Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (70 page)

The much-reduced imperial lands remained formally in being, though subsequent emperors accepted the de facto conversion of the earlier mortgages into outright sale. The remnants of the Alsatian, Ortenau and Swabian bailiwicks eventually passed to the Habsburgs, leaving only three villages as ‘free’ directly under the emperor. Old-style itinerant kingship was now clearly impossible.

Meanwhile, Charles developed his family’s lands to a far greater extent than any of his predecessors. Central to his policy was his family’s possession of Bohemia since 1310, because this gave the Luxembourgs royal status, considerable resources and a privileged position within the Empire. Charles deliberately widened Bohemian autonomy, elevating Prague as a distinct archdiocese in 1344, underpinned by the construction of St Vitus Cathedral after 1347 in the Gothic style. Having secured the German throne, he issued 12 charters in April 1348 confirming and extending Bohemian privileges, notably ‘incorporation’ of the kingdom’s various lands together under the
corona Bohemiae
.
⁷⁰
This allowed Charles to break the practice pursued since Rudolf of partitioning family possessions to accommodate younger sons and thus make the elder appear less threatening to the electors. Silesia, Lusatia and Moravia were all fully integrated within Bohemia, rather than as separate imperial fiefs. Charles’s younger brother Johann Heinrich and his third son Johann were given Moravia and Görlitz respectively in 1373, providing them with both status and resources, whilst keeping them under Bohemian overlordship. Brandenburg had to remain a separate imperial fief, because it had been confirmed as an electorate in 1356, and was needed to maintain Luxembourg influence in the electoral college.
⁷¹
A separate Bohemian chancellery was established to free Charles from dependence on the imperial chancelleries associated with the ecclesiastical electors. Royal prerogatives were manipulated to redirect east–west trade away from the Danube to the Nuremberg–Prague–Pressburg route, benefiting Bohemia and undercutting his Habsburg rivals. Charles’s measures had their limits: the Bohemian nobles defeated his attempt to revise their country’s law code in 1355. However, his rule there was secure and enabled him to draw on considerable tax revenues.

The Empire’s governance now finally came to rest in a truly magnificent capital. The 41,000-square metres Wenceslas Square was laid out to beautify Prague and promote the cult of Bohemia’s patron saint. The new Charles Square was nearly twice as large, dwarfing anything else in the Empire: Nuremberg’s main square was only 8,500 square metres. The new Prague University – central Europe’s first – was also part of a deliberate attempt to establish the city as a truly European capital.
⁷²
The old relationship was now reversed: German princes were expected to come to his new court.

The imperial insignia were gathered together in the new
Karlstein
(Charles’s Stone) castle, built 30 kilometres from Prague between 1348 and 1365, further underlining how Bohemia was now intended as the basis for permanent Luxembourg imperial rule. The Golden Bull of 1356 fixed Bohemia as the senior secular electorate. Charles’s two-year-old son Wenzel was crowned Bohemian king in 1363 as a preliminary step to securing his recognition as Charles’s successor in the Empire. The new title ‘king of the Romans’ deliberately transformed the election from the choice of the German king to deciding the fate of the Empire. This allowed Charles to overcome potential objections that
Bohemia should be excluded from the electoral college on the grounds it was not ‘German’.
⁷³
Wenzel’s election in 1376 was the first time a successor had been chosen during an emperor’s lifetime since Conrad IV in 1237.

Traditional practices were not abandoned entirely. Charles retained influence within the imperial church and continued cultivating contacts amongst counts and nobles in regions close to the king since the 1270s. These areas still provided 44 per cent of royal servants, compared to 33 per cent from his hereditary possessions, and they likewise received 38 per cent of royal charters, compared to the 20 per cent issued to his direct subjects.
⁷⁴
While Charles now had a fixed capital, he still spent long periods in Franconia, as well as making two extended tours of the western frontier (1356, 1365) and a prolonged progress across the Empire as part of his state visit to France in 1377–8.

Governance of Imperial Italy

Charles also continued the modest revival of imperial governance in Italy begun by Henry VII in 1311–13 and Louis IV in 1327–8 by undertaking his own Roman expeditions in 1354–5 and 1368–9. All three monarchs went primarily to be crowned emperor, but also to defend imperial prerogatives against papal and growing French influence.
⁷⁵
Their reception depended on circumstances, but only Henry encountered serious opposition. Despite local difficulties, Louis and Charles enjoyed greater support and benefited from the papacy’s absence in Avignon (1309–77). Italians generally preferred the emperor as a more distant overlord to more immediate alternatives like the pope or the Angevin kings of Naples.

The situation had changed considerably since the late Staufer era. The major Italian cities had mostly slipped from being republics to oligarchic regimes. These still sought confirmation of their autonomy, but their leaders now also wanted recognition as hereditary princes and were prepared to pay handsomely. The Visconti in Milan gave Charles 150,000 florins in return for recognition as imperial vicars in 1355, as well as contributing another 50,000 to his coronation expenses. Florence paid 100,000 florins that year, and agreed an annual tax of 4,000 florins that it paid until 1378. Altogether, Charles received an average of 34,000 florins from Italy each year of his 32-year
reign, constituting 21 per cent of all the money he obtained from the Empire.
⁷⁶

Charles sold confirmation of civic autonomy and other privileges, but he refrained from the wholesale alienation he practised in Germany. Moreover, like his two predecessors, he was generally careful to distribute his favours fairly evenly. Charles gained prestige from making peace with the Visconti rather than using force to secure Milan as the vital entry point into northern Italy. Wenzel continued his father’s practice of rewarding the Visconti, who were elevated as dukes of Milan in May 1395, repaying the favour four years later when they blocked Wenzel’s rival Ruprecht from entering Italy. However, Charles balanced this by appointing the counts of Savoy as general vicars in Italy in 1372 and integrating their possessions within Germany to secure an alternative route. Sigismund later conferred margravial rank on the Gonzaga, whom Louis had favoured in the 1320s to secure access through their strategic town of Mantua.

No Italian lord felt sufficiently confident to ignore the emperor, who might otherwise favour their local rival. Imperial displeasure could be expressed by placing a city under the ban that could legitimate attacks by its neighbours. Princely ranks bolstered urban despots against their internal opponents, while grants of vicar’s powers enabled them to extend control over their city’s hinterland. Although he did not appear often nor bring many troops, the emperor remained the sole recognized fount of honours. Charles conferred knighthoods on 1,500 Italians at his coronation in 1355.
⁷⁷
Italian cities depended on imperial protection for their merchants trading north of the Alps. The emperor was still seen as someone who could resolve local problems: Genoa voluntarily relinquished autonomy and placed itself directly under imperial authority for 20 years after 1311, because ‘self-rule no longer worked’.
⁷⁸

Structural Problems under Wenzel and Ruprecht

Charles achieved much, but he died in 1378 before completing the transition to imperial governance based on large hereditary possessions. Although far more substantial than those of any previous emperor, Charles’s lands were insufficient to meet all his costs and he was heading towards financial crisis. Meanwhile, his practice of pawning imperial cities, especially smaller ones like Friedberg, was stirring opposition
from their inhabitants, who felt their patron was betraying them to rapacious princes.

Wenzel was not the man to meet these challenges. A typical spoilt child of a family on the make, Wenzel was overindulged and inexperienced. He tended to dodge responsibility by going hunting, while his ill health after 1388 was exacerbated by alcoholism. Character flaws were still significant in this period, because personal presence remained an important aspect of imperial governance. Charles’s changes to the feudal hierarchy clearly established the electors as the new super-elite whose support had to be constantly cultivated and managed. Wenzel spent only three years of his 22-year reign outside Bohemia and a third of this time was in Nuremberg, being the imperial city easiest to reach from his kingdom. He failed to visit Germany at all in the critical decade after 1387 and altogether held only four assemblies with the electors and princes. Although he sent representatives to another five assemblies, these were considered poor substitutes by men whose own prestige still rested on their personal proximity to the monarch.

Meanwhile, Wenzel’s own position in Bohemia imploded after 1393. Having already antagonized the senior lords by favouring the lesser knights, Wenzel sanctioned the murder of Prague’s vicar general, John Nepomuk, who had opposed royal interference in the Bohemian church. The lords allied with the Habsburgs and Wenzel’s brother Sigismund and cousin Jobst in May 1394, imposing the latter as governor of Bohemia. The kingdom descended into civil war between Wenzel and Jobst after 1395. Although Wenzel eventually recovered control by 1397, the episode alarmed the electors, who had already convened independently in Frankfurt in July 1394, reviving the practice developed during the later Salian era of meeting without royal permission (see
pp. 406–7
). Wenzel squandered opportunities for compromise, prompting the electors to name Sigismund as general vicar for the Empire on 13 March 1396. This act challenged Wenzel, who, as king, alone held the right to make such an appointment, but it fell short of deposing him, because general vicars were intended simply to exercise imperial authority in the monarch’s absence from the kingdom. Sigismund had meanwhile become king of Hungary. His defeat by the Turks at Nicopolis in September 1396 prevented him from assuming the position and obliged the electors to move independently towards the full deposition of Wenzel.

The experience of deposing Adolf in 1298 revealed the risks of such
a step. The electors demonstrated how imperial political culture had changed since then by carefully choreographing their actions to conform to the new sense of collective responsibility. Further electoral congresses in 1397 and 1399 emboldened the electors to summon Wenzel to meet them in May 1400 to explain his actions. When he failed to appear, the four Rhenish electors assembled at Oberlahnstein on the Rhine on 20 August in the presence of numerous princes and lords. In contrast to the moral arguments used in earlier elections of anti-kings (and the absence of any real case in 1298), the electors cited constitutional grounds for deposing Wenzel because he had failed to fulfil his duties according to the Golden Bull. The four electors convened the next day in nearby Rhense and elected Ruprecht, count Palatine, as German king, leaving Wenzel as king of Bohemia.
⁷⁹

As in 1298, the electors had ulterior motives, since they resented the shift of political gravity after 1348 away from their own region to Bohemia and which they clearly sought to reverse through the choice of one of their own number as king. Ruprecht had the precedent of Louis IV and felt that the Wittelsbachs were rightfully the Empire’s first family. He was also conscious that the Habsburgs were growing stronger and wanted to seize the opportunity to pre-empt them as potential kings. The lengthy, peaceful process of deposing Wenzel contrasted with Henry IV’s violent usurpation of the English throne in 1399 in which he imprisoned and subsequently starved his rival, Richard II.

Contemporaries predicted failure from the start of Ruprecht’s reign. He clung on until his death in 1410, but his authority was restricted to the Middle Rhine, south-west Germany and Bavaria, while Wenzel held Bohemia and enjoyed some support in Germany and Italy. Ruprecht’s reign demonstrates the significance of Charles’s changes to the basis of imperial governance. The Palatinate was too small to sustain royal rule, providing 50,000–60,000 florins annually, whilst revenue from the imperial lands was only 25,000 florins, down from the average of 164,000 florins under Charles. Ruprecht was the first monarch to use the new financial services provided by the banks being founded in Italian and Burgundian cities, borrowing 500,000 florins during his reign. While this kept him afloat, he had little to offer potential supporters. His relative isolation is demonstrated by the fact that two-thirds of his lay advisors were his own subjects or vassals, while no senior imperial nobles sought employment at his court.
⁸⁰

Sigismund: Old Practices in New Circumstances

Charles’s strategy paid off, and the Luxembourgs were able to ride out Ruprecht’s challenge despite being led by the incompetent Wenzel. They were the only candidates at Ruprecht’s death in 1410. Wenzel was ignored, but rivalry between Sigismund and Jobst produced the Empire’s last double election.
⁸¹
The ongoing papal schism contributed to this, since rival popes backed different candidates. However, Jobst’s death within a few months enabled Sigismund to stage a second, unanimous election in July 1411.

Sigismund represents an exception to the general trend since 1273.
⁸²
He was forced to rely on more traditional methods of fostering consensus, because he lacked a territorial base within the Empire. Although Sigismund had ruled Hungary since 1387, that kingdom’s resources were fully committed to battling the Ottoman advance through the Balkans. Wenzel’s death in 1419 at last gave him Bohemia, but precisely at the point when this kingdom descended into renewed civil war during the Hussite insurrection. Brandenburg was recovered at Jobst’s death, but it had been ruined by the prolonged struggles to control it since 1373 and was transferred to Burgrave Friedrich IV of Hohenzollern in 1415, partly because of the high fees he was prepared to pay, but also to secure the friendship of one of the few important princes associated with Ruprecht’s regime. The Wettin margraves of Meissen were won over by enfeoffing them with electoral Saxony, left vacant by the extinction of the Wittenberg branch of the Askanier in 1422. These deals indicate the growing importance of Brandenburg and Saxony as electorates and helped integrate them with the previously more dominant four Rhenish electors. Finally, Sigismund revived closer ties with the Empire’s remaining free lesser nobility by allowing them to form leagues and so counterbalance growing princely influence in the regions (see
pp. 553–7
).