GOLDEN BULL. - Also called "Carolina" after the name of its author, it is the constitution published by Emperor Charles IV in 1356 and sanctioned in the two Diets of Nuremberg of the same year, in order to determine in detail the rule to be followed in the election of the emperor. This election depends solely on the majority of the votes of the electors, whose number is definitively limited to seven, namely the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, the king of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the count palatine and the margrave of Brandenburg. No mention is made of papal intervention in the designation and confirmation of the emperor; indeed it is implicitly excluded, as a consequence of the doctrines spread during the struggle between the Church and Emperor Louis the Bavarian; in this way the approach of a new epoch in ecclesiastical history was heralded. In this connection let us recall the doctrines of Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun in the Defensor pacis, where among other things it is affirmed that the Pope, as a mandatary of the people, can only crown the emperor; the writings of the nominalist William of Ockham, who proclaimed that imperial power comes not from the Pope but from God; the protests of the Diet of Frankfurt of 1344 and of the following assembly of Rense, against the demands of Pope Clement VI regarding the acceptance of the excommunicated Emperor Louis. The famous B. is called "golden" because it constitutes the "magna carta", the constant and fundamental code of the empire from the 14th century until the year 1806, in which the authority of the Holy Roman Empire was abolished, in homage to Napoleon.
Bibliography3 works
Giuseppe M. Pou y Marti
With the office of prince-electors there was joined the granting of particular privileges, such as those of the regalia of the mines and of the salt of their territory, and also the conferring of the attributes of majesty. Their principalities were declared indivisible, and primogeniture was established therein (for the lay electors), so as to ensure the conditions suitable to the position of the elector and to the possibility that he might continue in his principal function, which was that of giving his vote in the designation of the successor to the throne.
The procedure established for the voting operations was that the archbishop of Mainz, as first elector, should ask the other electors for their vote in order and should give his own last.
The bull remained in force until the cessation of the empire (1806); but, as regards the composition of the college of electors, it lapsed at the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The text of the bull was in Latin. It consisted of 31 chapters, of which the first 23 went back to 10 Jan. 1356 and were published in the Diet of Nuremberg; the remaining chapters were published with great solemnity in the presence of two thousand knights, of the dauphin of France, and of the pontifical legate, on Christmas Day of the same year in the Diet of Nuremberg. The bull, besides its importance for the election of the king, was also important for the evolution of financial law, as regards the regalia it had regulated, and for criminal law, by reason of the many norms concerning the maintenance of peace and the repression of acts that could disturb it.
Among the interpretative commentaries that the jurists made on this bull, that of Bartolus of Sassoferrato has remained famous.
Antonio Rota