Charles IV

Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1355-1378)

• Born: May 14, 1316
• Birthplace: Prague, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)
• Died: November 29, 1378
• Place of death: Prague, Bohemia (now in Czech Republic)

The greatest ruler of medieval Bohemia and the last important medieval Holy Roman Emperor, Charles was an efficient and effective administrator. He stabilized German political affairs, strengthened the power of his family in Bohemia and in Europe, and influenced the culture of his time.

Early Life

Charles was the oldest son of John of Luxembourg and the grandson of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII, who died in 1313. In the confused years following the death without direct heir of Wenceslaus (Václav) III, the last Přemyslid king of Bohemia, Henry had arranged for John to succeed to the Bohemian throne in 1310 and to marry Elizabeth, Wenceslaus's sister. This political marriage strengthened the Luxembourg position in Bohemia, and when Charles was born in 1316 the future of the new dynasty seemed assured.

Charles's early education was unsystematic. His mother schooled him in the traditions of government and foreign policy established by the last Přemyslids and instilled in him a love of the Bohemian land. His father, whose political and cultural tastes were oriented more toward France than toward Germany, involved him in many of his European ventures. John never felt particularly comfortable or welcome in Bohemia, and the time he spent there was chiefly for obtaining the financial resources to support his activities elsewhere. It was perhaps not surprising that he and Elizabeth should quarrel, and in 1323, he took Charles from Prague to Paris to be brought up at the court of King Charles IV of France. Periodically, John included his son on his numerous knightly campaigns. As a result, Charles rapidly learned the skills of survival in the world of political intrigue.

Charles's education was not, however, wholly practical and pragmatic. While in Paris, he made contact with the eloquent and learned abbot of Fécamp, Pierre Roger, whom he asked to become his tutor. Their friendship endured and was an important factor later, when Pierre became Pope Clement VI.

The next stage in Charles's education was in the arena of practical politics. In 1331, John took him on an expedition to Italy in support of Louis IV Wittelsbach of Bavaria, who had been Holy Roman Emperor since 1314. Charles was placed in a position of authority as imperial vicar in the region of Lombardy, and for two years he gained experience with the politically unstable world of the northern Italian communes. In October, 1333, he returned with his father to Bohemia, and the next year he was named margrave of Moravia. This position gave him royal power in the absence of the king, occasions that were frequent because of John's restless knight-errantry. For most of the period between 1334 and 1346, Charles was the de facto ruler of the kingdom of Bohemia. He governed wisely and well, restoring administrative efficiency and recovering many royal prerogatives and properties.

Life's Work

Events in 1346 changed Charles's status. Opposition to the rule of Louis IV had been growing in Germany, much of it fueled by hostility from the Papacy. When Pierre Roger became pope in 1342, he had embarked on a program to depose Louis and replace him with Charles. On July 11, 1346, a majority of electors in Germany withdrew support from Louis and elected Charles in his place. Although the electoral decision in 1346 was challenged, Charles's position was confirmed the following year when Louis died of a stroke. While some observers, both then and in later times, charged that Charles was a mere ecclesiastical puppet (they applied to him the derogatory term Pfaffenkönig, or papal king), the fact was that the Luxembourg family had an independent imperial tradition and Charles was a practiced and adroit politician who had broad support in Germany. His relations with the Papacy were to be close, but he was always an autonomous and powerful figure. Indeed, after Clement VI's death in 1352, Charles was really the dominant figure in continental Europe.

Immediately after his election, Charles left to join his father in a military campaign with the French against the English as a part of the Hundred Years’ War. At Crécy on August 26, John was led into battle by his retainers he had been blind for a number of years and in the subsequent French disaster, he was killed. Charles then withdrew from the conflict so that, as a contemporary observed, Bohemia would not lose two rulers in a single day. Now both emperor and king, Charles returned to Prague and began a thirty-two-year reign of great consequence for both Germany and Bohemia.

Charles's primary concern as ruler was the dynastic aggrandizement of his family. He increased the Crown lands in Bohemia and Moravia, added areas in Silesia to the family holdings, obtained the district of Eger (Cheb) on the border between Bohemia and the German lands, purchased the region of Lower Lusatia in 1367, and gained control of Brandenburg in 1373 in complicated negotiations with the Wittelsbach family and the Estates of Brandenburg. As a result, the Luxembourg family achieved a prominent position in Europe, one that may be compared with the later eminence of the Habsburg and Hohenzollern families.

Subordinate, but related, to Charles's dynastic interests was his royal policy in Bohemia. He tried to strengthen kingly power against the high Bohemian nobility. He prepared a written law code, known as the Majestas Carolina, which was submitted to the Bohemian Estates at the diet in 1355. They recognized the degree to which it would limit their traditional role as a law-interpreting body, and they refused to accept it. In other respects, and by other means, however, Charles was able to enhance royal authority. His support of urban development and commercial activity ushered in an era of prosperity for Bohemian cities. Charles used his position as emperor to ensure that Venetian trade routes with Bruges and London were shifted eastward in order to benefit the towns and merchants of his kingdom. Nowhere is Charles's impact more clearly seen than in Prague itself, for it was transformed into an imperial capital. Charles had already arranged in 1343 with his former tutor, now Pope Clement VI, to have Prague raised to an archdiocese. Now, as king, he undertook an extensive building program and founded a new commercial and settlement district.

In the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles pursued a policy that was realistic and moderate. He recognized that the centuries-long imperial tradition of trying to rule northern Italy as well as the German lands was an anachronism. He went to Italy to be crowned emperor in 1355, but he made no attempt to enforce imperial claims over the unstable and contentious communes of northern Italy. Elsewhere, he arranged to be crowned king of the old Burgundian royal domain of Arles in 1365. Nevertheless, Charles had no illusions that this kingdom could effectively be ruled as imperial territory. He eventually bestowed an imperial vicarate on the French dauphin for the whole kingdom except for the region of Savoy.

Charles's realism was best revealed in his issuance of the Golden Bull of 1356. This imperial constitution (named for the golden seal bulla) defined an orderly procedure for electing subsequent rulers; it identified the electors (four secular rulers and three ecclesiastical dignitaries), from whom a majority vote was necessary; it established the city of Frankfurt-am-Main as the meeting place for an election; and it prescribed the ceremonial procedural to be followed. While these details codified a process that had been evolving for a century, the bull nevertheless represented a statesmanlike resolution of problems that had plagued the empire for generations. Of particular note is the fact that the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria and the Habsburgs of Austria were excluded from the electorship. Moreover, there was no mention of papal prerogatives of assent to, or participation in, the election. Of equal importance for the future of German affairs was that the bull declared the electoral territories of the secular rulers to be indivisible and strengthened these electors in their own principalities to such a degree that they became practically sovereign rulers. Because the king of Bohemia was identified as one of the electors, Charles himself was confirmed in his territorial prerogatives. This accomplished what had earlier been frustrated in the Majestas Carolina.

Charles's activities were not limited to family affairs or internal politics. Within central Europe he was clearly the leading figure in relations with Poland, Hungary, and Austria. He tended to support France against England in the Hundred Years’ War. In his dealings with the Papacy, Charles promoted the popes’ return to Italy from Avignon, where they had been resident since the early fourteenth century. He was a supporter of ecclesiastical reform, both in Germany and especially in Bohemia. With the outbreak of the Great Schism (or Western Schism) in 1378, though he supported the Roman pope Urban VI, Charles tried to intervene to heal the division between the two claimants to the pontifical throne. His health failed him, however, and he died in Prague late in November, 1378.

Significance

From Charles's third marriage, to the niece of the Hungarian king, there came his son Wenceslaus (also spelled Wenzel or Václav), who was born in 1361 and who succeeded Charles without incident in 1378. This easy transition revealed the degree to which Charles had been successful in stabilizing and regulating German affairs. His statesmanship had given focus and direction to a process that had proceeded haphazardly in earlier generations. The effect of the Golden Bull of 1356 was not limited to the electors alone; in all the empire's principalities and city-states the same development toward territorial control may be observed. Charles recognized that the emperor had little power without a firm territorial base. His reign established the principality as the focus of German politics for the next several centuries.

Charles was also an influential religious and cultural patron. He was involved in the planning and building of the Gothic-style Saint Vitus's Cathedral in Prague, he endowed many religious establishments throughout the kingdom and the empire, and he himself wrote a biography of the patron saint of Bohemia, Saint Wenceslaus (c. 907-929). He also wrote a revealing autobiography, one of the few to come from a layperson in the medieval period. At his court, Charles entertained learned intellectuals and figures involved with the early Italian Renaissance. Charles was also patriotic about his Czech heritage. He referred to Bohemia as “the sweet soil of my native land,” he prided himself that he could speak the language “like any other Czech,” and he encouraged and patronized historians of Bohemia.

In 1347, Charles founded a university in Prague. It was the first north of the Alps and east of the Rhine. The University of Prague, which was allowed by the Papacy to have a theological faculty, quickly established its reputation under Charles's patronage as an important center of learning. By the end of the fourteenth century, it would become the European center of religious and theological controversy.

Charles's greatness lay not in wars waged or in conquests won but rather in his statesmanship, vision, and political realism. He was regarded by later Czech generations as “the father of his country.”

House of Luxembourg:

Reign

• Ruler

1308-1313

• Henry VII (crowned 1311)

1346-1378

• Charles IV (crowned 1355)

1378-1400

• Wenceslaus (deposed)

1410-1437

• Sigismund (crowned 1433)

Bibliography

Charles IV. Autobiography of Emperor Charles IV; and, His Legend of St. Wenceslas. Edited by Balázs Nagy and Frank Schaer, with an introduction by Ferdinand Seibt. New York: Central European University Press, 2001. Charles IV in his own words, available in English for the first time. Genealogical tables, maps, bibliographical references, indexes.

Du Boulay, F. R. Germany in the Later Middle Ages. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Although the scope of this volume goes far beyond the figure and rule of Charles, it is a useful book for understanding the larger context of Charles’s reign as well as some specific aspects of his rule in Germany. It was abreast of the most recent scholarship at the time of its publication. The treatment of towns, the Church, and the structures of society and governance is especially good. The section devoted specifically to Charles (pages 36-42) draws effectively on the important German biography by Ferdinand Seibt.

Jarrett, Bede. The Emperor Charles IV. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1935. This biography is largely uncritical and is based on secondary materials, with little reference to the sources. The one exception is that the author provides a partial translation of Charles’s autobiography. The translation is a loose one and misses many important nuances of this effort by Charles to present some of his imperial ideals, but it does communicate some of the directness of Charles’s literary style.

Krofta, Kamil. “Bohemia in the Fourteenth Century.” In Decline of Empire and Papacy. Vol. 7 in The Cambridge Medieval History/Middle Ages. 1932. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Though it deals with more than the reign of Charles, the primary focus of this chapter is on the years from 1333 to 1378. The political narrative is detailed and reliable, and the judgment on Charles is generally favorable. A good treatment of Charles in the context of Czech history.

Stoob, Heinz. Kaiser Karl IV. und seine Zeit. Graz, Austria: Styria, 1990. A rare biography, in German. Illustrations, maps on lining papers, bibliographical references, indexes.

Thomson, S. Harrison. “Learning at the Court of Charles IV.” Speculum 25 (1950): 1-20. A full and scholarly treatment of the cultural aspects of Charles’s reign. The author not only analyzes the formal literary and educational activities connected directly with Charles but also gives attention to the general cultural milieu, including the development of the Czech vernacular and the restructuring of the German language in the royal chancery.

Walsh, Gerald Groveland. The Emperor Charles IV, 1316-1378: A Study in Holy Empire Imperialism. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1924. Provides a short sketch of Charles’s imperial ideals but treats these in a rather old-fashioned way, reflecting many of the categories of nineteenth century German scholarship. There is very little discussion of Charles’s Bohemian policy and none of his leadership in the cultural sphere, except as it might be related to his political theory.

Waugh, W. T. “Germany: Charles IV.” In Decline of Empire and Papacy.Vol. 7 in The Cambridge Medieval History/Middle Ages. 1932. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1958. Treats the political details of Charles’s German policy in depth and with accuracy. The emphasis is on the way Charles maneuvered among the other political leaders in Europe and on his family policy. The evaluation of his accomplishments is generally negative. This is especially true with regard to what the author considers Charles’s surrender of imperial prerogatives.