Birthday Greetings #66

Happy birthday to Rupert of the Palatine who was King of the Romans (and by Romans I mean Germans) for a few years at the beginning of the fifteenth century.  Rupert was the Elector Palatine, one of the (at the time) seven great princes who were responsible for electing the Holy Roman Emperor.  Or rather, they elected the King of the Romans.  After said election the pope, if it took his fancy, crowned the Roman king emperor.  Some times it didn't take the popes fancy or the pope was in serious dispute with the Roman king or possibly was too busy beating up on one of the other popes who were trying to dig him out of the Lateran.  In such cases the would be Holy Roman Emperor died as a plain old King of the Romans with, no doubt, a sense of incompleteness.

In Rupert's case this sense of incompleteness would have been increased by the sheer disinterest the bulk of his subjects showed in being ruled by him.  They didn't revolt too much, for the most part they simply ignored him.  Part of this is probably due to the fact that the empire had a perfectly serviceable King of the Romans when Rupert took the job.  As I noted Rupert was one of the electors whose job it was to furnish the empire with its ruler when the current incumbent gave up life's weary burden.  But when you're one of said electors the temptation to elect yourself must be almost unbearable.  The current King of the Romans was Wenceslaus of the House of Luxembourg who was ruling as king of Bohemia.  Unfortunately he wasn't ruling in Bohemia very well and had a tendency to get locked up by various rebellious nobles.  As such he wasn't able to give Germany the attention that the nobility of Germany felt it merited.  Rupert and three other electors (making a majority) met together and essentially fired Wenceslaus and appointed Rupert in his place.

Rupert was a scion (glorious word, I must find out what it means one day) of the House of Wittelsbach a family better known for producing nutcase rulers of Bavaria than deeply mediocre would be emperors (although there was one inglorious period in the eighteenth century when they managed both).  The scene was set for how his reign was going to proceed at his coronation.  Roman Kings are crowned at the imperial city of Aachen.  However the people of Aachen pointblank refused to let Rupert set foot inside the gates so he had to cobble together a coronation in Cologne instead.

Still Rupert was now notionally King of the Romans and he sent hopeful signals to Pope Boniface IX even going to the extent of supporting Boniface against the other two popes that Catholic Christianity was currently burdened with.  Boniface smiled politely, trousered the cash and did nothing.  One of the major problems was that the House of Luxembourg was one of the most powerful in Germany and they hadn't forgotten that Rupert had essentially screwed Wenceslaus out of the crown.  The only reason why this didn't in fact turn into a full blown civil war is because Wenceslaus himself didn't seem to have any interest in getting the job back.  Finally when a Luxembourg family squabble got out of hand and resulted in Wenceslaus being locked up again (this time by his brother) the Luxembourgs subsided into sullen disinterest.

With not so much peace as an absence of war restored to the empire Rupert decided to invade Italy.  This was what political spin doctors would describe as a "vote winner".  The empire had old, long standing claims on northern Italy and for a Holy Roman Emperor (or even a mere King of the Romans) to actually make them good would definitely improve his prestige.  The only problem was you had to be successful, otherwise you just looked like an idiot.  And the fact that the territories in question weren't ruled by the emperor and hadn't been for centuries should have been a clue that extending the imperial authority was harder than it appeared.

Rupert gathered an army, marched across the Alps, besieged Brescia and then had to nervously explain to his troops that he'd left his wallet in his other siege train.  They went home.  Rupert, disinclined to besiege Brescia alone went too.  Any credit Rupert might have gained from not being actually killed by the Luxembourgs was blown away by this somewhat farcical campaign.

Rightly concluding that lack of funds was the principal reason for this latest failure Rupert attempted to increase the amount of land held directly by the king thus guaranteeing himself an improved revenue stream.  This irritated the handful of people who were prepared to admit publicly that they were his supporters because if they had wanted a strong, powerful ruler they probably wouldn't have agreed to Rupert in the first place.  The ensuing "awkwardness" continued until Rupert's death.  He was succeeded by another member of the House of Luxembourg.  The next member of the House of Wittelsbach to grasp at the imperial title was the wretched Charles VII whose misrule would make Rupert look like a political and military genius.