The counts of Luxembourg who won the imperial crown and the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary — Henry VII, Charles IV, and Sigismund.
The Luxembourgs were counts of a small but strategically placed territory between France and the Empire. Their fortunes were transformed in 1308 when Henry VII was elected King of the Romans; crowned emperor at Rome in 1312, he revived imperial ambitions in Italy before dying there in 1313. Through a marriage alliance he secured the crown of Bohemia for his son John.
From Bohemia, one of the wealthiest kingdoms of the Empire, the Luxembourgs built a power base that let them contend for the imperial throne across the fourteenth century against the Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs.
John of Bohemia, "the Blind," was the model of a wandering chivalric king, campaigning from Lithuania to Italy; blind in his last years, he insisted on being led into the fight at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and was killed there. His son Charles IV became the dominant statesman of the age: emperor and King of Bohemia, he made Prague a capital with a university and a great cathedral, and in 1356 issued the Golden Bull that fixed the procedure for imperial elections for centuries.
Under Charles IV the dynasty reached its height, holding the Empire, Bohemia, and Brandenburg and shaping the constitution of the Holy Roman Empire itself.
Charles’s son Sigismund inherited Hungary through marriage and later Bohemia and the Empire. His long reign was dominated by two crises: the Great Western Schism, which he ended by convening the Council of Constance (1414–1418) — the same council that condemned and burned the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus — and the Hussite Wars that erupted in Bohemia in response.
Sigismund died in 1437 as the last male Luxembourg. Through his daughter Elizabeth, married to Albert of Habsburg, the crowns of Hungary and Bohemia and the imperial claim passed to the House of Habsburg, opening their long ascendancy.