Chapter XIV: The Germanic Constitution: The Seven Electors

The reign of Frederick the Second was not less fatal to the domestic power of the German king than to the European supremacy of the Emperor. His two Pragmatic Sanctions had conferred rights that made the feudal aristocracy almost independent, and the long anarchy of the Interregnum had enabled them not only to use but to extend and fortify their power. Rudolf of Hapsburg had striven, not wholly in vain, to coerce their insolence, but the contest for the crown between his son Albert and Adolf Count of Nassau which followed his death, the short and troubled reign of Albert himself, the absence of Henry the Seventh in Italy, the civil war of Lewis of Bavaria and Frederick duke of Austria, rival claimants of the imperial throne, the difficulties in which Lewis, the successful competitor, found himself involved with a succession of Popes—all these circumstances tended more and more to narrow the influence of the crown and complete the emancipation of the turbulent nobles. They now became virtually supreme in their own domains, enjoying full jurisdiction (certain appeals excepted), the right of legislation, privileges of coining money, of levying tolls and taxes: some had scarcely even a feudal bond to remind them of their allegiance. The numbers of the nobility who held directly of the crown had increased prodigiously by the extinction of the dukedoms of Franconia and Swabia, and the reduction in area of that of Saxony: along the Rhine the lord of a single tower was often almost an independent prince. The petty tyrants whose boast it was that they owed fealty only to God and the Emperor shewed themselves in practice equally regardless of both powers. Preeminent were the three great houses of Austria, Bavaria, and Luxemburg, this last having acquired Bohemia, ad 1309. Next came the electors, already considered collectively more important than the Emperor, and forming for themselves considerable principalities. Brandenburg and the Rhenish Palatinate are strong states before the end of this period; Bohemia and the three archbishoprics almost from its beginning.

The chief object of the magnates was to keep the monarch in his present state of helplessness. The Hohenstaufen had been strong by their hereditary dominions as well as by their imperial authority: Frederick I is said to have been lord of four hundred castles. Unfortunately the Emperors who followed that great house had not similar patrimonial possessions; and indeed Rudolf was chosen because his private resources were too slender to make him an object of disquiet. Till the expense which the crown entailed had begun to prove ruinous to its wearer, the electors preferred to confer it on some petty prince, such as were Rudolf and Adolf of Nassau and Günther of Schwartzburg, seeking when they could to keep it from settling in one family. They bound the newly elected monarch to respect all their present immunities, including those which they had just extorted as the price of their votes; they checked all his attempts to recover lost lands or rights: they ventured at last (in 1399) to depose their anointed head, Wenzel, king of Bohemia, whose dissipated life and neglect of his duties certainly justified their displeasure. Thus fettered, the Emperor sought only to make the most of his short tenure, using his position to aggrandize his family and raise money by the sale of crown estates and privileges. His individual action and personal relation to the subject was replaced by a merely legal and formal one: he represented order and legitimate ownership, and so far was still necessary to the political system. But imperial progresses through the country were abandoned: unlike his predecessors, who, when they assumed the sceptre, had turned from the administration of their own domains to the service of the nation, he lived mostly in his own states, sometimes beyond the Empire’s frontier.

How thoroughly the national character of the office was gone is shewn by the repeated attempts to bestow it on foreign or half-foreign potentates, who could not fill the place of a German king of the good old vigorous type. Not to speak of Richard and Alfonso, the French Charles Count of Valois was proposed against Henry VII, and Edward III of England actually elected against Charles IV (the English parliament forbade him to accept). Sigismund, though he belonged to the house of Luxemburg, was, when chosen, a Hungarian king with interests primarily Hungarian; and George Podiebrad who was elected against Frederick III ruled over a Bohemia which felt itself more Slavonic than Germanic. The Emperor’s only hope would have been in the support of the cities. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they had increased wonderfully in population, wealth, and boldness: the Hanseatic confederacy was the mightiest power of the North, and cowed the Scandinavian kings: the towns of Swabia and the Rhine formed great commercial leagues, maintained regular wars against the counter-associations of the nobility, and seemed at one time, by an alliance with the already virtually independent Switzers, on the point of turning West Germany into a federation of free municipalities. Feudalism, however, was still too strong; the cavalry of the nobles was irresistible in the field, and the thoughtless Wenzel, who might have helped and used them, let slip a golden opportunity of repairing the losses of two centuries. After all, the Empire was perhaps past redemption, for one fatal ailment paralyzed all its efforts. The Empire was poor. The constructive abilities of Frederick I and his grandson, which ought to have been applied, as was the constructive talent of the English Henry II, to the establishment of an immediate financial control by the crown, and the introduction of some scheme of direct taxation, were distracted by their enterprises in Italy; and neither from princes, from ecclesiastics, nor from cities was any adequate royal revenue secured. The crown lands, which had suffered heavily under Frederick II, were further usurped during the confusion that followed; till at last, through the reckless prodigality of sovereigns who sought only their immediate interest, little was left of the vast and fertile domains along the Rhine from which the Saxon and Franconian Emperors had drawn the chief part of their revenue. Regalian rights, the second fiscal resource, had fared no better. Tolls, customs, mines, rights of coining, of harbouring Jews, and so forth, were either seized or granted away: even the advowsons of churches had been sold or mortgaged; and the imperial treasury depended mainly on an inglorious traffic in honours and exemptions. Things were so bad under Rudolf that the electors refused to make his son Albert king of the Romans, declaring that, while Rudolf lived, the public revenue which with difficulty supported one monarch, could much less maintain two at the same time. Sigismund told his Diet, ‘Nihil esse imperio spoliatius, nihil egentius, adeo ut qui sibi ex Germaniae principibus successurus esset, qui praeter patrimonium nihil aliud habuerit, apud eum non imperium sed potius servitium sit futurum.’ Patritius, the secretary of Frederick III, declared that the revenues of the Empire scarcely covered the expenses of its ambassadors. Poverty such as these expressions point to, a poverty which became greater after each election, not only involved the failure of the attempts which were sometimes made to recover usurped rights, but put every project of reform within or war without at the mercy of a jealous Diet. The three orders of which that Diet consisted, electors, princes, and cities, were each of them bent on its own interests and mutually hostile; their niggardly grants did no more than keep the Empire from dying of inanition.

1347-1378), and his electoral constitution.The changes thus briefly described were in progress when Charles the Fourth, king of Bohemia, son of that blind king John of Bohemia who fell at Cressy, and grandson of the Emperor Henry VII, found himself settled upon the throne which he had, as a candidate favoured by the Pope, disputed for some years with Lewis IV. His skilful and consistent policy aimed at settling what he perhaps despaired of reforming, and the famous instrument which, under the name of the Golden Bull, became the corner-stone of the Germanic constitution, confessed and legalized the independence of the electors and the powerlessness of the crown. The most conspicuous defect of the existing system was the uncertainty of the elections, followed as they usually were by a civil war. It was this which Charles set himself to redress.

The kingdoms founded on the ruins of the Roman Empire by the Teutonic invaders presented in their original form a rude combination of the elective with the hereditary principle. One family in each tribe had, as the offspring of the gods, an indefeasible claim to rule, but from among the members of such a family the warriors were free to choose the bravest or the most popular as king. That the German crown came to be purely elective, while in France, Castile, Aragon, England, and most other European states, the principle of strict hereditary succession established itself, was due to the failure of heirs male in three successive dynasties; to the restless ambition of the nobles, who, since they were not, like the French, strong enough to disregard the royal power, did their best to weaken it; to the intrigues of the churchmen, zealous for a method of appointment prescribed by their own law and observed in capitular elections; to the wish of the Popes to gain an opening for their own influence and make effective the veto which they claimed; above all, to the conception of the imperial office as one too holy to be, in the same manner as the regal, transmissible by descent. Had the German, like other feudal kingdoms, remained merely local, feudal, and national, it would without doubt have ended by becoming a hereditary monarchy. Transformed as it was by the Roman Empire, this could not be. The headship of the human race being, like the Papacy, the common inheritance of all mankind, could not be confined to a single family, nor pass like a private estate by the ordinary rules of succession.

The right to choose the war-chief belonged, in the earliest ages, to the whole body of freemen. Their suffrage, which must have been very irregularly exercised, became by degrees vested in their leaders, but the assent of the multitude, although ensured already, was needed to complete the ceremony. It was thus that Henry the Fowler, and Henry the Saint, and Conrad II were chosen. Though even tradition might have commemorated what extant records place beyond a doubt, it was commonly believed, till the end of the sixteenth century, that the elective constitution had been established, and the privilege of voting confined to seven persons, by a decree of Gregory V and Otto III, which a famous jurist describes as ‘lex a pontifice de imperatorum comitiis lata, ne ius eligendi penes populum Romanum in posterum esset.’ St. Thomas says, ‘Election ceased from the times of Charles the Great to those of Otto III, when Pope Gregory V established that of the seven princes, which will last as long as the holy Roman Church, who ranks above all other powers, shall have judged expedient for Christ’s faithful people.’ Since it tended to exalt the papal power, this fiction was accepted, no doubt honestly accepted, and spread abroad by the clergy. And indeed, like so many other fictions, it had a sort of foundation in fact. The premature death without an heir of Otto III, the fourth of a line of monarchs among whom son had regularly succeeded to father, threw back the crown into the gift of the nation, and was no doubt one of the chief causes why it did not in the end become hereditary.

Thus under the Saxon and Franconian sovereigns, the throne was theoretically elective, the assent of the chiefs and their followers being required, though little more likely to be refused than it was to an English or a French king; practically hereditary, since both of these dynasties succeeded in occupying it for four generations, the father procuring the son’s election during his own lifetime. So it might well have continued had the German king been a merely national king like his brethren in France and England. But, under the operation of the influences already described, the territorial aristocracy, sometimes aided by the Pope, were able to turn the developement of the ancient constitution into a new channel, so that the German kingdom became in point of law incontestably elective, and so continued ever thereafter. The precise steps by which this came to pass, and the nature of the proceedings at an election, have been matter for long and tangled controversy. Some points remain doubtful, because the original authorities are curt or vague in their accounts, especially as respects the procedure at those uncontested elections in which a reigning Emperor secured the choice of his son during his own lifetime. Without attempting to discuss these points, a few general propositions may be stated as probably true.

In the process of choosing a German king to be afterwards raised to the dignity of Roman Emperor, three stages may be distinguished.

The first stage is that of the deliberations and negotiations of the magnates which issue in the selection of one from among several candidates. For this process there would seem to have been, down till the middle of the thirteenth century, no rules formally prescribed and observed. There was no recognized method of voting, nor does the right of voting appear to be confined to any specified persons. Things were in practice determined not by a majority of votes, but by the personal, official, and territorial weight and power of those who took part. The number of the nobles whom custom admitted to join might be greater or less, but in fact the influence of the leading princes, ecclesiastical and secular, prevailed. Sometimes these magnates were allowed, or took it upon themselves, to make a preliminary selection, from all those who might be considered candidates for the throne, either of a certain small number, or of one only, to be thereupon presented to the nobles generally as the man fittest to be chosen. As early as 1156 this preliminary and informal selection, which took place at the election of Conrad II in 1024, of Lothar II in 1125, and of Frederick I in 1152, had obtained the name of Praetaxation; and in the persons who exercised it we may find the germ of the electoral college of later times.

The second stage of the process consisted in the solemn declaration by the princes, usually in the order of their official status or rank, of their choice of a particular person as king. This was the formal Electio in the strict sense of the word, and this custom required to be unanimous. In it certain magnates, three ecclesiastical and three or four secular, secured the right of delivering their voice first: and this prerogative voice would seem to have set them in a position of special authority which led to their being ultimately recognized as the persons exclusively entitled to elect. They were doubtless those, or the chief among those, who occasionally exercised the function of praetaxation. Here legal theory may have helped to settle what custom had left vague. It is first in the famous law book called the Saxon Mirror (Sachsenspiegel) compiled by Eike von Reppgau about ad 1230, that six princes (of whom more anon) are named as enjoying a special right. They are said to be ‘first in the choice,’ the first to make that formal expression of acceptance which technically constituted the election.

The last part of the process was the approval of the counts and other minor nobles, completed by that acclamation of the multitude which preserved the tradition of choice by the nation as a whole, but which gradually lost its importance under the preponderating influence of the great ecclesiastical and secular potentates. As we find, down at least till the middle of the twelfth century, no legal line drawn between those who were and those who were not entitled to vote—indeed, so far as law went, it might be said that all nobles and knights were entitled to some sort of voice—there was evidently a wide door open for disputes, and when an election was disputed, no means except war existed for settling it (Pope Innocent III and his successors claimed, but the Germans denied, a right of interference). Contests there were, and contests would have been more frequent had there not been a strong tendency to prefer the heir of the preceding sovereign, and had not the crown been often secured by a reigning Emperor for his son. A sense of the danger involved in this absence of fixed rules probably contributed to make the nation more and more disposed to recognize a special right of choice as vested in the few great potentates who towered above the other princes.

Comparing the electoral constitution of the Empire at the death of the last Saxon Emperor in ad 1024, and at the death of the last Hohenstaufen in 1254, we see that two great changes had passed upon it. It had become a fundamental doctrine that the Germanic (and imperial) throne, unlike the thrones of other countries, was purely elective. So clearly did the princes perceive this to be the keystone of their freedom that the influence and the liberal offers of Henry VI failed to induce them to surrender their privilege. And at the same time that practice of preliminary selection, and that right of being the first to deliver a formal elective voice, which have been already referred to, had ripened into a practically exclusive privilege of election. As this privilege became vested in a small body, the assent of the rest of the nobility began to be assumed as virtually given or certain to be given, so that after a time it passed not only out of use, but almost out of memory. Even in 1198 Pope Innocent III speaks of ‘princes specially entitled to choose the Roman king. On the double choice of Richard and Alfonso, ad 1257, the substantial question was as to the majority of votes in the electoral college: neither then nor afterwards was there any practical recognition of the rights of the other princes, counts, and barons, important as their voices had been three centuries earlier.

The origin of that college is a matter somewhat intricate and obscure. At the election of Frederick I in ad 1152, certain princes led and decided the choice of the nation, and at the election of Philip in 1198 the preponderant influence of a few is again apparent. But we do not yet find anything to indicate that a legal right as distinguished from a practically admitted preeminence had become vested in any particular persons. First in the Sachsenspiegel do we find six named as specially, one can hardly say exclusively, entitled, viz. the three Rhenish archbishops—the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the duke of the Saxons, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. Other authorities of the time recognize a seventh, the king of Bohemia, whom the Sachsenspiegel rejects as not being German. Then in ad 1263 a letter of Pope Urban IV declares (adopting the view stated by the friends of Richard of Cornwall, and by that time generally accepted in Germany), that by immemorial custom the right of choosing the Roman king belongs to seven persons, the seven who had just divided their votes on Richard and Alfonso of Castile. Of these seven, the three archbishops of Mentz, Treves, and Cologne, pastors of the oldest and richest sees, represented the German Church and had always borne a leading part in elections. The other four ought, according to the ancient constitution, to have been the dukes of the four nations, Franks, Swabians, Saxons, Bavarians, to whom had also belonged the four great offices of the imperial household. But of these dukedoms the two first named were now extinct, and their place and power in the State, as well as the household offices they had held, had descended upon two principalities of more recent origin, those, namely, of the Palatinate of the Rhine and the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The Saxon duke, though with greatly narrowed dominions, retained his leading place and his office of arch-marshal, and the claim of his Bavarian compeer would have been equally indisputable had it not so happened that both he and the Palsgrave of the Rhine were members of the great house of Wittelsbach. This house had acquired the dukedom of Bavaria in 1180 and the Palatinate, which represented the vote of the extinct dukedom of Lorraine, in 1214; but as both dignities were united in one person, no difficulty arose until the death of Duke Otto the Illustrious in 1253. When his sons shared his dominions, Lewis becoming Palsgrave, and Henry Duke of Bavaria, nothing was settled as to the vote and other rights of an elector, and before long both sons claimed these, and both with apparently reasonable grounds. The number Seven was now, however, beginning to be recognized as sacred: the king of Bohemia would not relinquish the place to which he laid claim as cupbearer; and the other electors were unwilling to see two votes enjoyed by one family. Thus a contest, which more than once nearly led to war, arose between the rival lines of Wittelsbach, and between the Bavarian line (whose title was thought the weaker of the two) and the king of Bohemia. Rudolf I, who in 1289 pronounced in favour of Bohemia, and Lewis IV, who directed that the vote should be exercised by the two lines alternately, in vain attempted to settle it, nor was it laid to rest until the issuing and confirming, at the Diets of Nürnberg and Metz in 1356, of Charles IV’s Golden Bull. 1356. This instrument, thenceforth regarded as a fundamental law of the Empire, after finally assigning the disputed vote and office of cupbearer to Bohemia (of which Charles was then king) proceeds to lay down a variety of rules for the conduct of imperial elections. Frankfort is fixed as the place of election, as a tradition dating from East Frankish days preserved the feeling that both election and coronation ought to take place on Frankish soil; the archbishop of Mentz is named convener of the electoral college; to Bohemia is given the first, to the Count Palatine the second place among the secular electors. A majority of votes was in all cases to be decisive. As to each electorate there was attached a great office, it was supposed as early as the time of the Sachsenspiegel that this was the title by which the vote was possessed; though in truth the office and the right of election had both the same source, for the great offices naturally belonged to the greatest of the imperial feudatories. The three prelates were archchancellors of Germany, Gaul and Burgundy, and Italy respectively: Bohemia cupbearer, the Palsgrave seneschal, Saxony marshal, and Brandenburg chamberlain.

These arrangements, under which disputed elections became far less frequent, remained undisturbed till the breaking out of the Thirty Years’ War, when the Emperor Ferdinand II by an unwarranted stretch of prerogative deprived (in 1621) the Palsgrave Frederick (king of Bohemia and husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England) of his electoral vote, and transferred it (1623) to his own partisan, Maximilian of Bavaria. At the peace of Westphalia the mediaeval mysticism which revered the number Seven had become out of date, so the Palsgrave was reinstated as eighth elector, Bavaria retaining her vote and rank, but with a provision that if the Bavarian branch of the house of Wittelsbach should come to an end, the Palsgrave should step into its place, which accordingly happened on the extinction of the Bavarian line in 1777. The sacred number having been once broken through, less scruple was felt in making further changes. In ad 1692, the Emperor Leopold I conferred a ninth electorate on the house of Brunswick-Lüneburg, which was then in possession of the duchy of Hanover and succeeded to the throne of Great Britain in 1714; and, in ad 1708, the assent of the Diet thereto was obtained. It was in this way that English kings came again to vote, as Richard the First had voted five centuries before, at the election of a Roman Emperor.

It is not a little curious that the only potentate who continued down to our own days to entitle himself Elector should be one who never actually joined in electing an Emperor, having been under the arrangements of the old Empire a simple Landgrave. In ad 1803, Napoleon, among other sweeping changes in the Germanic constitution, procured the extinction of the electorates of Cologne and Treves, annexing their territories to France, and gave the title of Elector, as the highest after that of king, to the Duke of Wurtemberg, the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hessen-Cassel, and the Archbishop of Salzburg. Three years afterwards the Empire itself ended, and the title became meaningless.

As the Germanic Empire is the most conspicuous example of a monarchy not hereditary that the modern world has seen, we may pause for a moment to consider what light its history throws upon the character of elective monarchy in general, a contrivance which has always had attractions for a certain class of political theorists.

First let it be observed how difficult, one might almost say impossible, it was found to maintain in practice the elective principle. In point of law, the imperial throne was from the tenth century to the nineteenth absolutely open to any orthodox Christian candidate. But as a matter of fact, the competition was confined to a few powerful families, and there was always a strong tendency for the crown to become hereditary in some one of these. Thus the Franconian Emperors held it from ad 1024 till 1125, the Hohenstaufen, themselves the heirs of the Franconians, for more than a century (1138-1254 with an interruption of fifteen years); the house of Luxemburg enjoyed it during four (though not continuous) reigns, and when in the fifteenth century it fell into the tenacious grasp of the Hapsburgs, they managed to retain it thenceforth (with but one trifling interruption) till it vanished out of nature altogether. Therefore the chief benefit which the scheme of elective sovereignty seems to promise, that of putting the fittest man in the highest place, was but seldom attained, and attained even then rather by good fortune than by design. Yet it is to be noted that every monarch from Henry the Fowler down to Charles IV, a space of four centuries, was a man of character and energy, who spent himself freely in the service of the State. Germany had no such ruler as England suffered from in John, or Edward II, or Richard II; nor was the average of capacity so high among the kings of France.

No similar objection can be brought against the second ground on which an elective system has sometimes been advocated, its operation in moderating the power of the crown, for this was attained in the fullest and most ruinous measure. We are reminded of the man in the fable, who opened a sluice to water his garden, and saw his house swept away by the furious torrent. The power of the crown was not moderated but destroyed. Each successful candidate was forced to purchase his title by the sacrifice of rights which had belonged to his predecessors, and must repeat the same shameful policy later in his reign to procure the election of his son. Feeling at the same time that his family could not make sure of keeping the throne, he treated it as a life-tenant is apt to treat his estate, seeking only to make out of it the largest present profit. And the electors, aware of the strength of their position, presumed upon it and abused it to assert an independence such as the nobles of other countries could never have aspired to.

Modern political speculation supposes the method of appointing a ruler by the votes of his subjects, as opposed to the system of hereditary succession, to be an assertion by the people of their own will as the ultimate fountain of authority, an acknowledgement by the prince that he is no more than their minister and deputy. To the theory of the Holy Empire nothing could be more repugnant. This will best appear when the aspect of the system of election at different epochs in its history is compared with the corresponding changes in the composition of the electoral body which have been described as in progress from the ninth to the fourteenth century. In very early days, the tribe chose a ruler, who was, though he usually belonged to the most noble family, little more than the first among his peers, with a power circumscribed by the will of his subjects. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the right of choice had passed into the hands of the magnates, and the people were only asked to assent. In the same measure had the relation of prince and subject taken a new aspect. We must not expect to find, in such rude times, a clear apprehension of the technical quality of the elective process, and the throne had indeed become for a season so nearly hereditary that the election was often a mere matter of form. But it seems to have been regarded, not as a delegation of authority by the nobles and people, with a power of resumption implied, but rather as their subjection of themselves to the monarch who enjoys, as of his own right, a wide and ill-defined prerogative. In yet later times, when, as has been shewn above, the assembly of the chieftains and the applauding shout of the host had been superseded by the secret conclave of the seven electoral princes, the strict legal view of election became fully established, and no one was supposed to have any title to the crown except what a majority of votes might confer upon him. Meantime, however, the conception of the imperial office itself had been thoroughly permeated by religious ideas; and the fact that the sovereign did not, like other princes, reign by hereditary right, but by the choice of certain persons, was supposed to be an enhancement and consecration of his dignity. The electors, to draw what may seem a subtle, but is nevertheless a real distinction, selected, but did not create. They only named the person who was to receive what it was not theirs to give. God, say the mediaeval writers, not deigning to interfere visibly in the affairs of this world, has willed that these seven princes of Germany should discharge the function which once belonged to the senate and people of Rome, that of choosing His earthly viceroy in matters temporal. But it is immediately from Himself that the authority of this viceroy comes, and men can have towards him no relation except that of obedience. It was in this period, therefore, when the Emperor was in practice the mere nominee of the electors, that the belief in his divine right stood highest, to the exclusion either of the mutual responsibility of feudalism, or of any practically enforcible responsibility to the people.

Peace and order appeared to be promoted by the institutions of Charles IV, which removed one fruitful cause of civil war. But these seven electoral princes acquired, with their extended privileges, a marked and dangerous predominance in Germany. They had once already, in their famous meeting at Rhense in 1338, acted as an independent body, repudiating in the name of the nation the extravagant claims of the Pope, and declaring that it was by their election alone that the Emperor acquired his rights. The position which they had then assumed, in a heartily patriotic spirit, was now legalized and made permanent. They became a separate order in the State, and were to enjoy full regalian rights in their territories. Causes were not to be evoked from their courts, save when justice should have been denied: their consent was necessary to all public acts of consequence. They claimed, as the choosers of the sovereign, to be the representatives of the ancient Roman Senate: and, since in the Middle Ages every institution must have its religious side, the persons of these senators were held to be sacred, and the seven mystic luminaries of the Holy Empire, typified by the seven lamps of the Apocalypse, soon gained much of the Emperor’s hold on popular reverence, as well as that actual power which he lacked. To Charles, who viewed the German Empire much as Rudolf had viewed the Roman, this result came not unforeseen. For him, the old dreams of world dominion had become as remote and obsolete as the dream of recovering Jerusalem. With few scruples, and little sense of what the honour of his crown required, he was an astute and thoroughly practical politician. Nothing of the old chivalric spirit of his grandfather Henry appears in his character or his conduct. He saw in his office a means of serving personal ends, and to them, while appearing to exalt by elaborate ceremonies its ideal dignity, he deliberately sacrificed what real strength was left. The object which he sought steadily through life was the prosperity of the Bohemian kingdom, and the advancement of his own house. In the Golden Bull, whose seal bears the legend—

there is not a word of Rome or of Italy. To Germany he was indirectly a benefactor, by the foundation of the University of Prague, the mother of all her schools: otherwise her bane. He legalized anarchy, and called it a constitution. The sums expended in obtaining the ratification of the Golden Bull, in procuring the election of his son Wenzel, in aggrandizing Bohemia at the expense of Germany, had been amassed by keeping a market in which honours and exemptions, with what lands the crown retained, were put up openly to be bid for. In Italy the Ghibelines saw, with shame and rage, their chief hasten to Rome with a scanty retinue, and return from it as swiftly, at the mandate of an Avignonese Pope, leaving the city the very day on which he had been crowned, halting on his route only to traffic away the last rights of his Empire. The Guelf might cease to hate a power he could now despise.

Thus, alike at home and abroad, the German king had become practically powerless by the loss of his feudal privileges, and saw the authority that had once been his parcelled out among a crowd of rapacious nobles. Meantime how had it fared with the rights which he claimed by virtue of the imperial crown?