A Distant Mirror_ The Calamitous 14th Century - Barbara W. Tuchman [351]
Through a century of rule by the Angevin dynasty, the Hungarian crown was closely connected with the French court and continued to be so under the Luxemburg dynasty, which began with Sigismund. He became King in 1387 by virtue of marriage to the daughter of the last Angevin King, Louis the Great, who died without a male heir. Son of the late Emperor Charles IV and younger half-brother of Wenceslas, Sigismund was a less serious statesman than his father, more able and sensible than his distracted brother. Like Wenceslas, he was well educated and fluent in four languages. Tall, strong, and uncommonly handsome, with light-brown hair worn long and curled, he was intelligent and well-meaning as a ruler but pleasure-loving, extravagant, and licentious, with a record of scandalous love affairs. History knows him largely as Emperor in later life, but at this time he was only 28 and barely keeping his balance in precarious circumstances.
Succeeding as an outsider to the Hungarian crown at nineteen, he had faced comparison with a dynamic and powerful predecessor, the enmity of rebellious nobles, a domineering mother-in-law, and a rival to the throne in the person of that throne-surfeited Angevin heir, Charles of Durazzo. Through hectic years of cabals and assassinations, Charles of Durazzo and Queen-Mother Elizabeth of Hungary managed to destroy each other, and the rebellious nobles were more or less contained, despite such intensity of feeling as caused one of them to shout at Sigismund, “I will never bow to you, you Bohemian pig!” Preoccupied by these various challenges in his first eight years as ruler, Sigismund was not able to mobilize effective resistance to the Turks, who took advantage of the situation to ravage his borders.
Personally brave though tactless, hot-tempered and cruel when angered, Sigismund had survived. Like each of the Luxemburgs, he had distinctive characteristics. On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler. Attending the Parlement at Paris to observe the courts of justice in operation, he heard a verdict given against a plebeian plaintiff named Seignet on the ground that he was no knight while the defendant was. To the astonishment of his retinue and assembled lawyers, judges, and onlookers, Sigismund rose, announced in a loud voice his right to make knights, summoned Seignet to him, bade him kneel, and dubbed him knight on the spot. Removing one of his gold spurs and his belt from which hung a dagger to represent a sword, he had one of his men put these insignia on the dumbfounded new knight, and “thus the King advanced the cause of the said Seignet.”
While not oblivious to the Turkish advance, the West, having no great attachment to Constantinople, paid little serious attention to the danger until it reached Hungary. Every Pope in the last forty years had, it is true, called for crusade against the approaching infidel, some with real fervor, but the fervor was more for invigoration of the Faith than from a realistic appreciation of the danger. Such enterprises as were launched against the Turks were narrow in scope and motivated by special interests. The interest of the popes was to re-absorb the Eastern Church within the Latin fold; the interest of the Venetians and Genoese was to preserve their trading posts in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean; the interest of the Lusignans of Cyprus was to preserve their kingdom against the Turkish tide. The nearest thing to a united effort was the Latin League organized by Pope Clement