Some 130 years after the publication of its inaugural volume--covering the period 911-1197--theConstitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum (“Laws and public documents of the [Romano-German] emperors and kings”) series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH) is nearing completion. In the past decade, the editors of the volumes covering the fourteenth century have made rapid progress, filling in most of the remaining gaps for the reigns of Ludwig IV (1314-1347) and Charles IV (1346-1378). The challenges of producing editions of monarchical documents for this late medieval period are substantial. The early volumes of the series could fit more than two centuries’ worth of laws into one fascicule, assisted by the fact that the letters and charters of the relevant kings and emperors were or would be made available in the parallel Diplomata series of the MGH. By contrast, the fourteenth-century volumes of the Constitutiones must include a broad swathe of documents that might be considered acta publica alongside legislation, and this for a period from which exponentially more written evidence survives compared with earlier centuries. (It is this ever-growing quantity of primary sources that ensures that the Constitutiones will most likely end with Charles IV, rather than extending into the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.)

Thus, the editors of this book--the first of two fascicules constituting volume 14, extending from January 1362 to December 1364 (while fascicule 14,2 will cover 1365)--have had to be selective when deciding which sources pertaining to Emperor Charles’s activities to include, yielding 450 meticulously edited items from this timespan. The majority have been printed before, but in editions of varying availability and quality, and often only as abstracts (Regesten), whereas here the editors have provided complete transcriptions of a substantial proportion of the items they chose to include. Many other sources are published in full for the first time in this volume, particularly charters destined for recipients in Italy (nos. 16, 49, 125, 233, 241-3, 248, 251, 255, 257, 295, 310, 315, 316, 353, 431-2, 443). Documents such as these, destined for speakers of languages other than German, are in Latin, as are some (but by no means all) of the charters of privileges and judicial rulings issued by Charles to ecclesiastical figures and institutions. Sources written for lay inhabitants of the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire, which take up most of this volume, are in German, and more specifically in the chancery form of Early New High German that had come to predominate in southern and central Germany around the turn of the fourteenth century. Following the principle established in Charles IV’s earlier MGH volumes, the editors have left out documents related to his other kingdom, Bohemia, apart from those directly connected in some way to actors in Germany. This is a pragmatic choice, albeit one which glosses over the ambiguous issue of Bohemia’s place within the Empire, particularly at a time when its king--one of the seven electors--was simultaneously emperor of the Romans.

The early to mid-1360s were a high point for the authority exercised by Charles IV over the Holy Roman Empire, falling between the civil wars of his early reign and the breakdown in the 1370s of his system of peace-keeping leagues (Landfrieden). Charles worked with local authorities to preserve relative peace on his well-worn itineraries between Prague and the Rhineland. This active and peripatetic approach also afforded opportunities for ritualized performance of sacral kingship, for example in ceremonies of enfeoffment for German princes and gifts of relics to religious houses, as highlighted in the recent research of Martin Bauch. The Golden Bull of 1356 had confirmed a “constitutional” order amenable to Charles’s dynastic designs. His first son to survive infancy, Wenceslas, had been born in 1361 and would be crowned king of Bohemia in 1363, ensuring the continued grip of the house of Luxemburg on its most important power base. Charles was mostly able to keep his Habsburg rivals at bay in these years, as we will shortly see. In view of this situation in the middle decades of his reign, the influential historian Peter Moraw wrote of Charles’s “hegemonic kingship” (hegemoniales Königtum).

This hegemony is on display in this volume, to the extent that we witness Charles’s chancery operating as the focal point of a variety of political activities for a diverse cast of actors in the German lands. Yet it was primarily a reactive hegemony, contingent on would-be recipients of royal privileges and justice approaching Charles’s court wherever it happened to be located at a given moment in time. Decisions and mandates invariably involved delegating duties back to autonomous princes, nobles, or cities. The dwindling offices, jurisdictions, and revenues that were still in the gift of the emperor were concentrated in a few regions such as the Upper Rhine, Swabia, and Franconia, and in this volume we primarily see them used to reward political allies and as a financial resource to be pledged in return for loans. Furthermore, the monarch did not single-handedly embody the polity, as was beginning to occur in the political ideology of France and other realms in this period. Contemporaries expressed a conceptual dualism between the emperor as an individual and controller of courtly institutions and patronage on the one hand and the Empire in the abstract, instantiated by its leading members (Glieder), on the other--as when, for instance, Charles granted the office of imperial bailiff (Landvogt) in Alsace to Burgrave Friedrich V of Nuremberg in 1363 in return for “the notable services which he has often usefully performed for us and the Empire [uns und dem reich]” (no. 181, p. 170).

Most of the types of documents contained here will be familiar to scholars of the late medieval Empire, but their distribution, range of recipients, and sometimes peculiar forms warrant attention. We see Charles confirming fiefs in conventional ways, often to princes and noblemen and women, but also to burghers and non-episcopal clerics. The content of fiefs included not only lands and offices, but all kinds of assets and jurisdictions, such as the copper mines and concomitant mining courts with which Charles enfeoffed Count Gebhard of Mansfeld in June 1364 (no. 361). Thanks to some of Charles’s lengthy itineraries in these years, fief-recipients as far afield as Namur and Liège (nos. 140, 145) can be found in this volume (in connection with the emperor’s stay in Aachen in late 1362--a place normally only visited by monarchs for their coronations, as it was located far from the south German heartlands of the Empire).

Charles’s chancery also granted and confirmed plenty of items in forms other than fiefs. We see it frequently distributing regalian rights, such as mints, tolls, and judicial powers--and occasionally trying to revoke them, as in Charles’s cancellation of Bishop Lupold of Bamberg’s right to charge a wine excise in October 1362 (nos. 128-129). These sources shed light on the value of the monarchy’s approbation in these areas of fourteenth-century government, even if they were administered by independent authorities on the ground, and offer revealing details on how they operated. We learn, for instance, about the granularity of livestock tolls: in March 1363 Charles granted Count Eberhard of Wertheim the right to charge one heller (worth approximately half a penny) for a pig sold locally in the village of Kredenbach, six heller for a horse destined to cross the Rothaar mountains, and three Würzburg pence for a horse headed towards the Wupper valley (versus two pence for a cow going in the same direction) (no. 190). The bishopric of Utrecht’s beer tax revenues had fallen because of a new hop-based brewing recipe (novus modus fermentandi cervisiam, videlicet per apposicionem cuiusdam herbe, que humulus vel hoppa vocatur (p. 393)) to which the tax did not apply, so Charles granted its rulers the right also to apply the tax to every cask of this new variety of beer in June 1364 (no. 370).Many such grants pertained to monastic institutions, which clearly looked to the monarchy in temporal affairs. This could enable noteworthy female protagonism on the part of convents. Charles exempted the Dominican nuns of Rothenburg ob der Dauber from the cattle tax that applied elsewhere in the diocese of Würzburg (no. 21), for example, and confirmed the immunity of the abbess of the convent of Alspach and her community of Poor Clares from all secular jurisdictions while placing her under the protection of the imperial bailiff in Alsace (no. 329).

The sources in this volume illuminate another sphere in which Charles exercised regalian rights: the operation and security of the public, “imperial” layer of activity that transcended individual lordships and territories, such as long-distance roads and markets. We witness Charles granting market rights to all kinds of settlements, including not only imperially-immediate cities but also subject or “territorial” towns (such as Eichstätt, no. 39) and villages (such as Burgwindheim, no. 209). In January 1363 he assured Venetian merchants that he would forbid Basel and its noble clients from hindering their commercial travels along the roads controlled by that city--although he also suggested that, if Basel did not co-operate, they use alternative routes, highlighting the practical limits of the emperor’s authority (no. 149). More concretely, Charles sought to promote the maintenance of roads and bridges, as when allowed Jewish settlement in Frankfurt in order to generate tithes that the city was supposed to use to maintain bridges across the River Main (no. 168).

The tendency to transfer revenues notionally belonging to the crown to other actors in order to meet obligations towards them draws attention to Charles’s financial methods, which can be analyzed in detail in a large proportion of the sources in this volume. His only regular fiscal income within the German lands came from the imperial taxes (Reichssteuer) levied on free and imperial cities. Here we see frequent evidence of their collection, but also of their pre-emptive ascription to various figures--from local noblemen to the king of Denmark--to whom Charles owed money (nos. 24, 27, 29, 30, 64, 87, 106, 117, 120, 173, 179, 215-16, 246, 252, 266, 282, 284, 304, 322, 354-5, 371-3, 387, 410-11, 437). Even taxes in kind--such as the twelve falcons apparently owed annually by the city of Lübeck to the crown (no. 167)--could be assigned to another authority (in the case of the falcons, to the archbishop of Mainz in 1363). A clearly essential instrument for raising funds for the monarchical administration was the pledge (Pfandschaft): the grant of an item (the so-called pledge) to serve as collateral for a loan extended by the pledge-recipient, who could use it for their own purposes until the monarch chose to redeem it. We see Charles pledging everything from a castle (no. 407) to jurisdiction over the Jews of Augsburg (no. 383) to the whole Mark of Lusatia (nos. 221, 332). Even imperial cities in their entirety could be pledged: Schweinfurt’s citizens redeemed their city out of its pledge to Countess Elisabeth of Henneberg (nos. 25-6), while in April 1364 Charles pledged Dortmund to Duke Rudolf II of Saxony for 20,000 florins (nos. 337-8). It should be stressed that this was a normal means of raising funds in late medieval Central Europe, which recent research has attested among German princes and the monarchs in Poland, Hungary, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, this volume demonstrates how pledging contributed to the erosion of the crown’s remaining possessions and jurisdictions (hence, presumably, the Habsburg emperors’ ending of the practice in the fifteenth century).

Charles’s political and judicial activities in these years appear multi-layered. His court adjudicated all kinds of routine disputes, with litigants ranging from small-town burghers to the Teutonic Order (nos. 42-3, 45, 114). The emperor encouraged and sanctioned Landfrieden (peace-keeping leagues) in many regions, in a crown-locality partnership that was by now several decades old (nos. 52, 90-91, 185, 231, 418). We find not only the renewal of these league treaties in the volume, but also evidence of their practical operation, as in October 1364, when Charles ordered the allied cities of Alsace to attack some retainers of the counts of Zweibrücken-Bitsch for robbing Bishop Dietrich of Worms on a public road (no. 407). The editors have also helpfully included some alliance treaties between powers whose interests closely intersected with (or challenged) those of the emperor in these years, such as the margraves of Brandenburg and the archbishop of Mainz (nos. 108, 112, 135-136, 269, 289). Finally, we can see dramatic developments in the “highest layer” of political activity in the Empire, the dynastic competition between Charles IV and his Habsburg rivals. Throughout 1362 and 1363, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria engaged in escalating diplomatic maneuvers in opposition to the emperor, through alliances with King Louis I of Hungary and with Milan (nos. 8, 54-56, 97, 104, 118, 248-249). For his part, Charles sought to counter Rudolf through partnerships of convenience with Zurich, the patriarch of Aquileia, and the dukes of Bavaria, among others (nos. 17, 92-94, 225, 234, 298-299). Eventually, mediation efforts by King Casimir III of Poland and Charles’s own daughter Catherine (Rudolf’s wife) effected a reconciliation at Brno in February 1364, and induced the emperor to recognize the Habsburg acquisition of Tyrol (nos. 288, 302-303, 305-306, 402). At the same time, Charles was pursuing his own strategic dynastic expansion westwards and northwards from his base of Bohemia, often by issuing titles and lands in those German-speaking regions as fiefs of the Bohemian crown (nos. 77, 198, 210-213, 230, 254, 258, 264, 332-336, 420-422).

Clearly, then, this is a volume that opens onto a multitude of themes. Late medievalists with many different interests will profit from consulting it. The editors have maintained the usual high standards of the MGH Constitutiones series, including the recent decision to include links--in a small number of applicable cases--to digital images of the original archival document on the European virtual primary source platform Monasterium.net (<https://www.icar-us.eu/cooperation/online-portals/monasterium-net/>). Furthermore, scholars around the world will soon benefit from a full digitization of this fascicule: all MGH volumes can be found at <https://www.dmgh.de>, with a delay of a couple of years from the date of publication.