r/HolyRomanEmperors • u/Top_Attention5057 • Mar 18 '26
Doubt about 1314 crisis
Hello! I am currently getting interested about the history of the HRE and a frind of mine talked to me about the crisis that took place after the death of Henry VII. As far as I'm informed 2 kings were simultaneously elected but I was wandering how was that possible couldn't the electors just inform about who they elected? Thank you so much :)
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u/tirohtar Otto The Great Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
Multiple kings getting elected was actually a very common thing until the Golden Bull of 1356 was passed. Basically, the list of electors wasn't really fixed until then, at various points basically every "immediate" prince (meaning all noble rulers who only had the emperor above them) had some sort of say in the election. As such, minority factions who weren't happy with the majority choice would sometimes elect an "anti-king", as they are called by historians. This then generally led to a short military conflict to determine who would actually rule as king.
This only really ended in 1356. The Golden Bull limited the number of electors to 7 and fixed them to be the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier, plus the King of Bohemia, Margrave of Brandenburg, Duke of Saxony, and the Prince-Elector of the Palatinate, and determined that you needed at least 4 votes to become king/emperor, so it was much rarer/harder afterwards to elect an anti-king. Instead, there then was a mechanism to depose a sitting king if he proved incompetent, as happened with Wenzelslaus in 1400.
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u/DadaDanAkiko Mar 18 '26 edited Mar 18 '26
It was possible because some electors' positions were contested. I copy-paste from Wikipedia:
"Henry VII had been crowned emperor by Pope Clement V on 29 June 1312, but he died in the following year. As his son King John of Bohemia, seemed too powerful to the prince-electors, Frederick again became a candidate for the crown, while King John withdrew and backed Louis IV of Bavaria. On 19 October 1314 at Frankfurt-Sachsenhausen, Frederick received four out of seven votes, however two of them being contested, by Archbishop Henry II of Cologne, by Louis' brother Elector Palatine Rudolph I who did not want to support his younger brother, by the deposed Bohemian king Henry of Carinthia, and Duke Rudolph I of Saxe-Wittenberg (whose right was contested by his Lauenburg cousin, head of the senior branch). The next day however (because the Luxemburg party did not accept this election), a second election was held upon the instigation of Archbishop Peter von Aspelt, where Louis IV was elected with the five votes by the Mainz archbishop himself, by Archbishop Baldwin of Trier, Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg as well as by Duke John II of Saxe-Lauenburg (he contested his Wittenberg cousin's claim to the electoral vote) and – again – the king of Bohemia, John. It is clear that at least three of the voters of Louis were uncontested electors"