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Wenceslaus, King of the Romans by
Max Barack from 1888
'Wenceslaus' (also ''Wenceslas'', , , ;
February 26,
1361 –
August 16 1419), called 'the Drunkard', was, by election,
King of the Romans[1] from
1376 and, by inheritance,
King of Bohemia (as ''Wenceslaus IV'') from
1378. He was the third Bohemian and second German monarch of the
House of Luxembourg. He was never crowned
Holy Roman Emperor by the
Pope, as would have been customary for a "King of the Romans," and he was deposed in
1400 from his elected royal office, though he did not recognise this and continued to employ his Roman title from his hereditary kingdom of Bohemia.
In
1373, Wenceslaus father,
Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, obtained for him the
Electoral Margraviate of Brandenburg. In 1376, he also obtained Wenceslaus's election as King of the Romans by the six
prince-electors. On Charles's death in 1378, Wenceslaus inherited Bohemia. In the cathedral of
Monza there is conserved a series of reliefs depicting the coronations of the kings of Italy with the
Iron Crown of Lombardy. The seventh of these depicts Wenceslaus being crowned in the presence of six electors, he himself being the seventh. The depiction is probably not accurate and was likely made solely to reinforce the claims of the cathedral on the custody of the Iron Crown.
Wenceslaus married, first,
Johanna of Bavaria on
29 September 1370. Following her death on
31 December 1386, he married her first cousin once removed,
Sofia of Bavaria on
2 May 1389. He had no children by either wife.
Accusing Wenceslaus of devoting far more attention to his Bohemian than to his
German duties, and of weakness in agreeing with
Charles VI of France to end their support of rival Popes, the princes of the German states deposed him as King in August 1400 in favour of
Rupert III,
Count palatine of
the Rhine, though Wenceslaus refused to acknowledge this successor's decade-long reign.
As King Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, until his death in 1419, he came into repeated conflict with the
Bohemian nobility, and sought to protect the religious reformer
Jan Hus and his followers against the demands of the
Roman Catholic Church for their suppression as
heretics. This caused many
Germans to leave the
University of Prague, and set up their own
University at Leipzig. Hus was executed in
Konstanz in
1415, and the rest of Wenceslaus's reign in Bohemia featured precursors of the
Hussite Wars that would follow his death.
He was the one who had
John of Nepomuk tortured and put to death, allegedly because he was not willing to reveal the confessional secrets learned from king's wife
Sofia of Bavaria as the popular Roman Catholic legend goes. In reality John of Pomuk was a notary in the consistory of
Archbishop of Prague Jan z Jenštejna, and was killed as a result of the property dispute and long personality conflict between the king and the fanatical archbishop.
Wenceslaus's political authority was severely limited by his
schizophrenia and
alcoholism. He died of a heart attack during a hunt in the woods surrounding his castle
Nový Hrádek near
Kunratice (today a part of
Prague), leaving the country in a deep political crisis.
Ancestors
Notes
1. This title was a precursor title to that of Emperor and was a replacement for the three titles King of Germany, King of Burgundy, and King of Italy, which he held.
References
★ Lindner, Thomas. ''Deutsche Geschichte unter den Habsburgern und Luxemburgern''. Vol. II. Stuttgart, 1893.
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