Rudolf III of Saxe-Wittenberg
Elector of Saxony-Wittenberg
Rudolf III (c. 1378 – 11 June 1419), a member of the House of Ascania, was Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg and Elector of Saxony from 1388 until his death.
Life
He was probably born at the Saxon Wittenberg residence, the eldest son of Duke Wenceslaus I of Saxe-Wittenberg and his wife Cecilia, daughter of Francesco I da Carrara, Lord of Padua.
Rudolf III took up government after his father's sudden death on 15 May 1388. Rudolf was involved in a long-running dispute with the Archbishopric of Magdeburg. He donated numerous gifts to the Wittenberg All Saints' Church.
Like his father, Rudolf was a loyal supporter of the Imperial House of Luxembourg. In 1419, Emperor Sigismund sent him to Bohemia, in order to quash the Hussite uprising that had begun with the Defenestration of Prague. He died on his way there, probably after being poisoned.
Rudolf was buried in the Franciscan monastery in Wittenberg. His coffin was moved to the crypt of the Wittenberg All Saints' Church in the 19th century, and to the family grave during the Second World War.
“Rudolf III of Saxe-Wittenberg” enters the record as elector of Saxony-Wittenberg. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rudolf, Saxe-Wittenberg and Elector can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rudolf III of Saxe-Wittenberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.