And Charles had another great disadvantage in his relations to the Papacy. In return for the support of Clement VI. he had made very extreme concessions in a treaty arranged at Avignon in April 1346. He had admitted that the imperial coronation must follow confirmation of the election by the Pope; he had promised that he would only go to Rome with the Pope’s consent, and would only stay there a single day; the Pope was to be arbiter in the disputes between the Empire and France. It is true that this treaty had not been published: and it is also true that Lewis had more than once offered even greater concessions as the price of absolution. Still, it was patent to all that Charles was the Papal candidate; and the injudicious boast of Clement that he held the imperial throne in his gift was not likely to conciliate German princes and people who had so energetically protested against spiritual dictation from Avignon. The imperial cities refused to open their gates to the Pfaffen-Kaiser, or ‘parson’s emperor,’ as they called him in derision.
While affairs were in this almost hopeless condition, three events occurred which greatly improved Charles’s prospects. The first was the sudden death of his rival, Lewis the Bavarian. Another was the outbreak in 1348 of the Great Plague or Black Death, which diverted men’s attention from political disputes, and led them to look for the checking of anarchy and disorder to the prince who possessed at any rate the title of king. The third event was the appearance in Brandenburg of a pretender claiming to be Waldemar, the last margrave of the House of Ascania, who was supposed to have died in 1319, when the electorate had been conferred upon the eldest son of the late Emperor. The ‘false Waldemar,’ as he is called, declared that he had never died, but had been driven by the stings of conscience to undertake a prolonged pilgrimage, from which he now returned to claim his rights. In order to weaken his Wittelsbach opponent, Charles gave his countenance |Charles secures the German crown.| to the pretender, who speedily secured a large part of Brandenburg.
It was an additional advantage to Charles that the party of the late Emperor had great difficulty in finding a successor to put in his place. In 1348 four electors—Henry of Virneburg, who still held the see of Mainz in defiance of the papal authority, the Elector Palatine Rupert, Lewis of Brandenburg, and Eric of Saxe-Lauenburg, who claimed to exercise the electoral vote of Saxony—sent proxies to Ober-Lahnstein to proceed to a new election. The vacant crown was offered in the first place to Edward III. of England, who had indirectly rendered a service to the Bavarian party by preventing French aid being sent to Charles IV. But Edward could neither neglect the French war nor face the resolute opposition of the English Parliament. On his refusal, the crown was offered to Lewis of Brandenburg, who had enough to do to cope with the false Waldemar, and then to Frederick of Meissen, who declined to risk anything in a losing cause. At last, in despair, the electors chose Gunther of Schwartzburg, a military leader of some reputation, but below the highest princely rank. Gunther, who had little to lose and everything to gain, accepted the proffered dignity, but he died in 1349, before he had time to test his ability to hold it.
Charles IV. set himself, with rare diplomatic ability, to make the most of his own advantages and of the difficulties of his opponents. The imperial cities, discontented by the death of their patron, Lewis the Bavarian, and involved in difficulties and disorders by the Plague, were gained over by the concession of privileges, and one by one opened their gates to Charles. Albert of Austria was detached from the Wittelsbach alliance by a politic marriage between his eldest son Rudolf and Charles’s second daughter Catharine. Charles, himself a widower, sued for the hand of a daughter of the Elector Palatine, and thus gained to his side the head of the House of Wittelsbach. Finally, by disowning the cause of the false Waldemar, he achieved the reconciliation of his most resolute opponent, Lewis of Brandenburg. The death of Gunther of Schwartzburg removed all difficulties in the way of Charles’s recognition, and by 1350 his title was acknowledged throughout the whole of Germany.
Charles IV. is incontestably the greatest ruler whom Europe produced in the fourteenth century, yet his merits have met |Character of Charles IV.| with singularly little appreciation except from Bohemian historians. To most English readers he is chiefly known from the saying of Maximilian I. that he was ‘the father of Bohemia but the stepfather of the Empire,’ or by the more recent epigram of Mr. Bryce who says that ‘he legalised anarchy and called it a constitution.’ Of the two sayings, the latter is by far the more unjust and ill-founded. Charles is a unique figure in the family of Luxemburg which rose to such sudden and short-lived eminence in the fourteenth century. His grandfather, Henry VII., threw away his life in a chimerical effort to revive an imperial authority which was no longer either possible or desirable. His father, John of Bohemia, was the representative knight-errant of his time, perhaps the noblest type of fourteenth century chivalry—now crusading in Poland, now trying to found a new territorial power in Italy, and in the end deserting his own interests to fight and fall in the service of an ally. Of Charles’s sons, the eldest, Wenzel, was a good-natured hedonist, who had few desires beyond the pleasures of the table; and the second, Sigismund, was a schemer who always imagined more than he could achieve. In the midst of this remarkable family, which can boast of three emperors and a king who twice narrowly missed election to the same dignity, Charles IV. stands in complete contrast both to his predecessors and his successors. He had none of the romantic enthusiasm of his father or his grandfather, but he had what was far better—a strong sense of the practical duties of government, and a strenuous business capacity which enabled him to carry them out. It is true that he failed to maintain the Ghibelline cause in Italy, but he preferred the more solid and substantial aim of building up a territorial monarchy in Germany. He was distinguished among contemporary monarchs for his preference of diplomacy to force, for his strong legal sense, and his love of order. Like Edward I. of England and Philip IV. of France, he marks the transition from mediæval to modern ideals and methods of government.
The merits of Charles IV.’s government in Bohemia have never been contested. One of the first-fruits of his good |Bohemia under Charles IV.| understanding with Clement VI. was the procuring of a papal bull to erect Prague into a metropolitan see, whereas it had previously been dependent on the Archbishop of Mainz. In 1348, while his affairs in Germany were in their most critical condition, Charles laid the foundations of the University of Prague, with a constitution modelled upon that of the University of Paris, where the king himself had studied. To Charles the Bohemian capital owes not only its university and its archbishopric, but also its famous bridge over the Moldau, and many of its most notable buildings. Much of his attention was given to the promotion of commerce. He established a uniform coinage, provided for the protection of highways, and lowered the tolls upon roads and rivers. He projected a canal from the Moldau to the Danube, which was to carry through Bohemia the traffic between Venice and the Hanseatic League. Many of his measures were protective in the extreme. Every foreign trader who crossed the Bohemian frontier was compelled to expose his wares for sale in Prague; no foreigner could conclude a bargain except through a native merchant; and all goods had to be sold by Bohemian weight and measure. Short-sighted as such regulations may appear in the present day, they were in accordance with the ideas of the time, and they were not unsuccessful in attaining their end. From German and Slavonic countries nobles, merchants, teachers and scholars flocked to the capital of Bohemia; the members of the university were to be counted by thousands before Charles’s death.
Under this beneficent rule Prague promised to become the chief city of Germany, and the balance of power and of civilisation was transferred from the west to the east. Charles, undoubtedly, looked forward to securing for the House of Luxemburg a position almost exactly similar to that afterwards attained by the House of Hapsburg; and he trusted that his descendants would enjoy, as the Hapsburgs did in later times, an unbroken and quasi-hereditary succession to the imperial throne. And his more sanguine schemes did not stop at this point. He founded in Prague a cloister of Slavonic monks, collected from Bosnia, Servia, and Croatia, whose task was to draw closer the bonds between Bohemia and the eastern Slavs, and ultimately to pave the way for a union between the Latin and Greek Churches. If this dream had been fulfilled, the Luxemburg House might have founded a power greater than that of any Emperor, and Bohemia, which has always been a triangular wedge thrust from the east into the west, might have become a rivet between the two great divisions of the Continent.
In 1354 Charles IV. set out for Italy to receive the Lombard crown at Milan, and the imperial crown in Rome. |Charles IV. in Italy.| From the Ghibelline point of view his journey was ignominious, but as throwing light upon Charles’s policy it was of great significance. He refused to be drawn into the vortex of Italian politics, or to break his treaty with the Pope. To the representations of the Ghibelline leaders, as to the eloquent appeals of Petrarch, Charles turned a deaf ear. He entered Rome to be crowned, paraded the streets in his imperial robes, and then retired outside the walls to San Lorenzo. With as little delay as possible, he hastened on his return journey. It was a deliberate renunciation of the claim of the mediæval Emperors to rule in Italy. Charles saw clearly that Germany had been ruined by the attempts of its rulers to make their monarchy in Italy a practical force, and in the interests of Germany he refused to imitate the folly of his predecessors. His main object was the reconstruction of an orderly and efficient authority in Germany, and that object could only be achieved by resolutely cutting himself free from the entanglement of Italian ambitions.
It was to the task of reform in Germany that Charles devoted himself immediately on his return to Germany, and his conferences with the diets at Nürnberg in 1355 and 1356 resulted in the issue of the great enactment with which his name will always be connected—the Golden Bull. There were two great and pressing |Difficulties in Germany.| problems which required solution. One very obvious cause of recent disorders in Germany had been the disputed elections to the Empire, and these were intimately associated with the uncertainty as to the rules of election. It is true that tradition had decided that there should be seven electors, and that certain sees and certain families had claims to the right of voting. But the German practice of subdividing lands among male heirs had given rise to great uncertainty as to which member of a family should exercise this right. Thus the House of Wittelsbach was split into two main branches, the one holding the Palatinate of the Rhine, the other the duchy of Bavaria. By family agreement the Wittelsbach vote was to be given alternately by the heads of the two branches, but such an arrangement was certain to give rise to quarrels. In 1314 the Saxon vote had been given on opposite sides by two rival claimants, and the same thing had taken place in the elections of 1346 and 1348. The prevention of similar disputes in the future was a primary condition of peace and order in Germany, and was one of the main objects of the Golden Bull.
The second great and pressing difficulty in Germany was the danger of the complete disruption of all political unity. There were innumerable tenants-in-chief, electors, princes, knights and cities, held together by nothing but common allegiance to a monarchy which had lost all efficient authority. If no remedy could be devised, Germany must become a mere geographical expression like Italy. The cities would become independent republics, and desolating wars between them and their princely neighbours would lead to incurable anarchy. In that case, the border provinces must inevitably fall to the growing power of France. Lyons was already gone; Dauphiné was practically lost. Provence and Franche-Comté, though acknowledging imperial suzerainty, were subject to French influence and destined to fall, with the Netherlands, under the rule of a French dynasty. German ascendency would disappear, first in the valley of the Rhone and then in that of the Rhine.