The Emperor and the King

There was a game where a group of people stood in a long line. The first person saw a word and had to express it through actions without saying it aloud. Then it was passed down person by person, until the last person guessed the contents of the slip based on the gestures they received.

Nine times out of ten, the guess was wrong, but the whole process was incredibly fun. It was often used as an icebreaker game.

Rumors worked the same way. They always started somewhere, then people passed them along according to their own understanding. By the end, the story being told was completely unrecognizable.

Emperors in the Middle Ages often shared names. Charles IV, who abolished the pope's power to choose the emperor, was a German of the Holy Roman Empire, not France's "Charles the Fair." He came from the House of Luxembourg. Perhaps after Marcus Aurelius Antoninus of the Roman Empire and Constantine VII of the Byzantine Empire, he was Europe's most renowned scholar-emperor. This made him stand out sharply among the many warlike German monarchs of the Middle Ages.

Charles the Fair had died as early as 1328, so he could not possibly have promulgated the Golden Bull in 1356. It stipulated that the emperor would be elected in Frankfurt by the seven most powerful prince-electors of the time: the ecclesiastical electors—the three archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trier; and the secular electors—the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhenish Palatinate, the Duke of Saxony-Wittenberg, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The electoral assembly was convened and presided over by the Archbishop of Mainz; the imperial coronation was held in Aachen; and the King of the Romans was the Holy Roman Emperor, no longer requiring an anointing and coronation by the pope in