Charles IV. secures the German Crown—His rule in Bohemia—His coronation in Italy—Difficulties in Germany—The Golden Bull—The Papacy and the Golden Bull—The results of the Golden Bull—The intentions of Charles IV.—The Territorial Policy of Charles IV.—The Succession question in Upper Bavaria—The election and coronation of Wenzel—The Swabian League—The Great Schism—Death of Charles IV.—Partition of the Luxemburg territories.

When Charles IV. returned from the campaign in France, which had cost his father’s life, he seemed to have very little |Position of Charles IV. in 1347.| chance of gaining the imperial throne, to which he had been elected by the opponents of Lewis the Bavarian. It is true that Bohemia was rich in mineral wealth, but in territorial power the House of Luxemburg was no match for the House of Wittelsbach, whose various members ruled over the Palatinate, the whole of Bavaria, the marks of Brandenburg, Tyrol, and the border districts of Hainault, Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and Utrecht. The second son of Lewis, Stephen, was head of the powerful Swabian League, and the imperial towns were all on the side of the Bavarian Emperor. The electors who had given Charles their votes were not prepared to make any sacrifices in his cause, and Albert of Austria, the most powerful of the non-electoral princes, was committed to the cause of Lewis. The chief ally to whom Charles might have looked for support was the French king; but Philip VI. was fully occupied in the war with Edward III., and was thus unable to take any part in the affairs of Germany.

And Charles had another great disadvantage in his relations to the Papacy. In return for the support of Clement VI. he had made very extreme concessions in a treaty arranged at Avignon in April 1346. He had admitted that the imperial coronation must follow confirmation of the election by the Pope; he had promised that he would only go to Rome with the Pope’s consent, and would only stay there a single day; the Pope was to be arbiter in the disputes between the Empire and France. It is true that this treaty had not been published: and it is also true that Lewis had more than once offered even greater concessions as the price of absolution. Still, it was patent to all that Charles was the Papal candidate; and the injudicious boast of Clement that he held the imperial throne in his gift was not likely to conciliate German princes and people who had so energetically protested against spiritual dictation from Avignon. The imperial cities refused to open their gates to the Pfaffen-Kaiser, or ‘parson’s emperor,’ as they called him in derision.

While affairs were in this almost hopeless condition, three events occurred which greatly improved Charles’s prospects. The first was the sudden death of his rival, Lewis the Bavarian. Another was the outbreak in 1348 of the Great Plague or Black Death, which diverted men’s attention from political disputes, and led them to look for the checking of anarchy and disorder to the prince who possessed at any rate the title of king. The third event was the appearance in Brandenburg of a pretender claiming to be Waldemar, the last margrave of the House of Ascania, who was supposed to have died in 1319, when the electorate had been conferred upon the eldest son of the late Emperor. The ‘false Waldemar,’ as he is called, declared that he had never died, but had been driven by the stings of conscience to undertake a prolonged pilgrimage, from which he now returned to claim his rights. In order to weaken his Wittelsbach opponent, Charles gave his countenance |Charles secures the German crown.| to the pretender, who speedily secured a large part of Brandenburg.

It was an additional advantage to Charles that the party of the late Emperor had great difficulty in finding a successor to put in his place. In 1348 four electors—Henry of Virneburg, who still held the see of Mainz in defiance of the papal authority, the Elector Palatine Rupert, Lewis of Brandenburg, and Eric of Saxe-Lauenburg, who claimed to exercise the electoral vote of Saxony—sent proxies to Ober-Lahnstein to proceed to a new election. The vacant crown was offered in the first place to Edward III. of England, who had indirectly rendered a service to the Bavarian party by preventing French aid being sent to Charles IV. But Edward could neither neglect the French war nor face the resolute opposition of the English Parliament. On his refusal, the crown was offered to Lewis of Brandenburg, who had enough to do to cope with the false Waldemar, and then to Frederick of Meissen, who declined to risk anything in a losing cause. At last, in despair, the electors chose Gunther of Schwartzburg, a military leader of some reputation, but below the highest princely rank. Gunther, who had little to lose and everything to gain, accepted the proffered dignity, but he died in 1349, before he had time to test his ability to hold it.

Charles IV. set himself, with rare diplomatic ability, to make the most of his own advantages and of the difficulties of his opponents. The imperial cities, discontented by the death of their patron, Lewis the Bavarian, and involved in difficulties and disorders by the Plague, were gained over by the concession of privileges, and one by one opened their gates to Charles. Albert of Austria was detached from the Wittelsbach alliance by a politic marriage between his eldest son Rudolf and Charles’s second daughter Catharine. Charles, himself a widower, sued for the hand of a daughter of the Elector Palatine, and thus gained to his side the head of the House of Wittelsbach. Finally, by disowning the cause of the false Waldemar, he achieved the reconciliation of his most resolute opponent, Lewis of Brandenburg. The death of Gunther of Schwartzburg removed all difficulties in the way of Charles’s recognition, and by 1350 his title was acknowledged throughout the whole of Germany.

Charles IV. is incontestably the greatest ruler whom Europe produced in the fourteenth century, yet his merits have met |Character of Charles IV.| with singularly little appreciation except from Bohemian historians. To most English readers he is chiefly known from the saying of Maximilian I. that he was ‘the father of Bohemia but the stepfather of the Empire,’ or by the more recent epigram of Mr. Bryce who says that ‘he legalised anarchy and called it a constitution.’ Of the two sayings, the latter is by far the more unjust and ill-founded. Charles is a unique figure in the family of Luxemburg which rose to such sudden and short-lived eminence in the fourteenth century. His grandfather, Henry VII., threw away his life in a chimerical effort to revive an imperial authority which was no longer either possible or desirable. His father, John of Bohemia, was the representative knight-errant of his time, perhaps the noblest type of fourteenth century chivalry—now crusading in Poland, now trying to found a new territorial power in Italy, and in the end deserting his own interests to fight and fall in the service of an ally. Of Charles’s sons, the eldest, Wenzel, was a good-natured hedonist, who had few desires beyond the pleasures of the table; and the second, Sigismund, was a schemer who always imagined more than he could achieve. In the midst of this remarkable family, which can boast of three emperors and a king who twice narrowly missed election to the same dignity, Charles IV. stands in complete contrast both to his predecessors and his successors. He had none of the romantic enthusiasm of his father or his grandfather, but he had what was far better—a strong sense of the practical duties of government, and a strenuous business capacity which enabled him to carry them out. It is true that he failed to maintain the Ghibelline cause in Italy, but he preferred the more solid and substantial aim of building up a territorial monarchy in Germany. He was distinguished among contemporary monarchs for his preference of diplomacy to force, for his strong legal sense, and his love of order. Like Edward I. of England and Philip IV. of France, he marks the transition from mediæval to modern ideals and methods of government.

The merits of Charles IV.’s government in Bohemia have never been contested. One of the first-fruits of his good |Bohemia under Charles IV.| understanding with Clement VI. was the procuring of a papal bull to erect Prague into a metropolitan see, whereas it had previously been dependent on the Archbishop of Mainz. In 1348, while his affairs in Germany were in their most critical condition, Charles laid the foundations of the University of Prague, with a constitution modelled upon that of the University of Paris, where the king himself had studied. To Charles the Bohemian capital owes not only its university and its archbishopric, but also its famous bridge over the Moldau, and many of its most notable buildings. Much of his attention was given to the promotion of commerce. He established a uniform coinage, provided for the protection of highways, and lowered the tolls upon roads and rivers. He projected a canal from the Moldau to the Danube, which was to carry through Bohemia the traffic between Venice and the Hanseatic League. Many of his measures were protective in the extreme. Every foreign trader who crossed the Bohemian frontier was compelled to expose his wares for sale in Prague; no foreigner could conclude a bargain except through a native merchant; and all goods had to be sold by Bohemian weight and measure. Short-sighted as such regulations may appear in the present day, they were in accordance with the ideas of the time, and they were not unsuccessful in attaining their end. From German and Slavonic countries nobles, merchants, teachers and scholars flocked to the capital of Bohemia; the members of the university were to be counted by thousands before Charles’s death.

Under this beneficent rule Prague promised to become the chief city of Germany, and the balance of power and of civilisation was transferred from the west to the east. Charles, undoubtedly, looked forward to securing for the House of Luxemburg a position almost exactly similar to that afterwards attained by the House of Hapsburg; and he trusted that his descendants would enjoy, as the Hapsburgs did in later times, an unbroken and quasi-hereditary succession to the imperial throne. And his more sanguine schemes did not stop at this point. He founded in Prague a cloister of Slavonic monks, collected from Bosnia, Servia, and Croatia, whose task was to draw closer the bonds between Bohemia and the eastern Slavs, and ultimately to pave the way for a union between the Latin and Greek Churches. If this dream had been fulfilled, the Luxemburg House might have founded a power greater than that of any Emperor, and Bohemia, which has always been a triangular wedge thrust from the east into the west, might have become a rivet between the two great divisions of the Continent.

In 1354 Charles IV. set out for Italy to receive the Lombard crown at Milan, and the imperial crown in Rome. |Charles IV. in Italy.| From the Ghibelline point of view his journey was ignominious, but as throwing light upon Charles’s policy it was of great significance. He refused to be drawn into the vortex of Italian politics, or to break his treaty with the Pope. To the representations of the Ghibelline leaders, as to the eloquent appeals of Petrarch, Charles turned a deaf ear. He entered Rome to be crowned, paraded the streets in his imperial robes, and then retired outside the walls to San Lorenzo. With as little delay as possible, he hastened on his return journey. It was a deliberate renunciation of the claim of the mediæval Emperors to rule in Italy. Charles saw clearly that Germany had been ruined by the attempts of its rulers to make their monarchy in Italy a practical force, and in the interests of Germany he refused to imitate the folly of his predecessors. His main object was the reconstruction of an orderly and efficient authority in Germany, and that object could only be achieved by resolutely cutting himself free from the entanglement of Italian ambitions.

It was to the task of reform in Germany that Charles devoted himself immediately on his return to Germany, and his conferences with the diets at Nürnberg in 1355 and 1356 resulted in the issue of the great enactment with which his name will always be connected—the Golden Bull. There were two great and pressing |Difficulties in Germany.| problems which required solution. One very obvious cause of recent disorders in Germany had been the disputed elections to the Empire, and these were intimately associated with the uncertainty as to the rules of election. It is true that tradition had decided that there should be seven electors, and that certain sees and certain families had claims to the right of voting. But the German practice of subdividing lands among male heirs had given rise to great uncertainty as to which member of a family should exercise this right. Thus the House of Wittelsbach was split into two main branches, the one holding the Palatinate of the Rhine, the other the duchy of Bavaria. By family agreement the Wittelsbach vote was to be given alternately by the heads of the two branches, but such an arrangement was certain to give rise to quarrels. In 1314 the Saxon vote had been given on opposite sides by two rival claimants, and the same thing had taken place in the elections of 1346 and 1348. The prevention of similar disputes in the future was a primary condition of peace and order in Germany, and was one of the main objects of the Golden Bull.

The second great and pressing difficulty in Germany was the danger of the complete disruption of all political unity. There were innumerable tenants-in-chief, electors, princes, knights and cities, held together by nothing but common allegiance to a monarchy which had lost all efficient authority. If no remedy could be devised, Germany must become a mere geographical expression like Italy. The cities would become independent republics, and desolating wars between them and their princely neighbours would lead to incurable anarchy. In that case, the border provinces must inevitably fall to the growing power of France. Lyons was already gone; Dauphiné was practically lost. Provence and Franche-Comté, though acknowledging imperial suzerainty, were subject to French influence and destined to fall, with the Netherlands, under the rule of a French dynasty. German ascendency would disappear, first in the valley of the Rhone and then in that of the Rhine.

Charles IV. was fully alive to these dangers. He had accompanied his father to Italy in 1330, had acted for a time as his vicegerent, and had then acquired an insight into Italian politics which profoundly influenced his subsequent policy. It is hardly too much to say that his guiding motive was to preserve Germany from the fate which nominal subjection to imperial rule had brought upon Italy. And though he was connected by relationship, education, and past alliances with the Valois House of France, he was by no means blind to the dangers of French aggression in the west. It was in the vain hope of checking the constant falling away of border lands that in 1365 he went through the ceremony of being crowned King of Arles, disused by his predecessors since Frederick Barbarossa.

On the subject of imperial elections, the provisions of the Golden Bull are clear and precise, and they remained a |The Golden Bull, 1356.| fundamental law until the Holy Roman Empire ended its shadowy existence in 1806. The number of electors is fixed at seven—viz. three ecclesiastics, the Archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier, and four lay princes, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The three ecclesiastical electors are to be archchancellors of the three kingdoms: the Archbishop of Mainz in Germany, the Archbishop of Köln in Italy, and the Archbishop of Trier in Arles. The four secular electors are to hold the great household offices: the King of Bohemia is chief cup-bearer, the Count Palatine grand-seneschal, the Duke of Saxony grand-marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg grand-chamberlain. The election of the Kings of the Romans and future Emperors is to be held in Frankfort, and decided by a majority of votes. The elected prince is to be crowned at Aachen, and to hold his first diet at Nürnberg. The territories to which the electoral dignity is attached are never to be divided, and the succession is to be regulated by the rules of primogeniture among male agnates. During a minority, the electoral vote and the administration of the electoral provinces are to be intrusted to the nearest male relative on the father’s side. The electors are to take rank before all other princes; they are to have the royal rights of coining money and of final jurisdiction without appeal. All confederations of subjects without the leave of their territorial lord are prohibited, and the towns are forbidden to grant their citizenship to pfahlbürger, or burghers outside the walls, or to receive fugitive serfs to the shelter of their walls and franchises.

There is one omission in the Golden Bull which is as significant and important as any of its direct provisions. The |The Papacy and the Golden Bull.| papal claims to confirm or veto an election, and to administer the Empire during a vacancy, were passed over in complete silence. The great electoral resolutions of Rense were practically but silently erected into an imperial law, and the election of future Emperors was to be treated as a private affair of the German nation. Innocent VI. did not hesitate to show his displeasure at the promulgation of such a law by a prince who was regarded as the docile creature of the Holy See. But Charles IV. showed a firmness worthy of Edward I. or of Philip the Fair. When the papal nuncio tried to levy a tenth of clerical revenues, Charles replied by demanding a reform of ecclesiastical abuses and by threatening to confiscate Church property. The Pope was forced to give way, and to abandon his opposition to the Golden Bull.

With regard to the practical results of the Golden Bull, historians are unanimous. It erected an aristocratic federation |Results of the Golden Bull.| in Germany in place of the older monarchy, and the German constitution never lost the impress which it received in the fourteenth century. The powers and privileges which the Bull conferred upon the electors were inconsistent with the exercise of efficient monarchical authority. And though the secular electors in 1356 were not, with the exception of Charles himself, very powerful princes, yet it was certain that the establishment of primogeniture and of indivisibility of territories would before long give them a territorial power proportionate to their elevated rank.

But historians have misjudged Charles IV., partly because |Motives of Charles IV.| they have fallen into the common error of confusing the results of the Golden Bull with the intentions of its author, and partly because they have paid insufficient attention to the precise circumstances of the time in which he lived. Charles was profoundly convinced—and it is difficult to maintain that he was wrong—that the mediæval Empire was at an end, and that any attempt to revive it would result in the ruin of Germany. The forces which he most dreaded were the rising cities in the north and south, and the greater territorial princes, such as the Hapsburgs and the Bavarian Wittelsbachs. Both of these were weakened by the Golden Bull—the cities by its actual provisions, and the princes by their definite exclusion from the electoral vote, and by the virtual lowering of their rank which was effected by the elevation of the electors. It is true that the electors themselves received powers and privileges which might prove the foundation of independence, but at the same time their interests were enlisted on the side of unity. The Golden Bull gave them a grander position as joint rulers of Germany than they could look forward to as mere rulers in their own provinces. Thus it might reasonably be hoped that they would resist the further progress of that disruption which had already done so much harm to Germany.

And while he provided this check upon growing disunion, Charles IV. had no desire or expectation that the state of things recognised and confirmed in the Golden Bull should be permanent. His intention was to obtain for the House of Luxemburg such an overwhelming territorial strength that he would secure to his successors a practically hereditary claim to the imperial office, and also such a predominance in the electoral college as would enable them to rule Germany through that body. By gradually adding province after province to the family domain, it might be possible in the end to build up a territorial monarchy like that which existed in England and was in process of construction in France. It is true that such a monarchy might be less imposing than the wide-reaching claims of imperial suzerainty, but it would be infinitely stronger and more advantageous to Germany. No single lifetime could be long enough to effect such a work, and Charles’s direct heirs only lasted for a single generation, and were themselves incapable of following in their father’s footsteps. But such territorial power as was afterwards gained in Germany by the Hapsburgs was, for the most part, acquired by following the lines laid down by Charles IV., and in more than one way the Hapsburgs may be regarded as the heirs of the House of Luxemburg.

It is this definite policy which gives to Charles’s territorial ambitions an interest and a dignity which are lacking to the purely selfish and aimless acquisitiveness of his |Territorial acquisitions of Charles IV.| predecessor. In 1356 John, Duke of Brabant and Limburg died, and his territories passed to his daughter and her husband Wenzel, Duke of Luxemburg, Charles’s youngest brother. The Emperor supported his brother against the rival claims of the Count of Flanders, and obtained from the duchess and the estates of Brabant an agreement that, in default of heirs, the provinces should fall to the main line of Luxemburg. In 1363 occurred a very important crisis in the family relationships of Germany through the death of Meinhard, the only son of Margaret Maultasch and of Lewis of Bavaria, the eldest son of the late Emperor (see p. 107). Meinhard’s death left vacant both Tyrol and the duchy of Upper Bavaria. The Hapsburg claim to Tyrol, which had failed in 1335, was promptly renewed by Rudolf of Austria. Rudolf was one of the princes who were most indignant at the increased rank given to the electors by the Golden Bull, and he had shown his irritation by assuming the title of ‘archduke,’ which in the next century was permanently adopted by the House of Hapsburg. Charles IV. seized the opportunity to gain over so powerful a malcontent. He confirmed Rudolf in possession of Tyrol, and at the same time concluded with him a treaty of mutual inheritance by which, on the extinction of either House, the other was to inherit all its lands. At the time, the House of Hapsburg seemed nearer to extinction than that of Luxemburg; and, as a matter of fact, the treaty was never actually carried out. But it is not a little curious that within a century after the male line of Luxemburg had come to an end, almost all the territories which it held in 1364 had passed, in one way or another, into the hands of the Hapsburgs.

Meanwhile a struggle had broken out as to the succession in Upper Bavaria. By a treaty made in 1349 between the sons of Lewis the Bavarian, that duchy ought now to have gone to Lewis the Roman and Otto, in whose favour their elder brother Lewis had renounced the possession of Brandenburg. But the second brother, Stephen of Lower Bavaria, anticipated their claim and obtained his own recognition from the estates of Upper Bavaria. The two margraves applied for assistance to Charles IV., and promised him the succession to Brandenburg if they died without heirs. This agreement ultimately took effect in 1373, when Otto, the surviving margrave, was induced or compelled to cede Brandenburg to the Emperor, who pledged himself to the estates that the union of Brandenburg with Bohemia should be perpetual. Thus Charles acquired a second electoral vote and a very notable increase of his territorial power in northern Germany. About the same time he betrothed his second son, Sigismund, to the daughter of Lewis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland, and thus opened a prospect of adding these states to the now enormous possessions of the Luxemburg House.

These actual or prospective acquisitions could be of little permanent value unless Charles could secure to his House the continued occupation of the imperial office, and in 1374 he began to sound the electors on the subject |Election of Wenzel.| of the election of his son Wenzel, a boy of fifteen years old. But there were many difficulties in the way. The Golden Bull made no provision for an election during the lifetime of any occupant of the throne. The spirit, if not the letter, of the law was against such a thing. There were also serious objections to the election of a minor, and many princes were jealous of the predominance already gained by the Luxemburgers. Charles, however, was not very scrupulous in such a critical matter, even about the observance of his own laws. He gained over the electors, but by the old objectionable method of bribing them. He did not hesitate to appeal for papal approval, thus reviving the pretensions which the Golden Bull had practically abrogated. But his policy was successful in its immediate aim. Wenzel was elected at Frankfort on June 16, and crowned at Aachen on July 6, 1376.

The election of Wenzel as King of the Romans was the last triumph of Charles IV. His repressive attitude towards the cities had met with only partial success. The great northern Hansa had conducted a successful war against Waldemar III., one of the strongest of Danish kings, and in 1370 had forced him to conclude a humiliating treaty at Stralsund (see p. 437). And in 1376 a new danger arose in the south. The Swabian towns were disgusted at the sacrifice |The Swabian League.| of the last imperial domains in their province to purchase electoral votes. They renewed an old league under the leadership of Ulm, and refused to recognise Wenzel’s election. At Reutlingen (May 14, 1377) the forces of the league won a complete victory over their hated enemy, the Count of Würtemburg. This was followed by a rapid extension of the confederation, and Charles was too old and too weak to attempt its suppression. In August, 1378, he authorised his son Wenzel to conclude a peace between the towns and the princes, and to concede the right of union to the former. Thus one of the provisions of the Golden Bull was abandoned during Charles’s own lifetime.

Nor was this the only blow which Charles experienced in his later years. He had long struggled to put an end to the papal residence at Avignon, which was a scandal to Europe and a serious injury in many ways to German and imperial interests. He had succeeded in persuading Urban V. to return to Rome in 1367, and had himself visited the Pope in the Eternal City. But Urban was alienated by Charles’s refusal to take active measures against the Ghibelline Visconti, and was easily induced by his French cardinals to return to Avignon. The whole work had to be begun again. At last, in 1377, Gregory XI. was persuaded to quit the |The Great Schism.| banks of the Rhone and to take up his residence in Rome. But he was meditating a second withdrawal from the city when he was overtaken by death. The new election had to take place in Rome, and the choice of the cardinals fell upon an Italian, Urban VI. This seemed for the moment a conspicuous triumph for Charles IV. But Urban’s violence alienated the French cardinals, who seceded from Rome and elected a rival Pope, Clement VII. Clement naturally threw himself upon French support, and fixed his residence at Avignon. Thus the return to Rome, instead of putting an end to scandal, gave rise to the famous schism in the Church which lasted for forty years. Charles IV. was bitterly chagrined, and appealed to all the European princes to recognise Urban and to resist the excessive and dictatorial power of France. And there was some reasonable ground for such an appeal. A brother of Charles V. of France was Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke’s wife was the heiress of Flanders, Artois, and Franche Comté. Another brother claimed the succession in Naples, and the King of Hungary and Poland was a member of the older House of Anjou. The prince who was naturally expected to resist this threatening danger to the balance of states was Charles IV., who might have found it necessary to lead an army against the French king and the Antipope. But on November 29, 1378, just two months after the |Death of Charles IV.| outbreak of the schism, death removed him from the scene of strife.

Before his death, Charles IV.’s weakness for his children had led him into an act which was ruinous to his most cherished schemes. The Golden Bull had shown how clearly he appreciated the advantages to a state of indivisibility and a strict rule of primogeniture. |Partition of Luxemburg territories.| These advantages he deliberately threw away in his own case. He even broke the solemn pledge which he had given never to separate the marks of Brandenburg from Bohemia. He left Bohemia and Silesia to his eldest son, Wenzel, while he transferred Brandenburg to his second son, Sigismund, and formed a duchy in Lausitz for the third son, John of Görlitz. Moravia was already in the hands of Jobst and Prokop, the sons of Charles’s second brother, John Henry; while Luxemburg was still held by the surviving brother, Wenzel, the husband of the Duchess of Brabant and Limburg. The family possessions had increased enormously since the days of Henry VII., but they were of comparatively little value when scattered among so many hands. The House of Luxemburg was never destined to hold the position imagined for it by the greatest ruler it produced, Charles IV.