The succession after the death of the Angevin King Louis I was anything but smooth. Having survived the disastrous defeat of the crusade at Nicopolis (1396) and loosened the fetters placed on him by his electors, the great lords, King Sigismund of Luxemburg maintained an, at times, tenuous hold on Hungary for decades. One baronial revolt followed another. In 1401 the king’s former allies, led by Archbishop Kanizsai, turned against him. Taking the king captive, an aristocratic council governed the country in the name of the ‘Holy Crown of Hungary’. This constitutional construct, though ephemeral at the time, was to have a long life. Juxtaposing the medieval metaphor of the crown, meaning the fullness of monarchic power, with the community of the realm (calling it in the Latin form corona regni in contrast to the older corona regis) came to express the noble commonwealth’s claim to sovereignty. In 1403 the same lords and a great number of lesser nobles supported Ladislas of Naples, son of the hapless Charles of Durazo (for a few weeks king of Hungary in 1385/6), in his short-lived bid for the Hungarian crown. However, Sigismund’s followers quickly crushed the uprising and the king’s position was not challenged further. While most of the rebels were pardoned, they never regained their commanding position. Since Boniface IX, the Roman pope, had backed the pretender, Ladislas, Sigismund took the opportunity to strengthen the crown’s control over the Hungarian Church: in 1404, he issued a decree, the so-calledplacetum regium, by which he prohibited appeals to the Roman curia and barred the way of papal appointees (the bullati) to Hungarian sees and prebends.
Sigismund’s establishment of the Order of the Dragon in 1408 marked the consolidation of his hold on the government of the kingdom. For the next thirty years Hungary was ruled by a new aristocracy, allied and devoted to a king who was usually absent. The twelve Hungarian Knights of the Dragon (the king and his queen and foreign potentates) between them held approximately half of the country’s castles, most of which they had received from Sigismund. Only three of these families held any position in the Angevin era, and only one of them came from a major landholding clan. Their collective holdings were nearly equal to what remained in the hands of the king, who had lost the greater part of the royal domain during his fight for the throne. While fourteenth-century kings had been able to count on the income and military force of about 150 royal castles and their appurtenances, Sigismund began to stabilise his position with fewer than fifty. Thus, crown and aristocracy held a balance of power in the kingdom.