During his last hours, waiting for death on his throne in Znojmo, Sigismund might have felt some pride in his accomplishments. He had held the German Kingdom together for a quarter of a century, and established two future imperial dynasties. His son-in-law Albert succeeded him as King of Bohemia and of Hungary and as Holy Roman Emperor: the Habsburg family continued to inherit the imperial crown until Napoleon liquidated the Empire. Albert’s successor, Frederick III, the last Emperor to be crowned in Rome, lived to hear of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, and Bartolomeu Dias’s passage to India. Frederick of Nuremberg and Brandenburg, Sigismund’s faithful friend and ally since the battle of Nicopolis, founded the Hohenzollern dynasty, whose last Emperor, Queen Victoria’s grandson Kaiser Wilhelm, died in 1941.
Sigismund’s fifty-year reign in Hungary had dragged that country, against some dogged resistance, into the mainstream of European events, with a single code of laws, a single currency, a market economy and an organized defence force. Above all, the great schism of the West had been ended, and the papacy restored, although even then more trouble was brewing between Pope Eugenius and the Council of Basel.
His most enduring achievement, ironically, was that messy arrangement patched up between the conservative Utraquists and his Bohemian Catholic followers. Sigismund had, like many others, assumed that this was nothing more than a temporary solution and that in due course all involved would return to the papal fold, but instead it turned out surprisingly durable. In 1517, when Martin Luther nailed his propositions to the Wittenberg church door, the Utraquists of Bohemia continued to enjoy the same rights as their Catholic countrymen, and even the reformed Taborites, the Moravian Brethren, flourished, although generally frowned upon. Successive popes had complained bitterly, hurled excommunications, and refused to recognize the renewed Compactata, but to no effect. The Church lands taken by the Hussites were never restored, and Bohemia had continued to flourish as an island of religious tolerance. It was an outcome that would probably not have worried Sigismund, never much interested in religious affairs.
Much of old Europe died with Sigismund, that great survivor; he had been the Lord of the World, the last Holy Roman Emperor acknowledged by all Christendom. His reign overlapped with those of four English, two French kings, half a dozen regents and twelve popes of different obediences. He had fought in person against the forces of five successive Turkish sultans, and had kept the Danube line secure. Sigismund’s struggle with the Turks had been simplified by their war with Venice between 1423 and 1430, which removed some of the pressure from the Hungarian borders. His ring of castles in Bosnia centred on the great fortress of Belgrade held firm, but the Serbian alliance, which he had settled personally in 1426, was crumbling. In 1428, at the height of the Hussite wars, Sigismund was forced once more to fight in person on the frontier. He then tried a desperate expedient, recruiting the Teutonic Knights to reinforce the frontier. They came not as crusaders against Islam, but as very expensive mercenaries, the cost estimated at over 300,000 florins a year. Nor were the Knights effective mercenaries: in 1432 Sigismund was obliged to end the contract. It was then that he began – typically while in Siena, reconciling Pope Eugenius with the Basel Council – to re-organize the Hungarian army. No subsequent European monarch until Napoleon was required, or able, to work on such a scale, and whereas Napoleon was intent on looting any country he invaded, Sigismund was fighting to preserve his own territory.
Albert of Habsburg was a welcome successor: even the Czechs recorded that ‘although a German, he was kind, wise and brave’, but within two years Albert was dead, fighting the Turks but having failed to persuade the Hungarians to rally behind him – and it was by then only the Hungarians who could form Christendom’s front line. The Germans had expended their energies uselessly against the Hussites and took little part in any further crusading effort.
That effort eventually came only in 1443. Pope Eugenius had spent the interval in cajoling the tottering Byzantine Empire to renounce the Orthodox faith and accept Catholicism: only then would any assistance against the Turks be given. For eighteen months in Ferrara and in Florence ecclesiastics and theologians argued as to whether there were fires in Purgatory – if indeed it existed – and whether the Holy Ghost proceeded from or through the Father and the Son. Only in July 1439 did the reluctant Greeks meet the Pope’s conditions; their reward was the promise of three hundred men and two ships and the undertaking to announce a Crusade at some future date. It took another four years before the Crusade was launched, and then it was only the eastern countries who took part in the fighting on land, although ships were provided from as far afield as Burgundy. Led by young King Wladyslaw of Poland, the Hungarian soldier John Hunyadi, who had learned his trade under Sigismund (some said he was the old King’s son) and the reliable Cardinal Cesarini, the Crusaders were at first successful, but the campaign ended with the army’s destruction at the port of Varna in 1444.
The Greek acceptance of papal hegemony had been unprofitable. No more help came from the Latins. Locked in by an unbreakable ring of Turkish troops the fortifications of Byzantium and the morale of the defenders disintegrated. On 29 May 1453 the city fell to Sultan Mehmet II in a single day’s assault, with the last Emperor, Constantine XI, killed in the struggle.
It marked not only the end of fourteen hundred years of empire but the decline of the Roman papacy as an international power, drawn to a close under Sigismund’s influence. Even although regular Councils ceased, the principle that a natural law existed which took precedence over any other was, if not universally accepted, at least launched on its career. After Constance, popes were Italian – the Borgias and one Dutchman excepted – usually preoccupied with their position as Italian princes and their place in international affairs eroded. The reforms at Constance were limited, but the international concordats cemented, especially for the English, the identity of national churches. Political realities were destroying papal pretensions, but the revelation that the claims to hegemony and civil power rested on a fake document, the so-called Donation of Constantine, made any attempts to reimpose unquestioned authority nugatory. It needed the shock of the Reformation to inspire the remodelling of the Catholic Church as a competitor within a more divided Christendom – and a Christendom much reduced, since some two hundred thousand square miles of what had been Christian states were now part of Dar al-Islam.
After the fall of Byzantium that perceptive observer, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, soon to be Pope Pius II, lamented: ‘Now Mohammed reigns among us. Now the Turk hangs over our very heads. The Black Sea is closed to us, the Don has become inaccessible. Now the Vlachs must obey the Turk. Next his sword will reach the Hungarians, and then the Germans.’ His analysis of the failure could serve as an epitaph for the passing of Sigismund.
Christendom has no head whom all obey. Neither the supreme pontiff nor the Emperor is given his due. There is no reverence, no obedience. Like characters in fiction, figures in a painting, so do we look upon the Pope and the Emperor … What order will there be in the army?What military discipline?What obedience? Who will feed so many people? Who will understand the different languages? Who will hold in check the different customs? Who will endear the English to the French? Who will get the Genoese to join with the Aragonese?Who will reconcile the Germans with the Hungarians, and the Bohemians?
After Sigismund no emperor, king or pope was able to unite Europe.
Accurate as was Pope Pius’s gloomy prophecy, he did not foresee the seismic shift that was soon to divide Europe and whose aftershocks continue to be felt. The Atlantic powers, Spain and Portugal in the lead, followed by England, Holland and France, focused their ambitions on the new worlds across the oceans. The rest of Europe fragmented by religious and political rivalries was left largely to its own devices, with only sporadic interventions from the West.
When the next pan-European Council gathered in Vienna, exactly four hundred years after that of Constance was convened, the Turkish empire was crumbling, a nuisance rather than a threat to Sigismund’s heirs. Another two centuries on the tolerant and eclectic Turkish rule has been replaced by radical or fundamentalist nation states: and the West continues the attempt to present a united front and to evolve a dialogue between religious and secular ideals.