with the Emperor, but was actually forbidden to put an end to the quarrel by the imperious Philip VI. This open dictation on the part of the French king drove the Germans to fury. In July, 1338, all the electors with the exception of the King of Bohemia met at Rense on the Rhine, and formally resolved that the imperial authority proceeds directly from God, and that the prince who is legally chosen by the electors becomes king and emperor without any further ceremony or confirmation. This meeting is noteworthy in the constitutional history of Germany as the first occasion on which the electors assumed corporate functions other than the filling of a vacancy in the throne. In the following month, a numerously attended diet at Frankfort endorsed the declaration of Rense, and proceeded to draw up laws which should strengthen the central power. The punishment of death is decreed against all breakers of the public peace: the feudal tenant who takes arms against his imperial overlord is declared to forfeit both life and property: whoever refuses to take up arms at the summons of the Emperor is pronounced guilty of felony. The decrees of Frankfort seem to promise a revival of the German monarchy.

In spite of all these advantages on the side of the Emperor, the quarrel ended, not exactly in a papal triumph, yet in the complete and humiliating discomfiture of Lewis. Doubtless the personal character of the Emperor |Causes of Lewis’s failure.| contributed essentially to this result. Lewis was well-meaning but vacillating: he could take strenuous measures under the influence of a stronger will, but when he lost his adviser his habitual irresolution and his superstitious dread of the terrors of excommunication returned upon him. To carry through the contest he required the firmness, the intellectual craft, and the want of reverence of a Philip the Fair; and he had none of these qualities. On more than one critical occasion, when success seemed within his grasp, he alienated and disgusted his supporters by grovelling offers to purchase absolution by surrendering all the principles which were at stake in the quarrel. Moreover, the doctrinal disputes in which he became involved, although a source of weakness to the Pope, were not an equal source of strength to the Emperor. The Franciscans had many powerful opponents, especially in the great rival Order of St. Dominic, and these were alienated from the Emperor by his alliance with a faction in the Church. The Franciscan cause rested upon an unpractical enthusiasm which could not command the lasting support of the clergy, accustomed as they were to wealth and to the influence which it confers. And in the end, the strong corporate spirit of the Church was inevitably aroused and alienated by the spectacle of a secular ruler interfering in questions of dogma, and claiming a right of interpretation and decision.

There was, too, in the Emperor’s position a fundamental weakness which, unless detected and remedied, was inevitably fatal to his success. Neither Lewis nor the Franciscan advisers who in the early years of the struggle dictated his conduct, could realise that the conditions of the Middle Ages were passing away. They could not see that the old imperial pretensions were obsolete; that intervention in Italy had always brought ruin to German kings; that even in Italy the Guelfs had the stronger, because the less anti-national, position; and that the Ghibellines, the professed champions of imperial ascendency, only pursued this policy for their own ends, and had no real desire to weaken their independence by the foundation of a strong Italian monarchy. Lewis had an almost unique opportunity of building up such a monarchy in Germany, not on the lines of the mediæval Empire, but on the basis of the newly awakened national sentiment and sympathy. This opportunity he threw away because he had no conception of the conditions under which alone such success could be attained. Instead of endeavouring to rule as an Edward I. or a Philip IV., he set himself to imitate the Ottos of the tenth century.

In 1325 Germany was astounded by the news that Lewis had been formally reconciled with his imprisoned rival. It is true that the treaty was not carried out, and Frederick, unable to fulfil his promises in face of the opposition of his brothers, returned to captivity. But in the following year the death of Leopold, the most resolute and active of the Hapsburg princes, removed all danger to Lewis from this quarter, and enabled him to follow the advice of his Franciscan counsellors and to take aggressive measures against the Pope. In 1327 the Emperor appeared |Lewis in Italy.| at Trent, where he was welcomed by the Ghibelline leaders eager to have his assistance against Robert of Naples. At Milan he received the iron crown of Lombardy, and thence, accompanied by Castruccio Castracani, Lord of Lucca, he set out for Rome. The Guelf cause seemed to be ruined in northern and central Italy, and the partisans of the Pope and Naples fled from the city. In January, 1328, Lewis was crowned Emperor by two bishops, whose chief qualification was that they shared with their patron the penalties of excommunication. Three months were spent in planning further proceedings, and in April John XXII. was formally declared uncanonically elected and guilty of heresy. In May, Peter di Corvara, a Franciscan friar, nominated by the Emperor and accepted by the acclamations of the citizens, assumed the papal title as Nicolas V.

This initiation of a schism in the interests of the Franciscan party marks the limit of the Emperor’s success in Italy. He had committed himself to an enterprise which he had neither the moral nor the material force to carry through. His immediate enemy, Robert of Naples, had not yet been even attacked. When the imperial troops advanced southwards in June, they were speedily compelled to retreat, and Lewis thought it advisable to evacuate Rome and retire to the Ghibelline strongholds in the north. The Emperor was accompanied by his Antipope, and the Roman populace, with characteristic inconstancy, expelled the imperial partisans and opened their gates to the Orsini and the Neapolitan troops. To make matters worse, death carried off two of Lewis’s chief advisers, Castruccio Castracani and Marsiglio of Padua. From this time his career in Italy was one long catalogue of blunders, and he eagerly seized the excuse for returning to Germany on the news of the death of his former rival, Frederick the Handsome (January, 1330). The unfortunate Nicolas V., deserted by his patron, was compelled to resign his dignity and to make the most humiliating submission to John XXII. He ended his life a prisoner in the palace of Avignon.

After such a complete and disastrous failure it might have been thought that the cause of Lewis was ruined, and that he too would have to submit to the triumphant Pope. But the open alliance of the Papacy with France, and the consequent alienation of Germany, enabled him to recover much of the lost ground, and by 1338 his position appeared |Position of Lewis in 1338.| to be firmer than ever. At the head of a national movement, which had expressed its sentiments unmistakably in the decrees of Rense and Frankfort, and closely allied with Edward III. of England, who was now committed to his great war with France, Lewis seemed able to dictate his own terms both to Benedict XII. and Philip VI.

But Lewis was as incapable as ever of pursuing a resolute and consistent course of policy, and at the very moment when success seemed assured he began to vacillate and draw back. In 1340 he suddenly abandoned the English alliance and made terms with Philip VI., in the hope that the French king would use his influence to secure for him the papal absolution. Philip, delighted to be freed from a very pressing danger, did endeavour to intercede with the Pope, but even the gentle Benedict fired up at this attempt to command what the king had previously forbidden; and the Pope died in April 1342, without having granted the Emperor the pardon for which he craved. The Germans were naturally disgusted by Lewis’s pusillanimity, but this feeling was as nothing compared to the storm of indignation excited by the Emperor’s conduct in the question of Tyrol. The final cause of Lewis’s failure is to be found in his reckless pursuit of that policy of family aggrandisement which had been almost forced upon the holders of the imperial dignity since the Great Interregnum. In his insatiable greed for territory, he did not hesitate to alienate the chief German princes at a time when their support was absolutely indispensable.

In 1335 Henry, Duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol, had died leaving an only daughter, Margaret Maultasch, who |Succession question in Tyrol.| was married to John Henry of Moravia, a son of King John of Bohemia. The claim of Margaret to succeed to her father’s territories was contested by the dukes of Austria, whose father, Albert I., had married the sister of Henry of Carinthia. The struggle for the succession between the Houses of Hapsburg and Luxemburg ended in a partition, the Hapsburg dukes taking Carinthia, while Tyrol was ceded to their niece Margaret. But the marriage relations of Margaret and John Henry proved extremely inharmonious, and in 1341 the former discarded her husband and threw herself upon the protection of the Emperor. The temptation to acquire a new province for his House was more than Lewis could resist. He had already in 1323, on the death of Waldemar of Brandenburg, conferred the vacant provinces and electorate on his eldest son Lewis. On the death of his cousins, the sons of Henry of Lower Bavaria, he had seized their land and had thus united the whole of Bavaria under his own rule. To these acquisitions he would now add the county of Tyrol. In reckless defiance of ecclesiastical prejudice, he usurped rights which had hitherto been exercised by the Church. By solemn decree he granted Margaret a divorce from her husband, and a dispensation to marry his own son, Lewis of Brandenburg.

The consequences of this reckless action might have been foreseen. The clergy were alienated by the assumption of clerical powers by a layman, while the lay princes, headed by John of Bohemia, were jealously indignant at such an addition to the already immense possessions of the Bavarian House. The new Pope, Clement VI., found himself at last in a position to raise an anti-imperial party in Germany, and to bring about the election of a rival king. But for the fact that Philip VI. was now engaged in the war with England, Clement, who was a thorough Frenchman, would probably have used all his influence to secure the election of the French king. As it was, it was natural to find a candidate in the House of Luxemburg, which had most cause for exasperation with Lewis, and was also closely allied with France. John of Bohemia himself was disqualified by blindness, having lost his eyesight in a campaign against the heathen Wends of Prussia, but his eldest son, Charles, was put forward in his |Election of Charles IV., 1346.| place. The only electors who supported Lewis were his own son, Lewis of Brandenburg, and the Archbishop of Mainz, Henry of Virneburg. The Pope, to secure another vote, deposed the archbishop, and awarded his see to Gerlach of Nassau. On June 11, 1346, the three Archbishops, with John of Bohemia and Rudolf of Saxony, formally elected Charles as king of the Romans. With characteristic quixotism the blind king, instead of asserting his son’s title with arms, hurried the new king off to France to aid his ally, Philip VI. On the field of Crecy John of Bohemia fell in heroic despair, but Charles IV., whose share in the battle is wrapped in some obscurity, escaped to Germany to maintain his title.

Meanwhile Lewis had made the last great addition to the territories of his family. His second wife, Margaret, was a sister of William IV. of Holland and Hainault, and |Death of Lewis, 1347.| on the death of that prince in 1345 his possessions fell to William V., a son of Lewis by this second marriage. The House of Wittelsbach seemed for the moment so powerful that it need fear no rival, and the injudicious absence of the Luxemburg princes had enabled Lewis to strengthen himself still further by an alliance with Albert of Austria. Charles found his position almost hopeless. An attack upon Tyrol was repulsed, and he was forced to retire to Bohemia. Lewis, confident of an easy triumph, left the prosecution of the campaign to the Margrave of Brandenburg and returned to Bavaria, where he died suddenly on October 11, 1347, while engaged in a boar-hunt near Munich.