Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor
Sigismund of Luxembourg was Holy Roman Emperor from 1433 until his death in 1437. As the husband of Mary, Queen of Hungary, he was King of Hungary and Croatia from 1387. He was elected King of Germany in 1410, and was also King of Bohemia from 1419, as well as prince-elector of Brandenburg. He was the last male member of the House of Luxembourg.
Sigismund was the son of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and his fourth wife Elizabeth of Pomerania. He married Mary, Queen of Hungary in 1385 and was crowned King of Hungary soon after. He fought to restore and maintain authority to the throne. Mary died in 1395, leaving Sigismund the sole ruler of Hungary.
In 1396, Sigismund led the Crusade of Nicopolis but was decisively defeated by the Ottoman Empire. Afterwards, he founded the Order of the Dragon to fight the Turks and secured the thrones of Croatia, Germany and Bohemia. Sigismund was one of the driving forces behind the Council of Constance that ended the Papal Schism, but which also led to the Hussite Wars that dominated the later period of his life. In 1433, Sigismund was crowned Holy Roman Emperor and ruled until his death in 1437.
Historian Thomas Brady Jr. remarks that Sigismund "possessed a breadth of vision and a sense of grandeur unseen in a German monarch since the thirteenth century". He realized the need to carry out reforms of the empire and the Church at the same time. However external difficulties, self-inflicted mistakes and the extinction of the Luxembourg male line made this vision unfulfilled. Later, the Habsburgs would inherit this mission and imperial reform was carried out successfully under the reigns of Frederick III and especially his son Maximilian I, although perhaps at the expense of the reform of the Church, partly because Maximilian was not particularly focused on the matter.
In recent years, scholarly interest has grown greatly in the person and reign of Sigismund—the ruler who had gained and led an imperial association almost reaching the size of the later Habsburg Empire—as well as cultural developments associated with his era. The setbacks which have been seen as his major failures are now generally considered by most scholars to be the results of the lack of financial resources and other heavy constraints, rather than personal failings.
Biography
Early life
Born in Nuremberg or Prague, Sigismund was the son of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and his fourth and final wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania, who was the granddaughter of King Casimir III of Poland and the great-granddaughter of Gediminas, a Grand Duke of Lithuania. He was named after Saint Sigismund of Burgundy, the favourite saint of Sigismund's father. From Sigismund's childhood, he was nicknamed the "ginger fox" in the Bohemian Crown lands on account of his hair colour.File:Mary.jpg|thumb|upright=.7|Sigismund's first wife, Queen Mary of Hungary
King Louis the Great of Hungary and Poland always had a good and close relationship with Emperor Charles IV, and Sigismund was betrothed to Louis' eldest daughter, Mary, in 1374, when he was six years old and Mary but an infant. The marital project aimed to augment the lands held by the House of Luxembourg. Upon his father's death in 1378, young Sigismund became Margrave of Brandenburg and was sent to the Hungarian court, where he soon learned the Hungarian language and way of life, and became entirely devoted to his adopted country. King Louis named him as his heir and appointed him his successor as King of Hungary.
In 1381, the then 13-year-old Sigismund was sent to Kraków by his eldest half-brother and guardian Wenceslaus, King of Germany and Bohemia, to learn Polish and to become acquainted with the land and its people. King Wenceslaus also gave him Neumark to facilitate communication between Brandenburg and Poland.
While Mary was accepted as monarch of Hungary, Sigismund vied for the crown of Poland as well. However, the Poles were unwilling to submit to a German sovereign, nor did they want to be tied to Hungary. The disagreement between Polish landlords of Lesser Poland on one side and landlords of Greater Poland on the other, regarding the choice of the future monarch of Poland, finally ended in choosing the Lithuanian side. The support of the lords of Greater Poland was however not enough to give Prince Sigismund the Polish crown. Instead, the landlords of Lesser Poland gave it to Mary's younger sister Jadwiga, who married Jogaila of Lithuania.
King of Hungary
On the death of her father in 1382, his betrothed, Mary, became queen of Hungary and Sigismund married her in 1385 in Zólyom. The next year, he was accepted as Mary's future co-ruler by the Treaty of Győr. However, Mary was captured, together with her mother, Elizabeth of Bosnia, who had acted as regent, in 1387 by the rebellious House of Horvat, Bishop Paul Horvat of Mačva, his brother John Horvat and younger brother Ladislav. Sigismund's mother-in-law was strangled, while Mary was liberated.Having secured the support of the nobility, Sigismund was crowned King of Hungary at Székesfehérvár on 31 March 1387. Having raised money by pledging Brandenburg to his cousin Jobst, Margrave of Moravia, he was engaged for the next nine years in a ceaseless struggle for the possession of this unstable throne. The central power was finally weakened to such an extent that only Sigismund's alliance with the powerful Czillei-Garai League could ensure his position on the throne. It was not for entirely selfless reasons that one of the leagues of barons helped him to power: Sigismund had to pay for the support of the lords by transferring a sizeable part of the royal properties.. The restoration of the authority of the central administration took decades of work. The bulk of the nation headed by the House of Garai was with him; but in the southern provinces between the Sava and the Drava, the Horvathys with the support of King Tvrtko I of Bosnia, Mary's maternal uncle, proclaimed as their king Ladislaus of Naples, son of the murdered Charles II of Hungary. Not until 1395 did Nicholas II Garai succeed in suppressing them. Mary died heavily pregnant in 1395.
To ease the pressure from Hungarian nobles, Sigismund tried to employ foreign advisors, which was not popular, and he had to promise not to give land and nominations to anyone other than Hungarian nobles. However, this was not applied to Stibor of Stiboricz, who was Sigismund's closest friend and advisor. On a number of occasions, Sigismund was imprisoned by nobles, but with the help of the armies of Garai and Stibor of Stiboricz, he was able to regain power.
Crusade of Nicopolis
In 1396, Sigismund led the combined armies of Christendom against the Turks, who had taken advantage of the temporary helplessness of Hungary to extend their dominion to the banks of the Danube. This crusade, preached by Pope Boniface IX, was very popular in Hungary. The nobles flocked in their thousands to the royal standard and were reinforced by volunteers from nearly every part of Europe, the most important contingent being that of the French led by John the Fearless, son of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy. Sigismund set out with 15,000 men and a flotilla of 70 galleys. After capturing Vidin, he camped with his Hungarian armies before the fortress of Nicopolis. Sultan Bayezid I raised the siege of Constantinople and, at the head of 10,000 men, completely defeated the Christian forces in the Battle of Nicopolis fought between the 25 and 28 September 1396. Sigismund returned by sea and through the realm of Zeta, where he ordained the local Montenegrin lord Đurađ II with the islands of Hvar and Korčula for resistance against the Turks; the islands were returned to Sigismund after Đurađ's death in April 1403.The disaster at Nicopolis angered several Hungarian lords, leading to instability in the kingdom. Deprived of his authority in Hungary, Sigismund then turned his attention to securing the succession in Germany and Bohemia, and was recognized by his childless half-brother Wenceslaus IV as Vicar-General of the whole empire. However, he was unable to support Wenceslaus when he was deposed in 1400, and Rupert of Germany, Elector Palatine, was elected German king in his stead.Return to Hungary
On his return to Hungary in 1401, Sigismund was imprisoned once and deposed twice. That year, he aided an uprising against Wenceslaus IV, during the course of which the Bohemian king was taken prisoner, and Sigismund ruled Bohemia for nineteen months. He released Wenceslaus in 1403. In the meantime, a group of Hungarian noblemen swore loyalty to the last Anjou monarch, Ladislaus of Naples, putting their hands on the relic of Saint Ladislas of Hungary in Nagyvárad. Ladislaus was the son of the murdered Charles II of Hungary, and thus a distant relative of the long-dead King Louis I of Hungary. Ladislaus captured Zara in 1403, but soon stopped any military advance. This struggle in turn led to a war with the Republic of Venice, as Ladislaus had sold the Dalmatian cities to the Venetians for 100,000 ducats before leaving for his own land. In the following years, Sigismund acted indirectly to thwart Ladislaus' attempts to conquer central Italy, by allying with the Italian cities resisting him and by applying diplomatic pressure on him.Due to his frequent absences attending to business in the other countries over which he ruled, he was obliged to consult Diets in Hungary with more frequency than his predecessors and institute the office of Palatine as chief administrator while he was away. In 1404, Sigismund introduced the Placetum Regium. According to this decree, Papal bulls could not be pronounced in Hungary without the consent of the king. During his long reign, the royal Buda Castle became probably the largest Gothic palace of the Late Middle Ages.
Crusade against Bosnia
In about 1406, Sigismund married Mary's cousin Barbara of Celje, daughter of Count Hermann II of Celje. Hermann's mother Catherine and Mary's mother Queen Elisabeth of Bosnia were sisters, or at least cousins who were adoptive sisters.Sigismund managed to establish control in Slavonia. He did not hesitate to use violent methods, but from the River Sava to the south his control was weak. Sigismund personally led an army of almost 50,000 "crusaders" against the Bosnians, culminating with the Battle of Dobor in 1408, a massacre of about 200 members of various Bosnian noble families. However, although the campaign militarily looked like a success, it ultimately failed politically and Hungarians retreated, while the Bosnian crown slowly but surely slipped away out of the reach for Sigismund and Hungarians.