Sigismund’s Imperial Rule Reconsidered

The last time Emperor Sigismunds reign in the Holy Roman Empire (1410/111437) was intensively researched was in the 1980s. The most important result was the monograph by Sabine Wefers, in which Sigismunds domestic policy in the Empire was presented as rather weak and reactive. Since the 1990s, research has focused much more on Sigismunds foreign policy and diplomacy, or his policy towards the Church and its ecumenical councils. Only in recent years has Sigismunds imperial policy become the subject of the international project Emperor Sigismund and Bavaria, funded by the FWF and the DFG. It examined the rulers relations with the secular and ecclesiastical powers in Bavaria in order to test the reliability of the prevailing image of Sigismunds imperial government. It was found that Sigismunds imperial government, at least in Bavaria, was much more intensive and effective than was previously thought, partly due to his dense personal network, partly due to the kings consistent exploitation of the manoeuvring space that the numerous local conflicts opened up for him. In the follow-up project Sigismunds Imperial Rule Reconsidered, the conclusions formulated on the basis of the Bavarian example are to be examined in a broader geographical context. The most important methods are prosopography, communication history, constitutional, legal and political history influenced by social and cultural history, but not least the analysis of imperial charters and their language. The latter analysis is carried out primarily by means of the volumes of abstracts edition published in the Regesta Imperii series that process documents from the Bavarian State Archives (Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv). In order to make the new analysis of Sigismunds imperial government as broad as possible, the project will organize a larger conference in which the project staff will compare individual aspects of Sigismunds relations with Bavaria with selected imperial regions, while invited guests will examine other regions on the one hand and general issues on the other. It is anticipated that the conference and its results will shed new light on Sigismunds rule and on several aspects of the structural development of the Empire in the first half of the 15th century in all its complexity. In the research to date this kind of complex view of the constitutional and political development of the Empire is exceptional.