Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 162 – Schisms and Deals, the international policies of Emperor Karl IV, also episode 25 of season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”.
For more than a hundred years the Holy Roman Empire was a mess of constant infighting between and within the great princely families. But by the 1360s the consistent policies and elaborate diplomacy of emperor Karl IV had produced a degree of stability not seen by anyone alive.
With the home front calm, the emperor can again assume a role on the European stage, setting in train seminal events that will reverberate across the centuries…
But before we start it is once more time for me to come before you like an Avignon pope in search of an armed escort to Rome. You know that keeping this show on the road is already a whole lot of work as it is. Now that we move into the early modern period the research effort required is growing exponentially, which is why I am contemplating adding some support to the team. And that will come at a cost, a cost that is borne by our generous patrons who have signed up on my website historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time contribution or subscribe on Patreon. Please remember that if you own an iPhone, do not sign up on Patreon from the phone since Apple will charge you a whopping 30% for nothing. And thanks a lot to Richard J, Guenter R. fan of the Simplicissimus, Madeleine S., Stefan K., Tom J. and Patrick A. who have already made the plunge.
These last two episodes we have focused on domestic policy, specifically the Golden Bull and how it shifted the political structure of the empire without saying anything fundamentally new. Now it is time to look at Karl IV’s role in a European context.
And the first point to make is that there was a role in a European context at all. For the last 100 years the kings and emperors had been preoccupied holding on to the bucking Bronco that was the Holy roman empire. When they ventured abroad it was to get to Rome to be crowned and ideally coming back without succumbing to disease, excommunication or attempted murder.
Karl’s clever policies and generous offers of marriages and military support, neither of which ever arrived kept his enemies divided and the empire free of major civil wars. And so he was the first ruler since Frederick II to cast his eye beyond the borders of the empire.
And cast afar he does. In 1370 he develops an interest in the Hanse and in Denmark. Yes, all the way north. No emperor had given a thought to these far flung places for centuries. Yes, Frederick Barbarossa had been in Lübeck in 1181 as part of the campaign to topple Henry the Lion. But that was an exception to the rule. Since Henry IV the emperors had stayed well clear of Saxony, unless they were Saxons themselves like Lothair III and Otto IV.
If you have listened to the series about the Hanseatic League, the year 1370 is the year when the Hanse in general and Lübeck in particular reach the absolute pinnacle of political, not economic, reach. They have just defeated king Waldemar Atterdag, the morning dawn who had reconsolidated the Danish kingdom. As a consequence the Hanse had gained a de facto monopoly on Baltic trade, namely the furs and beeswax from Novgorod, the grain from all along the Baltic coast and Poland, the metals from Sweden and most importantly the herring from Denmark, the staple food during the over 200 fast days catholic europe observed at the time.
One indicator how important the imperial court had become was that when Waldemar Atterdag fled Denmark after his defeat, he came to Prague. He lobbied the emperor to punish the Hanse cities for daring to attack an anointed monarch. But Karl had no intention to go after Lübeck. The city and its Hanse associates featured highly in his plans to foster the economy of his lands. One of his many projects was to divert trade from the traditional North south route along the Rhine to a new route from Venice via Vienna, Prague and Brandenburg to the Baltic and the North Sea.
Karl did not only refuse to help king Waldemar of Denmark, he actively supported Lübeck. He appointed the Burgermeisters of Lübeck as his imperial vicars, making them the most senior representatives of the empire in the North. This is the first time such a role was granted to anyone who wasn’t a senior aristocrat. And on the 20th October 1375 he showed up in person. For a full 11 days the city of Lübeck celebrated an imperial visit, a celebration that wrecked the city’s already fragile public finances. In return he formally addressed the members of the council as “Herren”, or lords, which must have felt great.
And then he did the other thing he was so good at, keeping people guessing. Whilst the emperor was wined and dined by the great merchants of the Hanse, king Waldemar Atterdag had finally passed away without a male heir. The result was a war of succession between the duke of Mecklenburg and Waldemar’s daughter. Margaret. The Hanse very much supported Margaret as they did not want to be surrounded on all sides by a ruler of both Denmark and Mecklenburg. Karl let slip that he preferred the Mecklenburg succession. Did he really or was that just another bargaining chip in his constant complex game of give and take? My guess it was the latter.
Whilst Lübeck was the northernmost end of his travels, he also travelled south again. And this time on a pan-European mission.
The reason for this journey lay in Avignon. By 1365 the popes had resided outside of Italy for 60 years already. The reigning pope, Urban V was the sixth pontiff to live in Avignon. They had made themselves comfortable in the splendid papal palace, they had bought the Comtat Venaissin, the county surrounding Avignon from the house of Anjou and Karl had released it from imperial overlordship.
But still the popes chafed under the influence of the French kings. Ever so often the popes had to make decisions in the interest of the house of Valois they would not otherwise have made. And this bias was making the church lose ever more prestige amongst the other monarchs across europe. Feeling the pinch, the successors to St. Peter had been looking for ways to get out of the clutches of the French. There was one obvious way to do that, and that was returning to Italy, and if possible returning to Rome.
The popes had tried to lay some groundwork by sending the energetic cardinal Albarnoz to rebuild papal influence in Rome. By the way Albarnoz was the cardinal who had accompanied Cola di Rienzi and then helped topple him. But despite hiring mercenary armies and fighting his way across what used to be the papal states, Albarnoz’ resources were simply insufficient to secure a safe return for the pope to Rome.
Given that none of the Italian republics and autocracies wanted the pope back, the only power in europe that could secure a return of the pontiff was the emperor. So when Karl came to Avignon in 1365 to discuss various other subjects to do with the plague of unemployed soldiers rampaging across the countryside, pope Urban V steered the conversation forcefully towards a second journey to Rome.
We do not know whether Karl embraced the idea joyfully out of his profound piety or whether he believed it to be a massive waste of time and money. But he could not refuse Urban’s demand. As emperor he was the protector of the church and Christians all across europe longed for the pope to return to Rome. One famous propaganda image of the time shows Saint Bridget of Sweden cowering amongst the ruins of a desolate Rome praying for the return of the pope.
Pope Urban V sets off for Italy in 1367 and miraculously made it to Viterbo. But then he runs out of puff. There is no way he can get into the Holy city by hook or by crook. The pope now demands Karls help most urgently.
Karl had been delayed by another outbreak of the Black death, the reluctance of princes and cities to provide money and soldiers and the usual complexity of Italian politics. Finally in April 1368 did he set off with a sizeable army, mostly comprising mercenaries. He entered Italy from the North East via Friuli and Aquilae and made his way to Milan. Barnabo Visconti, the ruler of Milan is not only a longstanding opponent of the emperor but also reluctant to let the pope get back into the papal states. As usual, there is a bit of moderate fighting before Karl got everybody to sit down around a table and hammered out a deal. The Visconti agreed to let the imperial army pass, provided a 1,000 additional helmets in exchange for being made imperial vicars of Lombardy.
Next stop is Tuscany where Karl gains free passage by approving whichever party had just recently seized power in whichever bloody coup and is now in need of some legitimacy.
In October 1368 Karl IV entered Rome and on the 29th of this month he welcomed pope Urban V at the gates of the city. Honoring an entirely made up ancient tradition Karl dismounts his charger and leads the papal horse with the pope on top to the Lateran palace. This service of the groom had been a point of contention for popes and emperors since forever. Some observers, like for instance the great Nurnberg banker Ulman Stromer described this act as a humiliation for the Reich. Others, like the Italian humanist Coluccio Salutati sees it as an image of hope, the two leaders of Christendom acting in unison, returning the church to its natural home.
It is the latter image that finds more currency across europe. And it is backed up with further displays of unity. Pope and emperor spent the next two months in close proximity, discussing how Italy in general and the papal states in particular could be stabilized.
Tuscany was a particularly complicated part of the conundrum. They tried to instigate a coup in Siena, but that failed. The next focal point was the Lucca. Lucca had fallen under Pisan control, something the Lucchese found unbearable. So in spring 1369 Karl took his army to Lucca and declared it a free and imperial city, thereby cancelling the Pisan overlordship. The Pisan could not do much about that, in part because of Karl’s army and in part because they were caught up in brutal infighting between the elites and the middle classes. Lucca still commemorates this day with a great parade on every Sunday after easter, the day the city threw off the Pisan yoke.
All good stuff, but now summer is approaching and with it the risk of disease goes up stratospherically. Karl took his army and returned across the Alps. So much for ever lasting unity between pope and emperor.
Poor pope Urban V realized quite quickly that there was no way he can hold out in Rome by himself. He packed his bags and returned to Avignon, no doubt cursing the inconsistency of the emperor. Urban V died a few months later, passing the baton on to Gregory XI.
The old pope may be gone, but the fundamental problem has not gone. The popes still needed to go back to Rome. After Urban V’s debacle, his successor Gregory XI did not rely on the emperor to pave the way to Rome. Instead of oaths and loyalty, Gregory XI and his legate, Robert of Geneva, believed in the power of money. The pope hired even more mercenaries including the famous company of John Harwood who forged a way to Rome with fire and sword. It was a hard fight since almost all north Italian cities had joined a league intended to stop the pope from returning. But return he did. He entered Rome on January 17th, 1378. By March 27th of that same year he was dead.
At that point things get a bit out of control. When the cardinals who had come along to Rome met to elect a successor, a mob gathered outside and demanded the election, not just of an Italian, but of a Roman. The cardinals inside were almost to a man, French. So they chose the next best option, Bartolomeo Prignano, the archbishop of Bari and vice-chancellor of the church. He was at least Italian, if not Roman. The new pope took the name Urban VI and was duly presented to people. The mob dispersed believing they had got their wish granted. It took them a little while to figure out that Urban VI was Neapolitan rather than Roman, enough time for the majority of cardinals to skip town and flee back to the safety of Avignon. Once they had arrived back home, the Avignon cardinals declared the election of Urban VI null and void, due to the threats to life and limb they had experienced. And they then proceeded to elect Robert of Geneva, perpetrator of the massacre of Cesena and other godly deeds as pope Clement VII.
This is the beginning of the western Schism, the almost forty years when two and sometimes three competing popes tore the Christian world apart. One pope would reside in Avignon under French protection, another in Rome, supported by, amongst others, the Holy Roman Emperors, including Karl IV. We will hear a lot more about the schism when we get into the next season, but suffice to say that this split did nothing to rebuild the already severely damaged moral authority of the papacy.
The Western schism is surely one of the seminal moments in the late middle ages with implications that reverberate into modernity. But as far as the role of the empire or more precisely the position of the emperor himself was concerned, another long term trend is taking shape. And that is the beginning of a rivalry between France and the empire/the ruling family of the empire.
Let us just quickly recap where the French monarchy is in the 1370s.
The Hundred-years war had begun in 1337. The first major battle at Crecy took place in 1346, a battle that Karl had actually taken part in and where his father had died in an act of chivalric madness. King Edward III of England had won this battle and used it to acquire the city of Calais. When the Black death hit in 1348, hostilities ceased for a few years. Action resumed in the 1350s but French luck did not improve. The next encounter at Poitiers in 1356 goes horribly wrong. The king John II called le Bon, the Good was captured. In the subsequent treaty of Bretigny the French ceded vast amounts of territory around the west and south west of France to the English on top of a 3 million ecu ransom for the release of the king. In return king Edward III of England renounced his claim to the French crown.
King John II was called “the Good” for reasons I will explain in a minute, but should in fact been called John the apocalyptically useless. He returned from captivity upon payment of the first third of the ransom and the provision of new hostages, including two of his sons. When one of his sons escaped, John II felt honor-bound to return back into captivity. John II died in England in 1364.
Many contemporaries interpreted his return to England as praiseworthy adherence to the chivalric code, which is why they called him the Good. But in practical terms this act was catastrophically ill judged. France was on its knees due to the enormous ransom payments, the loss of large sways of territory and the hordes of unpaid soldiers ransacking the countryside, not to mention the recurring waves of the Plague. What the country needed was an effective ruler trying to put things right. With John II absent, the burden of royalty fell on his eldest son, the future king Charles V. Charles V was nothing like his father, he was a diligent and competent man who attracted exceptional military commanders to his service like Bertrand du Guescelin.
But he was fighting with one hand tied behind his back. For one he had his father still in England which ruled out any action against the English. He also was seriously short of cash, forcing him to call the estates general that squeezed concessions out of him. But one of the most serious long term problems was his father’s generosity. John II had four sons and he left them each vast territories carved out of the royal purse. The youngest who had stayed with his father in captivity was most generously rewarded, Philip was made duke of Burgundy. Philip would later acquire the county of Flanders by marriage which made him the richest peer in France, rich enough to challenge royal authority, which is the story of Agincourt, Joan of Arc etc.
But we are still a bit before that. Charles V, despite all his handicaps, managed to secure his reign in France and in 1369 resumed hostilities with the English. And again, patiently, one by one, the French, led by Du Guescelin recovered every single bit of territory they had given up in the treaty of Bretigny. This process was completed in 1378 with the English reduced to Aquitaine and Calais.
What all this means for our emperor Karl is that he could step into a power vacuum left by the French preoccupation with the English. He could assert imperial authority on the western border by holding his splendid diet in Metz, he could even get the future Charles V to accept his lands in the Dauphine and Franche Comte as an imperial fief including the whole kneeling and swearing bit. In 1365 he took a few days off from his negotiations with pope Urban V and nipped down to Arles to get himself crowned king of the Arelat, the ancient kingdom of Burgundy. Again, nobody had done that since the days of Barbarossa. He then used the opportunity to reorganize this kingdom. In particular he moved Savoy out of the Arelat and under direct control of the empire.
The weakness of the French court may also have been one of the reasons why the Popes felt able to attempt a return to Rome.
But this weakness did not last forever. As I said, by 1378 Charles V had returned at least his territorial position back to the status quo ante. The country was still a lot poorer with the plague and decades of war and plundering mercenaries, but overall, the French were back in the saddle.
And being back in fighting force could only mean one thing, the French were looking for some new acquisitions. And there was an opportunity out there that was truly enormous. The house of Anjou, the cadet branch of the French royal house had amassed a whole host of crowns, Sicily, Hungary, Poland and Provence in particular. And they had the decency to die out, at least in part. King Louis the Great of Hungary was blessed with three daughters, but no son.
King Charles V of France moved quickly and managed to get his younger son Louis engaged to King Louis’ eldest daughter and heir presumptive, Catherine. The calculation behind this was obvious. Once cousin Louis of Hungary had snuffed it, the battle hardened French army would go to Hungary with pitstops in Provence and Sicily. And once there, Poland would be the next one on the list.
Our friend Karl IV, though now rapidly approaching his sixties, suffering abysmally from gout and the consequences of the mystery illness he had contracted in the 1350s, realized the deadly danger this plan posed for him and the empire. If the French were to rule the two kingdoms in his back, Hungary and Poland, the empire would be surrounded and would in the long run fall to the Valois as well. There was no room for a great House of Luxemburg and the seven electors in this scenario. Therefore this French plan needed to be scuppered and scuppered at all cost.
So in 1378 he took his son and heir Wenceslaus and set off to the city where he had spent his youth, Paris. No crowned emperor had been to Paris since Otto II’s ill-fated attempt at taking the city in 978. Such a visit caused no end of complexity for the court officials in charge of protocol.
According to roman law, which by now was accepted as the basis of temporal justice across France the emperor was the unconstrained ruler of the known world. Karl was emperor and France was part of the world, so Karl was at least in theory, the absolute monarch in France. But at the same time this could not be. All these last few centuries French lawyers had worked on the basis that the king of France was standing in for the emperor with all the rights that come with it. That worked fine as long as there is a zero percent chance of the actual emperor ever showing up.
Now Karl was far too politically savvy to insist on a legal fiction that would never be implementable. But what he did insist on was that the emperor did formally rank above the King of France. All the sequences of greeting and serving food and so forth were important to him, because most of his power rested on the imperial prestige.
Charles V and his courtiers did an exceptional job of treading the fine line between recognizing the imperial authority whilst not really admitting that the king of France was subordinate to the emperor. The event is recorded in a whole host of illuminated manuscripts and it is quite interesting to see how much care the painters took to depict the relative rank of the two monarchs.
There was one ceremony however that the French were unwilling to allow to let take place on French soil. And that was the reading of the Christmas story in church. Because Karl had the habit to read the crucial verses “And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from the emperor Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed” whilst wearing his full imperial regalia, crown, scepter and orb, basically appearing as the emperor Caesar Augustus in church.
To stop that from happening, the French held Karl back in Cambrai, on imperial territory until after Christmas 1377.
Once all these issues of protocol were sorted out, the two monarchs finally sat down to hash out their differences. No record of the discussions exists. All we know is what happened next.
The emperor appointed the dauphin of France, the future Charles VI as imperial vicar first in the Dauphine and then in the whole of the Arelat. With that the French monarch became the de facto ruler of Provence and the Rhone valley, territories that had once been part of the kingdom of Lothar and hence lands the French kings had always and forever believed were theirs. Though Charles VI was only made imperial vicar for life this appointment is usually seen as the moment when Provence leaves the purview of the Holy Roman Empire. It would still take until 1486 before Provence became formally a part of France.
Meanwhile the marriage between Louis of Valois and Catherine of Hungary did not take place. That was in part due to the fact that Catherine died aged 7 in 1378. But that was not the only reason. King Louis of Hungary still had another daughter, Hedwig, who he could have betrothed to young Louis. But that did not happen. Instead Hedwig remained unmarried at her father’s death, went to Poland, changed her name to Jadwiga and married the grand duke of Lithuania creating the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
Now I am not one to speculate about what happened here, but my best guess is that Karl and Charles had come to an agreement. The French King gave up his plans on Hungary and in exchange he got Provence. As the Germans say, better the sparrow in your hand than the dove on the roof.
If that was so, then we also see here a clear reorientation of imperial policy. Giving up positions in the west in the interest of expanding and deepening holdings in the east would be a key feature of Luxemburg and later Habsburg policy. It is also the beginning of the rivalry between the kings of France and the Holy Roman Emperors, a rivalry that would be an axis of European politics for 400 years, basically until Frederick the Great and the English mix things up.
As you hopefully see, this period of the 14th century is one of enormous change that lay the foundations for the events that will dominate the subsequent centuries. One last item we still have to tick off the list and that is the whole subject of succession. That is what we will do next week. I hope you will join us again.
And before I go let me just remind you that you can support the podcast by going to historyofthegermans.com/support where you can make a one-time donation or find a link to patreon.com/historyofthegermans.