The dispute over the Cypriot throne was, for Laszlo, nothing more than a pleasant windfall.
In truth, after the fact Laszlo had only to think calmly for a moment before he understood well enough that he had been used as a weapon by the Genoese.
Genoa ultimately lacked the strength in the eastern Mediterranean to overwhelm Venice, and having met with failure in the contest for Cyprus, they could only resort to moves outside the board — that is, to set their sights on him, the power behind the scenes.
Having worked this out, Laszlo suddenly felt a strange sensation of being manipulated by one of his own chess pieces.
Still, why would anyone refuse a Cyprus delivered free of charge?
He had already begun searching for a suitable territory for Queen Charlotte, who had suffered defeat after defeat, and would likely need to prepare a piece of land for Queen Catherine as well before long.
Come to think of it, this Queen Catherine was born of the distinguished Venetian Cornaro family, and her father appeared to be one of the imperial knights Laszlo had personally ennobled following Venice's submission.
In the entire affair, there was one other party that, though not especially prominent, was equally impossible to overlook — the Kingdom of Naples.
Charlotte had adopted a bastard son of the King of Naples, intending to marry him to a bastard daughter of James II in order to inherit the Cypriot throne; the Venetians, however, were ruthless — they had quietly done away with the girl who had been left in Venice as a hostage.
Yet even this had not changed Charlotte's intention to have the Neapolitan bastard inherit Cyprus.
After vigorous diplomacy, this woman had managed to draw in the Papacy, the Knights Hospitaller, Genoa, Naples, and the Mamluk Sultanate — but in the end she still met with failure.
It was not that Venice, castrated as it had been by Laszlo, was still strong enough to resist the combined opposition of so many powers; in reality, the support each party offered Charlotte was extremely limited, and her ultimate failure was entirely foreseeable.
This whole group fighting back and forth — they were either Laszlo's dogs or his allies, with one tacit partner, the Mamluks, thrown in for good measure.
Everyone had been tangled up over this small island nation for so many years; now it was time for Laszlo to deliver the final verdict.
Before long, a messenger set off for Venice, carrying the Emperor's decree to the Great Council of the Republic.
The proposal put forward by the Genoese would in the end have to be carried out by him as Emperor — and only his authority could bring this transaction to completion.
As for whether the Venetians would be willing to negotiate with the Emperor over a Cyprus they had fought so hard to secure, there was simply nothing to discuss.
As a vassal that had submitted under the weight of military force and blockade, they understood perfectly well the consequences of defying an imperial decree.
Having settled the related affairs of Cyprus, Laszlo quickly refocused his attention on the Imperial Diet then underway.
The smooth passage of the Imperial Law Code came as no surprise to him.
He had accumulated some experience beforehand at the All-Austrian Assembly, and had come to appreciate that transforming customary law into codified statute was in practice far more acceptable to people than simply promulgating new law from scratch.
Accordingly, he had ultimately chosen to allow local courts to adjudicate cases using customary law from their respective regions, while retaining the right to receive appeals — a provision that introduced an oversight mechanism over local courts, making them wary of issuing arbitrary or capricious judgments that might harm the interests of imperial subjects.
As for the increasingly well-defined division of rights and responsibilities, most princes took a positive view, and their own privileges were also guaranteed within this framework.
However, there were still troublemakers who stepped forward to challenge the Emperor.
If the regional branches of the Imperial Court served as appellate courts overseeing local courts in each district, and the Imperial Supreme Court in Vienna in turn held authority to supervise the regional branches, then who would supervise the Imperial Aulic Court in Vienna to ensure its rulings were always just?
Surely one could not rely entirely on the Emperor's personal integrity?
Previously, the princes had demanded that representatives elected from each Estate assist the Chancellor appointed by the Emperor in handling imperial judicial affairs — the underlying intention being to dilute the Emperor's power and undermine his control over the Imperial Supreme Court.
Unfortunately, the Emperor had yielded not a single inch on this point. The judges elected by the Imperial Diet did indeed play an important role in judicial affairs, their energies absorbed by the endless variety of lawsuits submitted to Vienna — while the truly significant cases were all decided by the Emperor and the Chancellor.
As a result, the imperial judges put forward by the various Estates had become the most overworked cohort in the entire governmental apparatus.
Without exception, they were distinguished legal scholars or imperial nobles well versed in jurisprudence, and now every last one of them had been turned into a busy laborer, resolving the most varied disputes for imperial subjects.
Under the original court ordinance, the three chambers of the Imperial Diet had collectively nominated twelve judges to serve in the Imperial Aulic Court.
These twelve were selected from among dozens of candidates: ten came from ten of the districts, excluding Burgundy and northern Italy, with each district nominating one; the remaining two seats came respectively from the Electoral College and the Princes' Chamber.
Twelve judges — even counting their assistants, the notaries they worked with, the lawyers, and the bailiffs, the total came to no more than a hundred or so people, and they faced the litigation of an entire empire.
Clearly, this number of personnel was wholly inadequate, and they were further required to cross-handle judicial proceedings outside their own districts.
After the Emperor authorized the establishment of branch courts in each district, the situation improved considerably, but these imperial judges still carried an enormously heavy burden.
The Imperial Diet had not failed to consider methods for expanding the bench in order to strengthen the legislature's grip on judicial affairs — yet a fatal obstacle stood in their way: a shortage of funds.
The imperial treasury's revenues were already growing increasingly strained by the cost of maintaining the operations of the Imperial Privy Council and the Imperial Court; if the Public Levy Ordinance for that year could not be renewed, and no tax revenue arrived from the Empire in November, every one of these imperial governmental institutions would collapse the following year.
Hiring more judges was inseparable from the question of money, and there was only one solution: to levy additional taxes on the imperial Estates.
Yet most of the imperial Estates within the Diet were themselves straining to avoid adding to their own burdens, and so the matter came to nothing — the Diet's left hand and right hand canceling each other out.
What, then, was it that at this moment sustained the institutional structure of the Vienna Aulic Court and maintained its remarkably high efficiency in resolving the Empire's many disputes?
The answer was the Emperor's appropriations — the bulk of which came from Austrian state finances and from the income generated by fines collected in the handling of various cases. Even before absorbing the Diet-elected judges into the court, Laszlo had already been quietly consolidating control over the judicial affairs of Austria, northern Italy, Bohemia, and Swabia by maintaining the efficiency and authority of the Imperial Aulic Court.
He who pays the piper calls the tune — and so the number of imperial judges directly appointed by the Emperor was more than double those nominated by the Diet, and the imperial courts across the various regions were for the most part under the Emperor's influence.
Now these princes, who refused to contribute funds yet wished to control imperial justice, stepped forward declaring they wanted to establish a new institution to oversee the Emperor's courts. Laszlo responded by immediately turning the tables and demanding they first renew the Public Levy Ordinance — and at a higher contribution than the previous five years.
And swiftly, the voices of opposition vanished, replaced by heated discussion of the Imperial Peace Ordinance and the Public Levy Ordinance.
No one would resist peace. Of course, a minority of ambitious men intent on using violence to expand their power and territory could not be ruled out — but such individuals were ultimately few and far between within the Empire.
Those imperial Estates lacking great strength had one overriding wish: that their own rights be respected and that they be allowed to exist securely under the protection of a powerful overlord.
And the Emperor was a perfect protector.
By comparison, the Imperial Diet in its capacity as a "forum for the princely league" was itself not actually possessed of power, nor did it have the genuine capacity to change things — and in the eyes of most imperial Estates, it was not worth relying on.
At bottom, it was simply another battlefield.
High-minded slogans like "imperial reform" were, in essence, about adjusting — or even reconstructing — the imperial order and the relationships of power within it.
The peace and order established through reform were in practice the result of the Emperor and the many imperial Estates engaging in continuous negotiation and arriving at compromise after compromise.
And the Imperial Diet, which led the reform process, was simultaneously both the arena of power struggle and the institutionalized fruit of compromise among all parties.
Concession and compromise were the foundations upon which the new imperial order was built, and for compromise to be reached, at least two preconditions had to be met: first, that the parties to the compromise were roughly matched in strength, with no single side able to overwhelm the others; second, that there was a subjective willingness to reach compromise, and a common understanding that all could accept.
By maintaining principled circumspection and an attitude of mutual respect, everyone could sit here calmly and speak openly about the Empire's future… well, most of the time, it was not quite so calm as one might imagine.
And within this dynamic balance of power, the Emperor's authority — bolstered by the territories beyond the Empire proper and the enormous prestige earned through his own deeds — had gradually come to overshadow all the imperial Estates below him.
According to the underlying logic of the electoral system, once an elected emperor sought to accomplish anything, he was bound to encounter opposition from all sides.
When threatened, an emperor either yielded, continuing to parcel out authority and distribute it to others, or steeled himself to stand against his opponents until one side emerged victorious.
Looking at the imperial resolutions reached over the years, the princes had repeatedly chosen to back down under the Emperor's forceful pressure — yet this time the resistance was noticeably greater.
The demands on manpower and resources made during two great wars over the past several years had deepened the imperial Estates' distrust of the Emperor.
A foundational principle of imperial politics was that "the acts of the sovereign require the consent of those affected."
This understanding derived from what was called "ancient and hallowed custom" — or more specifically, as an extension of the electoral system itself.
From Laszlo's perspective, this was an institutional defect of the Empire and a part that had to be corrected.
Yet contemporary scholars, freed from the lens of power politics, tended to regard this cumbersome system as a particular source of honor.
Think about it carefully: everyone had elected an emperor, and had now bound to his person a host of daunting obligations — protecting the Empire's subjects, maintaining peace, order, and justice, and defending the Church and the faith.
Yet to bear the full burden placed upon him by the entire Empire, the resources he could draw upon were limited to his own hereditary territories, plus whatever "charity" he could wring from the princes through unending compromise and concession.
This extreme imbalance between resources and responsibilities had been responsible for the Empire's perpetual "overloaded" monarchical condition. Before Laszlo launched his reforms and established a system capable of extracting resources — however imperfectly — almost no emperor had ever truly been able to meet the demands placed upon him.
And Laszlo was undeniably the fortunate exception: he happened to possess the resources sufficient to sustain the Empire, and with them had accomplished many of the "duties of the Emperor."
Now, he wished to use reform to claim repayment from the Empire — and yet the princes and the broad lower Estates of the Third Chamber were far from pleased.
"Ten years of levies, and the amounts have been raised — quite a few princes have lodged protests against this."
During a recess, Christoph reported the situation in the Secular Princes' Chamber to his father with a worried frown.
On the other side, the Ecclesiastical Princes' Chamber presided over by the Archbishop of Salzburg, Sixtus, was much the same.
"During the collection of the previous levies, the Church within the Empire experienced collective resistance from clergy refusing to pay taxes, and it was only under the armed coercion of the regional governors-general that normal taxation was eventually secured. Although the ecclesiastical princes have expressed sympathy with your demands, they equally hope that the privilege of tax exemption for the clergy will be respected."
"Do they not understand what a public levy means? There is no need to keep reporting this sort of thing — sooner or later they will understand that the imperial Church is also part of the Empire."
Laszlo waved his hand with considerable irritation; those insatiably grasping clergymen were always like this.
The Archbishop of Mainz, seated at his side, opened his mouth, then thought better of it and said nothing.
The two ordinances had, unsurprisingly, passed the Electoral College by a large margin, but had run into obstacles in the Princes' Chamber and provoked uproar in the Third Estate.
The matter of taxation was not, in truth, entirely bad news for the princes.
How much to tax, and how to tax — these were questions the Emperor had thought through carefully.
The quotas on the imperial Estates register were not so burdensome as to cause the princes actual financial losses, and by delegating tax-collection authority downward through the three-tier structure, the Emperor was effectively acknowledging their governance over their local territories — a concession he had been compelled to make in order to get the money quickly.
At least on the surface, the princes' authority of governance was affirmed, and they could even increase their income by levying additional surcharges and skimming a portion of the public levy for themselves.
But the vast lower Estates, and the peasants and townspeople at the very bottom, had been hit hard.
"Father, many princes have reported that during the Crusade and the campaign against France, in order to meet the Empire's levy demands, they imposed additional taxes on their subjects, provoking collective resistance from serfs and even triggering uprisings in some regions. Many are calling for the abolition of the special levies and for the ordinance's term to be reduced to one year."
"Hmph — reduce it to one year so they can cancel it whenever they please?" Laszlo's expression darkened immediately, and he saw through the princes' intentions at once.
He had not even set the tax as permanent, and yet these princes had the audacity to demand annual negotiations with him, all the better to wring further concessions from him each time.
The Archbishop Adolf sitting nearby heard these demands and also turned grim-faced; this was tantamount to pushing the fledgling imperial government to the very brink of collapse.
Perhaps none of them truly needed an imperial government subject to the Emperor's direction — in truth, for most princes, an imperial court of justice was quite sufficient.
And the broad class of imperial knights and peasants had never benefited in the least from the "institutional dividends" of the imperial reform, and resisted it completely, one and all.
"Your Majesty, the Third Estate is demanding representation in the upper two chambers; otherwise, over a hundred imperial county territories and monastic territories will collectively refuse to pay taxes. The representatives of the imperial cities, however, have shown little reaction — they have no great objection to paying annuities according to tradition."
Clement, who had been dispatched to preside over the Third Estate chamber, also reported the situation with a certain helplessness.
Had the guards maintaining order today not reacted quickly enough, there might well have been an incident of the chamber being stormed. Even now, thinking back on it, he still felt a lingering chill.