In 1938 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s dismissal of Hitler’s threat to Czechoslovakia as ‘a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing’ was disgraceful, but probably in accordance with the general British view. Apart from the obvious geographical howler – Prague and Nice, that favourite English watering place, are equidistant from London – pre-war Britons were comfortably ignorant of Europe east of the Rhine and north of the Alps. Today cheap flights have made cities such as Prague and Budapest popular tourist destinations, and at least Czech literature is better known, with Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek accepted as major writers, but the British conception of history remains resolutely provincial. The date 1415 is one of the few that have some resonance, as being that of Agincourt, yet that battle had only short-term and limited effects, while the international Congress being held at the same time in the German city of Constance changed the course of European history.
My own interest in that episode began many years ago when reading for the Cambridge History Tripos under the guidance of Dom David Knowles. At that time my particular interest was in the divergence between such reformers as Jean Gerson, striving to remain within the traditional bounds of Church authority, and those such as Jan Hus, reluctantly prepared to defy it. Since then, my experience in international business and with government bodies demonstrated how a combination of persuasion, coercion and a clear demonstration of economic advantages can influence events. Spending some time with one colleague in Africa extracting – eventually successfully – due payment from a reluctant francophone government gives one something of a feeling for the problems of medieval rulers.
This in turn focused my attention on the man who convened and presided over the Council at Constance: Sigismund of Luxembourg, German Emperor and King of Hungary. Without Sigismund’s personal qualities the Council would never have succeeded: it was his phenomenal energy, patience (not inexhaustible) charm and ruthlessness, coupled with a remarkable command of languages (French, German, Latin, Czech, Hungarian and Italian) that pushed the heterogeneous convention of popes, prelates and magnates into taking the hard decisions that rescued Christian Europe from the danger of imminent disintegration; and when crisis threatened, deployed the military force to avert it.
Yet Sigismund, it seemed, had been entirely neglected by British and American historians. In the 1,365 pages of Professor Norman Davies’s monumental work Europe Sigismund appears once (and not at all in the index), while one recent writer on the Ottoman Empire (Jason Goodwin in Lords of the Horizons) suppresses him entirely, replacing him with a fictitious King Ladislas. Nor have Czech or Hungarian historians thought much to Sigismund. The Kutná Hora Museum has simply omitted him from the list of Luxembourg Bohemian kings: Pal Engel records that ‘modern historiography has regarded him as one of the worst [of Hungarian rulers’]. Such views are, however, changing: after reviewing his achievements Professor Engel concluded that ‘when viewed in a European context, Sigismund can be seen as an outstanding figure in history’. Miklos Molhar concurs: Sigismund was ‘a prestigious emperor and a Hungarian king of calibre. He remains the most important sovereign of his era.’ A glance at the map shows Sigismund’s importance, in control (sometimes precariously) of vast territories extending from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean to the Baltic and the North Sea, with the rest of Europe acknowledging at least his moral authority.
I hope therefore that this short book may help to revive interest in this little-known period, while being conscious that the importance of the subject deserves a more thorough treatment.