BULLA AUREA. — Also called “carolina” after the name of its author, this is the constitution promulgated by Emperor Carlo IV in 1356 and enacted at the two Diets of Nuremberg held that same year, in order to determine in detail the procedure to be followed in the election of the emperor. This election depended solely on the majority of the electors’ votes; their number was 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. The papal intervention in the designation and confirmation of the emperor is not mentioned; indeed, it is implicitly excluded, as a consequence of the doctrines disseminated during the struggle between the Church and the emperor Ludovico il Bavaro. Thus the approach of a new epoch in ecclesiastical history was foreshadowed. In this regard, one should recall the doctrines of Marsilio da Padova and Giovanni di Janduno in the Defensor pacis, where, among other things, it is affirmed
that the Pope, as the people’s representative, can only crown the emperor; the writings of the nominalist Guglielmo Occam, who proclaimed that imperial authority derived not from the Pope but from God; and the protests of the Diet of Frankfurt of 1344 and of the subsequent assembly at Rense against the demands of Pope Clemente VI concerning the acceptance of the excommunicated emperor Ludovico. The celebrated B. is called “golden” because it constitutes the “magna carta,” the permanent and fundamental code of the empire from the fourteenth century until 1806, when, in homage to Napoleon, the authority of the Holy Roman Empire was abolished.
Giuseppe M. Pou y Marti
The office of prince-elector was accompanied by the granting of particular privileges, such as the regalian rights over the mines and salt of their territory, as well as the conferment of the attributes of majesty. Their principalities were declared indivisible, and primogeniture was established therein (for laymen), so as to ensure the conditions suited to the elector’s position and to the possibility that he might continue in his principal function, namely, casting the vote in designating the successor to the throne.
The procedure established for the voting operations was that the archbishop of Mainz, as first elector, should request the votes of the other electors in order and cast his own last.
The bull remained in force until the end of the empire (1806); but, as regards the composition of the electoral college, it ceased to apply with the Peace of Westphalia (1648). The text of the bull was in Latin. It consisted of 31 chapters, of which the first 23 dated from 10 January 1356 and were published at the Diet of Nuremberg; the remaining chapters were published with great solemnity, in the presence of two thousand knights, the dauphin of France, and the papal legate, on Christmas Day of that same year at the Diet of Nuremberg. In addition to its importance for the election of the king, the bull was also significant for the development of financial law, with regard to the regalian rights it regulated, and for criminal law, on account of the many provisions concerning the maintenance of peace and the suppression of acts that might disturb II.
Among the interpretative commentaries that the jurists produced on this bull, the one by Bartolo di Sassoferrato has remained famous. Antonio Rota