cede certain castles in the Upper Palatinate to him. According to the wishes of the Estates of Brandenburg, that country was incorporated with the lands of the Bohemian crown, and thus became an object of more direct interest to Charles.
By the annexation of Silesia, Lusatia, and Brandenburg, the Bohemian kingdom had in itself become one of the great European Powers, particularly as Charles had also obtained possession of territories in Germany. Large though isolated districts in the present kingdoms of Bavaria and Saxony had become either domains of the sovereign of Bohemia, or fiefs of the Bohemian crown, forming what Palacký calls "Bohemian islands" in Germany. It seems very probable that Charles planned the reconstruction of the German Empire under the house of Luxemburg, and with Bohemia as its centre. This plan, "had it succeeded, would have transformed Germany into a monarchy such as France was; but it would undoubtedly have resulted in the dissolution of the Bohemian nationality as such."[1]
It was certainly in view of these ambitious plans that Charles, at the price of great sacrifices, induced the German princes, during his lifetime, to proclaim his son Venceslas as his successor (1376). Charles died two years later (1378), at the age of sixty-two, at a moment when his death was an even more irreparable loss to Bohemia than it would have been at any other time.
The death of Pope Gregory XI in the same year (1378) marks the beginning of the great schism in the Western Church which tended largely to give a revolutionary turn to the movement in favour of Church reform already existing in Bohemia. If such conjectures were not in themselves futile, it would be interesting to speculate on the results had Charles—not then a very old man—lived to a greater age. As a man of acknowledged piety and learning,[2] faithful to the dogmas of the Catholic Church, and yet thoroughly convinced of the necessity of the reform of that Church, it is probable that the part he would have played would have differed much from that of his son and successor.
Charles, German Emperor and King of Bohemia, has been very differently judged by the historians of the two
