LEWIS THE BAVARIAN AND THE AVIGNON POPES, 1314-1347
Disputed election to the Empire—Quarrel between Lewis IV. and John
XXII.—The Franciscans and the Pope—The Heresy of the Beatific
Vision—National feeling in Germany—Causes of the failure of Lewis as
Emperor—The Expedition of the Emperor to Italy—Lewis supports the
Anti-Pope—His retirement from Italy—His position in 1338—The
Succession question in the Tyrol—Election of Charles IV.—Death of
Lewis.
The death of the Emperor Henry VII. (1313) gave occasion for one of
those disputed elections which were almost inevitable as [Sidenote:
Disputed election in the Empire.] long as there was no central power
strong enough to control German factions, and as long as the rules or
custom of election were uncertain and ill-defined. The Hapsburgs eagerly
grasped at the opportunity of recovering the power they had lost by the
death of Albert I. Their opponents, headed as before by Baldwin of
Trier, passed over John of Bohemia on account of his youth, and put
forward as their candidate Lewis, Duke of Upper Bavaria. The rival
forces were not ill-balanced. On October 19, 1314, Frederick the
Handsome, son of Albert I., was chosen at Sachsenhausen by the
Archbishop of Köln, Henry of Carinthia, still claiming the crown of
Bohemia (see p. 18), the Elector Palatine, and the Duke of
Saxe-Wittenberg. On the following day five electors—the Archbishops of
Mainz and Trier, John of Bohemia, Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, and
the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg—gave their votes at Frankfurt in favour of
Lewis the Bavarian. Thus two votes—those of Saxony and Bohemia—were cast
by rival claimants upon both sides. On November 25, a double coronation
took place: Frederick being crowned at Bonn, and Lewis at Aachen. The
dispute could only be settled by arms; and a desultory war, lasting for
seven years, was closed in 1322 by the battle of Mühldorf, where the
capture of his rival seemed to secure the final victory of Lewis.
But the very completeness of Lewis’s triumph only served to provoke a
far more formidable enemy than the Hapsburg duke. As long as the war
lasted in Germany, the Pope had been content to pursue his policy of
strengthening the Guelf party in Italy, confident that his Ghibelline
opponents could receive no assistance from beyond the Alps. Clement V.,
on hearing of the death of Henry VII., had seized the opportunity to
claim the administration, and to grant the office of imperial vicar
during the vacancy to his patron and ally, Robert of Naples. John XXII.,
who succeeded Clement in 1316, after an interregnum of over two years,
continued his predecessor’s policy. But Robert of Naples could only just
hold his own against the Visconti and other Ghibelline leaders; and the
battle of Mühldorf seemed likely to turn the scale decisively against
the Guelfs. In his partisanship for the Angevin cause, John XXII.
determined to revive the most extreme claims of the mediæval Papacy. On
the pretext that he had [Sidenote: Quarrel of Lewis IV. and John XXII.]
the right to decide the disputed election, and that neither claimant
could assume the imperial office without his sanction, he called upon
Lewis to plead his cause before the Roman Curia (1323), and, when he
failed to appear, pronounced him contumacious and finally proceeded to
issue a bull of excommunication against him. Thus commenced a struggle
between the Empire and Papacy which was continued under the pontificates
of Benedict XII. (1334-1342) and Clement VI., and was hardly terminated
by the death of Lewis in 1347.
In many ways this struggle looks like a revival of past struggles
between Emperors and Popes, and to raise the old questions as to the
relations of Church and State. But if it [Sidenote: Peculiarities of the
quarrel.] is examined a little closer, it will be found to differ in
several important respects from its predecessors, and to present
peculiar characteristics of its own. In the first place, the dispute
arises from more petty causes, and the combatants are of lesser mould
than the protagonists of earlier times. There is no Hildebrand or
Innocent III. among the Avignon Popes, and Lewis the Bavarian lacks both
the courage and the imposing personality of Frederick Barbarossa or
Frederick II. The pretensions of the rival powers are less far-reaching
and exalted; and if at times we find the language of the past reproduced
in the papal bulls, it sounds unreal and almost ridiculous. No more
conclusive illustration of the decline of both Papacy and Empire can be
presented than the impression of unreality and insignificance produced
on the mind by the records of this long and obstinate contest.
Yet it is hardly probable that this impression was shared by
contemporary spectators. To them the struggle must have seemed to
involve questions of vital importance. No previous contest between the
rival heads of Christendom had produced so much literature, or
literature of such merit and significance. Michael of Cesena, the
general of the Franciscan Order, John of Jandun, and William of Ockham,
‘The Invincible Doctor,’ exhausted the subtleties of the scholastic
philosophy in their championship of the imperial position against papal
pretensions. Above all, Marsiglio of Padua, in his great work the
_Defensor Pacis_, examined with equal acuteness and insight the
fundamental relations of the spiritual and secular powers, and laid down
principles which were destined to find at any rate partial expression in
the Reformation.[7]
This outburst of literary and philosophical activity was due in great
part to the fact that for the first time in the long strife between
Papacy and Empire, the struggle involved doctrinal differences. Hitherto
the contest had been between Church and State, and the Church had been
for the most part united. But, on the present occasion, the Church was
profoundly divided. The great Franciscan Order had been founded by the
professed advocate of clerical poverty. In course of time this original
principle [Sidenote: The Franciscans and the Pope.] had been departed
from, and the Order had amassed considerable wealth, though it had been
found desirable to conceal the change by making the Pope the trustee,
and giving the Order the mere usufruct of its property. This lapse from
the strictness of the original rules had given rise to a schism within
the Order. The Spiritual Franciscans, or Fraticelli, maintained that
Christ and the Apostles held no individual or corporate property, and
that the Church was bound to copy the examples of its founders. This
doctrine, which was accepted by a chapter of the Order in 1322, was not
likely to find favour with a Pope who was accused, with good reason, of
avarice. John XXII., urged on by the Dominicans, denounced the doctrine
as heretical, and thereby alienated the Franciscans, who could plead in
their favour a bull of Nicolas III., and appealed from the authority of
the Pope to a General Council of the Church. In common hostility to John
XXII., the Franciscans espoused the cause of Lewis the Bavarian, and it
was among them that he found his most enthusiastic champions, and his
most influential advisers.
This antagonism of a section of the Church to its own head seemed likely
to be increased in John XXII.’s later years, when he was induced to
favour the [Sidenote: Heresy of the Beatific Vision.] dogma that the
dead are not admitted to the divine presence until after the final day
of judgment. This contention struck at the root of the prevalent custom
of invoking the mediation of the saints, and provoked a storm of
opposition throughout Europe. Even the French king threatened to abandon
the cause of so heterodox a Pope, and on his death-bed John found it
prudent or necessary to retract his too hasty opinion.
It is obvious that these doctrinal disputes weakened the Papacy, and so
far tended to give the Emperor an advantage. But this gain to Lewis was
as nothing compared with the strength which he derived from the most
noteworthy peculiarity of the struggle. In all previous contests with
the Empire, the Popes had been able to command the services of an
anti-imperial party within Germany, and this party had included not only
the great ecclesiastics, but many of the lay princes. But in the great
critical moments of the struggle with Lewis, this was found to be
impossible. For the first time in history the German ruler found himself
[Sidenote: National sentiment in Germany.] backed up by a vigorous
national sentiment among his subjects, a sentiment quite as strong as
that which had supported Philip IV. of France against Boniface VIII. The
primary cause of this unwonted union among German princes and people was
undoubtedly the residence at Avignon and the subservience of the Popes
to France. The national revolt against a spiritual authority which
allowed itself to become the tool of a hostile state, led in England to
the issue of the great statutes of Provisors and Præmunire, and found
equally resolute expression in Germany in the famous decrees of 1338.
Benedict XII., more moderate and placable than his predecessor, had been
on the verge of a reconciliation with the Emperor, but was actually
forbidden to put an end to the quarrel by the imperious Philip VI. This
open dictation on the part of the French king drove the Germans to fury.
In July, 1338, all the electors with the exception of the King of
Bohemia met at Rense on the Rhine, and formally resolved that the
imperial authority proceeds directly from God, and that the prince who
is legally chosen by the electors becomes king and emperor without any
further ceremony or confirmation. This meeting is noteworthy in the
constitutional history of Germany as the first occasion on which the
electors assumed corporate functions other than the filling of a vacancy
in the throne. In the following month, a numerously attended diet at
Frankfort endorsed the declaration of Rense, and proceeded to draw up
laws which should strengthen the central power. The punishment of death
is decreed against all breakers of the public peace: the feudal tenant
who takes arms against his imperial overlord is declared to forfeit both
life and property: whoever refuses to take up arms at the summons of the
Emperor is pronounced guilty of felony. The decrees of Frankfort seem to
promise a revival of the German monarchy.
In spite of all these advantages on the side of the Emperor, the quarrel
ended, not exactly in a papal triumph, yet in the complete and
humiliating discomfiture of Lewis. Doubtless the personal character of
the Emperor [Sidenote: Causes of Lewis’s failure.] contributed
essentially to this result. Lewis was well-meaning but vacillating: he
could take strenuous measures under the influence of a stronger will,
but when he lost his adviser his habitual irresolution and his
superstitious dread of the terrors of excommunication returned upon him.
To carry through the contest he required the firmness, the intellectual
craft, and the want of reverence of a Philip the Fair; and he had none
of these qualities. On more than one critical occasion, when success
seemed within his grasp, he alienated and disgusted his supporters by
grovelling offers to purchase absolution by surrendering all the
principles which were at stake in the quarrel. Moreover, the doctrinal
disputes in which he became involved, although a source of weakness to
the Pope, were not an equal source of strength to the Emperor. The
Franciscans had many powerful opponents, especially in the great rival
Order of St. Dominic, and these were alienated from the Emperor by his
alliance with a faction in the Church. The Franciscan cause rested upon
an unpractical enthusiasm which could not command the lasting support of
the clergy, accustomed as they were to wealth and to the influence which
it confers. And in the end, the strong corporate spirit of the Church
was inevitably aroused and alienated by the spectacle of a secular ruler
interfering in questions of dogma, and claiming a right of
interpretation and decision.
There was, too, in the Emperor’s position a fundamental weakness which,
unless detected and remedied, was inevitably fatal to his success.
Neither Lewis nor the Franciscan advisers who in the early years of the
struggle dictated his conduct, could realise that the conditions of the
Middle Ages were passing away. They could not see that the old imperial
pretensions were obsolete; that intervention in Italy had always brought
ruin to German kings; that even in Italy the Guelfs had the stronger,
because the less anti-national, position; and that the Ghibellines, the
professed champions of imperial ascendency, only pursued this policy for
their own ends, and had no real desire to weaken their independence by
the foundation of a strong Italian monarchy. Lewis had an almost unique
opportunity of building up such a monarchy in Germany, not on the lines
of the mediæval Empire, but on the basis of the newly awakened national
sentiment and sympathy. This opportunity he threw away because he had no
conception of the conditions under which alone such success could be
attained. Instead of endeavouring to rule as an Edward I. or a Philip
IV., he set himself to imitate the Ottos of the tenth century.
In 1325 Germany was astounded by the news that Lewis had been formally
reconciled with his imprisoned rival. It is true that the treaty was not
carried out, and Frederick, unable to fulfil his promises in face of the
opposition of his brothers, returned to captivity. But in the following
year the death of Leopold, the most resolute and active of the Hapsburg
princes, removed all danger to Lewis from this quarter, and enabled him
to follow the advice of his Franciscan counsellors and to take
aggressive measures against the Pope. In 1327 the Emperor appeared
[Sidenote: Lewis in Italy.] at Trent, where he was welcomed by the
Ghibelline leaders eager to have his assistance against Robert of
Naples. At Milan he received the iron crown of Lombardy, and thence,
accompanied by Castruccio Castracani, Lord of Lucca, he set out for
Rome. The Guelf cause seemed to be ruined in northern and central Italy,
and the partisans of the Pope and Naples fled from the city. In January,
1328, Lewis was crowned Emperor by two bishops, whose chief
qualification was that they shared with their patron the penalties of
excommunication. Three months were spent in planning further
proceedings, and in April John XXII. was formally declared uncanonically
elected and guilty of heresy. In May, Peter di Corvara, a Franciscan
friar, nominated by the Emperor and accepted by the acclamations of the
citizens, assumed the papal title as Nicolas V.
This initiation of a schism in the interests of the Franciscan party
marks the limit of the Emperor’s success in Italy. He had committed
himself to an enterprise which he had neither the moral nor the material
force to carry through. His immediate enemy, Robert of Naples, had not
yet been even attacked. When the imperial troops advanced southwards in
June, they were speedily compelled to retreat, and Lewis thought it
advisable to evacuate Rome and retire to the Ghibelline strongholds in
the north. The Emperor was accompanied by his Antipope, and the Roman
populace, with characteristic inconstancy, expelled the imperial
partisans and opened their gates to the Orsini and the Neapolitan
troops. To make matters worse, death carried off two of Lewis’s chief
advisers, Castruccio Castracani and Marsiglio of Padua. From this time
his career in Italy was one long catalogue of blunders, and he eagerly
seized the excuse for returning to Germany on the news of the death of
his former rival, Frederick the Handsome (January, 1330). The
unfortunate Nicolas V., deserted by his patron, was compelled to resign
his dignity and to make the most humiliating submission to John XXII. He
ended his life a prisoner in the palace of Avignon.
After such a complete and disastrous failure it might have been thought
that the cause of Lewis was ruined, and that he too would have to submit
to the triumphant Pope. But the open alliance of the Papacy with France,
and the consequent alienation of Germany, enabled him to recover much of
the lost ground, and by 1338 his position appeared [Sidenote: Position
of Lewis in 1338.] to be firmer than ever. At the head of a national
movement, which had expressed its sentiments unmistakably in the decrees
of Rense and Frankfort, and closely allied with Edward III. of England,
who was now committed to his great war with France, Lewis seemed able to
dictate his own terms both to Benedict XII. and Philip VI.
But Lewis was as incapable as ever of pursuing a resolute and consistent
course of policy, and at the very moment when success seemed assured he
began to vacillate and draw back. In 1340 he suddenly abandoned the
English alliance and made terms with Philip VI., in the hope that the
French king would use his influence to secure for him the papal
absolution. Philip, delighted to be freed from a very pressing danger,
did endeavour to intercede with the Pope, but even the gentle Benedict
fired up at this attempt to command what the king had previously
forbidden; and the Pope died in April 1342, without having granted the
Emperor the pardon for which he craved. The Germans were naturally
disgusted by Lewis’s pusillanimity, but this feeling was as nothing
compared to the storm of indignation excited by the Emperor’s conduct in
the question of Tyrol. The final cause of Lewis’s failure is to be found
in his reckless pursuit of that policy of family aggrandisement which
had been almost forced upon the holders of the imperial dignity since
the Great Interregnum. In his insatiable greed for territory, he did not
hesitate to alienate the chief German princes at a time when their
support was absolutely indispensable.
In 1335 Henry, Duke of Carinthia and Count of Tyrol, had died leaving an
only daughter, Margaret Maultasch, who [Sidenote: Succession question in
Tyrol.] was married to John Henry of Moravia, a son of King John of
Bohemia. The claim of Margaret to succeed to her father’s territories
was contested by the dukes of Austria, whose father, Albert I., had
married the sister of Henry of Carinthia. The struggle for the
succession between the Houses of Hapsburg and Luxemburg ended in a
partition, the Hapsburg dukes taking Carinthia, while Tyrol was ceded to
their niece Margaret. But the marriage relations of Margaret and John
Henry proved extremely inharmonious, and in 1341 the former discarded
her husband and threw herself upon the protection of the Emperor. The
temptation to acquire a new province for his House was more than Lewis
could resist. He had already in 1323, on the death of Waldemar of
Brandenburg, conferred the vacant provinces and electorate on his eldest
son Lewis. On the death of his cousins, the sons of Henry of Lower
Bavaria, he had seized their land and had thus united the whole of
Bavaria under his own rule. To these acquisitions he would now add the
county of Tyrol. In reckless defiance of ecclesiastical prejudice, he
usurped rights which had hitherto been exercised by the Church. By
solemn decree he granted Margaret a divorce from her husband, and a
dispensation to marry his own son, Lewis of Brandenburg.
The consequences of this reckless action might have been foreseen. The
clergy were alienated by the assumption of clerical powers by a layman,
while the lay princes, headed by John of Bohemia, were jealously
indignant at such an addition to the already immense possessions of the
Bavarian House. The new Pope, Clement VI., found himself at last in a
position to raise an anti-imperial party in Germany, and to bring about
the election of a rival king. But for the fact that Philip VI. was now
engaged in the war with England, Clement, who was a thorough Frenchman,
would probably have used all his influence to secure the election of the
French king. As it was, it was natural to find a candidate in the House
of Luxemburg, which had most cause for exasperation with Lewis, and was
also closely allied with France. John of Bohemia himself was
disqualified by blindness, having lost his eyesight in a campaign
against the heathen Wends of Prussia, but his eldest son, Charles, was
put forward in his [Sidenote: Election of Charles IV., 1346.] place. The
only electors who supported Lewis were his own son, Lewis of
Brandenburg, and the Archbishop of Mainz, Henry of Virneburg. The Pope,
to secure another vote, deposed the archbishop, and awarded his see to
Gerlach of Nassau. On June 11, 1346, the three Archbishops, with John of
Bohemia and Rudolf of Saxony, formally elected Charles as king of the
Romans. With characteristic quixotism the blind king, instead of
asserting his son’s title with arms, hurried the new king off to France
to aid his ally, Philip VI. On the field of Crecy John of Bohemia fell
in heroic despair, but Charles IV., whose share in the battle is wrapped
in some obscurity, escaped to Germany to maintain his title.
Meanwhile Lewis had made the last great addition to the territories of
his family. His second wife, Margaret, was a sister of William IV. of
Holland and Hainault, and [Sidenote: Death of Lewis, 1347.] on the death
of that prince in 1345 his possessions fell to William V., a son of
Lewis by this second marriage. The House of Wittelsbach seemed for the
moment so powerful that it need fear no rival, and the injudicious
absence of the Luxemburg princes had enabled Lewis to strengthen himself
still further by an alliance with Albert of Austria. Charles found his
position almost hopeless. An attack upon Tyrol was repulsed, and he was
forced to retire to Bohemia. Lewis, confident of an easy triumph, left
the prosecution of the campaign to the Margrave of Brandenburg and
returned to Bavaria, where he died suddenly on October 11, 1347, while
engaged in a boar-hunt near Munich.
Footnote 7:
See on this subject Riezler, _Die Literarischen Widersacher der Päpste
zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers_, and Creighton, _History of the Papacy
during the Reformation_, i. pp. 35-41.