Sigismund of Luxembourg, finally crowned as Holy Roman Emperor in 1433, has proposed badly needed reforms from 1434-37 but has been unable to persuade the German princes to adopt them.

Before his death at sixty-nine, on December 9, 1437, the childless monarch, his treasury depleted, arranges for the succession of his titles to his forty-year-old son-in-law, Albert Habsburg, thus passing to this powerful family, for the first time, the crown of the Holy Roman Empire.