ИСТИНА

The new analysis of the first and main part (promulgated in Nuremberg) of the Golden Bull of the Emperor Charles IV reveals its text to be a heterogeneous aggregate of two different groups of imperial edicts. The first one consisted of elaborated charters, composed in the Emperor’s chancellery weeks or even months before the assembly in Nuremberg. The second one emerged obviously only during the diet itself. Therefore only the first group reflects some initial political intentions of Charles IV and his councilors, whereas the second one represents, on the contrary, rather spontaneous reactions of the Emperor on different claims of imperial princes taking part in the assembly. The original concepts of the first set of edicts underwent numerous changes in Nuremberg (and some of them might have been completely rejected). So the mostly quoted first two chapters (dealing with election of a new king) seem to have appeared only during the last days of the diet (and not at its very begin, as has been always unanimously presumed by scholars) as combination of one beforehand “prepared” edict with its different (in some cases extensive and heterogeneous) “improvised” emendations. Those “prepared” edicts, that still allow to identify them within the text of the Golden Bull, seem to give away two politically flagrant and closely related aims of their authors. The first one consisted in strengthening the position of the new Emperor Charles IV, and the second in additional legitimizing of his status through latent critics of the election procedure of 1314. The events of 1314 deprived the Luxembourgs of the crone and introduced the long period of political instability in the Empire that came to its end only with imperial coronation of Charles IV in Rome in April 1355. The collection of edicts, brought by Charles IV in his chancellery to Nuremberg, was neither an “imperial constitution”, nor even a coherent “Rechtsbuch”. They originated rather from momentary perception of the political situation of 1355 as from any sort of conceptual ideas of desirable institutional progress of the Holly Roman Empire.