The Golden Bull: How an Empire Elected Its King
- 16 July 2026
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Overview
Issued by Charles IV in 1356, the Golden Bull fixed the seven electors and established rules for choosing the King of the Romans, creating a durable imperial election procedure that made no place for papal confirmation.
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The Golden Bull of 1356: How the Empire Chose Its King
In October 1314, the Holy Roman Empire acquired two kings.
The death of Emperor Henry VII had left the throne vacant. One group of princes elected Frederick of Austria, a Habsburg. A rival group backed Louis of Bavaria, from the Wittelsbach dynasty. The competing elections took place within days of each other around Frankfurt. Both candidates were subsequently crowned, each claiming to be the rightful King of the Romans.
The disagreement was not settled by legal argument. It became a war.
Louis defeated Frederick and captured him at the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322, eight years after the double election. Yet military victory did not resolve the larger question of royal legitimacy. Pope John XXII challenged Louis’s right to exercise royal authority without papal approval, drawing the German monarchy into another bitter confrontation between Empire and papacy. Kevin Lucas Lord has shown how Louis’s defence relied increasingly upon German electoral custom as an authority independent of papal judgement (Lord, 2020).
The Golden Bull of 1356 was intended to make another double election less likely. Issued under Emperor Charles IV, it identified the seven princes entitled to vote, made a majority decision binding and prescribed where, when and under what conditions an election should take place.
It did not remove politics from the process. Nor did it create the electoral system from nothing. It took customs that had developed unevenly and gave them a clearer legal form.
The result was one of the most important documents in the history of the Holy Roman Empire.
Why the Empire Needed Clearer Rules
The Holy Roman Empire in 1356
The German monarchy was elective. A ruler might hope that his son would succeed him, but inheritance alone did not confer the crown. The leading princes of the Empire chose the King of the Romans, who could then seek imperial coronation.
This arrangement gave the princes considerable leverage. Candidates negotiated, made promises and confirmed privileges. A ruling dynasty could build influence across generations, but it could not treat the monarchy as private family property.
The basic principle of election was well established before 1356. The difficulty lay in the details.
By the late 13th century, seven princes were generally understood to possess electoral authority. Agreement over the precise membership of that group was less secure. Competing branches of the Saxon dynasty claimed the Saxon vote. Rival Wittelsbach lines disputed whether Bavaria or the Palatinate should participate. Questions also arose over who could exercise a vote when an electoral territory was divided or inherited.
The election of 1314 exposed these weaknesses. Both sides claimed enough votes to elect a king, but some of those votes were themselves disputed. The problem was not simply that the electors disagreed over the candidates. They disagreed over who counted as an elector.
The coronation created further complications. Louis was crowned at Aachen, the customary place for a German royal coronation, but not by the Archbishop of Cologne, who traditionally performed the ceremony. Frederick was crowned by the Archbishop of Cologne, but at Bonn rather than Aachen. Each side could therefore identify a defect in the other’s claim.
The conflict with Pope John XXII added another question: did a properly elected King of the Romans require papal confirmation before exercising royal authority?
The Golden Bull addressed these problems by building a complete succession procedure around named electors, a recognised location and majority voting. It could not prevent political hostility, but it made it harder to convert disagreement into two legally plausible kings.
Plain English: Why not make the crown hereditary?
The princes benefited from the election. Their votes gave them influence over candidates and allowed them to secure privileges. A permanently hereditary monarchy would have weakened that position.
Who Issued the Golden Bull?
Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor – Votive Panel of Jan Očko of Vlašim
Charles IV was born in 1316 into the Luxembourg dynasty. Through his father, John of Luxembourg, he inherited a powerful connection to the Bohemian crown. His mother, Elizabeth, belonged to the Přemyslid dynasty that had ruled Bohemia.
Charles was elected King of the Romans in 1346 while Louis IV was still alive and claiming the throne. His own route to power was therefore shaped by electoral competition. He became King of Bohemia in 1347 and was crowned emperor in Rome in 1355.
He was not trying to build a centralised monarchy on the model of a modern state. Government within the Empire depended upon negotiation with princes, bishops, cities and territorial lords. Charles understood that an electoral law would succeed only if the men expected to obey it had helped to establish its terms.
Historian Heiner Lück describes the Golden Bull as a compromise constructed around clarity, consensus and the privileged position of the electors. Its rules drew upon established customs rather than attempting to sweep them aside (Lück, 2023).
The document was issued in two stages. The first 23 chapters were proclaimed at Nuremberg in January 1356. Eight further chapters followed at Metz later that year. Together they formed a collection of 31 chapters.
Seven official copies were produced for the three archbishops, the four secular electoral interests and the cities of Frankfurt and Nuremberg, although their precise production histories differ. Six carried the golden seal that eventually gave the document its familiar name. The surviving originals were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013.
The election occupied much of the text, but not all of it. The Golden Bull also addressed succession within electoral territories, mining and monetary rights, judicial privileges, feuding, urban alliances and court ceremonial. It was an electoral settlement placed within a wider statement about political order.
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The Seven Electors
The Seven Prince Electors electing Henry, Count of Luxembourg Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor at Frankfurt on 27 November 1308
The Golden Bull established beyond practical dispute that seven princes held the right to elect the King of the Romans.
Three were archbishops. Four were secular rulers. Each possessed an imperial court office that expressed his ceremonial place within the Empire.
The ecclesiastical electors
| Elector | Imperial office |
|---|---|
| Archbishop of Mainz | Archchancellor for Germany |
| Archbishop of Cologne | Archchancellor for Italy |
| Archbishop of Trier | Archchancellor for Burgundy |
The archbishops were not merely churchmen invited into secular politics. They were territorial princes with lands, courts, revenues and extensive political networks.
The Archbishop of Mainz held the leading role in organising an election. Once the death of the king or emperor became known, he was responsible for summoning the other electors to Frankfurt. If he failed to act, the document allowed the electors to assemble without him.
The Archbishop of Trier cast the first vote. Cologne followed. Mainz voted last, after hearing the choices of the other six. That order gave Mainz an important position when the result remained undecided.
The secular electors
| Elector | Imperial office |
|---|---|
| King of Bohemia | Archcupbearer |
| Count Palatine of the Rhine | Archsteward |
| Duke of Saxony-Wittenberg | Archmarshal |
| Margrave of Brandenburg | Archchamberlain |
These offices were displayed during major imperial ceremonies. The archchamberlain presented water and a towel for the ruler to wash his hands. The archsteward brought food to the imperial table. The archcupbearer offered wine, while the archmarshal performed duties associated with horses and military order.
The ceremonies did not create the electors’ authority. They made that authority visible.
The electoral college had developed before Charles IV’s reign. Ernest Henderson’s introduction to the translated Golden Bull noted that the three archbishoprics and the Bohemian vote were already relatively secure. The most troublesome claims concerned rival branches in Saxony and Brandenburg and the competition between Bavaria and the Palatinate.
The Golden Bull settled the Saxon vote upon Saxe-Wittenberg and awarded the disputed Wittelsbach vote to the Count Palatine. Bavaria itself received no votes.
That distinction matters. The Wittelsbach dynasty was not excluded altogether: its Palatine branch possessed one vote, while Louis the Roman, another Wittelsbach, held Brandenburg in 1356. It was the Bavarian branch’s expectation of sharing or alternating the Palatine vote that the Golden Bull rejected. Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller describes this as a lasting affront that encouraged Bavaria to seek an electoral dignity of its own (Hergemöller, 2020).
The Habsburg dukes of Austria were also absent. Duke Rudolf IV responded to Austria’s comparatively weak position by promoting the forged Privilegium Maius, which claimed exceptional privileges and the invented title of archduke. The forgery cannot be reduced to the Golden Bull alone, but the settlement sharpened the status problem Austria faced inside the Empire.
Majority Voting and Legitimacy
The Golden Bull did more than name the voters. It prescribed how an election should proceed.
The Archbishop of Mainz was required to notify the electors following the ruler’s death. They were then to assemble at Frankfurt or send properly authorised representatives. An elector who failed to attend, or departed before the election had been completed without leaving an authorised proxy, lost his vote for that election.
The restrictions extended to their entourages. Each elector could bring no more than 200 mounted followers into Frankfurt, of whom only 50 could be armed. The rule acknowledged the obvious danger of placing seven powerful princes, their retainers and their rival interests inside one city.
The citizens of Frankfurt were ordered to protect the electors and prevent outside interference. Once the princes had assembled, other people could be excluded from the city while the election was under way.
The electors attended Mass in the Church of St Bartholomew and swore to choose a suitable ruler without accepting payment, promises or private bargains. The oath expressed an ideal rather than an accurate description of every imperial election. Candidates continued to negotiate and confirm privileges. Yet the document presented the vote as a solemn duty owed to the Empire.
Four votes settled the election
The decisive rule was majority voting.
Four of the seven votes were sufficient. Once a majority had selected a candidate, the Golden Bull ordered that the result should have the same legal force as a unanimous election. A defeated minority could dislike the result, but it could not create a second valid king simply by refusing to agree.
The rule even allowed an elector who was himself a candidate to cast the fourth and deciding vote for his own election. Three electors could choose a fourth member of the college, whose own vote would then complete the majority.
This closed one of the openings exposed in 1314. A divided college might still quarrel fiercely, but the law supplied a point at which the argument was supposed to end.
Thirty days and a restricted diet
The electors were not permitted to prolong negotiations indefinitely. If no decision had been reached within 30 days, the Golden Bull imposed a deliberately uncomfortable restriction:
“they shall live on bread and water”
—Golden Bull, Chapter II, translated by Ernest F. Henderson.
The electors were also forbidden to leave Frankfurt until they or a majority had chosen a king. Whether such a diet could always have been imposed upon seven of the Empire’s greatest princes is another matter. The clause expressed the urgency of avoiding a long vacancy.
Plain English: Four votes were enough
Three dissenting electors could object, delay and negotiate. They could not legally overturn a candidate supported by the other four.
The Pope Outside the Election Procedure
The Golden Bull did not declare war upon the papacy. Charles IV had cultivated papal support and had been crowned emperor in Rome in 1355. The document did not abolish imperial coronation, deny the religious standing of the emperor or announce a separation between secular and ecclesiastical authority.
Its challenge was quieter.
The Golden Bull described a complete royal election without assigning the pope any part in it. Mainz issued the summons. The seven electors assembled. A majority selected the king. The winner acquired authority through the election itself.
Friedrich Heer drew attention to this effective absence of papal involvement (Heer, 1968, p. 117). Hergemöller similarly argues that the settlement excluded papal claims to participate in the appointment or approval of the German king.
That interpretation needs careful wording. The Golden Bull does not contain a clause formally expelling the pope from the election. Its political force lies in its silence. Papal confirmation was unnecessary for the procedure it established.
The background reached back to Louis IV. After Louis intervened in northern Italy, Pope John XXII ordered him to cease exercising royal authority because his election had not received papal approval. Louis responded through a series of legal and political appeals that placed German electoral custom above papal jurisdiction.
In 1338, the electors gathered at Rhens and asserted that a king chosen by the proper electors did not require papal approval to exercise authority within the Empire. Lord argues that the principles advanced during Louis’s conflict with the papacy later entered the Golden Bull’s political intention, though not in the same explicit form (Lord, 2020).
Charles therefore avoided an unnecessary confrontation in the wording. He did not ask the pope to surrender a claimed right. He wrote an election law that proceeded without it.
Plain English: What did the document keep out?
The Golden Bull did not prohibit the pope from commenting on an election. It removed the procedural opening through which papal approval might be treated as necessary to make the election valid.
What the Golden Bull Did Not Do
The Golden Bull has sometimes been presented as the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire. That description is useful only if handled cautiously.
The Empire did not possess a single codified constitution in the modern sense. Its political order rested upon accumulated laws, customs, privileges, judicial decisions, feudal relationships and negotiated agreements. The Golden Bull became one of its fundamental laws, but it did not contain the whole system.
Nor did it create the seven electors from nothing. The electoral college had emerged gradually, and its membership was broadly recognisable before 1356. What the document did was settle contested claims and give the college a more definite legal identity.
It did not make imperial government democratic. Seven exceptionally privileged princes chose the king. Most princes, bishops, nobles, cities and subjects had no electoral vote.
It did not eliminate dynastic ambition. Charles strengthened the Bohemian vote that he himself held and later secured the election of his son Wenceslas during his own lifetime. Electoral law and family strategy continued to operate together.
It did not forbid every feud. The text condemned unjust wars, burnings, plunder and unlawful exactions, but the Empire’s culture of negotiated and formally declared violence did not disappear in 1356.
Neither did the settlement create a powerful central administration. It confirmed the electors’ rights over mines, coinage, tolls and justice. These concessions helped obtain their acceptance, but they also strengthened territorial authority.
The document even required the electors to meet annually to discuss the welfare of the Empire. Hergemöller notes that this provision was never consistently implemented. A law could declare an institutional routine without providing the machinery needed to sustain it.
Reading the Golden Bull in Plain English
First Folio of the Golden Bull of Charles IV
The document’s legal language can obscure how practical many of its provisions were. Read closely, it resembles a set of answers to problems that had already occurred.
Who starts the election?
The Archbishop of Mainz was to announce the ruler’s death and summon the electors within the prescribed period.
What this meant: Responsibility could not be endlessly disputed. One recognised prince was expected to initiate the process.
Why it mattered: Delay at the beginning of an interregnum created opportunities for rival factions to organise competing assemblies.
Where does the election happen?
The electors were to meet at Frankfurt.
What this meant: The election had a recognised location. A faction could not strengthen its case simply by convening somewhere else.
Why it mattered: The competing elections of 1314 had demonstrated how disputed places, procedures and voters could produce rival claims.
Frankfurt was one point in a wider geography of royal authority. The election occurred there, the royal coronation was associated with Aachen, and the new ruler’s first royal court was to be held at Nuremberg. Hergemöller records that five of the seven kings elected between 1356 and 1487 followed the Nuremberg requirement.
What makes the winner legitimate?
The majority decision was treated as binding upon the whole electoral college.
“such election shall in future be considered and looked upon as if it had been unanimously carried through”
—Golden Bull, Chapter II, translated by Ernest F. Henderson.
What this meant: The law converted a majority result into the legal equivalent of unanimity.
Why it mattered: The minority could no longer argue that its refusal to consent left the election formally incomplete.
What happens to the electoral territories?
The secular electoral dignities and the territories attached to them were protected against division. Succession was regulated so that one recognised heir inherited the electoral position.
What this meant: An electoral vote could not be fragmented each time a dynasty divided its lands among several sons.
Why it mattered: Territorial partitions had already created rival claims in Saxony and within the Wittelsbach dynasty.
Bohemia retained a distinctive position as a kingdom with its own laws and privileges. The Golden Bull confirmed the Bohemian king’s electoral status while protecting the kingdom’s jurisdiction from outside interference.
What did the new king owe the electors?
The successful candidate was expected to confirm the electors’ existing privileges, rights, liberties and customs.
What this meant: Election did not give the king a free hand against those who had chosen him.
Why it mattered: The electoral settlement depended upon reciprocity. The princes accepted a clearer procedure while the ruler acknowledged their exceptional standing.
Why include court ceremonies?
The Metz chapters described how the secular electors were to perform their imperial offices at ceremonial gatherings. The instructions covered such matters as carrying the imperial sword, presenting food and wine, and providing water for the ruler.
What this meant: Political rank was enacted publicly.
Why it mattered: Medieval government depended upon visible precedence. Where a prince sat, when he voted and what service he performed communicated his place within the Empire. Len Scales’s study of the Golden Bull emphasises its long life not only as law but as a repeated staging of imperial order (Scales, 2012).
Why the Golden Bull Endured
The Golden Bull remained a central component of imperial law until the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806. That longevity did not mean the electoral system remained unchanged.
Bavaria acquired an electoral dignity during the Thirty Years’ War. The Palatine vote was later restored, increasing the number of electors. Hanover received a further electorate at the end of the 17th century. The territorial reorganisation of 1803 transformed the college again shortly before the Empire disappeared.
Yet the main principles established in 1356 endured: a defined electoral body, majority voting and a formal procedure for choosing the ruler.
The surviving manuscripts show how seriously later generations treated the text. Hergemöller reports that 173 late medieval copies and another 20 early modern copies have been identified. Around 1400, King Wenceslas commissioned a lavishly illuminated version, now held by the Austrian National Library. Its decorated folios turned electoral law into a display of royal magnificence.
There was an irony in that commission. Wenceslas was deposed by electors in 1400. The document that confirmed the dignity of kings also confirmed the authority of the princes who judged them.
The Golden Bull made succession more predictable, but it did not shift power entirely towards the monarch. It strengthened the electoral college and protected the territorial privileges of its members. That was the bargain at the heart of the settlement.
Charles IV gave the Empire a clearer method for choosing its ruler. He did so by recognising that the ruler could not stand apart from the princes who elected him.
The Golden Bull did not make imperial politics simple, peaceful or democratic. It did something more practical. It identified the voters, established the place, fixed the procedure and determined when the argument had to end.
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Sources
- Charles IV. (1896). The Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV, 1356 A.D. (E. F. Henderson, Trans.). In E. F. Henderson (Ed.), Select historical documents of the Middle Ages (pp. 220–261). George Bell and Sons. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/golden.asp (Original work published 1356)
- German History in Documents and Images. (n.d.). The Golden Bull (1356) (T. A. Brady Jr. & R. C. Head, Trans. & Summ.). German Historical Institute. https://germanhistorydocs.org/en/from-the-reformations-to-the-thirty-years-war-1500-1648/the-golden-bull-1356
- Heer, F. (1968). The Holy Roman Empire (J. Sondheimer, Trans.). Praeger.
- Hergemöller, B.-U. (2020, February 27). Golden Bull, 1356. Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/EN%3AGolden_Bull%2C_1356
- Lord, K. L. (2020). Toward the Golden Bull and against the pope: The role of custom and honor in King Ludwig IV’s Nuremberg and Frankfurt appellations (1323–24). Austrian History Yearbook, 51, 91–113. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0067237820000107
- Lück, H. (2023). The Golden Bull of 1356. A legislative masterstroke by Emperor Charles IV. In E. Balogh (Ed.), Golden bulls and chartas: European medieval documents of liberties (pp. 109–138). Legal Heritage. https://doi.org/10.47079/2023.eb.gbac.1_5
- Scales, L. (2012). Re-staging the Reich: The life and times of the Golden Bull (1356). Bulletin of International Medieval Research, 17/18, 84–106. https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1426365
- Austrian Commission for UNESCO. (n.d.). The Golden Bull. https://www.unesco.at/en/communication/documentary-heritage/memory-of-the-world-in-austria/the-golden-bull
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Luciano Anastasi
Luciano is the founder of the MedievalHistory platform and the LinkedIn History Enthusiasts Group, where he is dedicated to curating and sharing high-quality medieval history content. His goal is to engage scholars, teachers, students, and enthusiasts by fostering insightful discussions and promoting scholarly resources on topics from medieval warfare and religion to societal transformations and daily life in the Middle Ages.
Luciano is also an active book reviewer, focusing on academic publications related to medieval history. He recently collaborated with Yale University Press to review forthcoming medieval history titles, aiming to deepen educators' and researchers' understanding of the period. Alongside his history endeavors, he has over 40 years of experience in IT leadership roles across various industries, including the public sector, banking, insurance, airlines and consulting, and has contributed to United Nations projects.
With a Master of Arts in Business Process Management, Luciano combines his expertise in IT strategy and governance with his passion for medieval history. He leverages technology to bridge the academic community and the wider public, making historical scholarship more accessible through engaging online content.
