36
John of Nassau was the great-grandson of the Emperor Adolf. On 19 October 1396, at the death of Conrad Archbishop of Mainz, John had been a candidate to succeed him in the post. The then emperor, Wenzel, favoured the claim of Joffrid of Leiningen, so a committee of five chose Joffrid to be recommended to the pope. John of Nassau went directly to Rome, paid Boniface 40,000 gold florins and was immediately confirmed as the Archbishop of Mainz, and so became the senior elector of empire.
He also became the open and bitter enemy of Wenzel. Without pausing for as much as a benediction, he established alliances with the Count Palatine, with the Bishops of Bamberg and Eichstadt, with the Burggraf of Nuernberg, the Markgraf of Meissen, the Count of Henneberg, and with the leaders of the cities of Nuernberg, Rotenberg, Windesheim and Weissenberg, electors all, and organized the downfall of Wenzel.
The reasons which the electors gave for Wenzel's overthrow would not bear close examination. Even though Wenzel was a drunkard and a murderer, they charged him only with having done nothing to end the schism and of betraying the interests of the empire. His true offences were that he had opposed John of Nassau's intention to become archbishop and that he had not shared the bribe of 50,000 florins which Gian Galeazzo Visconti had paid to Wenzel for making, Gian Galeazzo Duke of Milan.
The day after the electors declared Wenzel deposed, they proclaimed the Count Palatine, Rupert III, to be King of the Romans; the title which lighted the way to the imperial throne.
I must explain the difference between being King of the Romans and being Holy Roman Emperor. In 1316, Pope John XXII was determined to bring the Holy Roman Empire, which was Germany, the largest state by far in Europe, under tighter control. He took the position that, since Christ had invested Peter with the temporal no less than with the spiritual kingdom of this world, it followed that what the pope had given the establishment of the empire – the pope could also take away; that, when the emperor died, the jurisdiction of the empire reverted to the pope and that it was for him to appoint a new, emperor, thus altering the constitution of the empire.
The Germans contended that it was for the electors to choose the, future emperor and for the pope only to crown the object of their, choice, that in the event of a contested election it was for the God of Battles to decide between rival candidates.
The claim of the pope was not one which the electors could pass over in silence. They met at Rense and at Frankfurt in 1338 and resolved that the prince elected by them became King of the Romans without further ceremony, without need for further confirmation. However, it was understood that, to become the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of the Romans needed to be crowned by a pope at Rome.
Though torn by schism, wars and internal conflicts, the people of Christendom still thought of themselves as one society and, in a collectively aberrant way, as Romans, because no one liked remembering that Rome had fallen a thousand years before and that they, Christendom, represented the barbarians who had. pulled it down. The liberal German intellectuals liked to speak of their people as Roman., the populus romanus. Germany – where no Roman legion had ever tarried for fear of becoming the principal object of the brutally pagan German rites – called its king King of the Romans; with the expectation that he would subsequently be crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the pope at Rome, and continued to elect him – because. it would have keen unseemly to allow the throne of Caesar, which was the temporal lordship of the world, to be passed on by inheritance like somebody's. house. So, a thousand years after the
Romans had vanished from the earth, it was the custom of Christendom that:the.Holy, Roman Emperor was a drenched, red-nosed German princeling.
When the electors deposed Wenzel, they created a schism in the empire to co-exist with the schism in the Church. The three main contenders for the imperial throne were: Wenzel, now King of Bohemia, where he put it about that he was known as Good King Wenceslas, a local joke; Rupert, now King of the Romans; and Sigismund, King of Hungary, Wenzel's half-brother. As King of the Romans, Rupert was in line to be the next Holy Roman Emperor but, if anything happened to him, Sigismund was the coming man politically – at least he had most certainly become so by the time I left Mainz.
Sigismund's father Charles, a previous emperor; was said to be the greatest secular ruler of the fourteenth century because he founded the University of Prague in 1348, almost succeeded in uniting the Latin and Greek churches and, by his Golden Bull, brought organization and order to the principles of election to the imperial throne, thus holding Germany; together. For his three sons: Wenzel, Sigismund, and John of Moravia, he turned his life's work upside down, emptying it of wisdom. Against his own Golden
Bull, which called for an independent succession brought about by the electors he had named, he gave the imperial crown to Wenzel,then seventeen,, and died.
If Wenzel grew into a dangerous, murdering drunkard (which he did), Sigismund, seemed consciously to have designed a life for himself in which he was tossed about upon a noisy, splattering, whirlwind of random events. He had been betrothed when he was a small boy to Mary, infant daughter of Louis the Great, King of Hungary and Poland. Because of that marriage, Sigismund eventually succeeded to the Hungarian throne. Mary died in 1392 and, on his return from an utterly disastrous war with the Turks (securing his place in history by leading the last, Crusade, which required him merely to step across his own frontier to kill the infidel), Sigismund was imprisoned for five months by the outraged Hungarian barons, Solely as a result of Pippo Span's wit and daring, he escaped, but he was then seized by his own brother, messy Wenzel, because he had (also) pushed his way into Bohemian affairs and Wenzel was by then King of Bohemia.
In 1390, Boniface IX proclaimed Ladislas of Naples King of Hungary, inciting him against Sigismund, who, although ever-ready to pick up new titles like potatoes in a field, was passionate about retaining his used ones. Sigismund not only crushed Ladislas at Raab, but he ordered both Hungary and Bohemia to cease paying any money to the papal treasury.
He led a whirligig of a life because he knew he would not be either welcome or safe if he stayed in any one place too long. He travelled constantly with a gaudy escort. He entered towns encouraged by music large bands or a few fiddlers. He was an unscrupulous royal adventurer whose juggled sense of success was only slightly muted b his: second wife, Barbara. She was called the Hungarian Messalina a formidable combination of labels, and stayed mightily busy keeping Sigismund bobbing within, the eye of a storm of cuckoldry, Sigismund shrugged, that off. He himself was constantly being tripped and falling into the arms of passing women.
At one time, after defeating the Venetian at Motta, Sigismund forced their captain to hack off the right hands of 180 of his own men and fling them into the sea. Before that, while still the, young Hungarian king, Sigismund had disciplined some of the Hungarian nobles by calling thirty-one of them into his tent one by one and beheading them there. The slaughter stopped only because the rest of them refused to enter when they saw the blood of their comrades running out under the bottom flap of the tent. Sigismund always did things in the extreme, not only because he had no sense of proportion, but because he was never quite sure that what he was doing would be viewed as kingly enough. After Nicopolis, nearly dying of fever, he had himself hung up by his feet for twenty hours to let the sickness trickle out of his mouth, while hundreds of his subjects filed past; wondering about him.
Sigismund ploughed through his life flush with promise but slow of payment. He lived like a housefly, ever on the move lest some circumstance strike at him. Outstanding in his character was his instability. Within his flaccid self he was a creature of flighty impulse and indulgence, yet every exterior inch of him showed him to be a monarch among men – tall, majestic, handsome; manly, with a flowing yellow beard which turned grey in later years. His wife was wilfully pagan, a fair and graceful woman, although her face was marred with spots. Each time he strayed from her bed, she left his for two other women, three men and a stable boy, but in all this her husband never interfered. His magpie interest was kindled only by the glitter of material things.
More than anything else it was his amour-propre, somewhat of a lesser thing than ambition, which drove him to seek the position of Holy Roman Emperor, as the co-equal with the sort of people who had not existed since Boniface VIII. It was Sigismund's intention, when the great day came, not to admit even the pope as his peer. His father had `almost' re-established the unity of the Latin and Greek churches. Sigismund took it as his destiny to be hailed as the one man whose leadership would restore the unity of the Church by ending its schism. Sigismund, the most barbaric, ruthless and left-handed of the princes, the grinning knave of German royalty, was obsessed and besotted with the idea of the abolition of the offending schism in the church.
Sigismund's great-shield, his cloak of respectability and instant honour was the Holy Church. When all else failed, he knew that by rushing to its defence – whether to seal off its enemies, or to heal its schism, or to cry out
