Sigismund of Luxembourg
Sigismund of Luxembourg was king of Hungary for fifty years, emperor for thirty, and the man who summoned the council that burned Jan Hus. Born in 1368, the son of the emperor Charles IV, he became king of Hungary in 1387 by marriage at nineteen and spent the first half of his reign fighting the Ottomans. He organised the crusade that ended at Nicopolis in 1396, where the French knights charged without waiting for the Hungarian infantry and the army was destroyed; he escaped down the Danube by boat. He was elected King of the Romans in 1410 and inherited Bohemia in 1419. His great achievement was the Council of Constance. The Western Schism had run for nearly forty years with two and then three claimants to the papacy, and no one could summon a council to end it because no one agreed who could. Sigismund summoned it himself as emperor-elect, sat through it for four years, and got a single pope elected in 1417. The cost was Jan Hus. Sigismund gave him an imperial safe conduct to come and argue his case, and then did not or could not protect him when the council tried him for heresy and burned him in July 1415, which destroyed his credibility in Bohemia permanently. He spent the following seventeen years failing to conquer the Hussites, who beat five crusades and raided into Germany, and was finally accepted in Prague in 1436 after negotiating with them. He died in 1437, the last Luxembourg, and the empire went to the Habsburgs.
- Lived: 1368 CE – 1437 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
