A Federation of Princes and Free Cities
Germany, like Switzerland, was a federal country, but its parts were not governed by democratic assemblies. Their rulers were spiritual or secular princes who owed only slight obedience to the head of the Holy Roman Empire. Some states, such as Bavaria, Württemberg, Thuringia, Hesse, Nassau, Meissen, Saxony, Brandenburg, Carinthia, Austria and the Palatinate, were ruled by dukes, counts, margraves and other lay lords. Others, such as Magdeburg, Mainz, Halle, Bamberg, Cologne, Bremen, Strasbourg, Salzburg, Trier, Basel and Hildesheim, were in varying degrees subject to bishops or archbishops. By 1460, however, about a hundred towns had won freedom of action from their rulers, lay or clerical.
In each territory, representatives of the three estates (nobles, clergy and commoners) met from time to time in a local diet, which, since it controlled the money, could to some extent check the princes. Territories and free cities sent delegates to the Reichstag, or imperial diet. To choose a king the "diet of electors" was summoned. Its members were usually the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Count Palatine, and the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne. The man they elected was only called head of the Holy Roman Empire after the Pope crowned him, and until then he bore the title "King of the Romans."
The king in principle had his capital at Nuremberg, but often elsewhere, and sometimes even in Prague. His authority depended on tradition, ritual and office, not on land and power. Like any feudal prince, he owned nothing outside his own territory. To pay for administration and war he needed the consent of the Reichstag or the electors, and this dependence condemned even strong men like Charles IV and Sigismund to humiliating failures abroad. The ruin of the Hohenstaufen at the hands of the powerful popes of the thirteenth century had left the Holy Roman Empire, founded in 800 by Pope Leo III and Charlemagne, painfully weak. By 1400 it was a loose collection of Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Holland and Switzerland.
The Double Election and Pope John XXII
In 1314 two hostile groups of electors chose two kings on the same day, Louis of Bavaria and Frederick, Duke of Austria, and the quarrel between Empire and papacy flared. John XXII, from his seat at Avignon, recognized both as king but not emperor. He declared that only the Pope has power to crown an emperor, so he must judge the validity of the election, and that between an emperor's death and the election of a new one the Empire should be administered by the Pope.
Frederick and Louis chose to settle it by war. At Mühldorf in 1322 Louis crushed Frederick's army and captured him, and from then on held the full power of an emperor. John ordered him to resign and appear at the papal court to be tried as a rebel against the Church. Louis refused, and the Pope excommunicated him (1324), told all Christians of the Empire to refuse to obey him, and forbade clergy in regions recognizing his rule to perform religious duties.
In most of Germany the Pope's decrees counted for little, since Germans, like the English, saw the Avignon popes as servants or accomplices of France. As popular faith and papal power weakened, a way of thinking took root in which people were first patriots and then Christians. Catholicism, a kind of supranationalism, was drifting toward decay, and the Protestant movement, a kind of nationalism, was about to appear.
The Franciscan Allies and Marsilius
Louis found allies. John XXII's decree of 1323 made it heresy to believe that Christ and the apostles owned no property, and he had told the Inquisition to try the "Spiritual" Franciscans who held this belief. Many priests branded the Pope himself with heresy, expressed horror at the Church's immense wealth, and some even called the aged Pope "Antichrist." Michael of Cesena, head of the Franciscans, led a large minority of his order into open alliance with Louis (1324). Emboldened by their support, Louis issued a proclamation at Sachsenhausen against "John XXII, who calls himself pope," calling him a bloodthirsty and unjust man bent on destroying the Empire, and demanded that a general council of the Church be assembled to try him for heresy.
Louis's boldness grew when two professors of the University of Paris came to his court at Nuremberg. They were Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, whose book Defensor Pacis (Defender of the Peace), with its sharp attacks on the Avignon papacy, had pleased the king. They had written: what do you see there but a throng of parasites who pocket the income of church posts and sell its offices? What do you hear but the clamor of base and cunning lawyers, a shame to honest people? There the rights of the oppressed are trampled unless they pay to buy back their rights.
Influenced by the preachers of the Albigensians and Waldensians of the thirteenth century, and two centuries before Luther, the two writers held that Christianity must rest only on the teachings of Scripture. A general council should be summoned by the emperor, not the Pope. The emperor's consent must also be sought in the choosing of every bishop, and the Pope, like everyone else, must obey the emperor.
The Imperial Coronation in Rome
Delighted, Louis decided to go to Italy and be crowned emperor by the Roman people. In early 1327 he set out with a small army, a number of Franciscans and the two philosophers, to whom he had left the drafting of his opening speech. In April the Pope issued new decrees, excommunicating John and Marsilius and ordering Louis to leave Italy. But the Visconti of Milan welcomed Louis and, as official King of Lombardy, placed the Iron Crown on his head.
On 7 January 1328, amid intense popular emotion from a people aggrieved at the move of the papal seat to Avignon, Louis entered Rome. He settled in the Vatican palace, called the people to a public assembly on the Capitol and appeared before them to be crowned. The people agreed to his election, and on 17 January Sciarra Colonna, the aged Roman magistrate who a quarter century earlier had quarreled with Pope Boniface VIII and threatened his life, put the imperial crown on Louis's head. For one moment again he embodied the triumph of the rising state over a decadent Church.
An Antipope and a Retreat
Pope John, now seventy-eight, would not accept defeat. He proclaimed a general crusade to strip Louis of all offices and, with the threat of suspending church services, ordered the Romans to drive Louis out and obey him again. Louis answered with an act reminiscent of his excommunicated predecessor Henry IV. He called the people to another public assembly, issued a decree condemning the Pope for heresy and tyranny and deposing him, and left his punishment to the civil courts. By his command an assembly of Roman clergy and laity elected Peter of Corvara as pope, and Louis, the opposite of Leo III and Charlemagne, placed the papal tiara on Peter's head and named him Nicholas V (12 May 1328). Christendom was astounded and split into two hostile camps, along the same lines on which Europe divided after the Reformation.
A few small local events turned the situation sadly. Louis gave the spiritual leadership of the capital to Marsilius, who ordered the priests left in Rome to hold Mass and other rites despite the Pope's ban. Some refused, and harsh measures were used against them. Many Romans found this excessive. Italians had never warmed to Teutons, and when German soldiers took bread and food from the markets without paying, riots broke out. Louis needed money for his troops and imposed a levy of 10,000 florins (about $250,000 in the book's conversion) on the laity and an equal sum on the clergy and the Jews. Public anger grew so threatening that Louis judged it time to return to Germany. On 4 August 1328 the retreat from Italy began. The next day papal troops occupied Rome, destroyed and confiscated the houses of Louis's supporters. The people offered no resistance and went back to their worship and their sins.
William of Ockham and the End of the Adventure
At Pisa, Louis forgot the sorrow of defeat with the arrival of William of Ockham, the most famous philosopher of the fourteenth century, who had escaped from the Pope's prison at Avignon. By a not very reliable tradition he said to Louis: "You defend me with your sword, and I will defend you with my pen." He had a powerful, passionate pen but could not change the situation.
Louis had roused all the ruling elements of Italy against him. His Italian Ghibelline supporters, who had hoped to rule the peninsula in his name and for their own good, were offended when they saw he wanted all powers and privileges for himself. He also forced them to levy unjust taxes to fill his treasury. Since his forces did not match his claims, even the Visconti abandoned him and made peace with the Pope. The antipope, finding himself alone, surrendered to papal agents. He was dragged with a rope around his neck to John XXII, threw himself at the Pope's feet and begged forgiveness (1328). John forgave him, embraced him as a repentant prodigal, and sentenced him to life in prison.
The Pope's Hostility and the Rhens Declaration
Louis returned to Germany and repeatedly sent envoys to Avignon, offering many apologies and retractions to gain the Pope's pardon, but John did not forgive him and remained hostile until his own death (1334). When England entered the Hundred Years' War and sought an alliance with Louis, he regained some of his standing. Edward III recognized him as emperor and saluted him as such.
Taking advantage of the alliance of these two powers against the papal government, an assembly of German clergy and princes met at Rhens on 16 July 1338. It declared that no power or authority could depose or annul the election of a ruler chosen by the German electors. A council at Frankfurt am Main (3 August 1338) declared the Pope's decrees against Louis void. In its view, conferring the imperial title and its power belonged to the electors and needed no papal approval. Germany and England paid no heed to Pope Benedict XII's protests and advanced a step toward the Reformation.
Emboldened by this triumph, Louis resolved to apply the views of Marsilius fully and take control of spiritual affairs as of material ones. He removed the Pope's appointees from church posts and put his own in their places. He seized money collected by papal tax agents for a crusade. He also annulled the marriage of Margaret of Carinthia, heiress to most of Tyrol, and gave her to his own son, a relation within a degree that the Church forbade for marriage. Her rejected husband, his elder brother Charles and their father John, King of Bohemia, swore to take revenge.
Charles IV
Clement VI, who became Pope in 1342, thought the time right to dispose of the aged enemy of the papacy. With skilled diplomacy he persuaded the electors one by one that Europe would have no peace until Louis was removed and the Bohemian prince Charles took his throne. Charles, promised papal support, agreed. In July 1346 the electors met at Rhens and unanimously declared Charles King of Germany. Louis, who had received no answer from Avignon to his requests for obedience, prepared to defend his throne to the death. In the meantime he fell from his horse while hunting and died at sixty (1347).
Charles IV, king and emperor, governed well. The Germans did not like him because he made Prague the seat of the empire. But in Germany and in his own kingdom he reformed administration. He protected trade and exports, reduced tolls and road dues, put the coinage on an honest basis, and gave all Europe a relative peace for nearly a generation. In 1356 he issued a set of decrees known as the Golden Bull, though only a few of its many copies were sealed with the imperial gold seal, and it won a brief fame in history.
The Golden Bull and the Power of the Electors
Perhaps believing that his long absences from Germany required it, he gave seven electors powers that nearly overshadowed the imperial authority. The electors were to meet once a year and make laws for Germany. The king or emperor was only their executive. In their own realms they had full judicial power and the ownership of all mines, the right to mint coins, raise taxes, and, to a degree, make peace and war.
The purpose of the Golden Bull was to give legal force to existing facts and to build on them a cooperative federation of the princes' territories. But the electors became so absorbed in the internal affairs of their own domains that they forgot their larger responsibility as counselors of the Empire, so that only the name of Germany remained. The local independence of the electors did have the merit of making possible the protection of Luther by the Elector of Saxony, and so helped spread the Protestant movement.
Wenceslaus, Sigismund and Albert II
In his old age Charles secured the succession to the empire for his son (1378) with large bribes. Wenceslaus IV had some virtues, but loved drink and his native city above all. The electors disliked his tastes and deposed him (1400), choosing Rupert III, who left no mark on history.
Sigismund of Luxembourg, elected King of Hungary at nineteen (1378), became King of the Romans in 1411 and soon emperor. He was a man of varied gifts and a winning personality: handsome, proud, generous, kind, and in due season cruel. He knew several languages and, after women and power, loved literature most. His good intentions could have turned hell into heaven, but he lacked the heart and nerve to face a crisis. He honestly tried to remedy the defects of German government, passed some good laws and carried out a few. But his efforts were fruitless because of the electors' willfulness and ineptitude and their unwillingness to check the Turks' advance. In his last years he lost his money and strength in the war with the Bohemian Hussites. When he died in 1437, Europe mourned a man who had once been the voice of its progress and who failed at everything but the pursuit of grandeur.
Sigismund had recommended his son-in-law Albert, of the Habsburg family, to the electors of Bohemia, Hungary and Germany. Albert II obtained the crowns of the three countries but, before he could show his ability, died of dysentery on a campaign against the Turks (1440). He left no son, but the electors gave the crowns of king and emperor to another Habsburg, Frederick, Duke of Styria. From then on the royal lot fell regularly on a Habsburg prince, and so the imperial office became hereditary in that talented and ambitious house. Frederick III made Austria an archduchy. The Habsburg kings made Vienna their capital and the Archduke of Austria usually held the succession to the Empire. In this way the easygoing, gentle temper of Austrians and Viennese, like a delicate feminine element, mingled with the manly harshness of the northern Teutons.