Karel IV.

Charles IV (1316–1378) was king and emperor in a period when Christianity found itself in crisis and Europe was stricken by plague, the Hundred Years War and the beginnings of the Papal Schism. As a member of the Luxembourg dynasty, he was born in Prague, grew up in Paris, took his first steps in rulership in Italy, and became Roman, Bohemian, Lombardian and Arelat king and eventually Holy Roman Emperor. Pierre Monnet (*1963), who heads the French-German Institute of Historical and Social Sciences in Frankfurt am Main and is a specialist on the political and social history of the late medieval period, views Charles IV as split between the medieval and the modern and problematizes the view of Charles IV, often idealized in the Czech environment as Father of the Nation, by placing emphasis on his strategic steps in the expansion of territory as well as recalling the failures of Charles' descendants.