BERTOLDO di HENNEBERG. — Archbishop and elector of Mainz, b. in 1441, d. on 21 Dec. 1504. In 1484 he was appointed archbishop of Mainz and consecrated by Innocent VIII on 20 May 1485. He became chancellor to Maximilian I when the latter was elected emperor in 1493. On 4 Jan. 1496 he established literary censorship in his diocese, the first recorded in history. He sent ambassadors to Rome to protest against the bull of 20 Apr. 1487, by which Innocent VIII demanded the tithes of the ecclesiastical property of Germany in support of the Crusade. In 1495, at the Diet of Worms, with the aim of mitigating the emperor’s absolutism, he proposed the establishment of an imperial council for affairs of state. He was buried in the cathedral of Mainz.
BIBL.: J. B. Weckerle, De Bertholdi Hennebergensis archiepiscopi Maguntini... studiis politicis, Münster 1868; Hefele-Leclercq, VIII, 1, pp. 137-38; Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, II (1875), pp. 524-28. Emma Santovito