Law, Custom, and Honor in the Case of Ludwig IV of Bavaria, 1323-47

In 1314, Ludwig IV of Bavaria attained the title of King of the Romans, the intermediate step to the Holy Roman imperial crown since the tenth century. His bitterest rival John was elected pope only two years later. These two highly ambitious men swiftly fell into conflict with one another, but unlike those that had characterized imperial-church politics since the eleventh century, this was to be the last major medieval struggle between emperor and pope for preeminence within the Holy Roman Empire. By the time Ludwig died in 1347, practical efforts to implement the notion that the head of the Empire, whether emperor or pope, should likewise be ruler of all Latin Christendom had largely fallen into abeyance. At the same time, there was no longer any question of the pope holding temporal power in the Empire, as Ludwig and the imperial princes definitively rejected this centuries' old claim based upon Pope Leo III's coronation of Charlemagne more than five hundred years before. As such, Ludwig stands as a key figure at the end of a conflict that defined the contours of the High Middle Ages as much as economic and demographic expansion or the crusades. I argue that Emperor Ludwig IV of Bavaria cannily utilized and manipulated the discourses, processes, and ideas of canon and German customary law in a battle that began with both the papal and imperial parties using the corpus of canon law processes and appeals as the means to libel one another. The audience of these ostensible legal documents was no court of law. The papacy began the conflict by citing Ludwig with a monitio canonica – a canonical warning of an impending and immediately effective sentence in the absence of submission – that was sent far and wide, but not to Ludwig himself. Ludwig responded with his own appeals, mixing canon law process with claims grounded in the rhetoric of German and imperial custom, but like the pope aimed his words not to a court of laws, but of public opinion within the Empire. Ludwig used the rhetoric of customary law as a bulwark intended to preserve both his and the Empire's honor, which were inextricably linked by the oath that German kings rendered upon their royal coronation at Aachen. Bringing these concepts and their attendant scholarship to bear on the well-studied sources concerning Ludwig's contest with the papacy reveals the creative nature of Ludwig's defense. Alongside Ludwig's well-known dynastic concerns emerge his persistent, sincere, and inextricably linked attempts to defend the Empire against its rivals and to protect his own standing and honor at almost any cost, including the risk to his own eternal soul of persisting in an entrenched conflict waged against three consecutive popes. More broadly, Ludwig successfully repudiated papal efforts to impose its hierocratic vision of papal dominance upon the Empire, paving the way for his successor, Charles IV, to issue the famed Golden Bull of 1356, which definitively excluded the pope from the electoral politics of the German Lands and served as a fundamental constitutional basis of the Empire until its final dissolution in 1806.