BULL OF GOLD. — Also called the "Carolingian" from the name of its author, it is the constitution published by Emperor Charles IV in 1356 and sanctioned at the two Diets of Nuremberg in the same year, to determine in detail the rule to be followed in the election of the emperor. This election depends solely on the majority vote of the electors, whose number is definitively limited to seven: 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 disseminated during the struggle between the Church and Emperor Louis IV the Bavarian. In this way, a new era in ecclesiastical history was foreshadowed. In this regard, one may recall the doctrines of Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun in the *Defensor pacis*, where it is stated, among other things,
that the Pope, as the people's mandatary, can only crown the emperor;
the writings of the nominalist William of Ockham, who proclaimed imperial power to derive not from the Pope but from God;
the protests of the Diet of Frankfurt in 1344 and the subsequent assembly of Rense against the demands of Pope Clement VI regarding the acceptance of the excommunicated Emperor Louis.
The famous Bull 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, when, in homage to Napoleon, the authority of the Holy Roman Empire was abolished.
The office of prince-elector was accompanied by the granting of special privileges, such as the regalia of mines and salt within their territories, as well as the conferral of the attributes of majesty. Their principalities were declared indivisible, and primogeniture was established (for lay electors) to ensure the conditions suitable for the elector's position and the possibility of continuing in his primary function, which was to cast the vote in the designation of the successor to the throne.
The procedure established for the voting process was that the Archbishop of Mainz, as the first elector, would request the votes of the other electors in order and cast his own last.
The Bull remained in force until the dissolution of the empire (1806); however, with regard to the composition of the college of electors, it was altered by the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The text of the Bull was in Latin. It consisted of 31 chapters, of which the first 23 dated to 10 January 1356 and were published at the Diet of Nuremberg; the remaining chapters were solemnly promulgated in the presence of two thousand knights, the Dauphin of France, and the papal legate on Christmas Day of the same year at the Diet of Nuremberg. In addition to its importance for the election of the king, the Bull also had significance for the evolution of financial law, insofar as it regulated the regalia, and for criminal law, due to the many norms regarding the maintenance of peace and the repression of acts that could disturb II.
Among the interpretive commentaries that jurists produced on this Bull, that of Bartolus of Sassoferrato remains famous.