Episode 172 – A World Event
In November 1414 30,000 academics and aristocrats, bishops, blacksmiths and bakers, cardinals, counts and chefs, doctors, dancers and diplomats, princes, prelates and public girls descended on a town in Southern Germany built to house 6 to 8,000 people. They planned to stay a few weeks, 2-3 months max. But 3 and a half years later most of them were still there.
What did they get up to? The great tentpole events, the trial of John XXIII, the burning of Jan Hus and the election of Martin V is what the council of Constance is remembered for, but what about all that time in between?
When I began working on this episode, I had planned to move straight to the showstoppers. I think I said something to that effect at the end of the last episode. But when I dug deeper, I realised that this world event was so much more than a papal election and the trial of a dissenter. For 3 years Constance was at the same time a never-ending G20 summit, the greatest academic conference of the Middle Ages, a permanent imperial diet and the centre of the catholic church. Everybody who was anybody was there either in the flesh or had at least sent a delegation.
Issues and concerns were brought before the council that still plague people today. Is it ever right to kill a tyrant, and if so, when can it be justified? What rights should be guaranteed for indigenous groups, in this case Pagans, and how should their dignity be protected? Other attendees sought justice for crimes committed against them in a world where political murder had become commonplace. Others still demanded their reward for years of service or simply wanted their rights recognised.
Living cheek by jowl in tiny Constance the leading minds from across Europe, from the ancient universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna as well as from the newly founded seats of learning in Krakow, Prague, Heidelberg and Vienna shared their ideas, opinions, books and discoveries, paving the way for the intellectual shift we call the Renaissance.
Enough, me thinks to provide 30 minutes of great historical entertainment….
Episode 169 – Sigismund, not yet Emperor
The late 14th and early 15th century was a period of upheaval, the certainties of the Middle Ages, that the pope ruled the world and that knights were invincible were crumbling away, the long period of economic growth, of eastward expansion and conversion of the pagans made way for war, plague and famine. The church was split in half and the Ottomans were coming.
This was an age that called forth larger-than-life characters: Joan of Arc, fierce and holy; Henry Bolingbroke, seizing a throne; Jadwiga and Jogaila, uniting kingdoms; the audacious Gian Galeazzo Visconti and fiery Cola di Rienzo; the ever-scheming John the Fearless and Jacob van Artevelde; the tragic Ines de Castro and the unflinching Jan Žižka.
Into this glittering and turbulent lineup steps a man whose reputation has not exactly been polished by time. Despised in his kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia and even Constance, the city that owes him so much, decided to remember him as a fat naked crowned guy with skinny arms and legs, worn-out face, forked beard and disproportionate genitalia balancing on the hand of a nine-meter-tall sex worker. No, I am not making this up.
Sigismund, because that was his name, was a true enigma of the late Middle Ages. He had inherited his father’s charm and ruthless cunning, his knack for negotiating compromise in impossible situations, and his unshakeable belief in his role as the head of Christendom. But what he hadn’t inherited was his father’s performative piety, his zeal for relics, his asceticism—or his wealth. Instead, Sigismund was left with a volatile mix of ambition, enormous self-confidence, a lust for life, and, crucially, a chronic shortage of funds.
Yet despite his flaws, he took on Christendom’s two greatest crises—the schism and the Ottoman threat—and in doing so, managed to create a third…This is his backstory.