The idea was that as the sun and the seven planets illumined our heavens, so that great luminary, the German Emperor, should be the center of a political system composed of seven Electors.
These earthly luminaries, whose duty it was to elect a new Emperor, were the Archbishops of Mainz, Cologne, and Trèves, and the temporal princes of Bohemia, Brandenburg, Saxony, and the Palatine of the Rhine.
The very first act of these seven wise men was to place upon the throne Wenceslas, a brutal madman, who might better have been confined as a maniac.
It was during the reign of his brother and successor Sigismund that the burning of John Huss lighted the conflagration in Bohemia known as the Hussite War.
John Huss, a professor of the University of Prague, had dared to raise his voice against the temporal enrichment of a church whose Founder had not where to lay his head, and who had put behind him the kingdoms of this earth, when offered to him by Satan!
Huss, for this offense, came under the displeasure of the bishops. Charges were brought against him that he had maintained the existence of four Gods, and he was condemned and burnt (1415).
The Hussite war had none of the reforming purpose which led to the martyrdom they wished to avenge. It was a mad strife, beginning over some detail of the Communion Service, and ending in a war between Bohemian and German, in which for nearly twenty years the country ran with blood.
At this period an event occurred of trifling significance then, but of profound importance to future Germany.
In 1411 the Emperor borrowed one hundred thousand florins of Frederick of Hohenzollern, the Burgrave, or "Count of the Castle," of Nuremburg, direct descendant from that first Hohenzollern who helped to found the Hapsburg dynasty. For this loan Sigismund gave his creditor a mortgage on the territory of Brandenburg. Frederick at once took up his residence there, and subsequently made an offer of three hundred thousand gold florins more to purchase the territory. The Emperor accepted the terms, so the then small state was thereafter the home of the Hohenzollerns, and was on its way to become Prussia.
Sigismund and his brother Wenceslas belonged to another dynasty, that of Luxemburg. But after the death of the former, in 1440, the Hapsburgs succeeded again to the crown, which they wore until it was taken off at the bidding of Napoleon in 1806.