Charles IV. set himself, with rare diplomatic ability, to make the most of his own advantages and of the difficulties of his opponents. The imperial cities, discontented by the death of their patron, Lewis the Bavarian, and involved in difficulties and disorders by the Plague, were gained over by the concession of privileges, and one by one opened their gates to Charles. Albert of Austria was detached from the Wittelsbach alliance by a politic marriage between his eldest son Rudolf and Charles’s second daughter Catharine. Charles, himself a widower, sued for the hand of a daughter of the Elector Palatine, and thus gained to his side the head of the House of Wittelsbach. Finally, by disowning the cause of the false Waldemar, he achieved the reconciliation of his most resolute opponent, Lewis of Brandenburg. The death of Gunther of Schwartzburg removed all difficulties in the way of Charles’s recognition, and by 1350 his title was acknowledged throughout the whole of Germany. Charles IV. is incontestably the greatest ruler whom Europe produced in the fourteenth century, yet his merits have met [Sidenote: Character of Charles IV.] with singularly little appreciation except from Bohemian historians. To most English readers he is chiefly known from the saying of Maximilian I. that he was ‘the father of Bohemia but the stepfather of the Empire,’ or by the more recent epigram of Mr. Bryce who says that ‘he legalised anarchy and called it a constitution.’ Of the two sayings, the latter is by far the more unjust and ill-founded. Charles is a unique figure in the family of Luxemburg which rose to such sudden and short-lived eminence in the fourteenth century. His grandfather, Henry VII., threw away his life in a chimerical effort to revive an imperial authority which was no longer either possible or desirable. His father, John of Bohemia, was the representative knight-errant of his time, perhaps the noblest type of fourteenth century chivalry—now crusading in Poland, now trying to found a new territorial power in Italy, and in the end deserting his own interests to fight and fall in the service of an ally. Of Charles’s sons, the eldest, Wenzel, was a good-natured hedonist, who had few desires beyond the pleasures of the table; and the second, Sigismund, was a schemer who always imagined more than he could achieve. In the midst of this remarkable family, which can boast of three emperors and a king who twice narrowly missed election to the same dignity, Charles IV. stands in complete contrast both to his predecessors and his successors. He had none of the romantic enthusiasm of his father or his grandfather, but he had what was far better—a strong sense of the practical duties of government, and a strenuous business capacity which enabled him to carry them out. It is true that he failed to maintain the Ghibelline cause in Italy, but he preferred the more solid and substantial aim of building up a territorial monarchy in Germany.