Golden Bull of 1356

The election of the German king by the leading princes was long established, but disputes over the procedure and over the pope’s role had repeatedly led to double elections — most recently in 1314, when Louis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria were chosen by rival groups of electors. In 1338 the Declaration of Rhense had already rejected any papal involvement. Charles IV of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, elected King of the Romans in 1346 and crowned emperor in Rome in 1355, settled the matter in detail: the first 23 chapters were promulgated at Nuremberg on 10 January 1356, the remaining eight at Metz on 25 December. The document takes its name from its golden seal.

The bull named the seven electors — the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony and the Margrave of Brandenburg — and their ceremonial court offices; four votes out of seven were to suffice, so that a minority could no longer block an election. Elections were to take place at Frankfurt, coronations at Aachen and the first diet of each reign at Nuremberg. The electoral lands were declared indivisible and were to pass to the eldest son, and the electors received wide privileges, among them judicial immunity and the right to mint coins; leagues of towns were forbidden, except those formed to keep the peace. The Bavarian branch of the Wittelsbachs, rivals of the Luxembourgs, was left without a vote.

The pope is not mentioned at all; Innocent VI, who needed Charles’s support against the Visconti, did not protest. The Golden Bull governed the election of the emperors for more than four centuries, and historians see it as a milestone in the growth of the princes’ territorial power within the Empire. Seven original copies survive; in 2013 they were inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.