King Albrecht II

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 208: Boy meets princess, boy becomes king also Episode 6 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

Last week we saw the family slowly climbing out of the hole that Friedrich IV of the Tyrol had dug them. But despite all these consolidation efforts, the family was still in the second league of European princely families.

Then, just 25 years after Ernst the Iron married down into minor Polish royalty, his first cousin once removed, Albrecht V became King of Hungary, King of the Romans and King of Bohemia, all in one single year, 1438. 

How was that possible? Here is friend of the podcast, Eneas Silvio Piccolomini summarizing events: quote

Albrecht grew up and married Elizabeth, daughter of King Sigismund. She was a very beautiful woman, who lived with him most virtuously. After the Bohemians had turned to heresy and terrorised all their neighbours with wars, he alone, with great strength, protected Moravia and Austria, and the damage he inflicted upon the Bohemians was not less than the damage he took from them.

He was always in arms and, like the Bohemians, used waggon formations in battle. Making his soldiers undergo hard military training, Albrecht was the only one of all their neighbours whom the Bohemians feared, having been often defeated by him and put to flight.

When his father-in-law Sigismund died, the Hungarians soon called him to the kingship, and the Bohemians followed suit. Thus, in a very short time, he gained two large kingdoms. In the meantime, the electors of the Empire, having heard about Sigismund’s death, elected Albrecht as King of the Romans and sent their decree to him in Vienna.” End quote

Bish bash bosh – that is it, end of episode. Thanks for coming. OK, maybe we have to go with Skipper from the Penguins of Madagascar and demand: Kowalski- Analysis.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 208: Boy meets princess, boy becomes king also Episode 6 of Season 11: The Fall and Rise of the House of Habsburg.

Last week we saw the family slowly climbing out of the hole that Friedrich IV of the Tyrol had dug them. But despite all these consolidation efforts, the family was still in the second league of European princely families.

Then, just 25 years after Ernst the Iron married down into minor Polish royalty, his first cousin once removed, Albrecht V became King of Hungary, King of the Romans and King of Bohemia, all in one single year, 1438. 

How was that possible? Here is friend of the podcast, Eneas Silvio Piccolomini summarizing events: quote

Albrecht grew up and married Elizabeth, daughter of King Sigismund. She was a very beautiful woman, who lived with him most virtuously. After the Bohemians had turned to heresy and terrorised all their neighbours with wars, he alone, with great strength, protected Moravia and Austria, and the damage he inflicted upon the Bohemians was not less than the damage he took from them.

He was always in arms and, like the Bohemians, used waggon formations in battle. Making his soldiers undergo hard military training, Albrecht was the only one of all their neighbours whom the Bohemians feared, having been often defeated by him and put to flight.

When his father-in-law Sigismund died, the Hungarians soon called him to the kingship, and the Bohemians followed suit. Thus, in a very short time, he gained two large kingdoms. In the meantime, the electors of the Empire, having heard about Sigismund’s death, elected Albrecht as King of the Romans and sent their decree to him in Vienna.” End quote

Bish bash bosh – that is it, end of episode. Thanks for coming.

OK, maybe we have to go with Skipper from the Penguins of Madagascar and demand: Kowalski- Analysis.

But before we dig into the reasons for Albrecht’s meteoric rise, let me tell you about something I noticed recently. Apple releases information’s to podcaster about the percentage of an episode listeners consume on average. This number is consistently above a 100% for episodes at the History of the Germans. I have been wrecking my brain how that can be the case. But I think I found the cause. Many people use podcasts to fall asleep to, I do it too. There is even a word for this, ASMR and people make shows specifically for that purpose. Now I have been told by listeners that they love falling asleep to the sound of my voice, which is a bit weird, but nothing to be ashamed of. And that may explain the 110% consumption rate as people doze off to an episode running the second time. And if you are one of them, you may enjoy the fact that my monotonous droning on is never interrupted by enthusiastic endorsements of random consumer goods and services.

Therefore as you now wake up, thank Colin G., Henrik F, Thies, Silke H., Fisherman’s Fencer, Kristian S. and Adrian H. who have gone to historyofthegermans.com/support and made a generous contribution to your undisturbed sleep. 

And with that, back to the show

This story of boy meets girl, boy becomes king fits just a bit too neatly into the “You Happy Austria marry” trope. Rising from middling prince in the empire to ruler of three kingdoms is a process much lengthier and much more complex than just saying “I do” to the most suitable spouse and then be extremely lucky – though I cannot recommend both of these highly enough.

Albrecht V of Austria succeeded the emperor Sigismund as King of the Romans, Hungary and Bohemia on the back of decades, if not centuries of negotiations, hard grind, ruthlessness and skill, plus the political necessities of the time.

To make it easier to understand I have broken it down into five components, namely

1. his legal claim
2. his personal relationship with Sigismund
3. a lot of money, some of it dirty,
4. the geostrategic situation, and
5. Albrecht II being the right person at the right time

The Erbverbrüderung

Lapsed lawyer that I am, I start with the fine print, the Habsburg family claim to be the rightful heirs to the imperial Luxemburg dynasty.

That goes back to 1364, when emperor Karl IV and duke Rudolf IV of Austria signed what is called an Erbverbrüderung, a treaty between both families whereby they designate each other as heirs to all their lands and title. Basically, if you no longer produce male heirs, then I will get all you got and in exchange, if my family dies out, your heirs get all of mine. That agreement was renewed several times and formed the legal basis for Albrecht inheriting the lands and titles of the emperor Sigismund in 1437 – alongside his marriage to Sigismund’s only child that is.

Such mutual designations are actually not that rare. They were basically insurance against the emperor swooping in and grabbing your lands if your family tree withered. Because normally if there were no heirs, their fiefs would become what is called vacant. These lands and titles would then revert to the emperor who then had one year to enfeoff it to someone else. In the olden days that someone else had been the most worthy of the nobles. Though nobody can tell when these Olden Days were, because ever since the starting point of this podcast the emperors regularly passed vacant fiefs on to friends and family. It was during the Interregnum that this process went into overdrive. Rudolf I took Austria, Adolf of Nassau tried Thuringia, Albrecht I yearned for Bohemia, Henry VII got Bohemia and Ludwig the Bavarian snatched Tyrol, Brandenburg and Holland. The imperial princes hated that. They came up with these agreements designating each other as heirs. That way there was always an heir, the fief would never become vacant and the emperor could not get his greasy paws on it – problem solved.

Eventually, princes realized these pacts were even better as political currency. Promising your land to another dynasty in some distant, heirless future didn’t cost you a thing. But it bought you an ally right now. Plus an option to get hold of your neighbours territory. No surprise then that there were Erbverbrüderungen  everywhere, between Brandenburg and Poland, between Hessen and Thuringia, between Kleve, Julich and Berg and this one, between the Habsburgs and the Luxemburgs.

Sometimes these deals paid off big time. Sometimes they fizzled out. Sometimes they sparked wars when other claimants (cadet branches, sons-in-law, or the estates who thought they should get a say) got fed up with being shunted aside.

As always with these kinds of documents: they provided legitimacy, but they only mattered in the real world if you could back them up with either cold hard steel or the warm glow of gold, or both..

Back to the 1364 arrangement between Luxemburgs and Habsburgs. At first glance it looks like a fantastic deal for the Habsburgs. The Luxemburgs were Kings of Bohemia, dukes of Luxemburg, about to become margraves of Brandenburg and held a string of possessions all the way from Prague to the French border, whilst the Habsburgs had just Austria, Styria, Carinthia  and their homeland on the Rhine. Moreover, there were three Habsburgs signing the Agreement, Rudolf IV and his brothers Leopold III and Albrecht III, and all three of them were young and as it turns out, able to produce sons in as we saw unhealthy quantities. Meanwhile the Luxemburgs were Karl IV and his brother Johann-Heinrich, who between them had produced only one male heir so far, the future Wenceslaus the Lazy. And they were both in their forties, comparatively old for the age.

An amazing feat of negotiation. Rudolf IV had done it again, the great forger had outwitted the shrewd emperor Karl IV. Hang on, not so fast. We all know Karl IV and honestly, him being screwed over by a 25-year old duke with dubious classical knowledge, that was not likely.

And if you read the fine, fine print you see why it was Rudolf and the habsburgs who got the shrt straw, not the Luxemburgs. In the agreement the Habsburgs promised to give the Luxemburgs their duchies in case they died out, but the Luxemburgs would only hand over the goods if they died out and the Anjous of Hungary died out as well.

And then there was another snag. The most valuable piece of the Luxemburg inheritance was the kingdom of Bohemia. Now Bohemia had an ancient right to choose its own king, a right that Karl IV had to formally acknowledge (see episode 154 and 158 for more detail). And these ancient rights superseded not just legally but also practically any arrangement about mutual inheritance Karl IV may have entered into.

So, net, net, the Luxemburgs offered no more than a vague chance of getting back to the top, whilst the Habsburgs, were they to die out, which had almost happened just 20 years earlier, Karl IV’s family would get Austria, Styria, Carinthia etc., no questions asked. And best of all, the Habsburgs, once a powerful player in the three body problem of the 14^th century were now put before the Luxemburg bandwagon, forever snapping at that elusive carrot.

Well, we do know they did get the carrot in the end, but only after a whole lot of pulling and snapping.

The personal relationship

When the Erbverbrüderung that tied the Habsburgs to the Luxemburgs was signed, Sigismund was not even yet born. But throughout his career the Albertine line of the Habsburg had done its fair share of pulling and snapping at carrots.

There was a bit of a hiccup when Albrecht’s grandfather, Albrecht III, promised Sigismund a whopping sum of 100,000 florins for the crusade against the Turks in 1396.  The money never showed up. The crusade went ahead anyway and promptly ended in the disaster of Nikopol — not because of empty pockets, mind you, but because of knightly exuberance and arrogance (episode 168).

So despite the disappointment, the alliance held. Sigismund renewed the inheritance pact, this time with archdukes Wilhelm, Leopold IV and Albrecht IV. Plus, the deal was getting juicier for the Habsburgs. None of the current generation of Luxemburgers had managed to make any baby boys. Things got real and detailed provisions were made as to who gets what. Hungary, Sigismund’s crown jewel, was to go to Albrecht IV, the father of our Albrecht. Sigismund even got the Hungarian magnates to approve the succession and made Albrecht IV his viceroy in Hungary. Sadly, Albrecht IV wasn’t exactly a star hire. When Ladislaus of Naples invaded Hungary, he basically stood there holding Sigismund’s coat while things went sideways. (episode 169).

Things went further south when Sigismund’s brother Wenceslaus escaped from his Austrian prison under mysterious circumstances (episode 206). The Habsburg dukes, Leopold, Ernst and Albrecht’s father, duke Albrecht IV, came to Sigismund and said sorry. But only Albrecht meant it. When Sigismund asked his Habsburg allies to help him against some marauding robber barons in Moravia, only Albrecht IV showed up. The cousins stayed well back – with good reason.

The chronicler Thomas Ebendorfer tells us what happened next. While encamped before the robber’s castle, the duke and the king shared a cup of wine, a cup that contained poison. Sigismund survived thanks to the tried and tested method of being strung up by his feet which forced the poison out of his body. This method had once saved Albrecht’s ancestor, the king Albrecht I, even though it cost him an eye, but was not applied to duke Albrecht IV. Albrecht was left to digest the poison, which also came with a dose of dysentery, which finished him off.

That left behind a 7-year-old heir, the hero of our story, little Albrecht V. Given the circumstances one would hope that Sigismund felt some kind of responsibility for the orphaned son of his faithful ally. Whether or not he could afford such sensibilities or not, he came to young Albrecht’s aid, when the dukes Ernst the Iron and Leopold the Fat devastated his duchy of Austria in a feud over his guardianship – again episode 206 for more detail.

In 1408 Sigismund ordered Ernst and Albrecht to stop ruining their cousin’s land and also to let him rule his duchy when he turned 14. And to again quote Piccolomini: “ When he (that is Albrecht)  attained puberty and his subjects asked for him, Leopold put him under stricter guard and resisted his release, which gave rise to a serious conflict. In the end, the senior Lord of Walsee freed him from the hands of his guardian when, under the pretext of a hunt, he took Albrecht with him and brought him to Vienna. Thus the youth took up his rule, relying heavily on the advice of the man who had liberated him.”. As we mentioned in episode 206, this sequence of events made duke Leopold the Fat explode, or more accurately, implode in anger.

From then on, Sigismund and the Austrian dukes from the Leopoldine line, namely Ernst the Iron and Friedrich IV, were at each other’s throats. The wider Habsburg -Luxemburg Alliance had splintered.

Estranged from the rest of his family, still barely 15, Albrecht grew ever more attached to Sigismund. This link was further encouraged by the Austrian estates who had a strong influence over the young duke, not least because they had freed him from the control of his cousins.

In 1411, the year he took charge of his duchy was also the year he got engaged to Sigismund’s daughter, the 2-year old Elisabeth. Given this was Sigismund’s only child at the time, this looks like a major commitment on behalf of the King of Hungary and King of the Romans. Though again, by this time the Habsburgs are in a lower league of princes and engagements with them can be broken, should a more promising opportunity present itself. It was more a “save the date” than a formal invite.

In 1412 Albrecht and Sigismund meet at his grand gathering with the king of Poland at Buda where they both sign an agreement of mutual support against any and all adversaries, which angered the Austrian cousins, in particular Ernst the Iron. Albrecht now Team Sigismund all the way, even against his own family.

Then it seems they did not meet for quite some time. Albrecht V is not recorded as having taken part in the council of Constance, and if he did, he did not do anything of significance. This is odd given Constance is not that far from Vienna, it was the biggest party of the century and the political high point of his friend and mentor. But then it was also the place where Sigismund had humiliated his cousin and with him the family name.

Next thing we hear about him is in 1418 when he initiated a fundamental reform of monastic discipline. He started with the grandest monastery in his lands, the abbey of Melk, still one of the most impressive sights in Austria. These reforms were part of a broader European move to bring back the strict adherence to the rule of St. Benedict. As we have seen before, living by monastic rules is not just hard, it is pretty close to unbearable, which is why discipline kept deteriorating after every reform push. By the early 15^th century things had swung very far the other way and discipline in many monasteries had become exceedingly lax. This was one of the issues that Wycliff, Hus and his successors had highlighted and that animated the Hussite revolt.

Albrecht’s reforms were successful. The so-called melk reforms spread across Austria and Bavaria and monastic life flourished – at least for a while, before it became unbearable again. That was a great feather in the cap of our young and ambitious duke Albrecht.

In 1419, Albrecht gets another step closer to the dangling carrot. Sigismund came to visit him in Vienna they set a date for the wedding, the spring of 1422, when Elisabeth will reach the ripe old age of 12. We are moving from rather loose promise to serious commitment.

This decision cost Sigismund dearly. His wife, Barbara came from the family of the counts of Celje who had wriggled out of Habsburg overlordship and stood in firm opposition to the Austrian dukes, all three of them. Some argue that it was a disagreement about the Habsburg wedding of their only child that led to the serious marital rupture, though the gossip mills claimed infidelities on her part. In any event, the marriage was in dire straits which reduced the probability of the imperial couple producing another child, let alone a male heir. So Albrecht wins twice. Episode 184 if you are looking for more detail on the German Messalina”.

1419 is also the year when men fell out of windows in Prague and the Hussite revolt is getting going. This revolution is followed by a lengthy war which will be where Albrecht becomes not just a protégé but an indispensable ally to Sigismund.

As we have done a whole season on these dramatic events (episodes 164 to 184), we will only touch on the key moments and Albrecht’s role in them.

Albrecht participated in every one of Sigismund’s attempts to regain Bohemia. He came on the first crusade in 1420 (episode 177) .

Spring 1422, the date set for the nuptials with Elisabeth of Luxemburg came and went. What was going on? Given the convoluted situation in Bohemia, Sigismund’s advisers suggested very strongly to break the engagement with Albrecht and seek a marriage alliance with Poland. Poland was Bohemia’s neighbour to the North and East, a large and populous country and one of their princes had become a major force in Bohemian politics. In other words, Poland could offer a peaceful route back to Prague.  

Sigismund decided against the soft Polish option and honoured his commitment to Albrecht V. Though not for free. A loan of 400,000 florins, a truly astronomical sum was granted, enough to muster a huge army to take Bohemia back by force.

This may have been a political decision, but it was also a personal one. There is a personal warmth between them that went beyond the usual relationship between inlaws. Even before the marriage, Sigismund called him his “beloved son of Austria” and for the next decades builds him up as his heir and successor. He might have been the son he never had.

That being said, the two men were very different. Sigismund was often distracted and struggled to stick to his objectives, whilst Albrecht was clear, determined and focused on long term outcomes, Albrecht was a profoundly pious man who cared about the afterlife, whilst Sigismund was a cynic who used the schism as a tool to elevate his position, Sigismund was constantly chasing skirts, whilst Albrecht was a dedicated husband, and Albrecht was an able military commander much revered by his men, whilst Sigismund was a disaster.

And that he proved beyond doubt when he took Albrecht’s money and hired a massive army he led to wreck and ruin at Kutna Hora and Nemecki Brod (episode 181)

After that Sigismund would never again lead a major military action. Which meant he needed able military men who could keep the pressure on the Hussites, if not to defeat them.

One was the elector of Saxony in the North and the other one was his son-in-law, Albrecht, duke of Austria. Albrecht became first governor and in 1424, margrave of Moravia. For the next decade, Albrecht would hold this frontier against Hussite incursions and would stage the occasional attack into Bohemia.

Even though he lost battles more often than he won them, his military record stood head and shoulder above his peers. There were in total five crusades into Bohemia, some involving huge armies. And all of these armies literally ran away when they only heard the banging of the enemy drum, a drum the story goes was made from the skin of the genius Hussite commander Jan Zizka. Albrecht’s forces stood their ground. They learned to fight like the Hussites, with guns and wagenburgs. He trained his men so that he could coordinate between infantry, artillery and cavalry, making him one of the most admired commanders of his age.

Money, dirty money

Albrecht may have been a military prodigy, but genius does not pay the bills. Sigismund was always cash strapped and could never have have paid for the armies that held back the Hussites. All Sigismund could offer was titles and a promise of inheritance.

The money therefore had to come from Albrecht’s duchy of Austria. And just from the duchy of Austria. The silver mines of Schwaz, that fountain of ready cash was out of reach – in the hands of Albrecht’s cousin Friedrich IV who had no love lost for neither Sigismund nor for Albrecht.

So where did the money come from? Well, one chunk of cash came from the darkest chapter of Albrecht’s life – the Vienna Geserah of 1420/21.

On May 23^rd, 1420 Albrecht passed an order that all jews in Austria should be apprehended. Those who would accept baptism were freed, those who did not were to be expelled if they were poor and shoved onto rudderless boats floating down the Danube all the way to Bratislava.

The legal reason for these arrests shifted around a lot. Initially he claimed the Jews had sold weapons to the Hussites. Later he accused them of desecrating the Holy Host. The wealthy jews he had kept in prison were tortured, ostensibly to coerce them to get baptised, but in truth he was after their hidden treasures.

It got even uglier. He threatened to baptize children by force, which drove many to suicide. The rabbi himself killed children to spare them and then burned himself alive. Albrecht locked the remaining children in the synagogue, starving them while offering to sell them.

These atrocities were too much even for the pope, who declared all forced baptisms null and void and ordered Albrecht to stop. Still, at Easter 1421, Albrecht ordered the burning alive of 212 jews and another 21 were killed a few days later. They also burned the churchwarden who allegedly sold the jews the host they allegedly desecrated.

Such pogroms had been quite common in the wake of the Black Death almost a century earlier. But by the 15^th century they had become rarer, simply because there were a lot fewer Jewish communities still operating in the empire. Many had fled to Poland where they were welcomed with open arms.

What makes the Vienna Geserah unusual apart from the date was the allegation of co-operation with the enemy and the quite blatant financial motivation.  

Now, did this brutality make Albrecht rich? Not really. By the 15th century, Jewish communities had already been pushed out of big finance. Italian and German bankers had taken over lending to nobles, merchants, and princes with clever loopholes around the ban on usury. Jews were largely stuck with lending to the poor — a thankless and unprofitable job that made them easy scapegoats. So, whatever Albrecht squeezed out of Vienna’s Jews was a one-time payout and probably vanished quickly into military expenses.

So, where did the rest of the money come from? Well, where money for war comes from today, taxes. Albrecht called the estates of Austria almost every year, asking for more and more cash. And, they paid up. The Hussites were a real threat, regularly raiding Austria, and Albrecht had a reputation as a commander who could actually protect them.

The result? A stronger, more professional administration in Austria. Local troops were trained in Hussite-style tactics, robber barons were crushed, roads became safer, and despite constant war, the duchy flourished. More prosperity meant more taxes, which meant more soldiers, which allowed Albrecht to make himself ever more indispensable to his father-in-law.

The geostrategic logic

All that put Albrecht into pole position to inherit Sigismund’s lands and titles. He had the paperwork (the Erbverbrüderung), the marriage (Sigismund’s only daughter), the bromance (he and Sigismund were tight), and most importantly — the money that Sigismund always needed but never had. So just before Sigismund shuffled off this mortal coil in December 1437, he called on his nobles to recognise Albrecht as his heir.

But what was there to inherit? When Sigismund died in 1437 he had pawned off or lost the margraviate of Brandenburg and the duchy of Luxemburg, and had already given him the margraviate of Moravia. That leaves the three crowns, Hungary, Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire.

Sounds fancy, but here’s the catch — none of those crowns were hereditary. They were all elective.

The crown of the Holy Roman Empire is awarded by the prince electors without any legal or traditional regard for the relationship to the previous incumbent.

As for Hungary, since the extinction of the original Arpad dynasty, the magnates have decided who wears the crown of St. Stephen. Sigismund himself had only gained the crown after years of fighting and by convincing a majority of senior nobles and then his first wife that he was the man for the job.  Episode 169 if you want to go through all that pain again.

Equally in Bohemia it was the diet that had called John of Luxemburg to the throne in 1310 and after the Hussite revolt it had become abundantly clear that the only way to become and to remain king of Bohemia was with the consent of the estates.

Meang that all that happened so far was to put Albrecht onto the shortlist. When Sigismund closed his eyes forever on December 9^th, 1437, it was down to Albrecht to turn his great starting position into a viable claim on the thrones.

And Albrecht wasted no time. A month later he was in Hungary and whoever amongst the magnates was there elected and crowned Elisabeth and him as queen and king of Hungary. As will become clear later, the loyalty of the magnates lay more with his wife Elisabeth than with him, but what counts for now is that he became king.

The imperial election was even easier. Albrecht did not even ask to be elected, and having seen how distracting it had been for Sigismund, his advisers strongly suggested that he rejected the honour. Albrecht shrugged and accepted in March 1438.

Bohemia was trickier. Albrecht had spent decades fighting the Hussites and was a hardcore Catholic, so plenty of Czechs weren’t thrilled to see him as king. They even had another option: Władysław III of Poland, a teenager who marched into Bohemia with an army. But when his forces faced Albrecht’s, no battle was fought — Władysław went home, and Albrecht took control.

That is what happened, but what was the logic behind it? Why did the three kingdoms accept Albrecht as their ruler?

The answer to that is the geostrategic challenge that will cast its long shadow over European politics for the next 250 years – the Ottomans.

Just take a look at the Atlas. And remember that your globe is based on a Mercator projection that makes europe look a lot bigger than it actually is. In terms of surface area it is less than  a quarter of the size of Asia. And by 1438 europe was in terms of population, economy, culture and military capability a lot less than a quarter of Asia.

And one of the great powers of Asia, the Ottomans was coming for Europe. They had already defeated one of the largest European armies of the Late Middle Ages at Nikopol in 1397 (episode 168). The only reason they had not overrun Constantinople right away and then marched on to Budapest, Prague and Vienna was a threat to their southern border.

Timur or Tamerlane as the English called him defeated Sultan Bayezid, the victor of Nikopol at Ankara in 1402. It took the Ottomans thirty years to recover and reconsolidate, but by 1438 they were back pushing up the Balkans. And from now on they would not stop again.

Europe’s defences were weak. Hungary and its allies, namely Serbia and Wallachia were no match for the concentrated might of the Ottomans. The lands that lay right behind Hungary, Austria, Bohemia and Poland, they knew they were next in line. So, over the 250 years that followed, they had to come closer together. There is a geostrategic logic behind what would later become the Austro-Hungarian empire. It wasn’t inevitable at all that it would be led by the Habsburgs, but there was a logic for its existence as a political entity, despite all its cultural differences.

And Albrecht was one of the first who benefitted from this logic. Once he was accepted as king of Hungary, the Bohemians had not much choice. The Ottomans were coming up the Balkans under their new sultan Murat II. He had thrown the Venetians out of the Peloponnese in 1432 and he was mustering his new model army to go after Serbia and Hungary.

Albrecht’s rival for the Bohemian crown, Wladyslaw III, was a 14-year old boy with no military experience, whilst Albrecht was a battle-hardened general. And Albrecht had already gained the Hungarian crown.

So, in June 1438 the Bohemian barons elected and crowned Albrecht of Habsburg, king of Bohemia.

Epilogue

The rest of the story is short and painful. I will leave it again to Eneas Silvio Piccolomin to bring the story to its conclusion: quote:

“After his stay in Bohemia, Albrecht returned to Vienna and afterwards continued to Hungary. When he stayed in Buda, there was a popular uprising against the Germans. The Hungarians took to weapons, went on a rampage through the city, and killed the Germans they found on the spot.1 Then they went on to attack the merchants’ houses. Great anxiety seized all the Germans. The king stayed in the castle, trembling with fear and rebuking the queen for having brought him to this. The Hungarian barons did not feel safe with the people. Thus they went on for several hours, plundering and murdering many Germans.2 But Ban Ladislas,3 a great baron in Hungary and related to the queen by marriage,4 mounted his horse and rode through the city, and with many entreaties he managed to soften the people’s fury, for he was popular with them because of his respect for and merits towards them. Afterwards, the Hungarians declared that it was necessary to fight the Turks who were tearing the whole kingdom apart. Albrecht offered to do it and call on the German and other Christian princes to more easily expel the enemies. However, the Hungarians said there was sufficient strength in Hungary; only order and leadership were lacking. But if the king himself went to war, there would be both order and leadership, and there would be no need to call in foreigners when their own people sufficed. This the Hungarians did because they feared that the Germans would grow too [strong] in their kingdom. The queen sided with them, being only too happy to be shown more honour than her husband. The Hungarians honoured her because she spoke their language and was the heir to the kingdom. They accepted Albrecht as her husband, but they did not like that he was a German and, moreover, did not speak Hungarian. The woman was clever and cunning. She had a man’s mind in a woman’s body,5 and she pushed her husband wherever she wanted to. Thus, she induced her husband to accept the Hungarians’ advice.

An army was gathered, and, moving towards the battlefield, they came to a marshy and foetid area, where there was not enough wine and food. A public announcement was made forbidding all to touch arriving provisions without the queen’s permission. There was no mention of the king. Then, when the enemies approached, the Hungarians fled in all directions, leaving the king with only a few men. He barely escaped, cursing his wife roundly. So great was the disorder that the Hungarians approached the queen even when she was lying in her bed.

Very upset, Albrecht decided to return to Vienna to gather an army and avenge the Hungarians’ betrayal. While travelling, he fell ill from the extraordinary heat and ate too many melons, which caused his death. Thus, he fell as quickly as he had risen.”

King Albrecht II died on October 27^th, 1439 near Esztergom in Hungary.

He had no son at the time, but his wife was pregnant. What happened next and whether the Habsburgs would now rule Bohemia and Hungary for good, well that will be revealed next week. I hope you come along.

And if you find all of this worth supporting, go to historyofthegermans.com/support, where you can find various options to keep this show on the road and advertising free.