Disputed election to the Empire—Quarrel between Lewis IV. and John XXII.—The Franciscans and the Pope—The Heresy of the Beatific Vision—National feeling in Germany—Causes of the failure of Lewis as Emperor—The Expedition of the Emperor to Italy—Lewis supports the Anti-Pope—His retirement from Italy—His position in 1338—The Succession question in the Tyrol—Election of Charles IV.—Death of Lewis.

The death of the Emperor Henry VII. (1313) gave occasion for one of those disputed elections which were almost inevitable as |Disputed election in the Empire.| long as there was no central power strong enough to control German factions, and as long as the rules or custom of election were uncertain and ill-defined. The Hapsburgs eagerly grasped at the opportunity of recovering the power they had lost by the death of Albert I. Their opponents, headed as before by Baldwin of Trier, passed over John of Bohemia on account of his youth, and put forward as their candidate Lewis, Duke of Upper Bavaria. The rival forces were not ill-balanced. On October 19, 1314, Frederick the Handsome, son of Albert I., was chosen at Sachsenhausen by the Archbishop of Köln, Henry of Carinthia, still claiming the crown of Bohemia (see p. [18]), the Elector Palatine, and the Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg. On the following day five electors—the Archbishops of Mainz and Trier, John of Bohemia, Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg—gave their votes at Frankfurt in favour of Lewis the Bavarian. Thus two votes—those of Saxony and Bohemia—were cast by rival claimants upon both sides. On November 25, a double coronation took place: Frederick being crowned at Bonn, and Lewis at Aachen. The dispute could only be settled by arms; and a desultory war, lasting for seven years, was closed in 1322 by the battle of Mühldorf, where the capture of his rival seemed to secure the final victory of Lewis.

But the very completeness of Lewis’s triumph only served to provoke a far more formidable enemy than the Hapsburg duke. As long as the war lasted in Germany, the Pope had been content to pursue his policy of strengthening the Guelf party in Italy, confident that his Ghibelline opponents could receive no assistance from beyond the Alps. Clement V., on hearing of the death of Henry VII., had seized the opportunity to claim the administration, and to grant the office of imperial vicar during the vacancy to his patron and ally, Robert of Naples. John XXII., who succeeded Clement in 1316, after an interregnum of over two years, continued his predecessor’s policy. But Robert of Naples could only just hold his own against the Visconti and other Ghibelline leaders; and the battle of Mühldorf seemed likely to turn the scale decisively against the Guelfs. In his partisanship for the Angevin cause, John XXII. determined to revive the most extreme claims of the mediæval Papacy. On the pretext that he had |Quarrel of Lewis IV. and John XXII.| the right to decide the disputed election, and that neither claimant could assume the imperial office without his sanction, he called upon Lewis to plead his cause before the Roman Curia (1323), and, when he failed to appear, pronounced him contumacious and finally proceeded to issue a bull of excommunication against him. Thus commenced a struggle between the Empire and Papacy which was continued under the pontificates of Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI., and was hardly terminated by the death of Lewis in 1347.

In many ways this struggle looks like a revival of past struggles between Emperors and Popes, and to raise the old questions as to the relations of Church and State. But if it |Peculiarities of the quarrel.| is examined a little closer, it will be found to differ in several important respects from its predecessors, and to present peculiar characteristics of its own. In the first place, the dispute arises from more petty causes, and the combatants are of lesser mould than the protagonists of earlier times. There is no Hildebrand or Innocent III. among the Avignon Popes, and Lewis the Bavarian lacks both the courage and the imposing personality of Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick II. The pretensions of the rival powers are less far-reaching and exalted; and if at times we find the language of the past reproduced in the papal bulls, it sounds unreal and almost ridiculous. No more conclusive illustration of the decline of both Papacy and Empire can be presented than the impression of unreality and insignificance produced on the mind by the records of this long and obstinate contest.

Yet it is hardly probable that this impression was shared by contemporary spectators. To them the struggle must have seemed to involve questions of vital importance. No previous contest between the rival heads of Christendom had produced so much literature, or literature of such merit and significance. Michael of Cesena, the general of the Franciscan Order, John of Jandun, and William of Ockham, ‘The Invincible Doctor,’ exhausted the subtleties of the scholastic philosophy in their championship of the imperial position against papal pretensions. Above all, Marsiglio of Padua, in his great work the Defensor Pacis, examined with equal acuteness and insight the fundamental relations of the spiritual and secular powers, and laid down principles which were destined to find at any rate partial expression in the Reformation.[[7]]

This outburst of literary and philosophical activity was due in great part to the fact that for the first time in the long strife between Papacy and Empire, the struggle involved doctrinal differences. Hitherto the contest had been between Church and State, and the Church had been for the most part united. But, on the present occasion, the Church was profoundly divided. The great Franciscan Order had been founded by the professed advocate of clerical poverty. In course of time this original principle |The Franciscans and the Pope.| had been departed from, and the Order had amassed considerable wealth, though it had been found desirable to conceal the change by making the Pope the trustee, and giving the Order the mere usufruct of its property. This lapse from the strictness of the original rules had given rise to a schism within the Order. The Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, maintained that Christ and the Apostles held no individual or corporate property, and that the Church was bound to copy the examples of its founders. This doctrine, which was accepted by a chapter of the Order in 1322, was not likely to find favour with a Pope who was accused, with good reason, of avarice. John XXII., urged on by the Dominicans, denounced the doctrine as heretical, and thereby alienated the Franciscans, who could plead in their favour a bull of Nicolas III., and appealed from the authority of the Pope to a General Council of the Church. In common hostility to John XXII., the Franciscans espoused the cause of Lewis the Bavarian, and it was among them that he found his most enthusiastic champions, and his most influential advisers.

This antagonism of a section of the Church to its own head seemed likely to be increased in John XXII.’s later years, when he was induced to favour the |Heresy of the Beatific Vision.| dogma that the dead are not admitted to the divine presence until after the final day of judgment. This contention struck at the root of the prevalent custom of invoking the mediation of the saints, and provoked a storm of opposition throughout Europe. Even the French king threatened to abandon the cause of so heterodox a Pope, and on his death-bed John found it prudent or necessary to retract his too hasty opinion.

It is obvious that these doctrinal disputes weakened the Papacy, and so far tended to give the Emperor an advantage. But this gain to Lewis was as nothing compared with the strength which he derived from the most noteworthy peculiarity of the struggle. In all previous contests with the Empire, the Popes had been able to command the services of an anti-imperial party within Germany, and this party had included not only the great ecclesiastics, but many of the lay princes. But in the great critical moments of the struggle with Lewis, this was found to be impossible. For the first time in history the German ruler found himself |National sentiment in Germany.| backed up by a vigorous national sentiment among his subjects, a sentiment quite as strong as that which had supported Philip IV. of France against Boniface VIII. The primary cause of this unwonted union among German princes and people was undoubtedly the residence at Avignon and the subservience of the Popes to France. The national revolt against a spiritual authority which allowed itself to become the tool of a hostile state, led in England to the issue of the great statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, and found equally resolute expression in Germany in the famous decrees of 1338. Benedict XII., more moderate and placable than his predecessor, had been on the verge of a reconciliation with the Emperor, but was actually forbidden to put an end to the quarrel by the imperious Philip VI. This open dictation on the part of the French king drove the Germans to fury. In July, 1338, all the electors with the exception of the King of Bohemia met at Rense on the Rhine, and formally resolved that the imperial authority proceeds directly from God, and that the prince who is legally chosen by the electors becomes king and emperor without any further ceremony or confirmation. This meeting is noteworthy in the constitutional history of Germany as the first occasion on which the electors assumed corporate functions other than the filling of a vacancy in the throne. In the following month, a numerously attended diet at Frankfort endorsed the declaration of Rense, and proceeded to draw up laws which should strengthen the central power. The punishment of death is decreed against all breakers of the public peace: the feudal tenant who takes arms against his imperial overlord is declared to forfeit both life and property: whoever refuses to take up arms at the summons of the Emperor is pronounced guilty of felony. The decrees of Frankfort seem to promise a revival of the German monarchy.

In spite of all these advantages on the side of the Emperor, the quarrel ended, not exactly in a papal triumph, yet in the complete and humiliating discomfiture of Lewis. Doubtless the personal character of the Emperor |Causes of Lewis’s failure.| contributed essentially to this result. Lewis was well-meaning but vacillating: he could take strenuous measures under the influence of a stronger will, but when he lost his adviser his habitual irresolution and his superstitious dread of the terrors of excommunication returned upon him. To carry through the contest he required the firmness, the intellectual craft, and the want of reverence of a Philip the Fair; and he had none of these qualities. On more than one critical occasion, when success seemed within his grasp, he alienated and disgusted his supporters by grovelling offers to purchase absolution by surrendering all the principles which were at stake in the quarrel. Moreover, the doctrinal disputes in which he became involved, although a source of weakness to the Pope, were not an equal source of strength to the Emperor. The Franciscans had many powerful opponents, especially in the great rival Order of St. Dominic, and these were alienated from the Emperor by his alliance with a faction in the Church. The Franciscan cause rested upon an unpractical enthusiasm which could not command the lasting support of the clergy, accustomed as they were to wealth and to the influence which it confers. And in the end, the strong corporate spirit of the Church was inevitably aroused and alienated by the spectacle of a secular ruler interfering in questions of dogma, and claiming a right of interpretation and decision.

There was, too, in the Emperor’s position a fundamental weakness which, unless detected and remedied, was inevitably fatal to his success. Neither Lewis nor the Franciscan advisers who in the early years of the struggle dictated his conduct, could realise that the conditions of the Middle Ages were passing away. They could not see that the old imperial pretensions were obsolete; that intervention in Italy had always brought ruin to German kings; that even in Italy the Guelfs had the stronger, because the less anti-national, position; and that the Ghibellines, the professed champions of imperial ascendency, only pursued this policy for their own ends, and had no real desire to weaken their independence by the foundation of a strong Italian monarchy. Lewis had an almost unique opportunity of building up such a monarchy in Germany, not on the lines of the mediæval Empire, but on the basis of the newly awakened national sentiment and sympathy. This opportunity he threw away because he had no conception of the conditions under which alone such success could be attained. Instead of endeavouring to rule as an Edward I. or a Philip IV., he set himself to imitate the Ottos of the tenth century.