Part 222

The choice made (A. D. 1273) by the German Electors of Rodolph of Hapsburg for King of the Romans (see AUSTRIA: A. D. 1246-1282), was duly approved and confirmed by Pope Gregory X., who silenced, by his spiritual admonitions, the rival claims of King Alfonso of Castile. But Rodolph, to secure this papal confirmation of his title, found it necessary to promise, through his ambassadors, a renewal of the Capitulation of Otho IV., respecting the temporalities of the Pope. This he repeated in person, on meeting the Pope at Lausanne, in 1275, On that occasion, "an agreement was entered into which afterwards ratified to the Church the long disputed gift of Charlemagne, comprising Ravenna, Æmilia, Bobbio, Cesena, Forumpopoli, Forli, Faenza, Imola, Bologna, Ferrara, Comacchio, Adria, Rimini, Urbino, Monteferetro, and the territory of Bagno. Rodolph also bound himself to protect the privileges of the Church, and to maintain the freedom of Episcopal elections, and the right of appeal in all ecclesiastical causes; and having stipulated for receiving the imperial crown in Rome he promised to undertake an expedition to the holy land. If Rodolph were sincere in these last engagements, the disturbed state of his German dominions afforded him an apology for their present non-fulfilment: but there is good reason for believing that he never intended to visit either Rome or Palestine; and his indifference to Italy has even been the theme of panegyric with his admirers. The repeated and mortifying reverses of the two Frederics were before his eyes; there was little to excite his sympathy with the Italians; and though Lombardy seemed ready to acknowledge his supremacy, the Tuscan cities evinced aspirations after independence." During the early years of Rodolph's reign he was employed in establishing his authority, as against the contumacy of Ottocar, King of Bohemia, and the Duke of Bavaria.

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 1246-1282.

Meantime, Gregory X. and three short-lived successors in the papal office passed away, and Nicholas III. had come to it (1277). That vigorous pontiff called Rodolph to account for not having yet surrendered the states of the Church in due form, and whispered a hint of excommunication and interdict. "Rodolph was too prudent to disregard this admonition: he evaded the projected crusade and journey to Rome; but he took care to send thither an emissary, who in his name surrendered to the Pope the territory already agreed on. ... During his entire reign Rodolph maintained his indifference towards Italy." His views "were rather directed to the wilds of Hungary and Germany than to the delicious regions of the south. ... He compelled Philip, Count of Savoy, to surrender Morat, Payerne, and Guminen, which had been usurped from the Empire. By a successful expedition across the Jura, he brought back to obedience Otho IV. Count of Burgundy; and forced him to renounce the allegiance he had proffered to Philip III. King of France. ... He crushed an insurrection headed by an impostor, who had persuaded the infatuated multitude to believe that he was the Emperor Frederic II. {1450} And he freed his dominions from rapine and desolation by the destruction of several castles, whose owners infested the country with their predatory incursions." Before his death, in 1291, Rodolph "grew anxious to secure to his son Albert the succession to the throne, and his nomination by the Electors ere the grave closed upon himself. ... But all his entreaties were unavailing; he was coldly reminded that he himself was still the 'King,' and that the Empire was too poor to support two kings. Rodolph might now repent his neglect to assume the imperial crown: but the character of Albert seems to have been the real obstacle to his elevation. With many of the great qualities of his father, this prince was deficient in his milder virtues; and his personal bravery and perseverance were tainted with pride, haughtiness; and avarice." On Rodolph's death, the Electors chose for his successor Adolphus, Count of Nassau, a choice of which they soon found reason to repent. By taking pay from Edward I. of England, for an alliance with the latter against the King of France, and by attempts to enforce a purchased claim upon the Landgraviate of Thuringia, Adolphus brought himself into contempt, and in 1298 he was solemnly deposed by the Electors, who now conferred the kingship upon Albert of Austria whom they had rejected six years before. "The deposed sovereign was, however, strongly supported; and he promptly collected his adherents, and marched at the head of a vast army against Albert, who was not unprepared for his reception. A great battle took place at Gelheim, near Worms; and, after a bloody contest, the troops of Adolphus were entirely defeated," and he himself was slain. But Albert, now unopposed in Germany, found his title disputed at Rome. Boniface VIII., the most arrogant of all popes, refused to acknowledge the validity of his election, and drove him into a close alliance with the Pope's implacable and finally triumphant enemy, Philip IV. of France (see PAPACY: A. D. 1294-1348). He was soon at enmity, moreover, with a majority of the Electors who had given the crown to him, and they, stimulated by the Pope, were preparing to depose him, as they had deposed Adolphus. But Albert's energy broke up their plans. He humbled their leader, the Archbishop-Elector of Mentz, and the rest became submissive. The Pope now came to terms with him, and invited him to Rome to receive the imperial crown; also offering to him the crown of France, if he would take it from the head of the excommunicated Philip; but while these proposals were under discussion, Boniface suffered humiliations at the hands of the French king which caused his death. During most of his reign, Albert was busy with undertakings of ambition and rapacity which had no success. He attempted to seize the counties of Holland, Zealand, and Friesland, as fiefs reverting to the crown, on the death of John, Count of Holland, in 1299. He claimed the Bohemian crown in 1306, when Wenceslaus V., the young king, was assassinated, and invaded the country; but only to be beaten back. He was defeated at Lucka, in 1308, when attempting to grasp the inheritance of the Landgrave of Thuringia--under the very transaction which had chiefly caused his predecessor Adolphus to be deposed, and he himself invested with the Roman crown. Finally, he was in hostilities with the Swiss Forest Cantons, and was leading his forces against them, in May, 1308, when he was assassinated by several nobles, including his cousin John, whose enmity he had incurred.

_Sir R. Comyn, History of the Western Empire, chapters 14-17 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN; _W. Coxe, History of the House of Austria, chapter 5 (volume 1)._

GERMANY: A. D. 1282. Acquisition of the duchy of Austria by the House of Hapsburg.

See AUSTRIA: A. D. 1246-1282.

GERMANY: A. D. 1308-1313. The reign of Henry of Luxemburg.

The king (subsequently crowned emperor) chosen to succeed Albert was Count Henry of Luxemburg, an able and excellent prince. The new sovereign was crowned as Henry VII. "Henry did not make the extension of his private domains his object, yet favoring fortune brought it to him in the largest measure. Since the death of Wenzel III., the succession to the throne of Bohemia had been a subject of constant struggles. A very small party was in favor of Austria; but the chief power was in the hands of Henry of Carinthia, husband of Anna, Wenzel's eldest daughter. But he was hated by the people, whose hopes turned more and more to Elizabeth, a younger daughter of Wenzel; though she was kept in close confinement by Henry, who was about to marry her, it was supposed, below her rank. She escaped, fled to the emperor, and implored his aid. He gave her in marriage to his young son John, sending him to Bohemia in charge of Peter Aichspalter; to take possession of the kingdom. He did so, and it remained for more than a century in the Luxemburg family. This King John of Bohemia was a man of mark. His life was spent in the ceaseless pursuit of adventure--from tournament to tournament, from war to war, from one enterprise to another. We meet him now in Avignon, and now in Paris; then on the Rhine, in Prussia, Poland, or Hungary, and then prosecuting large plans in Italy, but hardly ever in his own kingdom. Yet his restless activity accomplished very little, apart from some important acquisitions in Silesia. Henry then gave attention to the public peace; came to an understanding with Leopold and Frederick, the proud sons of Albert, and put under the ban Everard of Wirtemberg, long a fomenter of disturbances, sending against him a strong imperial army. ... At the Diet of Spires, in September, 1309, it was cheerfully resolved to carry out Henry's cherished plan of reviving the traditional dignity of the Roman emperors by an expedition to the Eternal City. Henry expected thus to renew the authority of his title at home, as well as in Italy, where, in the traditional view, the imperial crown was as important and as necessary as in Germany. Every thing here had gone to confusion and ruin since the Hohenstaufens had succumbed to the bitter hostility of the popes. The contending parties still called themselves Guelphs and Ghibellines, though they retained little of the original characteristics attached to these names. A formal embassy, with Matteo Visconti at its head, invited Henry to Milan; and the parties every where anticipated his coming with hope. The great Florentine poet, Dante, hailed him as a saviour for distracted Italy. Thus, with the pope's approval, he crossed the Alps in the autumn of 1310, attended by a splendid escort of princes of the empire. {1451} The news of his approach excited general wonder and expectation, and his reception at Milan in December was like a triumph. He was crowned King of Lombardy without opposition. But when, in the true imperial spirit, he announced that he had come to serve the nation, and not one or another party, and proved his sincerity by treating both parties alike, all whose selfish hopes were deceived conspired against him. Brescia endured a frightful siege for four months, showing that the national hatred of German rule still survived. At length a union of all his adversaries was formed under King Robert of Naples, the grandson of Charles of Anjou, who put Conradin to death. Meanwhile Henry VII. went to Rome, May 1312, and received the crown of the Cæsars from four cardinals, plenipotentiaries of the pope, in the church of St. John Lateran, south of the Tiber, St. Peter's being occupied by the Neapolitan troops. But many of his German soldiers left him, and he retired, with a small army, to Pisa, after an unsuccessful effort to take Florence. From the faithful city of Pisa he proclaimed King Robert under the ban, and, in concert with Frederick of Sicily, prepared for war by land and sea. But the pope, now a mere tool of the King of France, commanded an armistice; and when Henry, in an independent spirit, hesitated to obey, Clement V. pronounced the ban of the Church against him. It never reached the emperor, who died suddenly in the monastery of Buon-Convento: poisoned, as the German annalists assert, by a Dominican monk, in the sacramental cup, August 24, 1313. He was buried at Pisa. Meanwhile his army in Bohemia had been completely successful in establishing King John on the throne."

_C. T. Lewis, A History of Germany, book 3, chapter 10._

See, also, ITALY: A. D. 1310-1313.

GERMANY: A. D. 1314-1347. Election of rival emperors, Lewis (Ludowic) of Bavaria and Frederic of Austria. Triumph of Lewis at the Battle of Mühldorf. Papal interference and excommunication of Lewis. Germany under interdict. Unrelenting hostility of the Church.

"The death of Heinric [Henry] replunged Germany into horrors to which, since the extinction of the Swabian line of emperors, it had been a stranger. The Austrian princes, who had never forgiven the elevation of the Luxemburg family, espoused the interests of Frederic, their head; the Bohemians as naturally opposed them. From the accession of John, the two houses were of necessity hostile; and it was evident that there could be no peace in Germany until one of them was subjected to the other. The Bohemians, indeed, could not hope to place their king on the vacant throne, since their project would have found an insurmountable obstacle in the jealousy of the electors; but they were at least resolved to support the pretensions of a prince hostile to the Austrians. ... The diet being convoked at Frankfort, the electors repaired thither, but with very different views; for, as their suffrages were already engaged, while the more numerous party proclaimed the duke of Bavaria as Ludowic V., another no less eagerly proclaimed Frederic. Although Ludowic was a member of the Austro-Hapsburg family--his mother being a daughter of Rodolf I.--he had always been the enemy of the Austrian princes, and in the same degree the ally of the Luxemburg faction. The two candidates being respectively crowned kings of the Romans, Ludowic at Aix-la-Chapelle, by the archbishop of Mentz--Frederic at Bonn, by the metropolitan of Cologne, a civil war was inevitable: neither had virtue enough to sacrifice his own rights to the good of the state. ... The contest would have ended in favour of the Austrians, but for the rashness of Frederic, who, in September 1322, without waiting for the arrival of his brother Leopold, assailed Ludowic between Mahldorf and Ettingen in Bavaria. ... The battle was maintained with equal valour from the rising to the setting sun; and was evidently in favour of the Austrians, when an unexpected charge in flank by a body of cavalry under the margrave of Nuremburg decided the fortune of the day. Heinric of Austria was first taken prisoner; and Frederic himself, who disdained to flee, was soon in the same condition. To his everlasting honour, Ludowic received Frederic with the highest assurances of esteem; and though the latter was conveyed to the strong fortress of Trapnitz, in the Upper Palatinate, he was treated with every indulgence consistent with his safe custody. But the contest was not yet decided; the valiant Leopold was still at the head of a separate force; and pope John XXII., the natural enemy of the Ghibelins, incensed at some succours which Ludowic sent to that party in Lombardy, excommunicated the king of the Romans, and declared him deposed from his dignity. Among the ecclesiastics of the empire this iniquitous sentence had its weight; but had not other events been disastrous to the king, he might have safely despised it. By Leopold he was signally defeated; he had the mortification to see the inconstant king of Bohemia join the party of Austria; and the still heavier misfortune to learn that the ecclesiastical and two or three secular electors were proceeding to another choice--that of Charles de Valois, whose interests were warmly supported by the pope. In this emergency, his only chance of safety was a reconciliation with his enemies; and Frederic was released on condition of his renouncing all claim to the empire. But though Frederic sincerely resolved to fulfil his share of the compact, Leopold and the other princes of his family refused; and their refusal was approved by the pope. With the magnanimity of his character, Frederic, unable to execute the engagements which he had made, voluntarily surrendered himself to his enemy. But Ludowic, who would not be outdone in generosity, received him, not as a prisoner, but a friend. 'They ate,' says a contemporary writer, 'at the same table, slept on the same couch;' and when the King left Bavaria, the administration of that duchy was confided to Frederic. Two such men could not long remain even politically hostile; and by another treaty, it was agreed that they should exercise conjointly the government of the empire. When this arrangement was condemned both by the pope and the electors, Ludowic proposed to take Italy as his seat of government, and leave Germany to Frederic. But the death [1326] of the war-like Leopold--the great support of the Austrian cause--and the continued opposition of the states to any compromise, enabled Ludowic to retain the sceptre of the kingdom; and in 1329, that of Frederic strengthened his party. But his reign was destined to be one of troubles. ... His open warfare against the head of the church did not much improve his affairs, the vindictive pope, in addition to the former sentence, placing all Germany under an interdict. ... {1452} In 1338, the diet of Frankfort issued a declaration for ever memorable in the annals of freedom. That the imperial authority depended on God alone; that the pope had no temporal influence, direct or indirect, within the empire; ... it concluded by empowering the emperor (Ludowic while in Italy [see ITALY: A. D. 1313-1330] had received the imperial crown from the anti-pope whom he had created in opposition to John XXII.) to raise, of his own authority, the interdict which, during four years, had oppressed the country. Another diet, held the following year, ratified this bold declaration. ... But this conduct of the diet was above the comprehension of the vulgar, who still regarded Ludowic as under the curse of God and the church. ... Unfortunately for the national independence, Ludowic himself contradicted the tenor of his hitherto spirited conduct, by mean submissions, by humiliating applications for absolution. They were unsuccessful; and he had the mortification to see the king of Bohemia, who had always acted an unaccountable part, become his bitter enemy. ... From this moment the fate of Ludowic was decided. In conjunction with the pope and the French king, Charles of Bohemia, who in 1346 succeeded to his father's kingdom and antipathy, commenced a civil war; and in the midst of these troubled scenes the emperor breathed his last [October 11, 1347]. Twelve months before the decease of Ludowic, Charles of Bohemia [son of John, the blind king of Bohemia, who fell, fighting for the French, at the battle of Crecy], assisted by Clement VI., was elected king of the Romans."

_S. A. Dunham, History of the Germanic Empire, book 1, chapter 4 (volume 1)._

ALSO IN: _J. I. von Döllinger, Studies in European History, chapter 5._

_J. C. Robertson, History of the Christian Church, book 8, chapter 2, V. 7._

_M. Creighton, History of the Papacy during the Period of the Reformation, introduction, chapter 2._

GERMANY: A. D. 1347-1493. The Golden Bull of Charles IV.

The Luxemburg line of emperors, and the reappearance of the Hapsburgs. The Holy Roman Empire as it was at the end of the Middle Ages.

"John king of Bohemia did not himself wear the imperial crown; but three of his descendants possessed it, with less interruption than could have been expected. His son Charles IV. succeeded Louis of Bavaria in 1347; not indeed without opposition, for a double election and a civil war were matters of course in Germany. Charles IV. has been treated with more derision by his contemporaries, and consequently by later writers, than almost any prince in history; yet he was remarkably successful in the only objects that he seriously pursued. Deficient in personal courage, insensible of humiliation, bending without shame to the pope, to the Italians, to the electors, so poor and so little reverenced as to be arrested by a butcher at Worms for want of paying his demand, Charles IV. affords a proof that a certain dexterity and cold-blooded perseverance may occasionally supply, in a sovereign, the want of more respectable qualities. He has been reproached with neglecting the empire. But he never deigned to trouble himself about the empire, except for his private' ends. He did not neglect the kingdom of Bohemia, to which he almost seemed to render Germany a province. Bohemia had been long considered as a fief of the empire, and indeed could pretend to an electoral vote by no other title. Charles, however, gave the states by law the right of choosing a king, on the extinction of the royal family, which seems derogatory to the imperial prerogative. ... He constantly resided at Prague, where he founded a celebrated university, and embellished the city with buildings. This kingdom, augmented also during his reign by the acquisition of Silesia, he bequeathed to his son Wenceslaus, for whom, by pliancy towards the electors and the court of Rome, he had procured, against all recent example, the imperial succession. The reign of Charles IV. is distinguished in the constitutional history of the empire by his Golden Bull [1356]; an instrument which finally ascertained the prerogatives of the electoral college.

See above: A. D. 1125-1152.