Even though the king spent most of the last decades of his reign abroad — especially after his election as emperor and his entanglement in the problems of the general council — he implemented a number of administrative reforms in Hungary. Between 1405 and 1435 Sigismund and his council issued a series of major laws, enhancing the status of cities (a reliable source of income for the treasury), regulating the administration of justice and revamping the defence of the realm. Although the central authority remained the informal royal council of barons and prelates, Sigismund co-opted lawyers, financial and military experts (the ‘captains’ of the defence system), lesser nobles and even burghers into it as ‘special counsellors’. In addition, the central royal courts of justice became more professionalised. First the court of the master of the treasury (magister tavarnicorum), with jurisdiction over the seven most important cities, was augmented by burgher assessors. Then the benches of the ‘personal royal presence’ and of the ‘special royal presence’, two courts passing judgement in the king’s name, mainly against violent nobles and usurpers of estates, were filled with men trained in law, although their chief justices remained barons. The predominance of customary law, even though the king issued a series of statutes (decreta), can be seen from the fact that university-trained jurists served only in the court of the chancellery; the real administrators of justice in most other courts were practically trained lawyers, well versed in the customs of the realm. Sigismund’s decrees also enhanced the jurisdiction of county magistrates, elected representatives of the lesser landowners: they were granted the right to call judicial assemblies on their own and to proscribe criminals. Through these meetings, called ‘proclaimed assemblies’, the counties were able to keep the peace in the absence of the ruler or even — as during the interregnum and civil war of the mid-century — in a kingless country. Furthermore, the county was empowered to secure the free movement of tenant peasants and to curb their violent abduction by greater landowners to the detriment of the lesser nobility in times of labour shortage. The military ordinances also increased the rights of county magistrates, entrusting them with the conscription of the local militia, the selection of a commander for the county’s levy, and meting out punishment to those reluctant to serve.
Sigismund was, however, less successful in meeting the crown’s evergrowing financial needs. Shortage of income was, of course, a new feature of the age, common to all rulers of Europe, but this predicament was more unusual for Hungary, where the Angevins had been dispensers of fabulous amounts of gold and silver from the northern Hungarian and Transylvanian mines. However, the output of these seems to have decreased, and the continuously adverse balance of Hungary’s foreign trade depleted the country’s reserves. The king had to mortgage many of the remaining royal estates, in one of his financial straits giving as security to the kings of Poland sixteen rich (mainly German) towns of the region which is today northern Slovakia. (They would not be returned to Hungary until the First Partition of Poland in 1772.) In contrast to his immediate predecessors, he turned again to the thirteenth-century practice of debasing the coinage (though not the Hungarian gold florin which never lost its value). By 1411 the silver penny was worth one third of its face value and the ‘quarting’ (farthing) issued in the 1430s triggered an uncontrollable fall in the value of money of change.
This ‘inflation’ was the main cause of a widespread uprising in Transylvania and eastern Hungary, the first major recorded rural revolt in the country. When in 1437 the bishop of Transylvania demanded the tithe in good money (after not having collected it in bad coin for many years), Magyar and Vlach (Romanian) peasants and lesser nobles, supported by a few towns, rose in arms in response, and the privileged groups of the region, Magyar nobles, free Szekely warriors and Saxon (German) townsmen, established a ‘union of three nations’ (the Kapolna Union of 1437, confirmed as the Torda Union of 1438), excluding Hungarian and Romanian peasants and freemen. The peasants, who agreed to abide by the king’s arbitration, were easily defeated by the lords, but the Union became the constitutional basis of Transylvania for centuries to come.
That Sigismund’s reign was later remembered in Hungary in negative terms was probably due to the nobility preferring valiant forays and heroic campaigns to diplomacy and efficient defence. There was also an element of xenophobia that reviewed the king as a ‘Czech pig’, as he was apostrophised during an attack on his foreign entourage in 1401. In fact, he brought Hungary into European politics, gave her leading men a chance to participate in the great issues of the age (Kanizsai, for example, became Roman chancellor, and many lords attended the Council of Constance or received military experience in Italy), and tried to emulate his father, the Emperor Charles IV, by making his residences into cosmopolitan capitals. Sigismund’s buildings in Pozsony (Bratislava) and Buda (the ‘Fresh Palace’), the art commissioned by him and the visits to his court of important early humanists (such as Pier Paolo Vergerio) are just now beginning to be properly appreciated by historians. It is true that many of the reforms in urbanisation and in the more efficient administration of justice remained incomplete, mainly because of the treasury’s poverty and the barons’ resistance to innovation, but some of them, especially the system of southern defence, survived their sponsor for decades.