Louis IV

Louis IV (born 1283?, Munich [Germany]—died October 11, 1347, Munich) was the duke of Upper Bavaria (from 1294) and of united Bavaria (1340–47), German king (from 1314), and Holy Roman emperor (1328–47), first of the Wittelsbach line of German emperors. His reign was marked by incessant diplomatic and military struggles to defend the right of the empire to elect an emperor independently of the papacy, to consolidate his own position, and to improve the status of his family.

Early life

As the younger son of Louis II, count Palatine and duke in Upper Bavaria, Louis had no claim to the crown by birth. On his father’s death in 1294, the 11-year-old boy was made a ward of his brother Rudolf, who was then 20, and of his mother, Mechthild, a Habsburg and a daughter of King Rudolf I. Louis immediately found himself involved in high politics; his brother took the side of King Adolf of Nassau and his mother that of her brother, Albert I of Austria, who was attempting to depose Adolf. Keeping her son out of Munich, she sent him to her brother’s court in Vienna, where he was reared, together with his Habsburg cousins, Frederick and Leopold. This circumstance no doubt had a lasting effect on Louis, though he never let political decisions be influenced by family ties. Albert’s victory over Adolf of Nassau at Göllheim (July 2, 1298) allowed Louis to assume the share in the government that was his by law but that his older brother had hitherto withheld from him. The rivalry between the brothers, which had flared up again after the assassination of King Albert (1308), ended in 1310 with a partition of territories, which Louis was able to impose on the strength of being the guardian of his Lower Bavarian cousins. But the traditionally anti-Austrian attitude of Lower Bavaria led to a quarrel with the Habsburgs. Having assured himself of his brother’s goodwill by means of a compromise (June 21, 1313), Louis gained a decisive victory over the Habsburgs at Gammelsdorf (November 9), while the succession to the German crown, fallen vacant with the emperor Henry VII’s unexpected death on August 24, was still the subject of negotiations.

The empire had become an elective monarchy, but counts no longer figured among the candidates. The houses of Habsburg and Luxembourg (Luxemburg), risen to the rank of major German powers as a result of acquiring Austria (1282) and Bohemia (1310), respectively, contended for the throne; had it not been divided into warring lines, the house of Wittelsbach might have been a third contender. On the strength of his victory, Louis, in 1314, became the candidate of the Luxembourgs, who had failed to gain the crown for John of Bohemia, the late emperor’s son. The Habsburgs, however, would not acknowledge Louis, though he was grandson of King Rudolf; in the double election of October 19–20, 1314, Louis gained little advantage from the fact that his claims were rather more substantial than those of the anti-king, Frederick III of Austria, crowned on the same day, November 25. Military successes enabled Louis to wrest exclusive control over Upper Bavaria and the Rhenish Palatinate from his brother, who had voted against him; but a permanent settlement with the latter’s descendants could be made only after the death of Rudolf, his widow Mathilde of Nassau, and his oldest son, Adolf. The dynastic Compact of Pavia (1329), dividing the house of Wittelsbach into a Bavarian and a Palatinate line, enabled Louis to gain the latter line’s support in matters of imperial policy. He failed, however, to achieve a lasting understanding with his Lower Bavarian cousins; that conflict was not settled until this line became extinct in 1340.

Struggle with the Habsburgs

Louis’s most pressing problem was the struggle with the Habsburgs. The decisive battle was fought on September 28, 1322, at Mühldorf, where Louis gained victory, taking prisoner King Frederick with his brothers. By April 1323 he could risk investing his oldest son, Louis, still a minor, with the Margravate of Brandenburg, which had been in abeyance since 1319. Territorial aspirations motivated the conclusion of a hereditary alliance with the house of Wettin as well as Louis’s second marriage, to Margaret of Holland (1324), which in 1345 led to the accession of Holland and its dependencies. These successes did not sit well with John of Bohemia, who refused to be pacified either by the donation of Upper Lusatia in 1320 or by the marriage of Duke Henry the Elder of Lower Bavaria with a Luxembourg the following year, or by the acquisition, by way of collateral, of the Egerland. Luxembourg finally allied itself with France, and this move, in turn, led to an increased hostility toward Louis on the part of the pope, who was wholly under French influence.

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Pope John XXII had taken advantage of the contest for the crown of Germany to appoint Robert of Naples imperial vicar in Italy vacante imperio (in the absence of a Holy Roman emperor) and to threaten the Italian Ghibellines with heresy proceedings. When Louis’s own imperial vicar forced the pope and Robert to raise the siege of Milan, the heresy proceedings were extended to Louis himself, who was excommunicated in March 1324. This interdiction, never lifted, exposed Louis’s adherents to a conflict of conscience while providing his enemies with a convenient excuse for disobedience. In the eyes of the Curia and of his other enemies, he was thenceforth merely Ludovicus Bavarus, Louis the Bavarian, by which name he lives on in history.

Louis hit back with several proclamations of his own, notably the so-called Sachsenhausen Appellation of May 22, 1324, in which the charge of heresy was turned against the pope. The argumentation ill-advisedly dealt with constitutional problems touching on the empire as well as with doctrinal points. Louis quickly acknowledged this as a mistake and softened its effect, but at this time the Austrians also joined the alliance of France and Luxembourg (July 27, 1324). Louis broke up the hostile combination by agreeing to share the rule with his prisoner Frederick; even so, he overcame Duke Leopold’s objections only by further agreeing (January 7, 1326) to abdicate altogether, provided that the pope gave his approbation to Frederick’s sole rule. There was little likelihood of that because the Curia was interested in perpetuating the rivalry for the German crown. Its reaction proved to Frederick that he had been callously used; he now became a loyal co-ruler with Louis.