John of Bohemia: Constructing a National Hero

CHAPTER FOUR JOHN OF BOHEMIA: CONSTRUCTING A NATIONAL HERO In the summer of 1296, an heir was born to Count Henry VII of Luxembourg.1 At the time, the dynasty was still recovering from the disastrous battle of Worringen against Brabant in 1288. The battle had ended all hopes of acquiring the ancestral lands of Limburg and left an entire generation of male family members dead on the field, their bodies lost. The arrival of the child heralded the rise of a new generation. Count Henry was only eighteen at the time. He would be elected King of the Romans in 1308, at the age of thirty, an election facilitated by his younger brother Baldwin, archbishop of Trier (r. 1307–1354). The son was named John, after his maternal grandfather, the duke of Brabant, who had been the victor of Worringen. After his election as king of the Romans, Henry installed his under- age son as count of Luxembourg. The position of emperor-elect offered new opportunities. Following the death of the last Přemyslid, Wenc- eslas III, Henry decided to use the contested succession in the king- dom of Bohemia to benefit his own family. In 1310 John was married to Wenceslas’s sister Elizabeth in Speyer and endowed with the lands of the Bohemian crown. Henry then left on his Italian journey, from which he would never return, and John made for his new lands in the East, where he had to impose his rule against the opposition of Henry of Carinthia. His policies in Bohemia were regularly met with opposition from the local nobility, on whom John never entirely managed to impose his own authority. After years of struggle, they merely established a modus vivendi. In Luxembourg, he met with greater approval, but, in all of his lands, the nobility was increasingly involved in the administration and were obtaining more power. This process gained 1 For the biography of John of Bohemia, see Jean Schoetter, Johann, Graf von Luxemburg und König von Böhmen, 2 vols. (Luxembourg: V. Bück, 1865); Raymond Cazelles, Jean l’Aveugle. Comte de Luxembourg, Roi de Bohême (Bourges: Tardy, 1947); Jiří Spěváček, Král diplomat (Prague: Panorama, 1982); Michel Margue and Jean Schroeder, ed., Un itinéraire européen. Jean l’Aveugle, comte de Luxembourg, roi de Bohême. 1296–1346. Publications du CLUDEM (Brussels: Credit communal; Luxembourg: CLUDEM, 1996). 162 chapter four momentum due to the ruler’s youth, and it continued because the extent of his holdings meant that he was absent from individual ter- ritories for long periods. Nevertheless, John’s territorial and family policies met with regular successes. He added Silesia to the lands of the Bohemian crown, held Tyrol for a couple of years and consolidated and expanded the county of Luxembourg. He made use of a vast array of means, pairing dip- lomatic negotiations with borrowing of money, creating pressure on neighbours through new castles, building a wide network of matrimo- nial alliances, buying rights and titles while mortgaging other lands, and spicing it all with the odd campaign when required. Practical poli- tics was combined with the prestige that came from an enthusiastic indulgence in the chivalric way of life. This was expressed through regular participation in tournaments and by his crusades against the Lithuanians. Unlike his father, John never managed to gain the imperial title. Instead, he supported Louis of Bavaria’s election against the Habsburg candidate, Frederick. Louis failed to live up to John’s expectations, especially after he revoked some concessions made to John for his sup- port in the battle of Mühldorf of 1322, leading the king of Bohemia to initiate his own imperial policies. On two occasions, John usurped the imperial privilege of intervening in Lombardy, and he established cordial ties with Pope John XXII in Avignon, very much in opposition to the emperor-elect. This and the vast amount of money extracted from the dynasty’s lands helped to secure the imperial title for his son Charles in 1346. John’s royal title also enabled him to expand the dynasty’s ties with the court in Paris. It was in his function as a close ally of the French crown that John of Bohemia died at the battle of Crécy in 1346, against Edward III of England, who won the day.2 2 The name ‘John of Bohemia’ will be given preference over other forms. In Luxembourg, the form ‘John the Blind’ has established itself, although this is a histo- riographic construct emerging only in the seventeenth-century (see below) and used less in other countries, except France and occasionally Germany. The Czech tradi- tion prefers ‘John of Luxembourg’ ( Jan Lucemburský), which can lead to confusion with the fifteenth-century count of Ligny, who won fame by capturing Joan of Arc in Compiègne. The form ‘John of Bohemia’ is preferred for three reasons: it unmistak- ably refers to this one historic person; it is the dominant form in all medieval sources; it deliberately breaks with the traditional Luxembourg-centric view described in the ensuing pages. .

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