CHARLES IV. AND THE GOLDEN BULL
Charles IV. secures the German Crown—His rule in Bohemia—His
coronation in Italy—Difficulties in Germany—The Golden Bull—The
Papacy and the Golden Bull—The results of the Golden Bull—The
intentions of Charles IV.—The Territorial Policy of Charles IV.—The
Succession question in Upper Bavaria—The election and coronation of
Wenzel—The Swabian League—The Great Schism—Death of Charles
IV.—Partition of the Luxemburg territories.
When Charles IV. returned from the campaign in France, which had cost
his father’s life, he seemed to have very little [Sidenote: Position of
Charles IV. in 1347.] chance of gaining the imperial throne, to which he
had been elected by the opponents of Lewis the Bavarian. It is true that
Bohemia was rich in mineral wealth, but in territorial power the House
of Luxemburg was no match for the House of Wittelsbach, whose various
members ruled over the Palatinate, the whole of Bavaria, the marks of
Brandenburg, Tyrol, and the border districts of Hainault, Holland,
Zeeland, Friesland, and Utrecht. The second son of Lewis, Stephen, was
head of the powerful Swabian League, and the imperial towns were all on
the side of the Bavarian Emperor. The electors who had given Charles
their votes were not prepared to make any sacrifices in his cause, and
Albert of Austria, the most powerful of the non-electoral princes, was
committed to the cause of Lewis. The chief ally to whom Charles might
have looked for support was the French king; but Philip VI. was fully
occupied in the war with Edward III., and was thus unable to take any
part in the affairs of Germany.
And Charles had another great disadvantage in his relations to the
Papacy. In return for the support of Clement VI. he had made very
extreme concessions in a treaty arranged at Avignon in April 1346. He
had admitted that the imperial coronation must follow confirmation of
the election by the Pope; he had promised that he would only go to Rome
with the Pope’s consent, and would only stay there a single day; the
Pope was to be arbiter in the disputes between the Empire and France. It
is true that this treaty had not been published: and it is also true
that Lewis had more than once offered even greater concessions as the
price of absolution. Still, it was patent to all that Charles was the
Papal candidate; and the injudicious boast of Clement that he held the
imperial throne in his gift was not likely to conciliate German princes
and people who had so energetically protested against spiritual
dictation from Avignon. The imperial cities refused to open their gates
to the _Pfaffen-Kaiser_, or ‘parson’s emperor,’ as they called him in
derision.
While affairs were in this almost hopeless condition, three events
occurred which greatly improved Charles’s prospects. The first was the
sudden death of his rival, Lewis the Bavarian. Another was the outbreak
in 1348 of the Great Plague or Black Death, which diverted men’s
attention from political disputes, and led them to look for the checking
of anarchy and disorder to the prince who possessed at any rate the
title of king. The third event was the appearance in Brandenburg of a
pretender claiming to be Waldemar, the last margrave of the House of
Ascania, who was supposed to have died in 1319, when the electorate had
been conferred upon the eldest son of the late Emperor. The ‘false
Waldemar,’ as he is called, declared that he had never died, but had
been driven by the stings of conscience to undertake a prolonged
pilgrimage, from which he now returned to claim his rights. In order to
weaken his Wittelsbach opponent, Charles gave his countenance [Sidenote:
Charles secures the German crown.] to the pretender, who speedily
secured a large part of Brandenburg.
It was an additional advantage to Charles that the party of the late
Emperor had great difficulty in finding a successor to put in his place.
In 1348 four electors—Henry of Virneburg, who still held the see of
Mainz in defiance of the papal authority, the Elector Palatine Rupert,
Lewis of Brandenburg, and Eric of Saxe-Lauenburg, who claimed to
exercise the electoral vote of Saxony—sent proxies to Ober-Lahnstein to
proceed to a new election. The vacant crown was offered in the first
place to Edward III. of England, who had indirectly rendered a service
to the Bavarian party by preventing French aid being sent to Charles IV.
But Edward could neither neglect the French war nor face the resolute
opposition of the English Parliament. On his refusal, the crown was
offered to Lewis of Brandenburg, who had enough to do to cope with the
false Waldemar, and then to Frederick of Meissen, who declined to risk
anything in a losing cause. At last, in despair, the electors chose
Gunther of Schwartzburg, a military leader of some reputation, but below
the highest princely rank. Gunther, who had little to lose and
everything to gain, accepted the proffered dignity, but he died in 1349,
before he had time to test his ability to hold it.
Charles IV. set himself, with rare diplomatic ability, to make the most
of his own advantages and of the difficulties of his opponents. The
imperial cities, discontented by the death of their patron, Lewis the
Bavarian, and involved in difficulties and disorders by the Plague, were
gained over by the concession of privileges, and one by one opened their
gates to Charles. Albert of Austria was detached from the Wittelsbach
alliance by a politic marriage between his eldest son Rudolf and
Charles’s second daughter Catharine. Charles, himself a widower, sued
for the hand of a daughter of the Elector Palatine, and thus gained to
his side the head of the House of Wittelsbach. Finally, by disowning the
cause of the false Waldemar, he achieved the reconciliation of his most
resolute opponent, Lewis of Brandenburg. The death of Gunther of
Schwartzburg removed all difficulties in the way of Charles’s
recognition, and by 1350 his title was acknowledged throughout the whole
of Germany.
Charles IV. is incontestably the greatest ruler whom Europe produced in
the fourteenth century, yet his merits have met [Sidenote: Character of
Charles IV.] with singularly little appreciation except from Bohemian
historians. To most English readers he is chiefly known from the saying
of Maximilian I. that he was ‘the father of Bohemia but the stepfather
of the Empire,’ or by the more recent epigram of Mr. Bryce who says that
‘he legalised anarchy and called it a constitution.’ Of the two sayings,
the latter is by far the more unjust and ill-founded. Charles is a
unique figure in the family of Luxemburg which rose to such sudden and
short-lived eminence in the fourteenth century. His grandfather, Henry
VII., threw away his life in a chimerical effort to revive an imperial
authority which was no longer either possible or desirable. His father,
John of Bohemia, was the representative knight-errant of his time,
perhaps the noblest type of fourteenth century chivalry—now crusading in
Poland, now trying to found a new territorial power in Italy, and in the
end deserting his own interests to fight and fall in the service of an
ally. Of Charles’s sons, the eldest, Wenzel, was a good-natured
hedonist, who had few desires beyond the pleasures of the table; and the
second, Sigismund, was a schemer who always imagined more than he could
achieve. In the midst of this remarkable family, which can boast of
three emperors and a king who twice narrowly missed election to the same
dignity, Charles IV. stands in complete contrast both to his
predecessors and his successors. He had none of the romantic enthusiasm
of his father or his grandfather, but he had what was far better—a
strong sense of the practical duties of government, and a strenuous
business capacity which enabled him to carry them out. It is true that
he failed to maintain the Ghibelline cause in Italy, but he preferred
the more solid and substantial aim of building up a territorial monarchy
in Germany. He was distinguished among contemporary monarchs for his
preference of diplomacy to force, for his strong legal sense, and his
love of order. Like Edward I. of England and Philip IV. of France, he
marks the transition from mediæval to modern ideals and methods of
government.
The merits of Charles IV.’s government in Bohemia have never been
contested. One of the first-fruits of his good [Sidenote: Bohemia under
Charles IV.] understanding with Clement VI. was the procuring of a papal
bull to erect Prague into a metropolitan see, whereas it had previously
been dependent on the Archbishop of Mainz. In 1348, while his affairs in
Germany were in their most critical condition, Charles laid the
foundations of the University of Prague, with a constitution modelled
upon that of the University of Paris, where the king himself had
studied. To Charles the Bohemian capital owes not only its university
and its archbishopric, but also its famous bridge over the Moldau, and
many of its most notable buildings. Much of his attention was given to
the promotion of commerce. He established a uniform coinage, provided
for the protection of highways, and lowered the tolls upon roads and
rivers. He projected a canal from the Moldau to the Danube, which was to
carry through Bohemia the traffic between Venice and the Hanseatic
League. Many of his measures were protective in the extreme. Every
foreign trader who crossed the Bohemian frontier was compelled to expose
his wares for sale in Prague; no foreigner could conclude a bargain
except through a native merchant; and all goods had to be sold by
Bohemian weight and measure. Short-sighted as such regulations may
appear in the present day, they were in accordance with the ideas of the
time, and they were not unsuccessful in attaining their end. From German
and Slavonic countries nobles, merchants, teachers and scholars flocked
to the capital of Bohemia; the members of the university were to be
counted by thousands before Charles’s death.
Under this beneficent rule Prague promised to become the chief city of
Germany, and the balance of power and of civilisation was transferred
from the west to the east. Charles, undoubtedly, looked forward to
securing for the House of Luxemburg a position almost exactly similar to
that afterwards attained by the House of Hapsburg; and he trusted that
his descendants would enjoy, as the Hapsburgs did in later times, an
unbroken and quasi-hereditary succession to the imperial throne. And his
more sanguine schemes did not stop at this point. He founded in Prague a
cloister of Slavonic monks, collected from Bosnia, Servia, and Croatia,
whose task was to draw closer the bonds between Bohemia and the eastern
Slavs, and ultimately to pave the way for a union between the Latin and
Greek Churches. If this dream had been fulfilled, the Luxemburg House
might have founded a power greater than that of any Emperor, and
Bohemia, which has always been a triangular wedge thrust from the east
into the west, might have become a rivet between the two great divisions
of the Continent.
In 1354 Charles IV. set out for Italy to receive the Lombard crown at
Milan, and the imperial crown in Rome. [Sidenote: Charles IV. in Italy.]
From the Ghibelline point of view his journey was ignominious, but as
throwing light upon Charles’s policy it was of great significance. He
refused to be drawn into the vortex of Italian politics, or to break his
treaty with the Pope. To the representations of the Ghibelline leaders,
as to the eloquent appeals of Petrarch, Charles turned a deaf ear. He
entered Rome to be crowned, paraded the streets in his imperial robes,
and then retired outside the walls to San Lorenzo. With as little delay
as possible, he hastened on his return journey. It was a deliberate
renunciation of the claim of the mediæval Emperors to rule in Italy.
Charles saw clearly that Germany had been ruined by the attempts of its
rulers to make their monarchy in Italy a practical force, and in the
interests of Germany he refused to imitate the folly of his
predecessors. His main object was the reconstruction of an orderly and
efficient authority in Germany, and that object could only be achieved
by resolutely cutting himself free from the entanglement of Italian
ambitions.
It was to the task of reform in Germany that Charles devoted himself
immediately on his return to Germany, and his conferences with the diets
at Nürnberg in 1355 and 1356 resulted in the issue of the great
enactment with which his name will always be connected—the Golden Bull.
There were two great and pressing [Sidenote: Difficulties in Germany.]
problems which required solution. One very obvious cause of recent
disorders in Germany had been the disputed elections to the Empire, and
these were intimately associated with the uncertainty as to the rules of
election. It is true that tradition had decided that there should be
seven electors, and that certain sees and certain families had claims to
the right of voting. But the German practice of subdividing lands among
male heirs had given rise to great uncertainty as to which member of a
family should exercise this right. Thus the House of Wittelsbach was
split into two main branches, the one holding the Palatinate of the
Rhine, the other the duchy of Bavaria. By family agreement the
Wittelsbach vote was to be given alternately by the heads of the two
branches, but such an arrangement was certain to give rise to quarrels.
In 1314 the Saxon vote had been given on opposite sides by two rival
claimants, and the same thing had taken place in the elections of 1346
and 1348. The prevention of similar disputes in the future was a primary
condition of peace and order in Germany, and was one of the main objects
of the Golden Bull.
The second great and pressing difficulty in Germany was the danger of
the complete disruption of all political unity. There were innumerable
tenants-in-chief, electors, princes, knights and cities, held together
by nothing but common allegiance to a monarchy which had lost all
efficient authority. If no remedy could be devised, Germany must become
a mere geographical expression like Italy. The cities would become
independent republics, and desolating wars between them and their
princely neighbours would lead to incurable anarchy. In that case, the
border provinces must inevitably fall to the growing power of France.
Lyons was already gone; Dauphiné was practically lost. Provence and
Franche-Comté, though acknowledging imperial suzerainty, were subject to
French influence and destined to fall, with the Netherlands, under the
rule of a French dynasty. German ascendency would disappear, first in
the valley of the Rhone and then in that of the Rhine.
Charles IV. was fully alive to these dangers. He had accompanied his
father to Italy in 1330, had acted for a time as his vicegerent, and had
then acquired an insight into Italian politics which profoundly
influenced his subsequent policy. It is hardly too much to say that his
guiding motive was to preserve Germany from the fate which nominal
subjection to imperial rule had brought upon Italy. And though he was
connected by relationship, education, and past alliances with the Valois
House of France, he was by no means blind to the dangers of French
aggression in the west. It was in the vain hope of checking the constant
falling away of border lands that in 1365 he went through the ceremony
of being crowned King of Arles, disused by his predecessors since
Frederick Barbarossa.
On the subject of imperial elections, the provisions of the Golden Bull
are clear and precise, and they remained a [Sidenote: The Golden Bull,
1356.] fundamental law until the Holy Roman Empire ended its shadowy
existence in 1806. The number of electors is fixed at seven—viz. three
ecclesiastics, the Archbishops of Mainz, Köln, and Trier, and four lay
princes, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke
of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The three ecclesiastical
electors are to be archchancellors of the three kingdoms: the Archbishop
of Mainz in Germany, the Archbishop of Köln in Italy, and the Archbishop
of Trier in Arles. The four secular electors are to hold the great
household offices: the King of Bohemia is chief cup-bearer, the Count
Palatine grand-seneschal, the Duke of Saxony grand-marshal, and the
Margrave of Brandenburg grand-chamberlain. The election of the Kings of
the Romans and future Emperors is to be held in Frankfort, and decided
by a majority of votes. The elected prince is to be crowned at Aachen,
and to hold his first diet at Nürnberg. The territories to which the
electoral dignity is attached are never to be divided, and the
succession is to be regulated by the rules of primogeniture among male
agnates. During a minority, the electoral vote and the administration of
the electoral provinces are to be intrusted to the nearest male relative
on the father’s side. The electors are to take rank before all other
princes; they are to have the royal rights of coining money and of final
jurisdiction without appeal. All confederations of subjects without the
leave of their territorial lord are prohibited, and the towns are
forbidden to grant their citizenship to _pfahlbürger_, or burghers
outside the walls, or to receive fugitive serfs to the shelter of their
walls and franchises.
There is one omission in the Golden Bull which is as significant and
important as any of its direct provisions. The [Sidenote: The Papacy and
the Golden Bull.] papal claims to confirm or veto an election, and to
administer the Empire during a vacancy, were passed over in complete
silence. The great electoral resolutions of Rense were practically but
silently erected into an imperial law, and the election of future
Emperors was to be treated as a private affair of the German nation.
Innocent VI. did not hesitate to show his displeasure at the
promulgation of such a law by a prince who was regarded as the docile
creature of the Holy See. But Charles IV. showed a firmness worthy of
Edward I. or of Philip the Fair. When the papal nuncio tried to levy a
tenth of clerical revenues, Charles replied by demanding a reform of
ecclesiastical abuses and by threatening to confiscate Church property.
The Pope was forced to give way, and to abandon his opposition to the
Golden Bull.
With regard to the practical results of the Golden Bull, historians are
unanimous. It erected an aristocratic federation [Sidenote: Results of
the Golden Bull.] in Germany in place of the older monarchy, and the
German constitution never lost the impress which it received in the
fourteenth century. The powers and privileges which the Bull conferred
upon the electors were inconsistent with the exercise of efficient
monarchical authority. And though the secular electors in 1356 were not,
with the exception of Charles himself, very powerful princes, yet it was
certain that the establishment of primogeniture and of indivisibility of
territories would before long give them a territorial power
proportionate to their elevated rank.
But historians have misjudged Charles IV., partly because [Sidenote:
Motives of Charles IV.] they have fallen into the common error of
confusing the results of the Golden Bull with the intentions of its
author, and partly because they have paid insufficient attention to the
precise circumstances of the time in which he lived. Charles was
profoundly convinced—and it is difficult to maintain that he was
wrong—that the mediæval Empire was at an end, and that any attempt to
revive it would result in the ruin of Germany. The forces which he most
dreaded were the rising cities in the north and south, and the greater
territorial princes, such as the Hapsburgs and the Bavarian
Wittelsbachs. Both of these were weakened by the Golden Bull—the cities
by its actual provisions, and the princes by their definite exclusion
from the electoral vote, and by the virtual lowering of their rank which
was effected by the elevation of the electors. It is true that the
electors themselves received powers and privileges which might prove the
foundation of independence, but at the same time their interests were
enlisted on the side of unity. The Golden Bull gave them a grander
position as joint rulers of Germany than they could look forward to as
mere rulers in their own provinces. Thus it might reasonably be hoped
that they would resist the further progress of that disruption which had
already done so much harm to Germany.
And while he provided this check upon growing disunion, Charles IV. had
no desire or expectation that the state of things recognised and
confirmed in the Golden Bull should be permanent. His intention was to
obtain for the House of Luxemburg such an overwhelming territorial
strength that he would secure to his successors a practically hereditary
claim to the imperial office, and also such a predominance in the
electoral college as would enable them to rule Germany through that
body. By gradually adding province after province to the family domain,
it might be possible in the end to build up a territorial monarchy like
that which existed in England and was in process of construction in
France. It is true that such a monarchy might be less imposing than the
wide-reaching claims of imperial suzerainty, but it would be infinitely
stronger and more advantageous to Germany. No single lifetime could be
long enough to effect such a work, and Charles’s direct heirs only
lasted for a single generation, and were themselves incapable of
following in their father’s footsteps. But such territorial power as was
afterwards gained in Germany by the Hapsburgs was, for the most part,
acquired by following the lines laid down by Charles IV., and in more
than one way the Hapsburgs may be regarded as the heirs of the House of
Luxemburg.
It is this definite policy which gives to Charles’s territorial
ambitions an interest and a dignity which are lacking to the purely
selfish and aimless acquisitiveness of his [Sidenote: Territorial
acquisitions of Charles IV.] predecessor. In 1356 John, Duke of Brabant
and Limburg died, and his territories passed to his daughter and her
husband Wenzel, Duke of Luxemburg, Charles’s youngest brother. The
Emperor supported his brother against the rival claims of the Count of
Flanders, and obtained from the duchess and the estates of Brabant an
agreement that, in default of heirs, the provinces should fall to the
main line of Luxemburg. In 1363 occurred a very important crisis in the
family relationships of Germany through the death of Meinhard, the only
son of Margaret Maultasch and of Lewis of Bavaria, the eldest son of the
late Emperor (see p. 107). Meinhard’s death left vacant both Tyrol and
the duchy of Upper Bavaria. The Hapsburg claim to Tyrol, which had
failed in 1335, was promptly renewed by Rudolf of Austria. Rudolf was
one of the princes who were most indignant at the increased rank given
to the electors by the Golden Bull, and he had shown his irritation by
assuming the title of ‘archduke,’ which in the next century was
permanently adopted by the House of Hapsburg. Charles IV. seized the
opportunity to gain over so powerful a malcontent. He confirmed Rudolf
in possession of Tyrol, and at the same time concluded with him a treaty
of mutual inheritance by which, on the extinction of either House, the
other was to inherit all its lands. At the time, the House of Hapsburg
seemed nearer to extinction than that of Luxemburg; and, as a matter of
fact, the treaty was never actually carried out. But it is not a little
curious that within a century after the male line of Luxemburg had come
to an end, almost all the territories which it held in 1364 had passed,
in one way or another, into the hands of the Hapsburgs.
Meanwhile a struggle had broken out as to the succession in Upper
Bavaria. By a treaty made in 1349 between the sons of Lewis the
Bavarian, that duchy ought now to have gone to Lewis the Roman and Otto,
in whose favour their elder brother Lewis had renounced the possession
of Brandenburg. But the second brother, Stephen of Lower Bavaria,
anticipated their claim and obtained his own recognition from the
estates of Upper Bavaria. The two margraves applied for assistance to
Charles IV., and promised him the succession to Brandenburg if they died
without heirs. This agreement ultimately took effect in 1373, when Otto,
the surviving margrave, was induced or compelled to cede Brandenburg to
the Emperor, who pledged himself to the estates that the union of
Brandenburg with Bohemia should be perpetual. Thus Charles acquired a
second electoral vote and a very notable increase of his territorial
power in northern Germany. About the same time he betrothed his second
son, Sigismund, to the daughter of Lewis the Great, King of Hungary and
Poland, and thus opened a prospect of adding these states to the now
enormous possessions of the Luxemburg House.
These actual or prospective acquisitions could be of little permanent
value unless Charles could secure to his House the continued occupation
of the imperial office, and in 1374 he began to sound the electors on
the subject [Sidenote: Election of Wenzel.] of the election of his son
Wenzel, a boy of fifteen years old. But there were many difficulties in
the way. The Golden Bull made no provision for an election during the
lifetime of any occupant of the throne. The spirit, if not the letter,
of the law was against such a thing. There were also serious objections
to the election of a minor, and many princes were jealous of the
predominance already gained by the Luxemburgers. Charles, however, was
not very scrupulous in such a critical matter, even about the observance
of his own laws. He gained over the electors, but by the old
objectionable method of bribing them. He did not hesitate to appeal for
papal approval, thus reviving the pretensions which the Golden Bull had
practically abrogated. But his policy was successful in its immediate
aim. Wenzel was elected at Frankfort on June 16, and crowned at Aachen
on July 6, 1376.
The election of Wenzel as King of the Romans was the last triumph of
Charles IV. His repressive attitude towards the cities had met with only
partial success. The great northern Hansa had conducted a successful war
against Waldemar III., one of the strongest of Danish kings, and in 1370
had forced him to conclude a humiliating treaty at Stralsund (see p.
437). And in 1376 a new danger arose in the south. The Swabian towns
were disgusted at the sacrifice [Sidenote: The Swabian League.] of the
last imperial domains in their province to purchase electoral votes.
They renewed an old league under the leadership of Ulm, and refused to
recognise Wenzel’s election. At Reutlingen (May 14, 1377) the forces of
the league won a complete victory over their hated enemy, the Count of
Würtemburg. This was followed by a rapid extension of the confederation,
and Charles was too old and too weak to attempt its suppression. In
August, 1378, he authorised his son Wenzel to conclude a peace between
the towns and the princes, and to concede the right of union to the
former. Thus one of the provisions of the Golden Bull was abandoned
during Charles’s own lifetime.
Nor was this the only blow which Charles experienced in his later years.
He had long struggled to put an end to the papal residence at Avignon,
which was a scandal to Europe and a serious injury in many ways to
German and imperial interests. He had succeeded in persuading Urban V.
to return to Rome in 1367, and had himself visited the Pope in the
Eternal City. But Urban was alienated by Charles’s refusal to take
active measures against the Ghibelline Visconti, and was easily induced
by his French cardinals to return to Avignon. The whole work had to be
begun again. At last, in 1377, Gregory XI. was persuaded to quit the
[Sidenote: The Great Schism.] banks of the Rhone and to take up his
residence in Rome. But he was meditating a second withdrawal from the
city when he was overtaken by death. The new election had to take place
in Rome, and the choice of the cardinals fell upon an Italian, Urban VI.
This seemed for the moment a conspicuous triumph for Charles IV. But
Urban’s violence alienated the French cardinals, who seceded from Rome
and elected a rival Pope, Clement VII. Clement naturally threw himself
upon French support, and fixed his residence at Avignon. Thus the return
to Rome, instead of putting an end to scandal, gave rise to the famous
schism in the Church which lasted for forty years. Charles IV. was
bitterly chagrined, and appealed to all the European princes to
recognise Urban and to resist the excessive and dictatorial power of
France. And there was some reasonable ground for such an appeal. A
brother of Charles V. of France was Duke of Burgundy, and the Duke’s
wife was the heiress of Flanders, Artois, and Franche Comté. Another
brother claimed the succession in Naples, and the King of Hungary and
Poland was a member of the older House of Anjou. The prince who was
naturally expected to resist this threatening danger to the balance of
states was Charles IV., who might have found it necessary to lead an
army against the French king and the Antipope. But on November 29, 1378,
just two months after the [Sidenote: Death of Charles IV.] outbreak of
the schism, death removed him from the scene of strife.
Before his death, Charles IV.’s weakness for his children had led him
into an act which was ruinous to his most cherished schemes. The Golden
Bull had shown how clearly he appreciated the advantages to a state of
indivisibility and a strict rule of primogeniture. [Sidenote: Partition
of Luxemburg territories.] These advantages he deliberately threw away
in his own case. He even broke the solemn pledge which he had given
never to separate the marks of Brandenburg from Bohemia. He left Bohemia
and Silesia to his eldest son, Wenzel, while he transferred Brandenburg
to his second son, Sigismund, and formed a duchy in Lausitz for the
third son, John of Görlitz. Moravia was already in the hands of Jobst
and Prokop, the sons of Charles’s second brother, John Henry; while
Luxemburg was still held by the surviving brother, Wenzel, the husband
of the Duchess of Brabant and Limburg. The family possessions had
increased enormously since the days of Henry VII., but they were of
comparatively little value when scattered among so many hands. The House
of Luxemburg was never destined to hold the position imagined for it by
the greatest ruler it produced, Charles IV.