CARLO IV, IMPERATORE

CAROLUS IV, Emperor. — Born at Prague on 13 May 1316 and died there on 18 November 1378. Son of John, king of Bohemia, he succeeded his father in 1346. He was supported by the Guelph party against Louis the Bavarian and, upon the death of his rival in 1347, was elected king of Germany and crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle on 25 July 1349. He came into Italy by way of Friuli, was crowned king of Italy at Milan on 6 January 1355, and then, by a cardinal deputed by Innocent VI, emperor at Rome on 5 April of the same year. Returning to Germany, he definitively organized the imperial election through the famous constitution of the Golden Bull of 1356, by which he established that the election of the emperor was reserved to a college of seven electors, namely the archbishops of Trier, Cologne, and Mainz, and the princes of Bavaria, the Palatinate, Saxony, and Brandenburg. In 1365 he went to Avignon to Urban V, by whom, on 4 June of that year, he was crowned king of Burgundy at Arles. He returned again to Italy in April 1368; at Udine he met Petrarch, and in October he met Pope Urban in Rome. He obtained from the electors that the empire pass to his firstborn son Wenceslaus, who was to succeed him also as king of Bohemia, and he succeeded in wresting the Margraviate of Brandenburg from the Wittelsbachs of Bavaria, which he gave to his second son Sigismund, who later became, through his marriage to Mary of Anjou, also king of Hungary. He was a great patron: he honoured Petrarch, contributed to the spread of humanism in Bohemia and Germany, and founded the University of Prague. He also gave great impetus to industry, commerce, and agriculture.