Page:Bohemia An Historical Sketch.djvu/94

 first retired to the monastery of Ourschamp near Nyon to nurse the wounds he had received. Charles then returned to Bohemia, and was preparing an invasion of Bavaria when the sudden death of King Louis (1347) freed him from his most dangerous enemy.

The party in Germany opposed to Charles did not, however, despair of raising up another rival king. Although King Edward III of England had already recognized the right of King Charles to the German throne, it was on him that the choice of the enemies of Charles first fell, as his victory at Crécy had made his name prominent throughout Europe.

King Charles sent William, Margrave of Juliers (Jülich), as envoy to the King of England, with the mission of dissuading him from accepting the German crown. This mission proved successful, and Edward (1348) refused the crown that was offered to him, and even concluded a treaty of alliance with King Charles.

Unable to find any prince who was willing to oppose Charles as King of the Germans, his enemies now chose Count Günther of Schwarzburg as king, a noble who was almost without territorial possessions, but who had enriched himself as a soldier of fortune. Count Günther's death in the following year (1343) for a time put an end to civil war in Germany, and we are told that King Charles, as a proof that he bore him no malice, was himself present at the funeral of the Count of Schwarzburg. The troubles caused about this time by the appearance of the "False Valdemar" in Bradenburg, and the part King Charles took in them, belong to German rather than to Bohemian history, and it will be of more interest to notice the various measures by which Charles strove to improve the social and political condition of Bohemia.

During the past reigns, particularly that of King John, the great nobles had profited by the constant financial difficulties of their sovereigns for the purpose of acquiring almost all the Crown lands which they held as securities for various—mostly very small—loans which they had made to their kings. Charles had already, as regent during his father's lifetime, succeeded in redeeming a great number of the pledged lands and castles, and during his reign he entirely carried out his design of liberating the Bohemian crown from a position of humiliating dependency. One of