Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 160 – The Golden Bull of 1356, also Episode 23 of Season 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.
“Every realm that is divided internally will go to ruin, for its princes have become the comrades of thieves. The Lord has poured out the spirit of deceit among them, so that they grope about at midday as though in darkness, and He has withdrawn the light from their dwellings, so that they are blind and leaders of the blind. And those who wander in the dark run into things, and those who are blind of spirit bring about evil deeds, which occur in disunity. [..]
You, Jealousy, have soiled the Christian Empire, which was reinforced by God with the virtues of faith hope and love, just like the indivisible Trinity, and whose foundations stand firmly on the kingdom of Christ; you have soiled it with your ancient poison that you have spewed forth like an evil snake on the Empire and its members. And to shatter the pillars and to bring the whole structure to collapse, you have incited disunity among the seven electors, who should illuminate the Empire like the light of the seven lamps of the mind.
But in the name of the office which we hold as Emperor we are obliged to act against disunity and struggle among the electors [..] for two reasons: because of our Imperial office, and because of our rights as an elector.
In order to increase the unity among them, and to bring about unanimity during elections and to avoid disgraceful divisions and to close the door to the multiple dangers that arise from them, we have issued the laws written down here at our festive Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, in the presence of all the spiritual and worldly electors, and before a large crowd of other princes, counts, free lords, lords, nobles and urban delegates. From our Imperial throne, decorated with the imperial insignias and treasures, wearing the imperial crown, after ripe deliberation, we issued them on the basis of our unrestricted imperial powers, in the year of our Lord 1356, on the 10th of January, in the tenth year of our royal power and the first of our Imperial power.”
So begins one of the most important constitutional documents of the Holy Roman Empire, the Golden Bull of 1356. But what did it actually say, and even more important, what did it not say and how does it fit into the context of the history of the Holy Roman Empire. That is what we are going to discuss in this episode.
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Even if you grow up in Germany, there is not an awful lot of political history of the 14th century you are likely to be taught. But two events you will hear about, one is the Interregnum and the other the Golden Bull. Why, because the Golden Bull remained on the statute books of the Holy Roman empire until 1806, and it governed its main political event, the election of a new emperor, throughout that time. It was never amended or changed. Creating a system to select a ruler that lasts unchanged for 450 years is no mean feat, and some have called it the constitution or the Basic Law of the Holy Roman empire.
That alone would be reason enough to dedicate a whole episode to it, but the significance of the document goes well beyond providing a procedure for the choice of a ruler.
When Karl IV returned from his imperial coronation in Rome in the summer of 1355 he was riding high. He had been crowned emperor with the blessing of the pope, he had made peace with the other powerful imperial families, the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs and he had asserted his and the empire’s power on the western frontier against the acquisitive French.
Having reached a degree of recognition few of his predecessors could have dreamt of, he wanted to use his power to put his two realms, that of Bohemia and the Empire onto a more stable footing. We have already heard that his plan to pass a fundamental law, almost a constitution for Bohemia had floundered on the resistance of the Bohemian barons.
But that did not discourage him from trying the same in the empire. He called an imperial diet to Nuernberg for January 1356 to discuss his proposal for a decree that would be later called the Golden Bull. By the way, the Golden Bull is not the only golden bull. The term means that the document had been sealed with a golden seal, marking it out as particularly important. But there have bee dozens if not hundreds of golden bulls. Some or famous, like the golden bull of Rimini that granted the Teutonic Knights ownership of Prussia and if you ask a Czech about the Golden bull, they would think of the one that turned Bohemia into an inheritable kingdom in 1212.
But in a German context The Golden Bull is the one issued in 1356/57 by Karl IV. Before we talk about why it is so important, let’s first look at what it actually says.
The Golden Bull is an imperial decree comprising 23 chapters first issued at the imperial diet in Nuernberg on January 10, 1356 and then amended by a further 8 chapters at a subsequent diet in Metz almost exactly one year later.
The majority of the document deals with the process of the imperial election and the role of the prince electors.
When I went to school, we were told that the Golden Bull established the system of election by the seven electors, but anyone who has listened to this series knows, that this is not so. Election by seven electors, namely the three archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the Count Palatinate on the Rhine and the Margrave of Brandenburg had been standard practice since at least the election of Rudolf von Habsburg, way back in 1273.
But what the Golden Bull does is making sure that from now on there should no longer be any more contested elections. And that is achieved by resolving certain open questions once and for all, and by closing down some loopholes.
The first thing was to make sure there is not going to be any confusion who these seven electors were. In the past this had been a problem since for instance the two branches of the ducal house of Saxony, the Sachsen-Wittenbergs and Sachsen-Lauenburgs each had claimed the right to elect. Equally the Wittelsbachs had set up a system of rotation between the Bavarian and the Palatinate line about who would be allowed to cast the vote. And, as we have seen in the election of Ludwig the Bavarian, ambitious candidates sometimes pulled prince-electors out of their hats, nobody had expected.
The Golden Bull made sure that there could only ever be seven men who could be the Prince lectors.
First it states that the vote for Saxony rested with the Sachsen -Wittenberg and that the Palatinate vote could only ever be exercised by whoever is the count Palatinate on the Rhine. The Sachsen Lauenburgs and the Bavarian Wittelsbachs were told that they were just imperial princes, like everyone else, something the latter in particular will resent for centuries to come.
Then a system of strict male primogenitur is introduced for the Prince-Electors. Only the eldest son of the elector should become elector and should also inherit all the lands associated with the electorate. Lands belonging to an electorate could not be divided up, sold, pawned or otherwise given away. Should an elector die without issue, his brother or his brother’s eldest son should take over. Is the elector younger than 18, his most senior male uncle was to cast the vote. And finally, if there is no male heir left, the electorate falls back to the emperor who can enfeoff it to any other suitable candidate.
The Golden Bull contains further provisions for the Prince electors that grant them pretty much all the imperial rights within their territories. They were now almost kings in their own lands. They could establish cities, build castles, set taxes, mint coins at will. Their judicial system was almost completely insulated from the imperial power, etc., etc.
Then there are very detailed procedural rules. The election has to take place in Frankfurt. The election is to be called by the archbishop of Mainz within a month of the death of the previous emperor. If he does not, the electors have to come to Frankfurt on their own accord. Electors who fail to show on the date, lose their vote. Each elector shall bring no more than 200 retainers, only 50 of whom are allowed to bear arms. The city council of Frankfurt is tasked with keeping the peace between the different groups.
Upon arrival the electors are to hear mass at the church of St. Bartholomeu, the church nowadays called the Kaiserdom. There they would also vote on the new ruler, each giving their vote in turn with the archbishop of Mainz voting last. Prince Electors could vote for themselves. If after three months they have failed to select a candidate, the electors are to be reduced to just bread and water. Whoever is elected by the majority has to be unanimously recognised as the emperor.
The coronation should take place in Aachen and the king should hold his first diet in Nuernberg
And then there are even more detailed rules and regulations, including detailed provisions about who sits where at dinner, who leads which procession and so forth.
All these rules were designed to make sure that the elections could take place peacefully and could only ever produce one legitimate King of the Romans. And in that respect, the Golden Bull was a huge success. Whenever there was an election, only one candidate was elected. That however did not mean we are completely out of the woods as regards competing kings. How that happened we will find out when we get there.
Apart from the provisions about the election and the prince electors, there are a few more, somewhat random chapters. On bans any form of associations, confederations or unions between cities or between individual lords, effectively outlawing city leagues, like for instance the Hanseatic League. But it also banned the associations that the Reichsritter, the knights had formed to protect their interests against the encroaching territorial princes. Karl also banned the practice of cities to admit local nobles as citizens, thereby removing them from the feudal context of their overlord. And finally there is an even more watered down version of the ban on feuding that Frederick II had included in the Mainzer Landfrieden more than 100 years earlier.
So, if we look at the heart of the Golden Bull, there is not an awful lot of new stuff. What it does, is sorting out the open questions and designing a procedure that reduces if not eliminates double elections and some provisions that limits the city’s and knight’s ability to fend off the encroaching territorial princes. All the rest, the idea of seven electors, the privileges to do as they like in their lands etc., had been standard practice for a long time, or go back to the Mainzer Landfrieden of Frederick II.
So, nice, but not earth shattering. So, why did contemporaries see it as something of huge importance? Why did they produce no less than 173 copies, some of which like the copy produced for king Wenceslaus IV, the son of Karl IV, includes delightful images of pretty washing girls, wild men and pretty birds .
As is sometimes the case, the real significance of the Golden Bull isn’t what was in it, but what wasn’t. And what wasn’t in the Golden Bull at all was any mention of the Pope. If anyone had listened to these last 159 episodes you have most likely retained at least one thing, that the pope was a seriously big deal for the empire. But now he does not even get ignored in this foundation document that set out the election process in enough detail that we know who walked in front of who when entering the city of Frankfurt on election day.
Was it an omission – no way. This was deliberate. A deliberate exclusion of the pope from the election of future emperors thereby removing the successor of St. Peter from the fabric of the empire that he had dominated since the days of Henry IV. And as much by luck as by design it worked.
How did the Golden Bull became the formal end point in a 300 year conflict between the popes and the emperors?
If we look back at what happened and what drove this sometimes brutal clash between Rome and the Kaiser, it boils down to three broad drivers, what we called the three roads to Canossa in episode 30. And these three were the rise in lay piety, the reform papacy and the internal conflicts in the empire that first erupted in the Saxon rebellions of the mid-11th century.
Let’s start with Lay Piety. What happened in a nutshell was that as medieval society enjoyed centuries of economic expansion, even people outside the church hierarchy found the breathing space to care about their spiritual wellbeing. They demanded competent priests who could guide them in living a life that pleased God and would make sure they will be counted amongst the righteous at the last judgement. This pushed for a reform of the church that was initially led by the emperor and many of his magnates.
The popes only got involved in this movement when it was already well under way. Pope Leo IX, (1002-1054) was the first pope who took charge of the task to clean up what was sometimes called the Pornocracy. His successors turned out to be equally capable and over the next 200 years the church cut down on simony and corruption, consolidated the theological underpinnings of the faith, improved the quality of the clergy, supported strict religious orders and through all that wrestled control of the reform process from the emperors.
This rise of the papacy to ever greater moral authority led them to claim temporal power over kings and emperors. The two swords were no longer equal, Innocent III declared that, like the moon, the monarchs received their lustre only as a reflection of the papal sun. And on a more tangible level, the two powers clashed over the question of investiture, i.e., who selects the bishops and archbishops, over power in Northern Italy and then even more intensely over who controlled the kingdom of Sicily
The first bust-up was during the reign of Henry IV that included the famous scene of the emperor kneeling in the snow begging the pope for forgiveness. But pretty much every one of the emperors that followed, found himself in some sort of dispute with the pope, even those that had set out as papal champions. Henry IV, Henry V, Frederick Barbarossa, Otto IV, Frederick II, Ludwig the Bavarian were excommunicated, whilst Lothar III, Henry VI, and Henry VII came close.
What tilted the balance in favour of the papacy was that this conflict wasn’t the only one the emperors had to deal with. The other frontline was the resistance of the aristocrats against a centralising, tax raising monarchy. This conflict broke out in the open again under Henry IV but it continued all throughout the Middle Ages, often somewhat inaccurately labelled as a fight between the Welf and the Hohenstaufen.
The Golden Bull is issued just at the time when all of these trends either petered out or changed direction.
Lets start at the back, the civil wars between princes and emperors. These ended more or less with the reign of emperor Karl IV.
Issuing the Golden Bull reconfirmed and strengthened the rights of the electors to act like kings in their own territories. The emperor had formally accepted the freedoms of the princes that Otto von Nordheim had so vehemently demanded in 1077.
Then he had sold or pawned almost the entirety of the resources that supported an imperial administration, which made the throne an exceedingly unattractive proposition. Only the largest of territorial princes could afford to be emperor, and with some small deviations, that is how the empire will work from here on out. Only the Luxemburgs and later the Habsburgs had enough Hausmacht to meet the imperial expenses.
And last but not least, the 30 years under papal interdict had fostered a sense of unity amongst not just the imperial princes, but the population as a whole. At the Kurverein zu Rhense in 1338 the prince electors, three of them veritable archbishops, had unanimously declared quote “that it is according to the law and ancient custom of the empire, approved that once someone has been elected as King of the Romans by the prince-electors of the empire or by the majority of the same princes, even if in discord, he does not need the nomination, approval, confirmation, assent, or authority of the Apostolic See to assume the administration of the goods and rights of the empire or the royal title.” This notion was then signed by a vast number of lesser lords and cities. No longer could the pope hope to use disunity in the empire to push his interests.
Which gets us to the second key driver of the conflict between papacy and empire, the rise of the reform papacy. We have talked about that yesterday and so we do not need to go into that much detail. But the main point is that the moral authority of the church had begun to erode after its total victory over Frederick II and his descendants. And once they had moved to Avignon that trend became an avalanche. John XXII condemnation of the poverty of the Franciscans, the shocking display of wealth by the cardinals and the papal court, the political dependency on the French king, the greed, the sale of ecclesiastical positions, all that and more put people off.
And with that erosion of moral authority, the church was no longer the institution people looked to as their guide to heaven. We already heard about the Flagellants who emerged during the years of the plague. But the writings of early reformers, of William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and so forth circulated amongst the educated classes, as did Petrarch scathing critique of the Avignon papacy and the visions of St. Bridget of Sweden. John Wycliff blamed the unworthy clergy for the plague in one of his earliest works. As literacy levels had improved significantly in particular amongst the merchant class in the cities, some of these ideas circulated more and more broadly.
By the time the Golden Bull was issued, the papacy had lost the ability to effectively fight the emperor. They had lost the spiritual leadership amongst the faithful, were politically boxed in and could no longer piggyback on the internal divisions of the empire.
And they also had a lot less reason to fight the emperors. Not since the catastrophic defeat of Karl’s grandfather Henry VII had an emperor attempted to exert effective power in Northern Italy. They were happy to declare a Visconti or Este an imperial vicar or elevate a Gonzaga to a margrave, all in exchange for cash, but apart from safe passage to Rome, they had demanded very little. And when Karl left the eternal city on the day of his coronation, he sent a clear signal to Innocent VI that he would not interfere with the papal states.
The conflict between the popes and the emperors was over. And because it was over, Karl could issue the definitive guide to an imperial election without mentioning the pope, and everybody, the pope included understood that a papal approbation would no longer be required. The elected king of the Romans was in charge of the empire from the moment he was elected and would remain so to his death.
The Golden Bull stated what should have been obvious to everybody at the time, but by stating it, made it real. That is why princes and cities all over the empire demanded copies of the document. And that is also why it was such a watershed moment.
Now that the destructive conflict with the papacy was formally over and the princes and emperor had found a permanent settlement, the empire could begin a new phase in its development. In this new phase the empire can finally establish its own institutions, the Reichstag as the political coordination mechanism between the imperial estates and the Allgemeine Landfrieden, Reichshofgericht and Kreise as a tools to provide policing and justice across the empire. The Golden Bull may not have broken new ground intellectually, but it was the kick-off document that launched the second phase of the Holy Roman empire that would last until 1806 surviving even Europe’s most devastating religious war.
Now that is my interpretation of what the Golden Bull was and what it meant. As you can imagine for such a totemic document there are many other views. So if you want to get really deep into it and can find a way to feed it into deepl or any other translation engine of your choice, there is a pretty comprehensive compendium published in 2006 called “Die Goldene Bulle Politik, Wahrnehmung Rezeption”. In it the crème de la crème of German medieval scholars investigate every nook and cranny of the document in over more than a 1000 pages.
I am afraid I could not follow up on all of these in the 25-30 minute format of this podcast. But we will touch upon some next week when we talk about the reception of the Golden Bull, in particular in Vienna where Karl’s son in law Richard IV of Austria, called the Founder is arch-irritated about some of his peers being formally elevated to a status above him. And in his anger he does what everybody else would do – he went down the archive and unearth some letters from Julius Caesar and Nero to his great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather. And then there is the relationship between the empire and France, the various other constitutions that are created during that period and lots more. I hope you will join us again.
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