The grand duke's ambition left me slack-jawed.
Surrounded on three sides, the Habsburgs would have no choice but to give in. Their power base was still limited to Austria. The Palatinate was mired in a civil war, and there was no telling how the other electors would react.
Since Karl IV's Golden Bull, the empire had seven electors: the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Electoral Palatinate, the Duchy of Saxony, the Duchy of Brandenburg, the Archbishopric of Mainz, the Archbishopric of Trier, and the Archbishopric of Cologne.
Incidentally, before the Golden Bull, the Wittelsbachs had held two electoral votes, but Karl IV declared it unacceptable for one family to hold two votes and stripped Bavaria of its vote.
When it came to light that the Palatinate had engineered this, the two branches of the Wittelsbach family became bitter enemies, worse than strangers. Ever since, the Count Palatine had kept Bavaria constantly in check.
