Sigismund
Sigismund was the king of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, as well as Holy Roman Emperor. He ruled Hungary and Croatia jure uxoris with his wife Mary, who was queen in her own right.
Contents
History
Sigismund was a younger son of Charles IV. A marriage was arranged with Mary, the heir presumptive of Hungary and Croatia.
Upon the death of Louis I, that claim was contested between Mary and Charles II, the senior Angevin male. Mary was immediately crowned in her own right.
Sigismund occupied Bratislava seeking to enforce the marital contract. They married in Buda in October 1385, but he was neither granted a royal title nor given a place in Hungarian government. He departed Hungary thereafter.
Charles II held the duchal titles of Croatia, Dalmatia, and Slavonia; once he was able to mobilize this powerbase, he quickly seized Buda in December 1385. He was assassinated in February, but Croatian nobility continued to press for alternative Angevin claimants. Mary was captured and imprisoned in Novigrad from July 1386 until July 1387.
Reign
Hungary
Sigismund funded a military intervention in Hungary by pledging Brandenburg to his cousin, Jobst of Moravia, and transferring many of the royal properties within Hungary to local nobility.
During the imprisonment, Hungarian nobility had elected Sigismund first as regent and then king. He was crowned in March 1387. Mary was quickly set aside from governmental powers.
Mary was injured while pregnant on May 17, 1395. She left no heirs. Sigismund remarried to Mary's cousin, Barbara, in 1406. Due to his extended travels and conquests, she would frequently reign as regent.
The Balkans
Once Bulgaria fell, Hungary became the frontier for war against the Ottomans. Sigismund led the unsuccessful Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396. This failure destabilized his authority within Hungary. To secure the border, he vassalized Lazarevic of Serbia by gifting the city of Belgrade and banate of Macso.
Croatian nobility again pressed an alternate Angevin claim, this time for Ladislaus of Naples, the son of Charles II. Ladislaus landed an army at Zadar but made no further advances. He claimed the duchy of Slavonia by holding this city. With regard to the kingdom, however, he was an unsuccessful claimant and the last male of the Angevin dynasty. He eventually sold his Dalmatian holdings to the Republic of Venice.
First Claim for the Holy Roman Empire
Amidst the Papal Schism, Sigismund's half-brother Wenceslaus IV was deposed as Holy Roman Emperor by the electors. Rupert was elected in his place. The empire would continue to be peacefully contested, with the two claimants remaining in their power bases (Bohemia and the county palatine of the Rhine, respectively).
Sigismund stepped into the dispute by capturing and imprisoning his half-brother, first in Eferding and then in Vienna. Sigismund occupied and ruled Bohemia for over a year. During this time, support for Rupert's claim to the Holy Roman Empire solidified. Wenceslaus IV escaped imprisonment and retreated to Prague.
Poland
Sigismund made a series of lucrative deals with the Teutonic Knights. He sold Neumark, a borderland adjoining Brandenburg, to them in 1402. In 1410 they paid him to invade Poland. That war ended with victory for Wladyslaw II and the order was forced to pay restitutions; Sigismund then borrowed that restitution money at a favorable rate. Sigismund's diplomatic success in Poland is generally attributed to Stibor of Stiboricz.
Second Claim for the Holy Roman Empire
After Rupert's death in 1410, both Sigismund and his cousin Jobst of Moravia were elected Holy Roman Emperor. Sigismund managed this by contesting Jobst's claim to Brandenburg (which he himself had pledged to his cousin) with the support of Frederick I, the Burgrave of Nuremberg, who formerly backed Rupert. Wenceslaus IV also maintained his claim to the title.
After Jobst's death in 1411, Wenceslaus IV bargained with Sigismund to keep the kingdom of Bohemia by ceding the Holy Roman Empire. The official coronation was held in Aachen on November 8, 1414. Frederick I was rewarded with the Brandenburg, newly raised to a margraviate, thereby establishing the Hohenzollern dynasty.
Under Sigismund's direction, the Council of Constance was convened in 1414 to resolve the Papal Schism. He followed this with attempts to convene a meeting in Paris between himself, Charles VI of France, and Henry V of England, to establish a secular agreement. Charles VI was instead persuaded to maintain support for the Avingon antipope. As a result, and in the context of the English victory at the Battle of Agincourt (1415), Sigismund signed a military alliance with England against France.
Bohemia
In order to facilitate the council, the Roman pope Gregory XII resigned on July 4, 1415. (The Pisan and Avignon antipopes fled and never responded to the council's summons, respectively. Both were deposed by the council.) However the council deferred a new election for over two years, so that related issues could be sorted without a papal authority. Chiefly these were the heresies that the Council of Pisa and the Pisan antipope failed to address conclusively. Jan Hus was condemned, tried, and executed despite a promise of safe passage. This launched decades of crusades known as the Hussite Wars.
Sigismund succeeded Wenceslaus IV as king of Bohemia in 1419. As a result of the Hussite Wars, however, the local nobility refused to acknowledge his claim. He spent the remaining years of his reign attempting tostabilizee his hold over the Holy Roman Empire. In 1421 his alliance to the Habsburgs was cemented with a marriage between his daughter, Elizabeth, and Albert II.
Legacy
Sigismund was the last male of the Luxembourg dynasty, ending that house.
He had no heirs with Mary, ending the Hungarian branch of the Angevin dynasty. Jadwiga unsuccessfully pressed that claim, but Sigismund held far greater support in Hungary and outlived her by decades; she left no heirs to press further claims.
He had one daughter with Barbara, Elizabeth, who married into the Habsburg dynasty. However, this Albertinian line of the Habsburgs was short-lived.