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 for its reform by attacking its heretics and simoniacs or battling Turks – he could keep his lustre from fading.
To place Sigismund upon the imperial throne suited the First Elector, the Archbishop of Mainz, who had eliminated Wenzel. Rupert had alienated his support by destroying nine castles in Wetterau in order to clean out nests of freebooters who had been pillaging the merchants of Swabia, Thuringia and Hesse. These castles, as it happened, were within the jurisdiction of the archbishop and paid full tribute to him. What the marchesa had known before she had proposed my expedition to Mainz was that the archbishop had decided to depose Rupert as King of the Romans. The pope's support, of Sigismund would be, for the archbishop, a political coup.
Therefore the marchesa knew that, when my embassy train reached Mainz in the autumn of 1410 with its household of 128 people, there to be joined with the mission of Cosimo di Medici, who had travelled with a staff of fifty-six; the Archbishop of Mainz was already inclined towards the views we would present. Cosimo was suitably impressed with my explicit authority. So was I. I had learned my part well, but the fact is, I have always had explicit authority and, if I couldn't stare down a little runt like Cosimo, what would be the sense of Cossa making me a cardinal in the first place?
I spoke only in German to Nassau and in Latin to Cosimo, easily dominating both men with genuinely rumbling dignity at banquets, masses and other occasions of state – more impressive in my scarlet robes, white beard and tragic eye swags than any of the candidates for emperor. Thank God it wasn't in Cossa's power to make me emperor. I persuaded Cosimo to allow me to outline for the archbishop; the generalities of the tremendous financial opportunity which was about to be offered to the First Elector, then at once turned to the subject of Pope John's deep thoughts on the erasure of the, schism by bringing Sigismund's youth and power into the awful breach. What was wanted, I told them, was that Sigismund should be elected, first; King of the Romans, then emperor, but, of equal importance, that Sigismund should know well that it had been the pope who had sponsored him with the electors.
A coup of statesmanship was struck. Cossa could believe that he was again preventing the reform of the Church while, at the same time, acquiring via Sigismund military protection on his northern and eastern flanks. Cosimo intended, however, that it would be through stringent Church reform that the strategy which he and the marchesa had so carefully developed would sweep the schism into history, eliminate the three present popes and sustain Europe as a stable place for the sensible conduct of business affairs. I warned Cossa about those people until I was blue in the nose, but he only shrugged and mouthed nonsense like `What will be will be.' The fact was that, as pope, Cossa was making more money than he had ever made in his life, and that was where contentment rested for him. Things like the Medici's determination to bring about structural and religious reform in the Church were indefinite and always far in the future. The only reform Cosimo truly believed in was that which would bring about an end to the schism for the benefit of European business. Cosimo was charming to Cossa at all times; while the marchesa fulfilled his sexual needs and satisfied his lust for power – but more important, their advice was making him an enormous amount of money. I warned him that it all had to end in our ruin. I told him again and again; but popes have never listened to their cardinals.