Episode 163 – Succession and Legacy • History of the Germans Podcast (2024)

Emperor Karl IV gets his son Wenceslaus IV crowned king of the Romans

This is the last episode of this season and it is time to say goodbye to Karl IV, Ludwig the Bavarian, Henry VII, Albrecht of Habsburg, Adolf von Nassau and Rudolf of Habsburg. These have been some eventful 138 years.

When Karl IV died in 1378 he left behind an impressive list of achievements but also a number of failures. And he left behind a son, Wenceslaus he had invested with so much hope and so many crowns, it not only broke the bank but even chunks of the political edifice he had so patiently built.

How and why is what we will discuss in this episode.

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 163 – Succession and Legacy, also episode 26 of Season 8 “From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull”.

This is the last episode of this season and it is time to say goodbye to Karl IV, Ludwig the Bavarian, Henry VII, Albrecht of Habsburg, Adolf von Nassau and Rudolf of Habsburg. These have been some eventful 138 years.

When Karl IV died in 1378 he left behind an impressive list of achievements but also a number of failures. And he left behind a son, Wenceslaus he had invested with so much hope and so many crowns, it not only broke the bank but even chunks of the political edifice he had so patiently built.

How and why is what we will discuss in this episode.

But before we start the usual reminder that all this advertising-free German history fun is funded by the generosity of our patrons who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and signed up as Patrons or have made a one time donation. And today I want to thank Jim V., Chris E. J, Gilles, John Thompson, Peter McCloskey and Martin E. who have so lavishly endowed us.

And with that, back to the show

These last three episodes we have looked at Bohemia, the Empire, the expansion of the Luxemburg possessions and the international successes of Charles IV. Now it is time to talk about his Achilles heel, his obsession with his son and heir, Wenceslaus.

The last time a son had followed his father on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire had been in 1191 when Henry VI took over from Frederick Barbarossa. One could claim that Konrad IV took over from Frederick II in 1250, but Konrad IV was never crowned and his reign in the empire was confined to his duchy of Swabia.

Spoiler alert, Karl IV will be the first emperor who gets his son elected and crowned during his lifetime. But that came at a price.

Before we can get into this we need to take a quick recap of Karl IV’s family history. He had been married a total of four times. His first marriage was to Blanche of Valois, the sister of king Philip VI of France, a marriage arranged whilst he lived in Paris. The couple were married for 18 years, but had only two children, both girls, but no son and heir.

Her death in 1348 came at an extremely opportune moment for Karl, because he was now free to marry Anne of Bavaria, the daughter of the Count Palatinate on the Rhine who brought him a crucial electoral vote as well as strategic positions in the Upper Palatinate. This relationship produced a much desired son, but the child died in infancy. Anne too died soon after.

Wife #3 was Anna of Schweidnitz, daughter and heiress of one of the Silesian dukedoms that Karl wanted to integrate into the Lands of the Crown of Bohemia. Anna was just 14 at the time they got betrothed and lived to age 23. In that time she got crowned Queen of Bohemia, Queen of the Romans and finally in 1355, she was crowned empress in Rome. But most importantly after first giving birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1358, in 1361 she delivered the long awaited heir, a boy called Wenceslaus.

Like so much of Karl’s activities, the birth of Wenceslaus was an elaborately designed spectacle. Karl had his heavily pregnant wife brought to Nürnberg, by now one of the three symbolic cities of the empire, alongside Frankfurt and Aachen. And he had invited the electors, imperial princes and representatives of the great cities for a diet at the same time.

On previous visits the emperor had stayed in the comfortable mansions of one of the great Nürnberg bankers where he could enjoy all creature comforts. But that would not do for the birth of an imperial child. So the family moved up the hill into the drafty castle once built by the Hohenstaufen emperors.

By ensuring his son was born in the imperial castle above the great imperial city, in the presence of the whole of the empire, Karl projects a clear message. This child, his son, was not just the future king of Bohemia, but he was also destined to be the future emperor.

My god is he a happy father. This is what he wrote to the Bohemians: quote: “Rejoice in the hearts of all our faithful! rejoice, our dear subjects, let the whole nation hold a great festival of joy. All Bohemia, and all its provinces, rejoice at the great happiness that has befallen you. You rich and poor, you young and old, rejoice, for behold the royal lineage has brought forth a scion! Heaven has finally granted our ardent wishes, and the Empress, our consort, has given birth to our heir to the throne, as promised by God! His appearance was like the rising sun dispelling the fog, for this newborn also dispelled the fickleness, indecision, fear and hope from the hearts of our subjects, and brought back their previous happiness, serene confidence and love.” End quote.

He may be laying it on thick, but then he was already 45 years old and until then without a male heir. This lack of a successor left the entire political structure he had built fragile. And that fragility impacted not just him, but the whole of his empire that could still remember the endless sequence of civil wars that had followed an imperial vacancy. Therefore it is likely that there were indeed celebrations of joy across the empire, welcoming the long awaited heir.

Karl’s excitement culminated in the weeks that followed. He had the baby weighed in gold, which he sent to Aachen in recognition for the miracle he attribute to the intercession of the saints and relics in this other great imperial city. He then called for the imperial regalia to be brought over from Prague to Nürnberg to be exhibited to the public.

For the christening 2 weeks later 5 electors, 18 bishops and numerous princes came to the church of St. Sebaldus in Nürnberg. Having just been to the christening of my niece and nephew, I know that children can sometimes be less than co-operative in religious ceremonies. Reports about young Wenceslaus christening tell of the little boy being more than obstinate. Stories circulate that in his revulsion he had soiled the holy water and even the fouled the altar, a bad omen for what may be coming.

Bad omen or not, these celebrations did not go down well with the Habsburgs and the Wittelsbachs who saw their chances of returning to the imperial throne vanishing. The events may therefore have triggered their attempt to overthrow Karl in alliance with the kings of Poland and Hungary. This conspiracy as we have heard, failed, in part because Anna of Schweidnitz was kind enough to expire in childbirth a year later, making way for Karl’s fourth marriage to Elizabeth of Pomerania. Elizabeth was the granddaughter of king Kasimir the Great of Poland and this union underpinned a new arrangement between Poland and the emperor, which in turn let the Habsburg conspiracy crumble into dust.

The marriage to Elisabeth of Pomerania lasted until Karl’s death and produced 6 children, 4 of which survived. The eldest of the two surviving sons, Sigismund will feature heavily in our next season, so keep him in mind.

But back to Wenceslaus. Karl is unperturbed in his urge to promote his precious little boy. First he creates a new altar for the coronation church in Aachen, dedicated to St. Wenceslaus where a Czech speaking priest is to pray for the now deceased members of the House of Luxemburg, including for Wenceslaus mother.

As soon as little Wenzeslaus could walk, he was crowned king of Bohemia. Karl’s advisers had tried to dissuade him from this, in large part because they feared it would be almost impossible to guide the child once crowned. After all, sending an anointed king on to the naughty step was fraught with complex issues of “lese majeste”. And as you probably know, the naughty step was not introduced until the early 2000s, so we are talking about much more hands-on punishments here.

Then, to paraphrase Jane Austin, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a young man in possession of a crown, must be in want of a wife. The young man in question being unable to even form the words “I do” was no obstacle for him to be promised in marriage to a daughter of the Burggrave of Nürnberg. That engagement ended when a better opportunity arose to get him a Wittelsbach bride, and a little later a Hungarian princess. Finally it is 14-year old Johanna von Wittelsbach who snatches the nine-year old heir.

3 years later Wenceslaus becomes the elector of Brandenburg, making him an imperial prince alongside his royal Bohemian title.

When Wenceslaus turns 15, the emperor gets going on his most ambitious project for his precious son, getting him elected and crowned king of the Romans. And ambitious it was.

Let’s start with the legal obstacles.

All the provisions of the Golden Bull are based on the implicit assumption that the previous emperor had died. There are no rules about electing a king of the Romans whilst the predecessor is still alive.

Plus, the Golden Bull had explicitly set out that an elector was only able to cast his vote when he had become 18 years of age, which suggests an emperor should also at least be 18 years old.

But regulation, schmogulation, if only enough bribes are paid, the Electors ewre all too happy to set aside these judicial niceties.

Ah, enough bribes. That was a bit of a problem. For one the bribes required came to a stunning quarter of a million florin. A princely sum that already but coming just in the wake of the 500,000 florin Karl had promised the Wittelsbachs for the margraviate of Brandenburg. Where to find such a princely sum? The imperial lands, cities, castles, tolls and so forth had already been pawned, sold and otherwise alienated in the run-up to Karl’s own election and coronation. Karl had bought back some of it during the course of the last 20 years, focusing mainly on freeing the imperial cities from the control of the territorial lords.

But these imperial cities were difficult to pawn again. Because in the intervening period Karl had ever so often asked the cities to fund his projects such as the journeys to Rome, his various coronations and acquisitions. And in exchange for payment of these taxes the cities had made Karl promise that he would never again pawn them away or diminish their privileges.

But needs must. So, Karl goes about pawning and selling imperial cities to territorial lords as if there had never been any such agreements. The crassest treatment was suffered by the city of Cologne, still Germany’s largest. To obtain the vote of the archbishop of Cologne, Karl had to revoke a number of privileges for the city. the problem was that he had just recently issued a charter granting Cologne a wide range of privileges and almost complete independence from the archbishop’s control. The only way to solve this conundrum was for the imperial chancellery to blatantly declared that they had never issued such a charter and that whatever paper the good citizens of Cologne held in their hand was not worth the parchment it was written on. When the baffled citizens protested pointing out their long track record of loyalty to the empire, Karl placed the whole city under the imperial ban.

That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The cities had already been quite upset about the Golden Bull that prevented them from forming city alliances for mutual protection, whilst at the same time not producing a general peace, a Landfrieden, for the whole empire. How were the roads going to be made safe if they could neither do it themselves nor rely on the government. In their eyes the emperor had not only failed them but was now charging excessive taxes, and worse, placing them under the control of territorial lords who wanted to dismantle their freedoms.

18 Swabian cities, led by the city of Ulm formed the Schwäbische Bund, a league of defense against imperial overreach. When Wenceslaus was finally elected and crowned in 1376, the cities refused to acknowledge him as king unless he vouched not to pawn them to anyone, ever.

Wenceslaus responded by declaring an imperial war against the cities and brought an army before the walls of Ulm. But that was as far as he got. His forces were – as so often in this period – unable to overcome the city’s defenses.

The success boosted the citizens of Ulm’s self-confidence and they began work on the Ulmer Muenster, a parish church that was to outshine all other churches in the land, even its cathedrals. Its tower was to rise higher than any other in the land, even in the whole of Christendom. Their architect was none other than the Father of Peter Parler the master builder responsible for St. Vitus cathedral and the Charles bridge in Prague. The great tower was only finished in the 19^th century, but at 161 meters became the highest church tower in the world.

The other outcome of the defeat was that Karl and Wenceslaus had to agree a ceasefire that wa supposed to turn into a lasting agreement. Negotiations were protracted. In a rather blatant twisting of the facts, Karl declared that he had never thought of pawning any of his most loyal imperial cities. The cities did not believe a word of that and by 1377 the Schwäbische Bund had grown to 28 members. Even the staunchly loyal city of Rothenburg ob der Tauber joined the alliance. They had even entered into negotiations with Karl’s enemies, the Habsburgs and count Eberhard of Württemberg.

At that point the emperor and his son realized that they were in a bit of a pickle. The cities had been not just an important source of taxes and soldiers funding the imperial tasks, but they had also been a counterweight to the power of the princes and in particular the prince electors. By alienating them, there was a genuine risk that the cities, even the still loyal ones like Nürnberg and Frankfurt could switch sides and leave the Luxemburgs isolated.

This point was likely made most forcefully by the members of Karl’s chancellery, many of whom were members of the educated elites of the cities. The same argument was made by his closest advisers and financiers, the great bankers of Nurnberg, Augsburg and Regensburg.

In 1377, father and son cave and solemnly promise that the imperial cities of the Schwäbische Bund cannot ever be pawned. Having rewarded the rebels, this privilege was then extended to the imperial cities that had remained loyal.

Making the imperial cities unalienable was certainly politically opportune, but it also removed the very last asset an emperor could use to fund any imperial infrastructure. From this time onwards, anyone carrying the crown of the Holy Roman Empire will have to depend predominantly on his own financial and military resources for whatever projects he -and very rarely she – wants to pursue.

Rebuilding his dynasties’ relationship with the cities preoccupied in his last years. In the summer of 1378, after return from his trip to France we discussed last week, he was in Nürnberg to hold a diet and was shocked to find still so many of the Swabian cities not attending. The problem had clearly not gone away despite all the assurances.

One final act was to write his testament. And as much as he wanted to pass all his possessions plus the lands of his half-brother, the duke of Luxemburg to his beloved Wenceslaus, he concluded that this would cause too much friction in the family. Therefore, he split this enormous territory that made up almost a quarter of the empire north of the Alps between his sons. Wenceslaus did get the lion’s share, i.e., the kingdom of Bohemia with Moravia and Silesia. But Brandenburg went to Wenceslaus half-brother Sigismund. A third brother, John was made duke of Görlitz, but as a vassal to his older brother. Apart from his sons, Karl had to also consider his nephews, the children of his brother Johann Heinrich of Moravia. The eldest of them, Jobst, went on to inherit Moravia, technically as a vassal to Wenceslaus, but we will see how that pans out.

On November 29, 1378 Charles IV passed away in his splendid capital, the city of Prague, aged 62, probably from general exhaustion and the severe gout he had suffered from for decades. He had ruled the empire for 30 years, not counting the first 2 years of civil war against the Wittelsbachs.

In this time, he had profoundly changed the empire. The Golden Bull became the bedrock of a newly defined empire, the Holy Roman Empire forever ridiculed by Voltaire. But as we discussed in the Golden Bull episode, there wasn’t much room for Karl to do anything other than recognizing the power of the princes. And, quite frankly, living in a country where a centralized monarchy has sucked all economic, cultural and political activity into a 607 square mile plot of overpriced land, I do see great advantages in the more fragmented structure of Germany where multiple cities host world leading industries, where one can have dozens of internationally recognized museums spread across the country, where towns have literary and theatrical traditions going back centuries and still thriving and where the states elect their own parliaments and governments – for good and for bad.

His other achievement was to bring the relationship between pope and emperor onto a new plane. This was not all his own work, his predecessor Ludwig the Bavarian had already cut a path here, and the weakness of the Avignon papacy was a major factor as well, but the fact remains that after 300 years of conflict literally to the death, from here forward pope and emperor acted in unison. Whether that was a good idea is something we will discuss by my estimate for the next at least 12 months.

And the most recognizable legacy of his reign is no doubt the city of Prague, its famous bridge, its cathedral, the extension that more than doubled its size, the astoundingly large squares, its university and the various monasteries and churches he founded. We have not talked much about his other great project, like his intended capital for Brandenburg in Tangermuende and the castle of Karl Steijn near Prague. If you ever get to Czech Republic, make sure you go there. Few medieval buildings exist that still breathe the spirit of its creator, as much as this does.

But despite his great achievements, he also failed to deliver in some crucial dimensions. The Golden Bull has always been a stripped-down version of a much larger legislative concept. What he had initially hoped to achieve is usually summarized under the title of general peace or Landfrieden. The Landfrieden is quite a bit more than just the idea of an agreement between princes and cities to keep the piece.

The way Karl thought about it was set it out in the Majestas Carolina, his abandoned project to create a new legal framework for Bohemia kingdom. This concept incorporated a lot of the provisions from the Constitutions of Melfi (episode 80) that Frederick II had implemented in his kingdom of Sicily.

Under a general Landfrieden, there would be an obligation for all parties to refrain from violence and instead bring their disputes before a judge. The judges would base their decision on the provisions in the law code and their decision was final. Anyone who would take up arms against that decision would become and enemy of the state and be persecuted by the state authority.

This would have given the emperor a monopoly of violence, as it was gradually been implemented in France and England. Trial by combat and feuding was to be replaced by written law implemented by institutions, resulting in a dramatic increase security and in consequence of communications and trade. It is a concept we find pretty basic and normal today but for medieval aristocrats it was an unacceptable infringement of their political rights. They had become used to being able to mold the law according to their personal preferences, and to use force in the pursuit of their perceived rights. In particular as it related to people of lower social standing, i.e., peasants and burghers, aristocrats did not believe to be bound by any rules. Only the interaction between aristocrats was to be governed by the chivalric code but again, not by a law made by the monarch.

These reforms failed on the resistance of the barons in Bohemia and Karl was smart enough not to try it in the empire where his position was weaker.

With the general peace being a no-go, the other reforms, such as common standard for coinage also fell by the wayside. It will be Karl’s successors who will spend the next 100 years dragging the elites of the empire kicking and screaming into a system of law and institutions that provides a general peace.

This story and the other big issue, the schism in the church and the recurring demands for church reform will be the subject of our next season. I have not yet decided on the title, so stay tuned. Next week I have lined up an interview with Vaclav Zurek, researcher at the Prague Academy of Sciences who has just written a biography of Karl IV, which is coming out in English translation this autumn. I am sure you will enjoy hearing this story from a Czech perspective.

See you on the other side.