The Golden Bull of 1356 and imperial elections

The Golden Bull of 1356 is the foundational constitutional document of the late medieval Holy Roman Empire. Issued by the emperor-elect Charles IV at Nuremberg on 10 January 1356, and at Metz on 25 December of the same year, the Bull regulated the procedure for the election of the King of the Romans — the German title by which the emperor-elect was known between his election and his coronation at the hands of the pope — and it did so in a form that would last, in its essentials, until the dissolution of the Empire in 1806. It defined the seven electors; it set out a majority procedure and an elaborate ceremonial; it codified the privileges of the electors, the rights of the people, and the obligations of the king to be elected. Its long working is part of the central business of late medieval German constitutional history. This article treats the political crisis of the 1340s that produced the Bull, the substantive provisions of the document itself, the privileges it granted, and its long working in the politics of the Empire from the late fourteenth century to the early sixteenth.

The crisis of the 1340s

The Golden Bull was not the first attempt to regularise the imperial election. The Constitutional Rules of 1338, issued by Lewis IV at the Diet of Coblenz on 16 July 1338 and confirmed at the Diet of Lierre on 4 March 1339, had been the first major imperial electoral law; it was the work of the jurists of Lewis’s chancery, the humanist Marsilius of Inghen and the Italian jurist Albertus de Albertis. The 1338 rules had been issued in the context of the long quarrel between Lewis of Bavaria and the papacy, and had been explicitly anti-papal in tone: the elected king was to rule without need of papal confirmation, and the pope was to have no role in the imperial government. The rules were never accepted by the papacy and were eventually superseded by the constitutional settlement of 1348, in which Lewis’s death in 1347 and the disputed election of Charles of Luxembourg (Charles IV) in 1346 had produced a rival claimant in the person of Günther von Schwarzburg, count of Schwarzburg-Blankenburg.

Günther was elected at Rhens on 30 May 1349, in a coup d’état of the Rhenish electors. The choice was a poor one: Günther was an old man, and his health broke within weeks of his election. He died at Eltville on 14 June 1349, having previously concluded a treaty with Charles at Eltville on 26 May 1349, by which he renounced his claim in return for a substantial financial settlement. Charles, the Luxembourg king, was now the unrivalled ruler, and the question of the moment was the constitutional settlement that would govern the next generation of imperial elections. The work of the following years was done partly in the Imperial Diet at Nuremberg in 1355/1356, partly in the chancery of Charles, and partly in the imperial council (Hofrat) that the new king had begun to organise in imitation of the French and English courts.

The Bull itself was the work of a small committee. The principal draftsman was Lupold of Bebenburg, bishop of Bamberg, the most distinguished of the imperial jurists of the period and author of the Tractatus de iure regni et imperii of c. 1340; the chancery was under the direction of the cardinal of Bohemia, Jan Očko of Vlašim, and the archbishop of Mainz, Gerlach of Nassau. The Bull was issued in two parts, the first at Nuremberg on 10 January 1356 and the second at Metz on 25 December 1356. The Nuremberg section dealt with the procedure of the election; the Metz section, the Metzer Diplom, was the longer document and dealt with the privileges of the electors and the rights of the imperial cities.

The seven electors

The Bull fixed the body of imperial electors at seven. The ecclesiastical electors were the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier; the secular electors were the king of Bohemia, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, and the margrave of Brandenburg. The choice of seven was a compromise. The three archbishops were the obvious and ancient electors. The four secular electors were the result of a long process of selection. The king of Bohemia was included partly on the grounds of his office, partly because Bohemia was a kingdom, and partly because the great Bohemian aristocracy, in the person of Charles IV, was now the political centre of the Empire. The count palatine of the Rhine was included as the representative of the Wittelsbach family, whose electoral rights had been the subject of long dispute in the previous generation. The duke of Saxony was included as the representative of the Ascanians, whose electoral dignity was confirmed for Aschersleben in 1263 and transferred to Wittenberg in 1307. The margrave of Brandenburg was included as the representative of the House of Wittelsbach in northern Germany, whose electoral rights had been in dispute between the Bavarian and Brandenburg branches.

The numbers of the seven electors were the result of a long historical process. The number had been in the air since the late thirteenth century: the so-called Sachsenspiegel of c. 1220/1230, written by Eike von Repgow, had counted seven electors; the Rheinisches Recht of the same period had counted three; the imperial Reichstag of 1240 had begun the formal process of recognition. The number seven was also the number of the seven electors as a body in the constitutional practice of the period. The Golden Bull was, in this sense, the codification of a usage rather than the invention of a new institution.

The procedure and the privileges

The procedure for the election was set out in detail in the Bull. The king was to be elected in Frankfurt am Main, the traditional city of the imperial elections. The election was to be held within thirty days of the death of the previous king; the archbishop of Mainz was to summon the electors to the city within one month. The election was to be by majority vote, with the archbishop of Mainz presiding. The successful candidate was to be crowned at Aachen by the archbishop of Cologne, the traditional officiant; in case of dispute, the electors were to choose a “stathalter” or imperial vicar. The elected king was to be styled “King of the Romans” until his coronation by the pope. The pope was to crown the emperor; the pope was not to have a vote in the election.

The privileges of the electors were substantial. The ecclesiastical electors were to enjoy the same regalia in their territories as the imperial princes; they were to mint coins, levy taxes, raise armies, and hold courts of justice in the imperial name. The secular electors were to enjoy the same regalia; they were to be imperial vicars in case of vacancy; they were not to be cited before any court but that of the emperor; they were to have the right of appeal to the imperial court. The Bull also set out the order of precedence of the electors: the archbishop of Mainz, the archbishop of Trier, the archbishop of Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the count palatine of the Rhine, the duke of Saxony, and the margrave of Brandenburg. The order of precedence was an important constitutional matter: the archbishop of Mainz was the convener of the elections; the archbishop of Trier and the archbishop of Cologne were the imperial chancellors of the Empire; the king of Bohemia was the imperial arch-marshal; the count palatine of the Rhine was the imperial seneschal; the duke of Saxony was the imperial marshal; the margrave of Brandenburg was the imperial chamberlain.

The rights of the cities and the imperial peace

The Metz section of the Bull dealt with the rights of the imperial cities, the Landfrieden (the imperial peace), and the procedure for the protection of the imperial peace. The imperial cities were confirmed in their privileges, their right of appeal to the imperial court, and their freedom from the jurisdiction of the territorial princes. The Landfrieden was to be observed throughout the Empire, and any breach was to be punished by the imperial court. The Bull also dealt with the rights of the imperial knights, the imperial counts, the imperial free peasants, and the imperial fiefs.

The substantive provisions of the Bull are important for several reasons. First, they confirm the federal character of the Empire. The Empire of the late medieval period was, in the Bull, explicitly a federation of imperial princes and imperial cities, presided over by a Habsburg-Luxembourg-Hohenzollern king. The Empire was not a national state; the Empire was not a centralised monarchy; the Empire was a constitutional order in which the king and the princes and the free cities were bound together by a system of reciprocal obligations. The Empire was, in the words of one recent German historian, “a federal state without a state apparatus”.

The working of the Bull

The Bull was not a perfect document. Its procedure was not always followed. The Diet was, by 1400, the real constitutive organ of the Empire; the king of the Romans was, in the countryside, elected by the princes as a body. The provisions of the Bull were sometimes overridden by the political circumstances: the disputed election of Wenceslaus in 1376, the contested election of Rupert in 1400, the disputed election of Sigismund in 1411, the contested election of Albert II in 1438, and the disputed election of Frederick III in 1440 were all constitutional crises in which the procedure of the Bull was bent. The provisions of the Bull were also modified by the practice of the next generation: the provision for the imperial vicars, the procedure for the archchancellors, the order of precedence of the secular electors (the Bavarian Wittelsbachs were recognised as a separate electorate in 1623, the Palatinate electorate being transferred to them; the Wittelsbachs were compensated by the creation of a new electorate for the Palatinate in 1648; the Brunswick-Lüneburg electorate was created in 1692).

The Bull was, however, an extraordinarily durable document. It remained in force for 450 years. It was the working constitutional order of the Empire from the 14th century to the dissolution of 1806. It was the basis of the Reichsgrundgesetz (the fundamental law of the Empire) of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. It was the basis of the federal constitutional order of the 19th century, in the German Confederation of 1815 and the North German Confederation of 1867. It was, in important respects, the basis of the Grundgesetz of 1949. The German federal tradition is, in this sense, the direct descendant of the Bull of 1356.

Reading the Golden Bull

The Golden Bull is the work of a particular political moment. The constitutional crisis of the 1340s was the work of an old Empire in search of a new order. The Bull was, in the long view, an extraordinary document: it solved the immediate problem of the contested elections; it provided a workable procedure for the next four centuries; and it left the Empire a federal polity in the making. The historiography of the Bull is, in its way, a microcosm of the historiography of the late medieval Empire. The constitutional school of the late 19th century (the Reichsverfassungsgeschichte of Schroeder, the Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte of Gneist, the Staatsrecht des Heiligen Römischen Reiches of Zeumer) read the Bull as the foundation of the imperial constitution. The newer scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s (Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, Karl-Heinz Spiess, Michael Menzel, the Studien zur Reichsverfassungsgeschichte of the Munich school) has read the Bull as a moment in a long process of constitutional development, and has been more attentive to the local and regional circumstances that produced it. The most useful single introduction in English is now Whaley’s Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (2012), which sets the Bull in the wider context of the German constitutional tradition.

References and further reading

Bryce Lyon, Medieval Constitutionalism: The Imperial Capitularies and the Golden Bull (Princeton, 1981).
Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806 (London, 2011).
Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (2 vols, Oxford, 2012).
Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller, ed., Die Goldenen Bullen der Kaiser Karl IV. (1355/1356 und 1357) (Hanover, 2002).
Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages, trans. S. B. Chrimes (Oxford, 1956).