Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans, episode 179. Meanwhile in the Empire, Sigismund, King of the Romans, King of Hungary, and recently crowned King of Bohemia, is not doing too well. Despite his long list of glittering titles, he is stuck in the town of Kutna Hora. The revolutionaries who have taken Prague, built strongholds, have created a completely new army for a completely new form of warfare, and were taking over more and more of his ancestral kingdom.
When one of his most strategic positions, the castle of Wishehrad, comes under siege, he had to take his forces into another battle with the Hussites, which will set off a string of events that will bring what every true supporter of the Holy Roman Empire must have been craving. Taxes? Come and find out. Before that, we start with a little story about the world of podcasting. Every year we get to hear that the number of podcast listeners has gone up.
I just saw a report that said that the percentage of Americans listening to podcasts at least once a month has risen to 44%. And then the next news item is that the podcast networks left, right and center are cutting their workforces, that platforms shut down and long established shows give up. Why is that? Now one element is the shift from traditional podcasting platforms like Apple Pocket Casts or Podbean to YouTube and Spotify video.
The difference is that monetization through advertising on traditional platforms leaves a lot more on the table than at the video platforms. The video platforms control the adverts you see and pass through a pittance to the creators. Whilst in a traditional RSS feed, 100% of the advertisers fees go to the creators and their networks. And as listeners migrate across to YouTube and Spotify video, podcaster advertising revenues decline.
So in order to make ends meet, they put ever more advertising into the slots. Many shows I love and listen to have now three minutes at the beginning and four minutes in the middle. That is seven minutes per show. I'm listening to two episodes per day on average, which makes it 14 minutes per day on average, or three and a half days for the whole year. Imagine what you could do with all that time. Listen to the entire back catalogue of the history of the Germans, for instance.
Which is why we should be so thankful to all of you who keep this show advertising free. In particular Finbar G, Gilman L, Caspar H, Gary C, Charles M. And David and William. And if you want to join this august group, you can do so on my website@historyofthegermans.com support and just a quick apology for getting Jan Hus and Jan Ika mixed up last episode. Just to clarify, Jan Hus is not the kind of person carrying a military flail. That would be Jan Ika. And with that, back to the show.
Last week we ended on the battle of Wittkop Hill. This was an encounter between the crusading army of Emperor Sigismund and the Hussite defenders of the city of Prague. On July 14, 1420. The Defenders did win. And 500 years later, work began on the Wittkopf Hill memorial that that towers above the city of Prague. It's boasting a 22 meter high statue of Jan Ika which weighs a cool 16.5 tons.
I have not been there yet, but I will come to Prague this summer and I will look for any memorial for the two women and the one girl that according to Lawrence of Brezova, had fought thousands of Saxons and Thuringian knights with their bare hands. Let's say I'm not very helpful now. Such a massive monument suggests it had been a huge battle, but I'm afraid it wasn't. The stated number of casualties of about 500 would not be a huge loss for an army that was allegedly 150,000 men strong.
So if we scale this down by the average degree of exaggeration, we are looking at really at the upper end. 50 to 100 casualties on the imperial side and far fewer amongst the Hussites. Basically an average Tuesday night in Glasgow. Still, it was a hugely important battle. By defending the Witkow hill, Prague was able to keep its supply lines open. With supplies coming in, Sigismund's plan to starve the city out was doomed. And he was as usual, running out of money.
So the great crusading army disappeared back home, leaving Sigismund with just his own troops from Hungary and the forces of the Catholic barons and cities. But he did not give up that quickly. The Catholic lords of Bohemia had told him that they were in touch with moderate and conservative forces amongst the Hussites. Conflict was rife amongst the various factions, they said. And soon almost all of Bohemia would recognize him as king, they said. And so let's just elect and crown you, they said.
And so the crown of St. Wenceslas was taken out of the beautiful chapel his father had built and placed on Sigismund's head, whilst in the city below, the Hussites were still celebrating their victory. After that, Sigismund returned to Cudna Hora and patiently waited for the inevitable surrender of his enemies. Now, the Catholic bands weren't entirely wrong about the rifts between the various factions inside the movement. The Hussites weren't by any means a monolithic religion.
What they agreed on were the four Articles of Prague, that is, the right to receive communion as bread and wine, the freedom to preach the gospel, the poverty of the Church, and the eradication of sin. But for the moderates, these were the maximum demands, and for the radicals, this was the bare minimum. So the Tabarites topped it up. They produced a more detailed program comprising 12 articles.
Therein they demanded the destruction of all monasteries, the stripping out of all gold and imagery from the churches, the closing of brothels, expulsion of prostitutes, a ban on fancy clothing, and all these other things that would become incredibly popular in England in the 1640s. They probably wanted to ban Christmas as well. And then there were different factions amongst the radicals as well. Some of them were seriously off the reservation, claiming that the third age had arrived.
That's after the Age of God, which ruled by the Old Testament. There was the Age of Christ, dominated by the New Testament. And now we have the Age of the Holy Spirit, where there is no testament at all, just direct communication between the Godhead and the leaders of the community. And that also meant there was no longer any sin, and any action that might have been regarded as sin in previous ages was therefore no longer sin.
Sounds like a great party for some, but was absolutely abhorrent to the puritanical mainstream Taborites. These internal divisions were suppressed when Sigismund's great army was lying before the gates, but came back out with a vengeance when he withdrew. Jan Ika was smart enough to take his forces back to Tabor before things got dicey. But the radicals in the new town went on a rampage.
In one infamous instance, Wenceslas Coronada, our friend and End of Days preacher from Pilsen, took a mob out to the monastery of Aula Regia, the greatest of the many splendid Cistercian monasteries in Bohemia, and place of burial of King Wenceslas. They pulled the dead king's body out of his grave and destroyed this medieval masterpiece. Its greatest treasure, an image of the Madonna, was covered by rubble and only found again 200 years later.
These hooligans then celebrated their achievement in a distinctly un puritanical way when they went through the sizable wine cellar of the monastery, followed by a drunken attack on the castle of the Vizgerat, where at least some of them came to a sticky end. These antics shocked the moderates, who now had to protect their churches from the vandalism of their alleged coreligionists.
But despite these internal frictions, the Hussites were still completely unaware that the only solution would be unconditional surrender to the men they held responsible for the death of Jan Hus and the whole mess therein. It took a few months for Sigismund to realise that this situation was a lot worse than he had imagined. Surely no letter of surrender had arrived, the crusaders had gone and the Catholic barons promises of imminent victory sounded increasingly hollow.
According to Sigismund's biographer, he accused them of having contrived a vicious plan to thwart his ambitions. They were all closeted Hussites and that there were no four lords in the whole of Bohemia and Moravia who could be trusted. But things could be getting even worse. During the course of the autumn, the Prague forces intensified the siege of the Vishen. This strategically important fortress was still occupied by a sizable and well led royal garrison.
They had held out for three months now, but supplies were running low and the inhabitants of the fortress were walking around pale like corpses. Sigismund had to come to the aid of the Visionrad unless he was prepared to lose both face and a crucial stronghold. His initial plan was to lure the castle's besiegers away from the fortress by attacking Hussite towns in the surrounding countryside.
But the Hussite commander this time, not Jan Giska, but Baron Kushina of Lichtenberg, did not fall for it and continued the siege. On October 28, the commander of the garrison, himself a Catholic Bohemian baron, met his counterpart under a flag of truce. He agreed that if by nightfall on 31 October, no effective help had arrived, he would surrender the castle with all its heavy weapons at 0900 the next morning.
In exchange, he and his soldiers would be allowed to withdraw honorably and with all their small weapons. In the meantime, Sigismund had given up on his clever plan. His army was now camped just across the river in Prague Castle. All that was holding him back from going out to relieve the Visenrad was the need for more reinforcements. He was waiting for an army of 2,000 Moravians to top up the 16,000 men he already had.
Minor snag was that these Moravians did not arrive until the evening of the 31st, exactly the moment the garrison commander became bound by oath to hand over the castle. But neither Sigismund Noye's generals knew anything about this agreement. The only way they had been communicating with the castle had been through the burning of nearby villages to announce their arrival, not subtle enough to convey complex terms of surrender.
What also did not help was that the Hussites captured the messengers Sigismund had tried to send into the Vizgerat with his own battle plan. When Sigismund mustered his troops in the morning of the 1st of November to attack the Hussite siege positions that surrounded the castle, they found the enemy very well entrenched. The leader of the Moravians counseled the king to halt the attack. Sigismund responded that it was wholly fitting that he would fight these peasants today.
But the Moravians kept warning him that any action would risk the destruction of the army and that they feared the flails of these peasants, at which point Sigismund accused them of cowardice and disloyalty to prove that they were neither. The Moravians then agreed to take the most dangerous position on the battlefield, where they were fighting uphill into the enemy positions. The battle plan was comparatively simple.
Sigismund's forces would attack the Hussite positions from the front and the Visharat garrison would fall into their back and then, squeezed between the two sides, the Hussites would be unable to move and had to surrender. But it failed miserably for one, because the garrison commander of the Vishehrad stuck by his agreement and blocked the gates so that even those soldiers who wanted to fight could not exit.
Secondly, because the Hussite defenders held their positions, firing their guns and crossbows at the knights who had to cross an open field, the advance halted and then turned back. That retreat turned into a rout as the besiegers chased after them and the peasants cruelly killed many with their flails. No quarter was given, even to those who surrendered and promised to convert. The Moravians took the biggest losses.
Lawrence of Brezova lists dozens of barons and knights whose names I will not recount out of respect for the Czech language. These gentlemanly and rugged warriors, these handsome and curly haired young men, were butchered like pigs and immediately stripped off of all their armor as well as their clothing down to their underwear. End quote.
The chronicler of the life of Emperor Sigismund blames his sudden retreat on our not exactly friend of the podcast Nicholas of Diemniste, the butcher of Kutna Hora, who turned his horse around in the height of battle. Sigismund himself observed the fighting from the top of a hill in order to coordinate between this attack and a parallel, equally disastrous attempt to retake the Charles Bridge for the nth time.
When he saw the destruction of his men, he was struck with terror and fled in tears with his retinue. The Vicherat garrison surrendered the castle as agreed, and the common people violently entered and invaded the churches with great ruckus, broke and dashed to pieces. Pictures, altars, organs, chairs and other Decorations. End quote. This begins a process of dismantling the ancient royal residence that lasted for centuries and left little of this once great castle.
The rest of Sigismund's campaign of 14201421 is short and sad. Following the success at the Vishirat, the Hussites were riding high. The Tabarites under Jan Ika defeated the baron Rosenberg, the richest and most powerful Bohemian baron and loyal Catholic. Rosenberg had to recognize the Four Articles of Prague and allow Hasite religious practice on all his lands. That brought almost the entirety of southern Bohemia under Hussite control.
Then Jan Ika turned against the Pilsener Landfrieden, an alliance of royalist cities in western Bohemia. He took several fortresses and laid siege to the town of Tachov. Tachov was a predominantly German speaking town and lies just seven miles from the border to Bavaria and Franconia. That rang alarm bells everywhere from Nurnberg to Landshut.
What if these fanatic heretics who were putting monasteries to the torch and burned every Catholic priest, descended from the Burmawald and infested the land with their erroneous ideas? So when the citizens of Tachov sent for help to Sigismund and the Duke of Bavaria, the city of Naunberg, an army of 12,000 gathered quickly to relieve the stricken town.
Sigismund brought his remaining forces over from Kutna Hora, at which point Jan Ika raised the siege of Tachov, garrisoned the three towns he had conquered earlier and returned to Tabor to gather fresh forces. Sigismund's army then laid siege to one of these fortresses, Cladbury, where one of Giska's paladins was holed up with about a thousand men. Despite outnumbering the garrison 121 Sigismund made scant progress in taking Cladbury.
Meanwhile, Rudyka was on his way back with the Tabarite force of a few thousand men. Given the size of Sigismund's army, that appeared not enough. So he asked the people of Prague for help. Despite the ever deepening religious and political differences between the moderates in Prague and the radicals, they did answer the call. 7,000 men and 320 war wagons joined the Tabarites. The stage is set for a decisive battle.
But seeing a Taborite force of roughly equal size approaching far larger than he had expected, Sigismund lost heart. He sent the Bavarians and the Franconians back home, took himself down to Kutna Hora and left Tachov and all the royalist towns in western Bohemia to their destiny. Soon thereafter he left Bohemia altogether and returned to Hungary.
Prague Castle surrendered to the Hussites in July 1421, the campaign that had started with an invasion by the great Christian lords from dozens of countries, allegedly 150,000 men strong, had been defeated by peasants, townsfolk and some barons from a medium sized kingdom on the edge of the empire. And what was even worse than the military defeat was the complete loss of political authority in Bohemia.
The moderates, who had for various reasons tried again and again to reconcile with the heir to the crown, had comprehensively come off the idea that Sigismund could ever be their gracious king. Not only had he pushed back all their attempts to make peace, his armies had also run amok across Bohemia on their return journeys.
As far as his Bohemian subjects were concerned, he was the man who had Jan Hus guilt, had gone through with the coronation not sanctioned by the majority of barons and cities, and had at every opportunity shown no respect for their sincere desire to follow the Holy Scripture. So at an assembly of the Bohemian estates in the summer of 1421, they decided to offer the Bohemian crown to Ladislav Jugaila, the victor of Tannenberg and the ruler of Poland, Lithuania.
The court in Krakow was already sympathetic to the Hussite ideas, and an alliance with Eastern Europe's most powerful ruler would be a counterweight to the crusaders. Jugana turned the offer down, but his nephew, Sigmund Kobitovich was game. I mean, seriously, are they making these names up so just that I can make a fool of myself? Anyway, Polish Sigmund shows up in Bohemia and Sigismund lost another political lever.
These events will obviously have a major impact on Bohemia and we will look into that in an upcoming episode. This show, however, is called the History of the Germans. And it's high time to find out what all this means. The rise of the Ottomans, the Hussite Revolution and the Council of Constance. What it means for the German lands. And these German lands are in a dreadful state.
Though they had not seen a major war since the wars of Succession between Carl IV and Ludwig the Bavarian way back in 1345-49, in Hot Depot time. That was episode 156, literally six months ago. So that sounds pretty good given that France was caught up in the Hundred Years War all throughout this time and, and in Italy, the rivalry between Milan, Florence, Venice and dozens of other cities and their lords resulted in a near permanent state of war.
But what the German lands had instead was a never ending sequence of feuds. Feuds between barons, but also between cities and the princes, and the princes and the barons and even peasants were feuding. Feuds are in Some way even more destructive than outright war. A feud was rarely fought by breaking each other's castles or city walls, let alone trying to kill the opponent.
The latter would have completely defeated the purpose of the feud, which was to force him to admit publicly that he was wrong. Feuds focused more on intimidation, arson, looting, cattle rustling and kidnapping, with a sideline in burning villages and manors, uprooting vineyards and putting fields to the torch. One famous never ending feud was that between the Archbishop of Mainz and the Count Palatinate on the Rhine.
These two electors held territories in close proximity and obviously had important roles in the empire, creating fantastic opportunities to knock each other out. In particular, the very fragmented areas of southern Germany and the Rhineland were prone to ambitious lords and princes seeking a few villages or towns here and there, on the grounds that Great Aunt Eleanor was the second cousin of the Duke of Andersvoor who had once owned them.
To get a scale of the devastation, according to the historian Peter H. Wilson, 1200 Villages in the Rhineland were devastated during the first half of the 15th century. That's almost as many villages as were destroyed in Bohemia during the Hussite wars, where really large armies criss crossed the country every year. And one of the reason for the collapse of law and order can be laid at the feet of the largely ineffectual rulers of the empire.
Since 1370, after King Wenceslas attempt at pushing through a general peace Landfrieden had ceased around 1388, no further serious effort was undertaken to bring things under control. When Wenceslas reign in the empire came to its ignominious end, Ruprecht of the Empty Pocket, made a few half hearted attempts to assert his position and then retreated to his gorgeous castle above Heidelberg, founded a university, which I'm very grateful for and and just generally forgot about the empire.
The next one on the list was then our friend Sigismund, who had taken over by 1410, had stayed back in Hungary for the first four years of his reign, and then spent almost all his entire energy and political capital on the Council of Constance and was now preoccupied with the Bohemian affairs. Bottom line, there was even more interregnum during these 40 years than there was during the actual interregnum.
As an anonymous writer stated, a few years we behave like sheep without shepherds, we stray in the pasture without permission. Obedience is dead, justice is afflicted. Nothing is in good order, end quote.
Though there surely is never a time when organizational near collapse is a good thing, by this time, the early 15th century is a particularly bad time to be bad at the job, as I mentioned at the beginning of this season, for centuries there had not been an existential external threat for the empire. The last one may have been the Mongols, but they never got deep into the heartlands and then they disappeared very quickly. Hence this constant feuding and disunity could be sustained.
But now some serious challenges are coming up. The Ottomans stand at the Hungarian border. That is still 800 kilometers away. But 50 years ago, there were 1600 kilometers away. The Hussite ideas were a fundamental challenge to the existing order, as anyone could see, as Bohemian towns and villages went up in flames. France is still in agony. But Henry V of England, the victor of Agincourt, had died in 1422, leaving his kingdom to a baby.
Joan of Arc will seek her audience with the French king in 1428. And the unstoppable expansion of the French monarchy begins. So strong leadership and fundamental reform is what is needed. When Sigismund left Bohemia in the spring of 1421, utterly defeated and utterly broke the elites of the empire, the electors, the princes and the city councillors knew that their ruler would not be able to spare much time on bringing peace and security to their land.
Nor, quite frankly, did his military record impress much. Nikopol had been in disaster then. Vidkov Visharat now running away from the decisive battle. That is not a good look. Talking about looks, the whole affair had left a bit of a sour aftertaste in the mouths of the crusading German princes. They struggled to understand why their king gave up so quickly after the comparatively minor skirmish on Witkoff Hill. Why did he not make another attempt at going up there?
And then this whole business with the Catholic barons promising him the crown without bloodshed. How was that supposed to work? Unless Sigismund was prepared to make concessions to the Hussites? Sure, he'd turned them down several times before, but still, how was that supposed to work? And now the withdrawal from Takhov. They were all there, ready and good to go, and Dani simply walked away. So he was either a coward or had been some sort of deal with the Hussites. It all smelled a bit fishy.
But it was not just disappointment with Sigismund as an individual. The structure, institutions and processes of the empire that had developed throughout the Middle Ages were simply no longer fit for purpose. A fundamental reform was needed. The first step in that direction happened at the end of May 1421, when the princes and cities of the empire got together without the emperor's knowledge or involvement, and they declared an imperial war against the Hussites.
An army of the princes and estates was to meet in eager on August 23 and then March into Bohemia. When Sigismund heard about it, he might have been angry that they went on their own. But he had to support the initiative, though it wasn't his army. At least it was an army that would go up against the Hussites. So whilst all this is going on, he sets up his own initiative to deal with the Hussites. As usual, he cannot move that fast because of the lack of cash.
The solution was to marry his only child, his daughter Elizabeth, to Albrecht, the Habsburg Duke of Austria. This made Albrecht in one fell swoop, the heir to Hungary Bohemia, and puts him into pole position for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. That sounds a little bit like the Habsburg Empire, because it is the Habsburg Empire. And Elizabeth came with a decent dowry, the whole of Moravia, a land that Sigismund actually controlled.
In exchange, Sigismund got about 400,000 florins, enough to muster an army of 12,000 and to go to Bohemia and fight the Hussites. But all that marriage contract negotiation had taken time. The army that had been created outside of his control had already gone off to Bohemia and had begun the siege of one of the Hussite towns. But when Jizka's soldiers, their war wagons, flails and guns appeared over the hill, the crusaders panicked and ran back home.
So within just two years, the Hussite armies had built up a reputation of efficiency and terrible cruelty. The mere appearance of their flags left these veterans of a thousand feuds tremble in their boots. Sigismund's own efforts got underway. A month later, his army of again around 15,000 or so entered Bohemia. This time he could not bottle it again. And so when Zizka and his terrifying army caught up with him, he had to take a stand.
Well, he shouldn't have, because this was the huge and the very decisive defeat we were all expecting. We'll take a closer look at this battle and the subsequent ones in one of the next episodes. But for now all we need to know is that the flower of the Hungarian and Bohemian chivalry was lying dead in the ice cold Sazavar river, squashed by Zizka's war wagons. Sigismund barely escaped with his life and ran back to Hungary.
Now, at this point, Sigismund, who after all had reunited the church after 40 years of schism, had lost all credibility and support. A certain Andreas of Regens book says about him around that Domitian and Diocletian were the most cruel men, Decian and Maximian, the most wicked men, Africanus and Julian the apostate the most desperate men, Herod, Nero and Adrian, the most corrupt men. Yet none of them committed as many and as such destructive act as this man.
His name is great, not in goodness, but in deceit. He does not spare the saints, he does not fear God, he does not respect men. He does not hesitate to exterminate holy virgins. He is not ashamed to commit sacrilege to profane sacred places or to defile the burial sites of his ancestors. He fears offending his idol, which he carries around with him more than he dreads despising God, his Creator. End quote. Not a good look at all.
The natural next step from here would be for the imperial leadership to get together, depose the incumbent and select a new one. That is what the electors had done with Sigismund's brother Wenceslas. And indeed they did get together and they did discuss deposing Sigismund, but they didn't go through with it. There was nobody who wanted the job, or more precisely, afford the job.
As the author of the reformation of Emperor Sigismund would write a few years after that, an emperor or a king of the empire cannot establish or maintain his position. And so much has been taken from him by the electors and others that things have become very miserable indeed. End quote. What kind of kingdom, let alone empire, is this, where nobody wants to sit on the throne?
And even though the electors and princes were the main beneficiaries of this state of affairs, they also realized that this complete absence of coordination mechanism was not or no longer viable. It was a Hussite revolt and the fear that it could spread intellectually and militarily to the empire that forced them to act. This is the very beginning of a hundred year long process of imperial reform that will reshape the empire into its early modern incarnation as a mixed monarchy.
And the first item on the agenda was finance. You've already heard me going on and on and on about the importance of taxes, but indulge me again. By 1422, the great monarchies of France and England, as well as the great Italian states, all collected taxes. There was no other way to finance the ever increasing cost of warfare. Armies had become larger and weapons more sophisticated and expensive. Emperor Henry VII had attempted to regain Italy with 5,000 men.
By now, armies of 10 to 15,000 were common, and by the end of the century, 50,000 men would be standard size. By the early 16th century, one year of campaigning on the Ottoman front cost between 1.8 and 3.6 million florins. And by 1550 this doubled again to 5.4 million florins. The income from the empire, from the Imperial Estates was 20,000 florins. 20,000 against 1.8 to 3.6 or 5.4 million.
The existing system of financing imperial war out of the emperor's private purse, supplemented with some voluntary contingents from the princes and cities, was woefully inadequate to defend the country. So in July 1422, an Imperial diet, one called by the electors rather than by Sigismund, decided on the very first imperial tax, called the common penny. And this tax is calculated as 1% of the wealth of each of the imperial princes and the cities.
But it was not a system of taxation that would really catch on. The reasons were simple. Firstly, the information about how much anyone owned in monetary terms was simply not available. But even more importantly, the cities in particular did not want to disclose their wealth. They feared, quite rightly, that if the local princes knew how rich they actually were, the territorial lords would double their efforts to bring the cities under their control.
This process of reintegrating one's free cities into princely territories had already been underway for a long time and was only going to accelerate. To avoid the issue of disclosure of wealth, the common penny was replaced with the matriculous system. In this system, each of the members of the empire was obliged to provide a fixed number of soldiers, or at a later stage, the cash equivalent.
That meant cities did not have to disclose their wealth, they just needed to negotiate a suitable level of contribution. Those who provided more soldiers under the matricular system were given more say in where they would be deployed. So it became a give and take that mirrored elements of the ancient system of voluntary contribution and the obligatory nature of a taxation system. Another tax that was much easier to get agreement on was a 3% tax on Jewish property.
This came on top of a now long period of oppression of the Jewish population, who were banned from many attractive occupations, including now high finance, and were reduced to menial work and payday lending. There were regular waves of expulsion of Jewish populations, though due to the fragmented nature of the empire, there wasn't a blanket ban on Jewish life, as had been the case in England from 1290 to 1655. One should therefore not expect much from this tax on the Jews.
Well apart from further emigration eastwards, where the Polish rulers welcomed them with open arms. The other great reform complex was the judiciary. Way back in the 13th century, Rudolf of Habsburg had created regional entities, the Kreise, the Circles. The imperial circles were designed to maintain the peace within a certain area, were led by a captain who could use imperial resources to enforce his judgment.
This infrastructure had largely been dismantled by subsequent rulers, but Sigismund tried to revive it, admittedly with limited success. However, the imperial circles would become a key element of the imperial reform. With his imperial circles being stuck, Sigismund tried another tack. He proposed the free and imperial cities form one huge alliance, not just amongst themselves, but also with the imperial knights.
The alliance would then police itself, have their own courts and enforcement mechanisms. It would mean a lot of feuds between these smaller entities could be dealt with on a local level. It also meant that the territorial princes would have to think twice before attempting to snatch a few villagers from their neighbouring city or lordship.
If there was a major alliance protecting said city or lord, this was a big step away from his father's golden ball that prevented the formation of city leagues. But this initiative too got stuck. Like his father, Sigismund had a knack for generating physical manifestations of political ideas. Crowns tend to be great for that purpose. In 1423, at the Imperial regalia, the crown, the holy lance, The Purse of St Stephen, the Coronation mantle, the socks and so forth, brought over to Nurnberg.
Up until this moment, these regalia had always been kept in the possession of whoever held the imperial title. They were often a pawn in the negotiations over succession and, as we know, were essential part of any coronation ceremony. Which is why up until now, every emperor had kept them in whichever was his best defended castle. Sigismund put an end to it. He had the regalia taken from his castle in Hungary to the hospital of the Holy Spirit in Nurnberg.
The transport was organized by Nuremberg patrician, who hid these priceless treasures in a wagon load of fish for the journey. And the city of Nurnberg was given charge all of these treasures. Nurnberg was one of the three spiritual capitals of the empire, along with Frankfurt, where the emperors were elected, and Aachen, where they were crowned.
By keeping the crown and the other regalia under the care of the city of Nuremberg and displaying them once a year for two weeks, Sigismund separated the institution of the empire from the person of the emperor. The logic behind that was that it was easier for the princes of the empire to rally around the crown than around an emperor who, like himself, had some minor reputational issues.
Sigismund's father had done the same thing with the crown of St. Wenceslas, which was kept in Prague Cathedral, not in the royal castle. Despite all of Sigismund's and the elector's efforts, imperial reform still took almost a century to come to fruition. But it did start during the reign of Sigismund. And it was a reaction to, amongst other things, The Hussite revolution.
And there is one more way in which Sigismund had a lasting impact on the empire, and that was the final allocation of the electoral rolls. We've already heard that in 1415 he granted the electorate of Brandenburg to Frederick of Hohenzollern, a position his descendants would hold until the end of the empire. Amongst other titles acquired alongside and by marrying his daughter and sole heir to Albrecht of Austria.
In 1421, the electoral vote of Bohemia would finally end up with the House of Habsburg, though that took a little while. As we'll find out, the other electoral title that was reallocated during his reign was the Electorate of Saxony. This title had been held by the Ascanian dukes of Wittenberg, the descendants of Albrecht the bear. But in November 1422, the last of this line died without offspring.
Sigismund very rapidly decided to award the title and electoral rights to Frederick the Belligerent, the Margraf of Meissen. Sigismund was deep in debt to Frederick, which may account for his decision to elevate him. Now the house of Wetin that Frederick belonged to will hold the electoral title until the end of the empire. They too became a huge force, not just on account of their wealth, but also on account of their support for the Reformation and later as kings of Poland.
And then by turning Dresden into the epitome of baroque splendor. These three joined the house of Wittelsbach that had held the electorate as Counts Palatine on the Rhine since the beginning, and will hold it all the way to the end. As the secular electors rise in prominence, the ecclesiastical ones, the Archbishop of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, gradually diminish. And even below the electors, the main princely power blocs are also settling down.
Of the very old houses, the wealth in Brunswick are still around and will become kings of Hanover and England. The Reginars hold Hesse and the Zeringer rule in Baden. Then there are the newer houses. The counts of Wurtemberg are now well established in the southwest, the dukes of Mecklenburg and Pomerania holding their lands in the north, while the house of Oldenburg will add the Danish throne in 1448.
And like on the electoral level, the bishoprics and archbishoprics gradually come under the sway of these princely houses, either directly because one of the family occupies the seat, or. Or through simple exertion of force, the empire is assembled. The process of imperial reform has kicked off. Just our friend Sigismund looks a bit down in the dumps.
Next week we'll see how he claws his way back, by hook and by crook, to finally become king of Bohemia, a country barely recognizable from the days of his father, Carl iv. I hope you will join us again. And just a quick thanks to Professor Duncan Hardy, whose excellent translations of key documents help us enormously.
Ah, and as always, historyofthegermans.com support is where you can deposit your imperial common penny with the podcast and receive the immense gratitude of your fellow members of the Empire SA.