The Holy Roman Empire by Joachim Whaley

Author:Joachim Whaley [Whaley, Joachim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

Sigismund and the reform of church and empire

The Luxemburg dynasty offered the only serious candidates. A small faction elected Charles IV’s son Sigismund (r. 1410–37). A larger group insisted on Sigismund’s cousin Jobst of Moravia, though he died the following year. Sigismund was promptly re-elected but it was three years before he came to Germany for his coronation at Aachen in 1414, which indicates the difficulty of the first decade of his rule. Bohemia remained in the hands of his stepbrother Wenceslas. Sigismund had been king of Hungary since 1387, which also gave him Dalmatia, Croatia, Serbia, and Bulgaria. But it brought him few resources, perennial problems of fierce regional opposition, and the need to repel occupying Turkish forces. The claim made by Ladislaus of Naples to the Hungarian throne in 1403 tied Sigismund down in Italy and engulfed him in prolonged conflict with Venice, to which Ladislaus had sold his rights to Dalmatia. Even when Sigismund finally inherited Bohemia in 1419, he encountered noble opposition and the prolonged Hussite insurrection, an anticlerical religious reform movement headed by Jan Hus which inflamed the Czech population from 1402. Sigismund was not recognized as king for seventeen years.

In Germany Sigismund had virtually no property—even Luxemburg was pledged—and his long absences made him reliant on a small number of confidants. His first visit to Germany for his coronation seemed promising. He travelled from Aachen to Constance to preside over key sessions at the church council that deliberated there from 1414 to 1418. This resolved the schism by deposing two popes, forcing one to resign, and electing Martin V (r. 1417–31). It also asserted the authority of the church council and resolved that the councils should be held at regular intervals, though both resolutions later led to conflict. Above all the attempt to deal with heresy failed, and the trial and execution of Hus in 1415 merely prolonged the Hussite insurgency for another two decades.

The church councils of Pavia (1423–4) and Basle (1431–49) plunged the church into a bitter struggle between papacy and council. Proposals for reforming the empire, made at diets in 1414 and 1417, led nowhere, which generated further demands for a general review. A renewed Hussite offensive in 1425 initiated another decade of conflict which only ended with a peace agreed at Prague in 1435. In the 1430s, furthermore, the duchy of Burgundy, which also owned Brabant, Limburg, Holland, Zeeland, and Hennegau, challenged imperial authority in the north-west. Constant unrest in Hungary also impeded Sigismund’s ability to provide effective leadership.

Sigismund was crowned emperor in Rome in 1433 but he made no impact on Italy. Perhaps his greatest legacy to the empire was that he married his daughter Elizabeth to the Habsburg Duke Albert of Austria. Following Sigismund’s death in 1437, Albert was crowned king of Hungary and Bohemia and elected king of the Romans, though he died in battle against the Turks in October 1439 before he could be crowned emperor.

Alongside establishing a Habsburg succession, Sigismund’s reign was significant for four other developments.

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