Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor

• 1. Introduction

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  Sigismund of Luxembourg was born on the 15th of February 1368 and died on the 9th of December 1437 -- a man who wore so many crowns that keeping track of them was itself a political act. King of Hungary. King of Croatia. King of Germany. King of Bohemia. King of Italy. And finally, Holy Roman Emperor. Yet historian Thomas Brady Jr. wrote that Sigismund "possessed a breadth of vision and a sense of grandeur unseen in a German monarch since the thirteenth century" -- and still called his reign a story of unfulfilled ambition.

  He was nicknamed the "ginger fox" as a child, which tells you something about the impression he left on people. He inherited rivals and crusades and a church in crisis. He ended a papal schism that had split Christendom for decades. He founded a knightly order to fight the Ottoman Empire. He hosted a gathering so vast that its guest list included three kings, a Serbian despot, thirteen dukes, twenty-one counts, and forty thousand horses.

  And yet when Sigismund died, the male line of the House of Luxembourg died with him. The questions this documentary will examine: How did one man accumulate so many thrones? What drove his obsession with the Turks, the church, and reforming an empire that would not be reformed? And what did he actually leave behind?

• 2. The Ginger Fox

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  Sigismund was born in either Nuremberg or Prague, the son of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and his fourth wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania. Elizabeth was no minor figure herself: she was the granddaughter of King Casimir III of Poland and the great-granddaughter of Gediminas, a Grand Duke of Lithuania. His father named him after Saint Sigismund of Burgundy, the emperor's favourite saint.

  At the age of six, Sigismund was betrothed to Mary, the eldest daughter of King Louis I of Hungary. The match was diplomatic: Louis and Emperor Charles had a close relationship and the betrothal was designed to expand the territory held by the House of Luxembourg. When Charles IV died in 1378, the ten-year-old Sigismund became Margrave of Brandenburg and was sent to the Hungarian court. He learned the Hungarian language, adopted the Hungarian way of life, and was named heir and designated successor to the Hungarian throne by King Louis himself.

  In 1381, at thirteen years old, Sigismund was sent by his guardian and eldest half-brother Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia to Kraków to learn Polish. Wenceslaus also gave him the Neumark to ease communication between Brandenburg and Poland. Sigismund also competed for the Polish crown, but the Polish nobility refused to accept a German sovereign tied to Hungary. The crown went instead to Mary's younger sister Jadwiga, who married Jogaila of Lithuania. That outcome would shape Sigismund's relationship with Poland for decades.

• 3. A Throne Won and Nearly Lost

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  Mary became Queen of Hungary in 1382 on her father's death, and Sigismund married her in 1385 at Zólyom, the city now called Zvolen. The Treaty of Győr accepted him the following year as Mary's future co-ruler. But the throne came with immediate danger: Mary was captured in 1387 alongside her mother Elizabeth of Bosnia, who had served as regent, by the rebellious House of Horvat. Elizabeth of Bosnia was strangled. Mary was liberated.

  Sigismund was crowned King of Hungary at Székesfehérvár on the 31st of March 1387. To raise money, he pledged the Margraviate of Brandenburg to his cousin Jobst of Moravia. For the next nine years he fought to hold an unstable throne. He could not do it alone: only an alliance with the powerful Czillei-Garai League kept him in power, and the price was steep. Sigismund had to transfer a sizeable portion of royal properties to the baron class whose council then governed the country in the name of the Holy Crown.

  Mary died heavily pregnant in 1395, having suffered a horse-riding accident in the hills of Buda on the 17th of May. Mother and child both died shortly after the birth. Her death ended Sigismund's claim to Hungary through marriage and opened a succession crisis that lasted until his second marriage. In the southern provinces, a rival claim from Ladislaus of Naples -- son of the murdered Charles II of Hungary -- was not suppressed until 1395, when Nicholas II Garai finally put it down.

• 4. The Crusade That Failed

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  In 1396, Sigismund assembled the combined armies of Christendom. The Ottoman Turks had pushed their dominion to the banks of the Danube, and Pope Boniface IX had preached a crusade that drew support from across Europe. Hungarian nobles joined by the thousands. The most important foreign contingent came from France, led by John the Fearless, son of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy.

  Sigismund set out with fifteen thousand men and a flotilla of seventy galleys. After capturing Vidin, his forces camped before the fortress of Nicopolis. Sultan Bayezid I then lifted the siege of Constantinople and arrived with ten thousand men. Between the 25th and the 28th of September 1396, the Christian army was completely defeated in the Battle of Nicopolis. Sigismund escaped by sea.

  On his return he passed through the realm of Zeta, where he rewarded the local Montenegrin lord Đurađ II with the islands of Hvar and Korčula for resistance against the Turks. The disaster at Nicopolis angered Hungarian lords and destabilised the kingdom. Stripped of domestic authority, Sigismund turned outward -- seeking recognition in the Kingdom of Germany, where his childless half-brother Wenceslaus IV acknowledged him as Vicar-General of the empire. When Wenceslaus was deposed in 1400, Sigismund could not defend him, and Rupert of Germany was elected king instead. On his return to Hungary in 1401, Sigismund was imprisoned once and deposed twice in the same year.

• 5. The Order of the Dragon

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  After the massacre at the Battle of Dobor in 1408 -- where Sigismund personally led an army of almost fifty thousand against the Bosnians and roughly two hundred members of Bosnian noble families were killed -- Sigismund founded a personal order of knights: the Order of the Dragon.

  The order's stated purpose was fighting the Ottoman Empire. Its membership was carefully chosen from among Sigismund's closest political allies and supporters. The principal founding members included Stefan Lazarević, Nicholas II Garay, Hermann II Count of Celje, Stibor of Stiboricz, and Pippo Spano. The most important European monarchs eventually joined as well.

  Stibor of Stiboricz deserves particular attention. Of Polish origin from the powerful Clan of Ostoja, Stibor was described by Sigismund's contemporaries as his closest friend. With Sigismund's backing, Stibor accumulated a position of extraordinary personal power: he held the title of Duke of Transylvania and owned roughly twenty-five percent of modern-day Slovakia, including thirty-one castles -- fifteen of them positioned along the four-hundred-and-six-kilometre-long Váh river. Sigismund repeatedly relied on Stibor's military force when Hungarian nobles imprisoned him, and on his diplomacy when navigating the complex politics of Poland, Lithuania, and the Teutonic Knights.

  Alongside the order, Sigismund worked to secure Hungary's southern borders through alliance rather than conquest. In 1403 he gave the city of Belgrade and the Banate of Macsó to Despot Stefan Lazarević of Serbia in exchange for allegiance. Stefan remained Sigismund's loyal vassal until his death in 1427.

• 6. The Council of Constance

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  By 1414, the Western Christian church had three men simultaneously claiming to be pope. Sigismund used the weakness of one of the claimants, Antipope John XXIII, to extract a promise that a great council would be held at Constance to settle the Schism. He then became the driving political force behind that council.

  The Council of Constance ran from 1414 to 1418. During its sittings, Sigismund travelled to France, England, and Burgundy in an attempt to secure the abdication of all three rival popes. His visit to England led to a close relationship with King Henry V. The Treaty of Canterbury, signed on the 15th of August 1416, created a defensive and offensive alliance between England and Sigismund against France. In recognition, Henry inducted Sigismund into the Order of the Garter. The council ended in 1418 having resolved the Schism -- a genuine achievement.

  But the council also burned the Czech religious reformer Jan Hus at the stake for heresy in July 1415. Sigismund had granted Hus a safe conduct and had protested his imprisonment. The burning took place during Sigismund's absence, decided by an ad hoc church court outside his jurisdiction. Whether Sigismund bore moral responsibility became, and remains, a matter of controversy. What is certain is that the Bohemians held him responsible. When Sigismund reportedly replied to a cardinal who corrected his Latin -- "Ego sum rex Romanus et super grammaticam" ("I am king of the Romans and above grammar") -- the philosopher Thomas Carlyle later nicknamed him "Super Grammaticam". In 1415 he awarded Brandenburg to Frederick I, Elector of Brandenburg, making the House of Hohenzollern one of the most powerful in Germany.

• 7. The Hussite Wars

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  Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia died in 1419, leaving Sigismund the nominal King of Bohemia. He would wait seventeen years before the Czech Estates actually acknowledged him. The Bohemians distrusted him as the man they held responsible for Jan Hus, and when Sigismund declared his intention to prosecute the war against heretics, they took up arms.

  Three military campaigns against the Hussites ended in disaster. At the 1422 Diet of Nuremberg, Sigismund and German territorial princes organised two armies: one to relieve the castle of Karlštejn under Hussite siege, the other to destroy the Hussite field army. The Hussite commander Jan Žižka defeated the imperial force at the Battle of Kutná Hora and then again at the Battle of Německý Brod. These two defeats ended what was described as "the first Imperial and Catholic attempt to crush the Bohemian heretic rebellion".

  The institutional response came in January 1424 in the form of the Union of Bingen, which brought together Rhenish princes, the Elector of Saxony, and Margrave Frederick of Brandenburg in a mutual-assistance pact against the Hussite threat. Scholar Duncan Hardy has argued that Sigismund's political style relied precisely on these associative mechanisms: the customary institutions through which princes, nobles, and towns built collective action. Sigismund's own assessment of what he needed is reflected in a remark recorded in the source: he understood that reforming the empire and reforming the church had to happen simultaneously, not sequentially.

• 8. Emperor at Last

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  On the 25th of November 1431, in Milan, Sigismund received the Iron Crown as King of Italy. He then spent time at Siena negotiating his coronation as emperor and pressing Pope Eugenius IV to recognise the Council of Basel. On the 31st of May 1433 he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome. He was sixty-five years old.

  The papacy and the emperor found brief common cause. Shortly after the coronation, Pope Eugenius began attempting to build a new anti-Ottoman alliance, spurred by an Albanian revolt against the Ottomans that had begun in 1432. In 1435 Sigismund sent the Bulgarian nobleman Fruzhin to negotiate an alliance with the Albanians. He also dispatched Daud, a pretender to the Ottoman throne, in early 1436. After the rebel defeat in 1436, those plans collapsed. Sigismund was recognised as King of Bohemia in 1436, though his power there was little more than nominal.

  Sigismund died on the 9th of December 1437 at Znojmo in Moravia. He had ordered in life that he be buried at Nagyvárad -- the city now called Oradea in Romania -- next to the tomb of King Saint Ladislaus I of Hungary, a monarch he deeply venerated as the ideal of a perfect Christian warrior king. He had gone on pilgrimage to Ladislaus's tomb several times during his reign. The male line of the House of Luxembourg ended with him. His only surviving legitimate child, Elisabeth of Luxembourg, passed his claims to her husband Albert V, Duke of Austria, who became the German king as Albert II -- and the Habsburgs inherited what Sigismund could not complete.