Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor

Sigismund was born in Prague on February 14, 1368, the second surviving son of Emperor Charles IV and his fourth wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania ^[1]. Charles ruled Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire from Prague, and the city where Sigismund spent his childhood was then one of the great capitals of Europe, enlarged by his father with a new university, a stone bridge, and an ambitious cathedral. The boy grew up amid this building program and the ceremonial life of an imperial court that drew scholars and diplomats from across Christendom.

His father planned the family's future with care. The elder son, Wenceslas, was groomed for Bohemia and the imperial title, while Sigismund was directed toward the east. In 1372 Charles betrothed the four-year-old prince to Mary, daughter of Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland, a match that promised the Luxemburgs a claim to two more kingdoms ^[2]. Sigismund was sent to the Hungarian court to learn the language and customs of his intended realm, and he eventually spoke Hungarian alongside German, Latin, Czech, French, and Italian.

Charles IV died in 1378, when Sigismund was ten. The emperor had already invested him with the Margraviate of Brandenburg, one of the seven electorates of the empire, giving the boy a vote in imperial elections and a territorial base of his own ^[1]. The death of Louis the Great in 1382 then opened the Hungarian succession and set the young margrave on the path that would dominate his life.

Winning Hungary proved far harder than the betrothal contract suggested. Mary was crowned in 1382, but real power lay with her mother, Elizabeth of Bosnia, and factions of the Hungarian baronage resisted a Luxemburg consort. A rival claimant, Charles of Durazzo from the Angevin line of Naples, seized the throne briefly in 1385 before being assassinated, and in 1386 rebellious nobles captured Mary and her mother, murdering the queen mother in captivity ^[2]. Sigismund married Mary in 1385, raised troops, and bargained relentlessly with the barons. On March 31, 1387 he was crowned King of Hungary at Székesfehérvár, though he paid for the crown with sweeping grants of royal land and offices to the magnates who backed him ^[3].

The defining shock of his early reign came from the south. The Ottoman Turks had crossed into the Balkans and crushed the Serbs at Kosovo in 1389, and Sigismund answered by organizing one of the last great international crusades. In 1396 he led a coalition of Hungarian, French, Burgundian, German, and other knights down the Danube to besiege the fortress of Nicopolis. On September 25, 1396 Sultan Bayezid I destroyed the crusader army; the French cavalry charged prematurely, the allied force collapsed, and Sigismund escaped down the river by boat while thousands were killed or captured ^[4]. The defeat at Nicopolis ended serious crusading against the Ottomans for a generation and forced Hungary onto the defensive.

His troubles multiplied at home. Mary had died in a riding accident in 1395, weakening his legal standing, and in 1401 a league of barons imprisoned him for months. Sigismund survived through negotiation and a second marriage, in 1405, to Barbara of Cilli, daughter of a powerful magnate. In 1408, after crushing a revolt in Bosnia, he and Barbara founded the Order of the Dragon, a chivalric society that bound leading nobles of the region to the defense of the crown and of Christianity; Vlad II of Wallachia, father of Vlad the Impaler, later took his epithet Dracul from membership in the order ^[3].

The Luxemburg inheritance in the empire meanwhile fell into disorder. Sigismund's elder brother Wenceslas, King of the Romans since 1376, was deposed by the electors in 1400 for inactivity, and the rival elected in his place, Rupert of the Palatinate, died in 1410. After a contested double election, Sigismund secured general recognition as King of the Romans in 1411, adding the leadership of the empire to his Hungarian crown ^[1].

The great crisis facing Latin Christendom was the Western Schism. Since 1378 two, and after 1409 three, rival popes had claimed the throne of Saint Peter, each backed by different kingdoms. Sigismund made ending the schism his central project. He pressed the Pisan pope John XXIII to summon a general council at Constance on the shore of Lake Constance, and the assembly opened in November 1414 with Sigismund presiding as its secular protector ^[5]. When John XXIII fled the city in 1415 hoping to dissolve the council, Sigismund held the assembly together, and it deposed or obtained the resignation of all three claimants. He then traveled personally to Aragon and other courts to negotiate the withdrawal of obedience from the Avignon claimant Benedict XIII. In November 1417 the council elected Martin V, restoring a single undisputed papacy for the first time in thirty-nine years ^[5].

Constance also produced the event that darkened the rest of his reign. The Bohemian reformer Jan Hus had come to the council under a safe conduct issued by Sigismund to defend his teachings. The council condemned Hus as a heretic, and on July 6, 1415 he was burned at the stake outside the city walls ^[6]. Sigismund's failure to protect a man traveling under his guarantee outraged Bohemia. Among the political achievements of these years was one more with long consequences: in 1415 he granted Brandenburg to his ally Frederick of Hohenzollern, installing in the electorate the dynasty that would one day rule Prussia and Germany ^[1].

Wenceslas died in August 1419, days after radical followers of Hus threw Prague councillors from the windows of the New Town hall in the first Defenestration of Prague. Sigismund was the legitimate heir to Bohemia, but much of the kingdom refused to accept the man they blamed for Hus's death. He had himself crowned King of Bohemia at Prague Castle in July 1420 while the city below remained in rebel hands, and almost at once his crusading army was beaten on Vítkov Hill outside Prague by Hussite forces under the one-eyed commander Jan Žižka ^[6].

What followed was more than a decade of warfare. Five papal crusades were proclaimed against the Hussites between 1420 and 1431, and every one of them failed. The Hussite armies, built around fortified wagon lines, massed handguns, and disciplined common soldiers, repeatedly routed the heavily armored knights sent against them, most spectacularly at Domažlice in 1431, where the crusader host fled before battle was fully joined ^[7]. Sigismund, unable to conquer his own kingdom, gradually shifted from war to diplomacy.

The settlement came through another general council, meeting at Basel. Negotiators worked out the Compacts of Basel, which allowed the Bohemians to receive communion in both bread and wine, the central Utraquist demand, in exchange for their return to the Roman church. After moderate Hussites destroyed the radical field armies at the Battle of Lipany in 1434, agreement became possible, and in 1436 the diet at Jihlava proclaimed the Compacts and finally accepted Sigismund as King of Bohemia ^[7]. He entered Prague in August 1436, sixteen years after his first coronation there.

Sigismund married twice. His first wife, Mary of Hungary, brought him his first crown; her death in 1395, while pregnant, left him a king by election and arms rather than by marriage. His second wife, Barbara of Cilli, whom he married in 1405, was a capable political figure in her own right, twice serving as regent of Hungary during his long absences abroad, and she was crowned queen alongside his later coronations in Bohemia and the empire ^[3]. The marriage was politically productive but personally distant, and near the end of his life Sigismund had Barbara arrested on suspicion of intriguing over the succession.

His only surviving legitimate child was a daughter, Elizabeth of Luxemburg, born in 1409. In 1421 she was betrothed to Albert of Habsburg, Duke of Austria, and the marriage followed in 1422. Since Sigismund had no son, Elizabeth and Albert became the designated heirs to Hungary and Bohemia, a decision that ultimately carried the Luxemburg inheritance into the Habsburg dynasty ^[2].

Contemporaries found Sigismund magnetic and exasperating in equal measure. He was tall, striking, and famously charming, a fluent talker in half a dozen languages who enjoyed festivals, tournaments, and the company of scholars and women. He was also chronically indebted, mortgaging towns, mines, and even the Spiš region of northern Hungary (pledged to Poland in 1412 for a loan) to fund his wars and travels ^[3]. A restless itinerant, he spent years at a time outside Hungary, crossing Europe from Paris and London, which he visited in 1416 while mediating between France and England, to Rome and Constance.

The imperial title came to him only near the end. Sigismund went to Italy in 1431, received the Lombard iron crown in Milan that November, and after long negotiations with Pope Eugenius IV was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on May 31, 1433 ^[1]. He was the first emperor crowned in Rome since his father Charles IV in 1355, and the last but one ever to be crowned there.

In Hungary his final decade mixed defense with reform. He built up a system of border fortresses along the Danube and Sava against the Ottomans, anchored on Belgrade, which Hungary had acquired in 1427; the line held for nearly a century after his death ^[4]. He also promoted the towns, granting privileges to royal free cities and drawing their representatives into the diet, and as king he controlled a productive minting system fed by Hungarian gold, the source of his title as mint lord in contemporary records. In 1437 a major peasant revolt in Transylvania, provoked by taxation and tithe demands, was suppressed only after the nobility, Székely, and Saxon communities swore a mutual alliance.

Sigismund fell gravely ill in 1437 while arranging the succession. Determined to secure Bohemia and Hungary for his son-in-law Albert of Habsburg, he traveled from Prague toward Hungary despite his condition and died on December 9, 1437 at Znojmo in southern Moravia, aged sixty-nine ^[2]. At his own instruction he was buried at Nagyvárad (now Oradea in Romania) beside the shrine of Saint Ladislaus, the warrior king of Hungary he had venerated all his life. With him the male line of the House of Luxemburg ended.

Any list of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor achievements begins at Constance. The council he assembled and protected ended the Western Schism, the most damaging institutional crisis of the medieval church, and its decree Haec sancta became a founding text of the conciliar movement, the idea that a general council held authority over the pope ^[5]. His grant of Brandenburg to the Hohenzollerns and the passage of his crowns to the Habsburgs through his daughter Elizabeth reshaped the dynastic map of central Europe for centuries ^[1].

His reputation has always been divided. In Czech memory he was long the perjurer who let Jan Hus burn, an image sharpened by nineteenth-century national historiography, while Hungarian historians have increasingly stressed his fifty-year reign as a period of institutional growth: stronger towns, a reorganized army and border defense, and Hungary's emergence as the hub of a European-scale monarchy ^[3]. Modern scholarship, including the studies of Jörg K. Hoensch and the exhibitions marking the six-hundredth anniversary of Constance, treats him as one of the major political managers of the late Middle Ages rather than a mere failure at Nicopolis and Prague ^[8].

Among the more durable Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor facts is the sheer span of his rule: king of Hungary for fifty years, head of the empire for twenty-seven, and the only man of his age to wear the crowns of Hungary, Bohemia, Lombardy, and the empire together. The problems he wrestled with, Ottoman expansion, church reform, and religious dissent backed by armed force, defined the following century. A biography of the last Luxemburg emperor is therefore also a portrait of Europe in transition, and the fortresses, charters, and dynastic settlements he left behind kept working long after 1437 ^[8].