Louis IV of Bavaria
Louis IV was excommunicated for eighteen years for the offence of being elected emperor without papal approval. He was a Wittelsbach duke of Upper Bavaria, elected King of the Romans in 1314 by a majority of the electors while a minority chose his Habsburg cousin Frederick the Fair, which produced eight years of civil war. He won it at Mühldorf in 1322 by hiding a body of cavalry until the decisive moment, captured Frederick, and held him for three years before releasing him on terms so generous that they eventually ruled jointly. The quarrel that defined his reign was with Avignon. Pope John XXII claimed that a king elected in Germany could not exercise imperial authority before papal approval, demanded that Louis abdicate, and excommunicated him in 1324 when he refused. Louis's reply was to make his court the refuge of everyone in Europe with a reason to argue against papal power: Marsilius of Padua, whose Defensor Pacis derived all lawful authority from the people and denied the pope any coercive power at all; William of Ockham, who had been summoned to Avignon over the poverty of Christ; and the leadership of the Franciscan spirituals. He marched to Rome in 1328, was crowned by a representative of the Roman people rather than by a pope, and declared John deposed for heresy. The electors settled the constitutional point in 1338 at Rhense, declaring that election alone made an emperor. He died in a bear hunt in 1347. The writers he sheltered outlasted the quarrel entirely. Marsilius and Ockham were read by the conciliarists at Constance, by Wycliffe and Hus, and by the sixteenth-century reformers, so a dynastic dispute about an election produced a large part of the vocabulary later used to argue that authority comes from below.
- Lived: 1282 CE – 1347 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
