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On 31st of October 1517 a hitherto unknown professor at the smallish university of Wittenberg published 95 theses. And by doing so, he unleashed a sequence of events that would fundamentally change the face of Europe and still defines communities and nations.
The interesting question about the 95 theses is not why Luther rote them, but why they had any impact at all. Martin Luther stands at the end of a mile long queue of learned and sometimes less learned men who railed against the decadence of the church, called for a return to the actual text of the bible and demanded that the clergy lives like the apostles. But somehow the message on that fateful day in 1517 gained traction across the Christian world in a way no previous attempt had.
Why? That is a question I believe will be the guiding line through the coming seasons. Something about the social, political, cultural, religious and economic landscape of early modern Germany must have provided the cinder on which protestant ideas could catch fire.
You will now ask, why is Dirk talking about the Reformation. The last season ended on the 14th century, a good 150 years before “the day that changed western Christianity”. Aren’t we supposed to go through this chronologically.
Oh yes we are. But as we are moving forward at our accustomed pace we will hit the Hussite revolt that started in 1415. This religious uprising has so many common threads with Luther’s reformation, it may be seen as a dress rehearsal for the actual Reformation. Luther himself declared in 1519 “Ich bin ein Hussite” I am a Hussite.
Spoiler alert, the Hussite revolt did not lead to the fraction of the catholic church, but that makes it even more interesting. What were the circumstances that led the people of Bohemia and many other parts of the empire to take up arms to defend their convictions, how come they were successful and by what means could a reconciliation be achieved? Knowing that will help us understand why a 150 years later such a settlement failed to materialize, dividing Europe into Protestants and Catholics and spurning some of the bloodiest civil wars in history.
To explore the causes and impact of this reformation before the reformation we will take a look at the decline of the house of Luxemburg, the emergence of the Ottoman empire, the creation of Burgundy as a political entity separate from France, the defeat of the Teutonic Knights and the great western schism with its resolution at the Council of Constance where amongst other things Jan Hus was convicted and burned at the stake. We will dive into Jan Hus’ and his predecessor’s thoughts and convictions as well as the military innovations of Jan Zizka and probably a lot more things I have not yet thought about.
The music for the show is Flute Sonata in E-flat major, H.545 by Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach (or some claim it as BWV 1031 Johann Sebastian Bach) performed and arranged by Michel Rondeau under Common Creative Licence 3.0.
As always:
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To make it easier for you to share the podcast, I have created separate playlists for some of the seasons that are set up as individual podcasts. they have the exact same episodes as in the History of the Germans, but they may be a helpful device for those who want to concentrate on only one season.
So far I have:
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen
The Hussite Wars from 1419 to 1435 tore apart the medieval world. This revolution created a new way to think about the world and about faith that had not been seen before, nor had anyone seen Jan Zizka's deadly military inventions.
This podcast is part of the broader History of the Germans podcast that aims to track the history of the German people from the Early Middle Ages to Reunification in 1991. If you enjoy this show, check out any of the other seasons or follow the main show.
So far I have the following seasons:
The Ottonians (919 AD-1024 AD)
Salian Emperors and Investiture Controversy (1024 AD-1125 AD)
Fredrick Barbarossa and Early Hohenstaufen (1125-1190)
Frederick II Stupor Mundi (1190-1268)
Saxony and Eastward Expansion
The Hanseatic League
The Teutonic Knights
The Holy Roman Empire (1250 AD -1356 AD)
The Reformation before the Reformation (1356AD -1439 AD)
The Empire in the 15th Century
The Fall and Rise of the Habsburgs (1439AD -1519 AD)
Hello and welcome to season
nine, Reformation before the Reformation,
the Great Western Schism, the
Hussite wars and the rise of the
Ottomans.
On 31st of October 1517, a
hitherto unknown professor at the
smallish University of
Wittenberg published 95 theses.
And by doing so, he unleashed
a sequence of events that would fundamentally
change the face of Europe and
still defines communities and nations.
The interesting question about
the 95 theses is not why Luther wrote
them, but why they had any
impact at all.
Martin Luther stands at the
end of a mile long queue of learned
and sometimes less learned men
who railed against the decadence
of the Church, called for a
return to the actual text of the
Bible and demanded that the
clergy lives like the apostles.
But somehow, the message on
that fateful day in 1517 gained traction
across the Christian world in
a way no previous attempt had before.
Why now?
That is a question I believe
will be the guiding line through
the coming seasons.
Something about the social,
political, cultural, religious and
economic landscape of early
modern Germany must have provided
the cinder on which the
Protestant ideas could catch fire.
Now you will ask, why is Dirk
talking about the Reformation?
The last season ended on the
late 14th century, a good 150 years
before the day that changed
Western Christianity.
Aren't we supposed to go
through all this chronologically?
Oh, yes, we are.
But as we are moving forward
at our accustomed pace, we will hit
the Hussite revolt that
started in 1415.
And this religious uprising
has so many common threads with Luther's
Reformation, it may be seen as
a dress rehearsal for the actual
event.
Luther himself declared in
1519, Ich bin ein Huss sitte, I'm
a Hussite.
The Hussite revolt did not
lead to the fraction of the Catholic
Church.
But that makes it even more interesting.
What were the circumstances
that led the people of Bohemia and
many other parts of the Empire
to take up arms to defend their convictions?
How come they were successful?
And by what means could a
reconciliation ultimately be achieved?
Knowing that will help us
understand why, 150 years later,
such a settlement failed to
materialize, dividing Europe into
Protestants and Catholics and
spurning some of the bloodiest civil
wars in history.
To explore the causes and the
impact of this Reformation before
the Reformation, we will have
to take a look at the decline of
the House of Luxembourg, the
emergence of the Ottoman Empire,
the creation of Burgundy as a
political entity separate from France,
the defeat of the Teutonic
Knights, and the Great Western Schism
with its resolution at the
Council of Constance, where, amongst
other things, Jan Hus was
convicted and burned at the stake.
We will dive into Jan Hu's and
his predecessors thoughts and convictions
as well as the military
innovations of Jan Shizka and probably
a lot more things I have not
yet even thought about.
Now that is quite a list of
very diverse topics, which is why
we'll have to change the
structure of our narrative.
So far our storylines have
mainly followed along with the lives
of kings and emperors, not
necessarily because they were great
men driving events, but
because events centered around them,
making their lives a good
crutch to hang the story on.
The period we are now entering
was different.
In the late 14th and early
15th century, the rulers of the Holy
Roman Empire were on many
occasions tangential to the overall
picture or even completely
absent from the stage.
So to give a proper account we
will therefore have to look at things
from multiple viewpoints.
Events or people who have
taken top billing in one episode
may make cameo appearances in
others, all in the hope of painting
a broad picture of this
fascinating period in history.
It will be challenging, but
also hopefully fun and interesting.
Ok, but before we start, I
have to come to you Cap in the History
of the Germans podcast is
entirely free for anyone to enjoy,
even to enjoy without advertising.
Which means the funding for it
has to come from somewhere.
And that somewhere is the
generosity of our patrons who make
their ongoing monthly
contributions from £2amonth on patreon.com
historyofthegermans or through
a one time donation on historyofthegermans.com
support.
And why don't you join them?
And let's thank Jean Louis S,
Jocelyn hs, Marina H, Marc S, Michael
E and Miroslav D.
Who who have made such
generous one time donations already.
And with that back to the show
last season we kicked off with a
10,000ft overview of where we
were, what had happened before, and
where the tides of history
were ebbing and flooding.
I think that worked quite well
and it gives listeners who are coming
new to the history of the
Germans a chance to catch up.
If you're one of them, you're
most welcome.
Our starting point for this
season is November 1378, most precisely
the 29th of November, the day
the Emperor, King of the Romans,
King of Italy and King of
Burgundy, Karl Charles Carrel IV
breathed his last.
So why that date?
It's because we're at the
point of transition from the Middle
Ages to the early modern
period, and Carl IV and his Golden
Bull were in many respects the
endpoint of some key historical trends
that had dominated the Middle Ages.
But what does transition from
Middle Ages to early Modern actually
mean?
In what way is this new epoch
different from what went on before?
The answer is in almost every
possible economic, social, political,
cultural and religious.
So let's start with the economy.
The Middle ages from the 10th
century onwards were a period of
sustained economic growth,
driven by a combination of improving
climate conditions, the so
called Medieval Warm Period and a
series of improvement to
agricultural techniques.
For instance, the use of
heavier ploughs drawn by horses,
something made possible by the
invention of the horse collar and
the horseshoe.
Another key invasion was crop
rotation that hugely increased yields.
And social change, namely the
replacement of slavery with serfdom
and then with tenancy
agreements pushed productivity.
These improvements drove a
rapid rise in population, which in
turn brought more and more
land under cultivation.
For Britain, where we have
reasonable data, the population rose
from 1 million to 5 to 6
million between the post Roman period
and the year 1300.
By then, that is, by 1300,
about 10.5 million acres had been
put under the plough again, a
roughly threefold increase from the
Roman period.
At these levels, most regions
in Western Europe had reached saturation,
which led to a huge migration
eastwards, where almost 10% of the
population of the empire left
their overcrowded homes in the Rhineland,
in Flanders, Holland and
elsewhere to search for pastures
new in what is today East
Germany, but also in Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Czechia, the Baltic
States, Prussia and even further
afield.
This medieval warming period
ended in the middle or end of the
13th century.
And by the 14th century Europe
was gradually getting colder, a process
called the Little Ice Age that
peaked in the 16th and 17th century
and lasted until the mid 19th.
Severe famines, as one had not
seen for centuries, began in the
1310s.
Natural catastrophes became
more common.
The Grote Mandrenke, the great
drowning of men in 1362, killed roughly
25,000 people, sank the town
of Runghold in frisia and turned
5,000 square kilometers of
land into a shallow sea off the Dutch
coast, an area far larger than
the Eiselmeer and Makhmir that remain
of it.
The biggest humanitarian
disaster was, however, the Black
Death, the plague that killed
roughly a third of Europe's population
and kept returning in regular
intervals for centuries.
The combination of these two
effects, the climate and the plague,
meant that growth stalled and
populations shrunk.
Much of the land that had been
cultivated in the 13th century was
no longer viable in the 14th,
and it was also no longer needed,
as there were less mouse to feed.
This change in population and
economics then drove social change.
The dramatic cull of people
during the Plague often hit the cities
harder than the countryside,
as people lived closer together there.
For some cities, the Black
Death brought about rapid decline.
Some vanished completely, but
those that survived quickly filled
up again.
They had not lost their
economic advantages, which meant
that there were suddenly a
large number of job openings.
For many a peasant tired of
paying ever increasing rents to their
landlord, life in the city
became an attractive proposition.
So these surviving country
dwellers left for the bright lights
and freedoms of the towns and cities.
And that not just happened
during the great plague of 1348-52,
but again during all the
subsequent outbreaks that occurred
every 10 to 15 years.
Now, this in turn caused some
serious problems for the landowners,
in particular for the knightly class.
They had so far benefited from
the population explosion that had
created an almost
inexhaustible supply of cheap labor
to toil on their estates,
either as tenants or as farm hands.
But now that well had dried
up, first through the disease and
then the rural exodus that followed.
If they wanted to keep their
workforce, they had to pay them fair
wages.
The bank of England did an
analysis of wages going back to the
13th century.
And the period of the Black
Death was the only time before the
Industrial Revolution when
real incomes increased.
Great for peasants pockets,
but a severe cut to the baronial
profits.
Profits already depleted by
the decline in prices.
Prices had dropped because,
well, there were simply less people
around demanding foodstuff.
As the knights, these
embodiments of the medieval world,
saw their financial resources
shrink, they experienced another,
even harsher hit to their
social standing.
For centuries, the knight in
his metal cocoon, riding his mighty
war horse, was a leopard tank
of his day, a weapon so powerful
only another knight could
stand up to it.
But that time was coming to an end.
The battles of Morgarten,
Muldorf and in Flanders had had shown
that infantry armed with
halberds and cunning could inflict
serious damage on armoured riders.
The success of the English
longbowmen at Crecy and Poitiers
should have penetrated the
minds of the French nobility as much
as it did their armor, though
they still needed another reminder.
At Agincourt, cannons appear
from the late 14th century, at which
point the hegemony of the
knights on the battlefield is well
and truly over.
Moreover, tactics changed.
The amateurish armies of
volunteers that were the mainstay
of the Middle Ages were
replaced by bands of professional
soldiers.
The practice began in Italy,
where the city councils got used
to hiring condottiere to fight
their wars, rather than sending their
precious sons out to the battlefield.
The Hundred Years War saw the
Rise of the compagnie of mercenaries
Offering their services to
either party in the conflict and
the civil wars of the
interregnum in the empire were decided
by who could hire and pay the
best mercenaries.
As the knights declined, their
role at the top of the tree in the
councils of the princes and
emperors was taken by the merchants,
bankers and lawyers.
When in the 12th century,
Frederick Barbarossa's main advisors
had been the Duke Otto von
Wittelsbach and Reinhold von Dassel,
the Archbishop of Cologne, 200
years later, Emperor Carl IV's chancery
was staffed with lawyers from
the lower nobility or city patricians.
He listened more to the advice
of his Nuremberg bankers, who could
provide him with cash to pay
for his mercenary armies or his acquisitions,
and in whose mansions he much
rather stayed than in some drafty
castle.
The rise of the merchants and
bankers was no coincidence.
Trade networks expanded in the
13th and 14th century.
Ships had become larger.
Transport costs were falling.
Shipping bulk goods, wheat,
herring, wood, ash, base metals,
even ore became viable
businesses alongside the longer established
trade in spices, furs and beeswax.
This was the height of the
power of the Hanseatic League that
gained a near monopoly on the
east west trade all the way from
Novgorod and Bergen to Bruges
and London.
A specific area of growth for
the German cities and Nuremberg in
particular, were advances in metallurgy.
Mining and smelting had always
been a key industry in the German
lands, ever since the silver
mines of Goslar opened in the 10th
century.
But in the 14th century, new
technologies were developed.
One particular breakthrough
exploited the fact that most copper
ore in Europe contained traces
of silver.
The secret Zeiger process,
developed by a Nuremberg merchant,
enabled them to separate the
two metals.
It made the copper purer and
hence more valuable, and left behind
an amount of silver as a windfall.
And this process was
extraordinarily lucrative.
Traders could make six times
from the sale of the copper and silver
than they had to pay for the
copper ore.
As economic activity in the
cities thrived, they were able to
translate this into influence
and political independence.
Under the feudal system that
prevailed across Europe, cities were
subject to the ownership
rights of the prince on whose territory
they were located and whose
forefathers had often founded them
in the first place.
But over time, some cities in
the empire have been able to shake
off their overlord.
Places like Cologne,
Regensburg, Mainz and Strasbourg
had paid off or chased off
their bishops who had once ruled
over them and had become free
cities then.
The cities that were located
on royal land benefited from the
weakness of the central power.
They would proudly declare
allegiance to the emperor and, under
duress, pay him taxes.
But in all other respects,
these imperial cities were as free
as the free cities.
Then you have places like
Hamburg, where the city council simply
forged a charter that had
declared them a free and imperial
city and pushed this claim
through by force, force and fortune.
But even where formal
overlordship remained, as was the
case with most members of the
Hanseatic League, the cities enjoyed
a large degree of freedom, at
least in the 14th and 15th century.
Which now gets us to the
overall political picture.
The great medieval dynasties
of the Ottonians, the Salians and
the Hohenstaufen had expired
by 1268, a centuries long conflict
with the papacy over
leadership of Christianity and repeated
attempts to bring northern
Italy to heel had ended with a comprehensive
defeat of imperial power.
The last of These emperors,
Frederick II, had died in 1250.
Excommunicated militarily and
physically exhausted and increasingly
paranoid, his son Conrad was
never crowned king of the Romans
and perished in the attempt to
defend his kingdom of Sicily against
Charles of Anjou, the papal champion.
The last of the dynasty,
Conradin died aged just 17, on the
executioner's block in Naples,
having failed to oust the usurper
of the Sicilian crown.
After that, the empire had no
effective leadership for two decades.
Two foreigners, Alfonso X of
Castile and Richard of Cornwall,
were simultaneously elected as
kings of the Romans, but neither
could assert much authority.
In 1273, the Prince Electus.
At that point, a still
somewhat fluid group in elected Rudolf
of Habsburg, a count from the
Aargau in modern day Switzerland.
Rudolf was a truly impressive figure.
A ruthless warrior, but
commensurate strategist and politician.
He had profited enormously
from the collapse of the Hohenstaufen
power, taking over lands and
cities previously held by the imperial
family.
He was, however, still only a
count, and his family had been relative
parvenus.
That may have been the reason
the electors chose him, believing
he would be a weak ruler who
would grant them whatever rights
and privileges they desired.
As it turned out, Rudolf was
nothing of that sort.
He initiated a restitution
policy, forcing princes and bishops
to hand back the formerly
royal lands to the king.
Peter Wilson estimated that
roughly two thirds of the former
imperial resources were recovered.
Rudolf also embarked on a
confrontation with the richest and
most powerful of the imperial
princes, King Ottokar II of Bohemia,
the Golden King.
Relying on the large silver
mines in Kutna Ora, Ottokar II had
expanded his realm by
acquiring Austria, Styria, Carinthia
and what is now Friul and Slovenia.
Rudolf outmanoeuvred Ottokar
and forced him to hand him the Austrian
duchies.
In a subsequent battle, Rudolf
defeated Ottokar ii, who died in
the field.
And with that, the Habsburgs
took over Austria, which over time
became the center of their power.
Upon Rudolf's death, the
electors refused to elect Rudolf's
son, which would have created
a new royal or even imperial dynasty.
Instead, they chose another
little Count, Adolf von Nasser.
Now Otto tried the same trick,
this time going after the land graveyard
of Thuringia.
But that plan failed.
He irritated the Prince
Electus, who then deposed him and
called back Albrecht von
Habsburg, the son of Rudolf they
had previously rejected.
Albrecht defeated and killed
Adolf and took control of the empire.
Now Albrecht's main interest
was now to further expand his and
his family's possessions.
And the golden opportunity of
the time was the Kingdom of Bohemia,
where King Ottokar's family,
the premislids, had died out.
There was a lot of back and
forth, and just when Albrecht was
preparing for another invasion
of Bohemia, he was murdered by his
nephew.
Now Adolf and Albrecht
represented a new approach to the
role of King of the Romans.
These men looked at the title
only as a way to expand their personal
wealth, in particular using
the royal prerogative to claim fiefs
that had become vacant upon
the extinction of the vassal's family.
The empire and its interests
were clearly secondary.
Their successor was another
little Count, Henry of Luxembourg,
and the calculation of the
prince electors was again the same
as before.
Let's get someone with limited
resources on the throne and then
push him round.
And again their gamble did not
work out.
Henry VII was cut from a
different cloth.
He had grown up at the French
court and had a much broader perspective.
He saw that unless he gained
the imperial crown through a coronation
in Rome, the imperial title,
and with it political power over
the empire would inevitably
fall to the French king.
Henry VII therefore set off
for Italy, the first emperor to be
crowned in Rome for almost a century.
But apart from the coronation,
his stay in Italy was a terrible
failure.
Like his predecessors, he was
dragged into protected Italian domestic
conflicts that he could not resolve.
His army perished before the
walls of Brescia.
His beloved wife succumbed to
disease and so did he just a year
later.
But the House of Luxembourg
did receive a windfall.
Profit, profit they did not
even aspire to.
And it was the most valuable
of them, the Kingdom of Bohemia.
The Bohemian nobles, who had
retained the right to choose their
ruler, offered the crown to
John, the son of Henry vii.
Though Henry saw it as a
distraction from his main objective,
the Roman coronation.
He was persuaded to let the
Bohemians take his son home as their
new king.
John of Luxembourg would later
become famous as the Blind King of
Bohemia, whose rather
pointless chivalric deeds at the
Battle of Crecy gained him the
respect of Edward the Black Prince
of Wales.
After Henry VII's death, we
have another simultaneous election
of two kings of the Ludwig of
Wittelsbach, Duke of Upper Bavaria,
and Frederick of Habsburg,
Duke of Austria.
In 1322, Ludwig did emerge
victorious at the Battle of Muldorf
and becomes the undisputed king.
But by then, imperial power
was already so diminished that title,
its resources and
prerogatives, added only marginal
advantages to its holder.
The political landscape had
become a system of three roughly
equal sized power structures.
The House of Habsburg centered
around Austria and their holdings
in southwest Germany, Alsace
and Switzerland, the Luxembourgs
as Kings of Bohemia and Counts
of Luxembourg, and the Wittelsbachs
as Dukes of Bavaria and Counts
Palatinate on the rhine.
During the 30 year long reign
of Ludwig the Bavarian, the three
parties carved up all vacating fiefs.
Between them, the Habsburgs
received Carinthia, the Wittelsbachs,
Brandenburg and Holland,
Hennegau and the Luxembourgs.
Silesia.
Where they clashed, was over
the county of Tyrol, which controlled
the important transalpine
routes, including the Brenner Pass.
John of Luxembourg got their
first, gaining the hands of the heirs
of these lands, Margarete
Maltas, for his son Johann Heinrich.
However, that relationship
broke down and Margarete threw the
Luxembourger out and married
the son of Ludwig the Bavarian, without
prior divorce.
Oh, scandal.
In the end, after Margarete's
only child had died, she handed the
county over to the Habsburgs,
where it remained.
Now Ludwig managed to keep a
lid on all these conflicts until
in 1347, the cattle boiled over.
The Luxembourg party elevated
Karl, the son of the Blind King of
Bohemia, to become King of the Romans.
Karl managed to overcome his
opposition, partially because both
Ludwig the Bavarian and the
next champion of the Wittelsbach
cause both died, but mainly
through bribery.
And these bribes were
astronomical, adding up to about
1.6 million gold florins.
To raise these funds, Karl
sold, pawned and granted away almost
all that was left of the royal
lands and rights.
Though he bought some of it
back later, the net result was that
from now on, any holder of the
royal or imperial title had to fund
pretty much the entirety of
their administration from their personal
fortune, and only very few could.
Carl IV reigned for 30 years,
a period during which he stabilized
the situation in the German
lands and issued the most significant
constitutional document in the
14th the Golden Bull.
The Golden Bull did actually
not say anything fundamentally new.
It set out that the King of
the Romans was elected by a majority
of the seven electors, these
being the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne
and Trier, the King of
Bohemia, the Duke of Saxon Wittenberg,
the Count Palatinate on the
Rhine, and the Margrave of Brandenburg.
These electors had been set
more or less since the election of
Rudolf von Habsburg in 1273.
So all the Golden Bull did was
to clarify exactly which branch of
the respective houses was
allowed to vote.
It set out the voting process,
location and the like.
It also granted the prince
elector's king like status in their
own lands.
They enjoyed all formerly
royal rights and privileges, like
the establishment of tolls,
the raising of taxes, the minting
of coins, the building of
castles and the establishment of
cities.
Their subjects had only
limited recourse to imperial justice.
Basically, they were
completely autonomous, though still
part of the empire.
But again, that was not really
a change from the status quo, just
a written confirmation of it.
The significance of the Golden
Bull lay less in what it said than
what it did not say.
The Golden Ball makes no
mention of the Pope at all.
And by this omission it
asserts that the Pope has no role
in the choice of the future emperor.
Hitherto, the popes had
declared an explicit right of approbation.
That is, they reserved the
right to reject the election if they
did not agree with what came out.
This was one of the
manifestations of the superiority
of the popes over the emperors
that had been the key intellectual
and political battleground of
the Middle Ages.
Pope John XXII and Ludwig the
Bavarian had clashed over exactly
this question.
The approbation.
This conflict resulted in the
excommunication of Ludwig, his family,
and in the end, the entire empire.
Ludwig managed to hold on to
his throne and gained the support
of the imperial bishops,
abbots and clergy in his defiance
of the papacy.
He even got crowned in Rome,
not by the Pope or cardinal, but
by the people and Senate of
Rome, much like the pagan empress
of old at the Kufere Ein
Suriens, the electors asserted their
right to elect the future
emperor without any interference
from the papacy.
This statement was obviously
not recognized by the papacy.
But when Carl IV issued the
Golden Bull, which in a more elegant
way said exactly the same
thing, the Pope did not object too
loudly.
And that brought the long
lasting papal imperial conflict,
that central axis of medieval
politics, to an end and laid the
foundations for a new
constitution of the empire.
As yet unknown.
If we sum up the political
situation over these 125 odd years
from 1250 to the death of Karl
IV in 1378, we one question should
come up which how could the
empire afford a hollowed out central
authority, squabbling princes,
excessive bribery and a papal interdict
on top?
Why did they not get invaded?
Any other state with that
level of dysfunction would not have
been able to maintain its
territorial integrity.
And that gets us to something
that nobody ever seems to mention.
For almost 300 years, ever
since the battle on the Lechfeld
in 955, there had not been any
external threat to the empire's borders.
And this is truly astounding.
If you look at France and its
constant wars with England, Spain's
Reconquista, the never ending
wars between the Scandinavian kingdoms,
Poland's conflict with the
Lithuanians and the Teutonic Knights,
it becomes clear that in this
respect the Holy Roman empire in
the 13th and 14th century was
an exception.
Basically, the empire was
exceedingly lucky.
On its eastern border, Poland
had disintegrated into dozens and
dozens of smallish duchies
ruled by descendants of King Boleslav
III the Rymouth.
The powers to the east of
Poland had been wiped out by the
Mongols, who themselves made
only one brief effort to move west
before their urge for conquest
died down.
So instead of being a threat
to the empire, Poland and the east
became an area of conquest and immigration.
First the buffer states of the
Slavic Wends between the Elbe and
the Polish border were taken
over by Saxon nobles who founded
Brandenburg and then the
various Saxon duchies.
Some of the Slavic elite, like
the Dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania,
were co opted into the Empire.
The Teutonic Knights were
called in by a Polish duke to deal
with the pagan Pruzzi and
established the order's state.
In Prussia, the Hanseatic
League founded cities all along the
Baltic coast.
Equally, the Hungarians had
integrated into the west and Bohemia
was part of the Empire.
The Scandinavians in the north
were preoccupied with their constant
wars of succession, often
finding themselves dependent upon
the Counts of Holstein or the
Dukes of Mecklenburg or dealing with
the Hanseatic League.
Finally, in the west, the
kings of France had focused on their
internal consolidation rather
than outward expansion.
Their 200 year wars against
their largest vassal, the King of
England, left little resources
for forays eastwards.
As for the south, Italy was a
key battleground for medieval imperial
politics.
But there was always more of a
civil war between the papal and imperial
faction, not a war of conquest.
As we head into the end of the
14th and 15th century, this picture
changed considerably.
The kingdom of Poland
recovered from centuries of total
fragmentation.
Under Ladislaw the Elbow High
and Casimir the Great.
The Piast duchies united back
into a kingdom and took an ever more
aggressive stance against the
Teutonic knights and the encroaching
margraves of Brandenburg.
At the same time, King Louis
the Great of Hungary led a renaissance
of Hungarian power and played
a key role in imperial politics.
And all that happened on the
doorstep of Bohemia, the main power
base of the imperial family.
Equally, the French monarchy
had started nibbling away at the
French speaking imperial
bishoprics of Cambrai, Toul, Verdun,
Metz and Liege.
Further south, Provence, still
part of the kingdom of the Arelat,
and hence imperial territory,
was ruled by a cadet branch of the
French royal family.
The Franche Comte, once home
to Barbarossa's wife Beatrice, was
gradually transferred to
France in the 14th century.
The issue of French
encroachment became an increasingly
important topic, in particular
under the Luxembourg emperors Henry
VII and Carl iv, who hailed
from that area.
Carl IV used the weakness of
the French monarch after their defeat
at the battles of Crecy and
Poitiers to to reassert imperial
authority by holding a massive
diet in Metz in 1356, where the Golden
Bull was finally proclaimed.
However, once France had
regained the territory ceded to the
English in the Treaty of
Brittany, they turned their gaze
again eastwards to the empire.
In the last year of his life,
Emperor Carl IV travelled to France
to find a compromise with
Charles V over the former kingdom
of Burgundy and and the
succession to the Hungarian and Polish
thrones.
In this deal.
Details are unknown.
It seems as if Karl IV had
handed over de facto control of Provence
and the Rhone valley to the
French crown in exchange for his
son's succession in Hungary.
What we can conclude from that
is that the main political axis had
shifted from north, south to
east west.
In the Middle Ages, emperors
were focused on Italy and on the
papacy.
But by the end of the 14th
century, most of time and effort
is spent on France, Poland and Hungary.
And just generally, the center
of power in the empire has shifted
east.
The medieval emperors had
their main landholdings and support
base in the south and along
the Rhine River.
But now, under Karl iv,
imperial power relies on Bohemia,
with its satellites Silesia
and Moravia, and the recently acquired
Margraviad of Brandenburg.
With external pressures
mounting, fundamental reform of the
empire becomes ever more pressing.
To put that into perspective,
King Edward III of England had borrowed
1.1 million gold florin to
fight the Hundred Years War against
the French.
The total income of the
emperor from his imperial resources
was now just 20,000.
If he wanted to raise
exceptional taxes, the only place
he could do that was in the
imperial cities that would occasionally
heed his demands, but not always.
The other source of funds were
the merchant bankers in these cities,
who lent considerable amounts
against huge interest and upon handover
of valuable collateral.
Despite their importance for
the functioning of the empire, by
1378, the cities were most
unhappy with the state of affairs
being dependent upon trade.
Their main concern was the
safety of the roads and rivers, the
the tolls charged, and the
stability of the currency.
When Carl IV designed the
Golden Bull, he initially wanted
to address all three subjects.
He aimed for a communal policy
on coinage, guaranteeing the levels
of precious metal content,
restrictions on tolls and a general
peace.
A landfrieden.
The Landfrieden would have
been a permanent ban on private violence,
requiring the princes to
eradicate the robber barons and recognize
a system of law courts that
based their decisions on written
laws.
In exchange, the cities would
have to refrain from forming leagues
and associations for mutual support.
A doing all these things by themselves.
But these provisions were
never passed.
In the negotiations, the
princes managed to water the rules
on mints, tolls and the peace
down to practically zero.
All that was left in the
Golden Bull was the ban on the formation
of city leagues.
So no points to Gryffindor for
figuring out what happened next.
With the central government
unable to guarantee safety from illegal
and legal robbery, the cities
defied the Golden Bull.
The Swabian cities, most of
them imperial ones, formed a league
led by the city of Ulm.
They refused to swear
allegiance to Karl's son Wenceslas,
which resulted in a war.
The Imperial army failed to
scale the walls of Ulm, and the Emperor
had to reach for a compromise
that sanctioned the Swabian League.
And the war boosted the
confidence of the citizens of Ulm
to a point that they gave
their parish church, the Ulma Munster,
the tallest church tower in
the world.
Or at least they tried.
The tower was only completed
in the 19th century.
Another, even more unusual
league formed in the southwest imperial
cities of Zurich, Berne and
Lucerne, joined the forest cantons
of Uri, Schwitz and Nied
Walden in an agreement of mutual
support.
Support against their not
really that oppressive overlords,
the House of Habsburg.
But it's not only the
economic, social and political culture
that has fundamentally changed
by the middle of the 14th century.
There is also a huge cultural
shift when we talk about culture
in the Middle Ages, what we're
actually talking about is religion,
and even more specifically,
the Church and its head, the papacy.
Ever since the 10th century,
religious history was driven by the
constant demand for reform of
the Church.
Given the importance the
afterlife played in the minds of
people in the Middle Ages, the
quality of the church personnel who
performed the holy sacraments
was of crucial importance.
A sinner wanted to be sure
that his absolution was valid, so
that his time in purgatory was
really shortened.
And for the sacrament, be it
Eucharist, baptism, confession, confirmation
or last rites, to be valid, it
had to be performed accurately, something
only a competent and properly
anointed priest could ensure.
And even though the papacy had
confirmed many times that even sacraments
administered by unworthy
clergymen in an inaccurate manner
were valid, the people still
demanded better.
And these reform efforts came
in waves.
Once disappointment with the
established church reached boiling
point, reformers gained
traction, proposing changes.
The Cluniac abbots, St Peter
Damien Anselm of Canterbury, preached
reform in the 11th century,
Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th
and St Francis in the 13th.
For most of this period, the
papacy was able to retain control
over the reform process.
They usually achieved that by
co opting the movements into their
system, be it as Cluniacs,
Cistercians or Franciscans.
This, combined with the
relentless persecution of those reformers
they branded heretics, kept
the popes in charge.
But in the 14th century, the
Papacy lost control of the reform
agenda.
They had moved to Avignon,
where they spent their days under
the watchful eye of the French
monarch and doing their bidding even
when it was sanctioning a raid
on the Templar Order.
In this period, the Church
became much more efficient as an
organization, gaining more and
more control over the local bishoprics
and even individual clergy positions.
At the same time, it also
improved its fiscal capabilities,
collecting tithes more
consistently, drawing the first year
income of newly elected
bishops and clergymen, and issued
indulgences as a way to
monetize their store of holiness.
This process made the Avignon
papacy appear greedy and worldly
to the common man.
And moreover, it made it
unpopular with the local clergy,
whose autonomy and income they
had seized.
Pope John xxii, a lawyer more
than a theologian, put oil in the
fire when he pressured the
Franciscan order to give up its vows
of poverty.
He reasoned that the image of
a poor Franciscan habit next to a
bejewelled cardinal made the
latter look bad.
This debate that had quickly
become a debate over whether the
Church as a whole should be as
poor as Jesus had been had a devastating
impact on the perception of
the papacy.
The pope was seen as endorsing
the worldliness of the Church rather
than fighting it.
And worldly the Church had become.
Teenage archbishops, drunk
parsons, dissolute monks and lustful
nuns returned, not just as
tropes in folktales and bawdy songs.
Having lost the moral high
ground, the popes saw their hold
on political power wane when
Pope John XXII excommunicated the
elected king of the Romans,
Ludwig IV the Bavarian.
The move backfired badly.
Ludwig marshalled a coalition
between the Franciscan dissenters
and the Imperial Church
against the Pope for almost 30 years.
Did the Church in German lands
live outside the reach and in defiance
of the papacy?
Even when the papal candidate,
Carl IV replaced Ludwig, he quickly
shed the mantle of papal prodigy.
Nobody wanted to be a
Pfaffenkoenig, a pet of the Church.
Carl IV did formally reconcile
the Empire with the Holy See, and
the interdict was lifted.
But the hold of the pope over
the empire was broken, as the Golden
Bull made clear, the
calamities of the papacy did not
end with the golden bull.
In 1377, Pope Gregory XI
returned to Rome from Avignon.
But there he died.
Just months later, the
cardinals elected a new pope, Urban
vi.
How free and fair this
election was depends on what impact
one ascribes to the Roman mob
that had gathered outside, threatening
to kill everyone inside unless
they chose a Roman pope.
So once back in Avignon, the
cardinals declared the election of
Urban VI null and void and
elected a new one, Clement vii.
We now have two popes.
Urban VI was recognized by
several powers, including the emperor
and the king of England,
whilst Clement VII relied mainly
on French support.
The great Western schism was born.
As the two popes were
preoccupied with their internal squabbles,
hope for church reform receded
further and further.
The inability of the papacy to
lead a successful reform program
left a void.
Whenever that had happened in
the Middle Ages, the emperors had
occupied this empty space,
claiming universal responsibility
for Christendom.
But that claim had moved so
far away from political realities
of the day, even pious rulers
like Carl IV could not really take
up the mantle anymore.
Which meant the reformed
debate was left to the laity and
the intellectuals.
Men like Dante, William of
Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Petrarch
developed entirely new
concepts on how the church should
be organized.
Marsilius, who's one of the
most unfairly overlooked political
thinkers in European history,
was the most radical in his defense
of Patcis, the defender of the
peace he declared that all laws that
bind men in the here and now
derive their legitimacy from the
acclamation of the people.
A ruler rules only on the
support of the ruled, not by divine
right.
Hence, in the empire, it is
the emperor who makes the laws in
agreement with the ruled,
represented by the prince electors.
The Pope, on the other hand,
has no power in the temporal world.
His realm is only the
spiritual world.
Marsilius writings gained a
lot of traction.
They were translated into
French, Italian and German, which
indicates they were read not
just by the Latin speaking intellectual
elite, but much more broadly.
Other thinkers, namely John
Wycliffe, who we have not yet talked
about, developed these ideas further.
What helped the spread of new
concepts were also the new universities
that had sprung up across
Central Europe.
Prague University opened in
1348, Krakow, 1364, Vienna Pest in
Hungary, 1367, Heidelberg,
Leipzig 1409 and Rostock in 1419.
Charismatic preachers spread
their message of the sinfulness of
the official church and the
urgent need for reform.
In particular in the empire,
which had been detached from the
papacy for decades.
Under Ludwig the Bavarian, the
population was already very sceptical
of the ability that reform
could be achieved from inside the
Church.
And that is where our story begins.
Next week we will kick off by
looking at Karl IV's successor, King
Wenceslas IV, who inherited
what looked like a stable and well
sorted reign, even though
several key reform projects were
still unfinished.
Will he be able to continue in
his father's footsteps, deliver the
Landfrieden, protect the
empire against its external foes
and resolve the great Western schism?
Well, let's see.
And whilst you wait, you may
want to brush up on some of the earlier
episodes that go into a lot
more depth on some of the topics
we've just discussed.
In particular the episodes
149, 151 where we discuss the reign
of Ludwig the Bavarian, which
was a crucial period when the empire
and the Church drifted apart.
Or if you need a refresher on
how the imperial power fell Apart,
the episodes 73, 77 traced the
story of the civil war between Philip
of Swabia and Otto IV that
brought a free for all for the imperial
princes, and then the early
years of Frederick ii, who had to
accept the status quo.
Or if you'd like to hear more
about the Hanseatic League or the
Teutonic Knights, you can find
these as separate podcasts, unimaginatively
titled the Hanseatic League
and the Teutonic Knights.
Wherever you find the history
of the Germans, you can listen to
all of these on
historyofthegermans.com as well,
where you can also support the
podcast by signing up as a patron
or by making a one time donation.
See you all next week.