Hello and Welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 161 – A Luxemburg Empire, also episode 24 of Season 8: from the Interregnum to the Golden Bull.
"In the regions of Germany, he worked to establish peace and foster the affairs of the empire. Then, in the same year, during the month of November, he entered the city of Metz, a city both large and exceedingly famous, where, as it was said, no emperor had been walking under the crown for 300 years. He was received with great solemnity by the princes, nobles, and citizens. The citizens of the city went out to meet him three miles away, presenting him with the keys to the city and all its gates, willingly submitting themselves and their possessions to his empire with all benevolence. And there was great joy at the entrance of the lord emperor; all the clergy and the entire populace joyfully met him, warmly welcoming him, and led him to the episcopal residence prepared for his lodging, with relics, hymns, and songs.
Afterwards, the lord emperor stayed there and summoned an imperial court and council with the princes of the empire to be held in the same city during the upcoming feast of the Nativity of Christ. When the feast of the Nativity of the Lord approached, the ambassadors of the lord pope arrived at the imperial court, namely Cardinal Talleyrand and the Abbot of Cluny. Additionally, the two sons of the King of France, the firstborn and the second, the nephews of the lord emperor, also came. Furthermore, the archbishops of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz were present, along with the Duke of Luxembourg, representing the King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer. The Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, and the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, also attended, as well as the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the arch-steward, and the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, the holders of the great offices of the Holy Empire.
On the feast of the Nativity of the Lord, during Matins, the lord emperor, adorned with imperial insignia, read the Gospel before the aforementioned princes that began with: 'A decree went out from Caesar Augustus,' and the lord cardinal sang the first Mass before the emperor, from whose hands the lord emperor humbly and devoutly received the Holy Eucharist. Then the Archbishop of Cologne celebrated the High Mass of that day, and after it was solemnly performed, all the archbishops, bishops, and other prelates, as well as secular princes, led the lord emperor and the lady empress, dressed in imperial robes and insignia, solemnly to the banquet hall prepared in the town square and exquisitely decorated, where many tables and seats were set up for the invited guests.
When the lord emperor was seated at the head of the table, the holders of the great offices of the empire came forward, each performing their respective duties according to custom. First came the aforementioned archbishops the archchancellors of Germany, Italy and Burgundy each carrying their imperial seals. Then the Duke of Saxony, the arch-marshal, came on his charger before the table, carrying oats in a silver vessel for the imperial horses, and he seated each prince at the table in the place designated for them. After him came the Margrave of Brandenburg, the arch-chamberlain, on horseback, carrying a golden basin and beautiful towels, and he offered water to the emperor, who was seated on the throne. Next, the Count Palatine brought food in golden dishes and, after tasting it, placed it before the emperor. After him came Wenceslaus, Duke of Luxembourg and Brabant, the brother of the lord emperor, representing the lord King of Bohemia, who is the arch-cupbearer, carrying wine in golden cups, and after tasting it, he gave it to the emperor to drink. Finally, the Margrave of Meissen, the arch-huntsman, and the Count of Schwarzburg, the under-huntsman, came with hunting dogs and many horns, making a great noise, and they brought a stag and a wild boar to the prince's table with all due cheerfulness.
A great feast was held on that day, the likes of which no one could recall. After the feast, the lord emperor bestowed various magnificent gifts upon the different princes, and they all departed with joy and happiness to their own lands. In the same year, the emperor laid the foundation or the primary stone for the new Prague Bridge near the monastery of St. Clement. In the year of our Lord 1358, the lord emperor went to Bohemia and constructed many buildings there." end quote
All is well in the empire. The Golden Bull had been debated, agreed, sealed and then celebrated at the great diet in Metz you just heard about. The first time in decades that all the Prince Electors had come together and performed the ancient duties of their offices. Even the Dauphin of France had come to do homage to Karl IV for the lands he held inside the empire.
But did all the princes join in the joy? No, not really. There are always some who felt left out and they will try to upturn the new order. How they tried to do that and why these efforts laid the foundations for the future Habsburg empire is what we will discuss today…
But, before we start just the usual reminder that the history of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. And you can become a patron too by going to my website historyofthegermans.com and look for support the show. There you can ether join Patreon or make a one-time donation. And thanks a lot to Brigham T., Vincent C., Christopher B., Charisse P for a second time, Owen O. and Julian T. who have already signed up.
Last week we discussed the Golden Bull of 1356, its content and significance. And despite the fact that there wasn’t much fundamentally new in the provisions, by writing down the detailed process for the election of a King of the Romans, it fixed in place who the seven electors were and – by omission rather than explicitly – that the pope had no say in the choice of ruler.
We discussed why the popes had to accept this resolution to the 300 year conflict between Rome and the empire, a conflict that had dominated our narrative for the last 160 episodes. So, if you have not listened to it, do it now.
But the pope wasn’t the only loser from the Golden Bull. There were also the Bavarian Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs.
The house of Wittelsbach had two electoral votes in 1357, one as Counts Palatinate on the Rhine and one as margraves of Brandenburg.
As I mentioned before, the fundamental difference between the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs was that the Habsburgs almost always stuck together in the interest of the dynasty, whilst the Wittelsbachs literally always fought amongst each other. In a way Karl owed his ascendance to the throne to one of these family squabbles which led to the defection of the Wittelsbach count palatinate to his side in 1348. The different branches would constantly fight each other, then divide territory between them in complex treaties and succession arrangements. This propensity to quarrel with their brothers and cousins is at least partial reason why the capital of Germany is now Berlin rather than Munich.
One of these complex treaties amongst members of the House of Wittelsbach was an arrangement between the Palatinate line and their cousins, the sons of Ludwig the Bavarian whereby the two sides of the family would take turns in exercising the electoral vote.
The Golden Bull prohibited this arrangement as it sets out that only the count Palatinate could cast a vote. That froze the dukes of Bavaria, specifically Ludwig the elder out of this vote.
But he still had another one, that of Brandenburg. Brandenburg as you may remember had initially been acquired by emperor Ludwig the Bavarian for his son Ludwig the Elder and had become the key battleground of Karl’s war over the imperial crown. Karl had supported a usurper called the false Waldemar who had thrown Ludwig the Elder out of the Margraviate. In 1350 Karl had settled with the Wittelsbachs, dropped the false Waldemar and enfeoffed Ludwig the elder as margrave again.
But for Ludwig the Elder Brandenburg was a bit second best. The county’s soil was famously sandy, gaining it the nickname the Reichsstreusandbuechse. So it wasn’t particularly fertile. Moreover, the Wittelsbachs never managed to get a proper grip of the margraviate. Local lords and the cities, in particular the largest, Berlin, kept feuding with each other and with Ludwig the Elder. The war of the false Waldemar had further devastated the land, so that net, net there was not much profit to be made of that territory. And, it was a long way from Munich.
As one would expect, Ludwig the Elder was very disappointed with the outcome of the Golden Bull. Hence he started a feud against Karl and tried to bring together a coalition of opponents to Karl’s reign which we will talk about in a minute in more detail. Amongst the members of this coalition should have been his 5 brothers, each holding a bit of the vast territory their father had gathered together in 30 years on the throne.
But Ludwig the Elder stumbled over the perennial Achilles heel of his house, the endless bickering. Karl managed to pull three of the five brothers over to his side with the promise of one of his daughters in marriage and ever-lasting support, that -as we know – never materialises.
In the end Ludwig the Elder caved in. He even passed the margraviate of Brandenburg to his two brothers, Ludwig the Roman and Otto the Lazy, two, as you may gather, not very dynamic stewards of the lands that would rise to dominance in centuries to come.
Mismanagement, lack of interest and rather complex arrangements over inheritance meant that in 1373 the Wittelsbachs were willing to sell the margraviate to Karl IV for the astronomic sum of 500,000 gold florin. Raising these funds brought him to the edge of what he could extract from Bohemia, the empire and all his other assorted positions.
Despite the truly enormous price, the deal was a bad one for the Bavarian Wittelsbachs. By selling Brandenburg they were kept out of the exclusive circle of the electors until 1623. Not being electors, the family did not move to primogenitor and so the duchy of Bavaria remained split into four different branches, Munich, Ingolstadt, Landshut and Straubing, each too small to play a significant role in German, let alone European politics. It took until 1505 before the four branches were reunited and Bavaria mattered again.
For Karl, the acquisition of Brandenburg, even in its sorry state was a major deal. It did fit into his broader strategy and vision.
As we are talking about people who were disappointed with the Golden Bull, one very vocal group were 19th century historians. They blamed Karl for selling the empire down the river. By giving the Prince electors king-like status inside their lands, he had made the creation of a powerful state as they were emerging in France and England, impossible. And many claimed he did it deliberately, as he was king of Bohemia first and emperor second.
This assessment is a fundamental misunderstanding of both the situation of the empire in the 14th century and the process how the French monarchy had become so dominant.
First up, there was no way Karl or anyone else was able to force the imperial princes, let alone the prince Electors into a system of centralised monarchy. The privileges and rights that granted them independence from imperial control were already hundreds of years old when Karl took over. The emperors who had made serious attempts, Henry IV, Lothar III and Barbarossa had found themselves in hot water very quickly. There was no imperial administration or infrastructure except for the chancery and a rudimentary court system. No capital, no army and hardly any resources to fund the state.
But the even more important point is that the Capetion kings did not come to dominate France by enforcing the ancient royal rights. No, they rose to hegemony by acquiring one county and duchy after the other as their own private possession. These private possessions were then comingled with the crown. In other words, the great princes of France weren’t defeated but disinherited.
If you look at Karl’s approach to the empire, he was doing exactly the same thing. He was patiently acquiring one county or duchy after another, growing his personal fiefdom in the hope that – at some point – his dynasty would own every single duchy, margraviate, county and city in the empire. Exactly the way the French kings had done since the 11th century.
And in this way Karl acquired not just Brandenburg, but vast holdings in an area called the upper palatinate, which is roughly between the Czech border and Nurnberg. He built a system of connecting castles and estates, all the way from Nurnberg to Frankfurt as the nucleus for further expansion. He bought lower Lusatia and then upper Lusatia. His brother Wenzel had also built a major position in the West around Luxemburg and Brabant. As emperor he controlled the imperial cities mostly in Swabia. Through family ties he controlled parts of Bavaria. Through a complex marriage strategy Karl created options on other territories, should the incumbent die without male heirs, all driven by this concept of Hausmacht. And he bought Brandenburg. At its height, the Luxemburgs controlled a quarter of the empire directly.
And this quarter wasn’t just in the south. Karl becomes the first emperor to go to north for centuries, he is the first to visit Luebeck since Barbarossa. The great rift between the old duchy of Saxony and the rest of the empire is being bridged.
Therefore, even for a 19th century historian, who judged every action on whether it was helpful or unhelpful for the creation of a centralised nation state, Karl’s approach should have been applauded. The attempts to subdue the princes never worked, so time to try a new strategy. Buy what you can, what you can’t marry and only what resists to the end, conquer.
Still we aren’t done with the critics of the Golden Bull. It’s fiercest opponent is Rudolf IV, duke of Austria, head of the House of Habsburg. For the Habsburg the Golden Bull was a slap in the face. Other than the Wittelsbachs, they had not been given any electoral seat, nada, silch. And they had been the house that had placed two kings on the throne and been one of the three great families that had dominated imperial politics in the first half of the 14th century.
What really irritated them was that the Prince Electors had been given an elevated social status above the other imperial princes. The prince electors had special rights in their territories few other lords enjoyed. They were the inner circle that was meant to advise the emperor in annual conventions. Whenever there was an official imperial dinner, the Electors sat at a high table, whilst the other imperial princes were relegated to the lower tables in the second rank.
And Rudolf did not want to sit at the cat’s table. He was after all a descendant of Rudolf von Habsburg and duke of Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, count of Tyrol and Landgrave in Alsace. These were the actual titles, but since taking over the duchy of Austria, the Habsburgs had engaged in some serious mythmaking. The first thing was to co-opt the Babenberg family that had held Austria from the 10th century onwards and can trace back even further to the Carolingian times. The Babenberg’s were not just ancient but also most venerable. They had produced a string of dukes with epithets like “the Devout”, “the Illustrious”, “the Glorious” and “the Holy”. The latter, Leopold became a particular focus thanks to the miracles that were attributed to him. As the Habsburgs now claimed they had received Austria as an inheritance from the Babenberg’s, instead of by legalised theft, they also began using Babenberg names, in particular Leopold.
This notion of ancient, if not holy ancestry sat even more awkward with the relegation to second division in the Golden Bull.
Rudolf needed to reassert the standing of his family and therefore instructed his chancery to generate five documents to p[ove the eminence of the house of Austria. Three of those were copies of existing privileges, but two were something different. The first was a charter from emperor Henry IV from 1056 confirming the existence of 2 letters in the possession the Babenberger duke Ernst of Austria. The first letter was from none other than Julius Caesar addressed to the people of Noricum, the Roman province roughly equivalent to Austria. In this letter Caesar asked them to accept his uncle as their ruler, who had been given absolute rights over them as their feudal lord. The second letter is from emperor Nero, saying that Noricum/Austria is by far the most splendid of the Roman provinces and that henceforth it should be released from all taxes and duties to the empire. Caesar’s uncle was – as you can guess – the ancestor of the Babenbergs and hence the Habsburgs.
Then there is a second document, the privilegium maius, or greater privilege. That was based on something that actually did exist, the privilegium minus, or lesser privilege by which Barbarossa had elevated the Babenbergers to dukes of Austria (see episode 50). That privilege had already granted wide reaching rights to the dukes of Austria, but Rudolf needed more. He instructed his chancery to include provisions such as the right to wear a special crown that included the fillet or headband normally reserved for actual kings. And with this crown came a new title, “palatine archduke”. There we go, the Habsburgs invented the title of archduke. The title came with a lot of honours, including sitting to the right of the emperor at public events, leading processions and been given equal rank to the electors.
These documents, in particular the letters from Caesar and Nero were received with unreserved hilarity by contemporaries. Asked of his opinion, the poet and great Latinist Petrarch called the obvious anachronisms “not just risible but stomach churning”.
Still Rudolf insisted, all this was true and, since the Habsburgs did win in the end, the Greater privilege including the letters were considered genuine until the 19th century.
But Rudolf did not just fight with the quill. He did put together a coalition with the Wittelsbachs and the kings of Hungary and Poland against Karl IV.
Why the Wittelsbachs joined is quite obvious. As for the kings of Poland and Hungary, they had grown concerned about the rise of Karl’s power. His interest in Brandenburg and further north made the Poles uncomfortable. Then there was Karl’s long time association with the Teutonic Knights who had been clashing with the Poles over Pomeralia and Lithuania. As for Hungary, its ruler was the king of Poland’s named successor and as such had a strong interest in the wellbeing of his future kingdom.
Even though Karl was by now in a vastly more powerful position than either the Habsburgs or the Wittelsbachs, a war against their combined forces and those of Poland of Hungary would be hard, if not impossible to win.
As always, Karl resolved the issue, not with weapons, but with diplomacy. He went to meet king Kasimir the great of Poland in person and reassured him of his good intentions towards his kingdom. And to underpin that, he dropped his support for the Teutonic Knights in the conflict over Pomeralia (see episode 134). And to seal it all off, in 1363 he married Kazimir’s granddaughter, Elizabeth of Pomerania.
With Poland out of the coalition, the king of Hungary had no reason to support a Habsburg-led insurrection. This king of Hungary was Louis I, called the Great. He was from the French house of Anjou that also ruled the kingdom of Naples. Louis was an eminently capable ruler who vastly extended Hungary and – like Karl – provided the country with a foundational document, this one remained in force even longer, until the end of the first world war. Not only that, he finally inherited Poland from Kasimir who had no male heir in 1370.
The two monarchs grew closer over time and in 1373 Louis promised his second daughter Mary in marriage to Karl’s second son, Sigismund. This would become very significant in the future, as Louis died without male heir. His three daughters, Catherine, Mary and Hedwig would inherit Hungary and Poland. When Louis died in 1382, Catherine was married to the dauphin of France, Mary was betrothed to Sigismund and Hedwig was not yet promised. Those of you who have listened to the series about the Teutonic Knights may remember Hedwig. The nobles of Poland called her to rule the kingdom, changed her name to Jadwiga and married her to Jogaila, the grand prince of Lithuania. These two than created the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth that stretched from the Baltic to almost the Black Sea.
His coalition broken, Rudolf’s plan to defeat Karl and potentially even become emperor himself had fallen apart. But again, Karl reacts as a diplomat, not as an autocrat. He could have probably sought a military resolution, but that was, as he kept saying, far too expensive and unpredictable.
Instead he sat down with the angry archduke and soothed his pains. He accepted some of the provisions of the greater Privilege despite knowing them to be fake. He confirmed the Habsburg acquisition of Tyrol and he agreed a family compact. This compact set forth that should either family die out in the male line, the other should inherit all their possessions.
Wow, what a long list of great options Karl had accumulated. By marrying Elizabeth of Pomerania, he had gained an option on the duchy of Pomerania and, through her grandfather Kasimir, an option on Poland. Then he had got his second son Sigismund an option on Hungary, and again possibly on Poland. And thanks to the family compound with the Habsburgs, an option on Austria.
And that last option looked pretty good for Karl. He had by now three sons, Wenceslaus, Sigismund and Henry plus a brother, Johann Heinrich of Moravia with his son Jobst. A lot of dudes, whilst Rudolf IV himself had no children and died already in 1364, leaving his lands to two brothers, Albrecht III and Leopold III, who, unusual for the Habsburgs, squabbled and divided their lands.
But then option probabilities change over time and in particular long dated ones can pay out in the most unexpected ways. But that is a story for an entire new season, far too much for a single episode.
Next week we will discuss what I initially thought I could fit in here, which is Karl’s policy in the west of the empire, in particular his relationship with France and the events in Brabant. We will also talk about Karl’s succession plans and how he gets those implemented. I hope you will join us again.
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