Wenceslaus was born in the Imperial city of Nuremberg, the son of Emperor Charles IV by his third wife Anna Svídnická, a scion of the Silesian Piasts, and baptized at St. Sebaldus Church.

When on 10 June 1376 Charles IV asserted Wenceslaus' election as King of the Romans[2] by the prince-electors, two of seven votes, those of Brandenburg and Bohemia, were held by the emperor and his son themselves.

Most of them quietly acquiesced when King Wenceslaus proclaimed an ambivalent arrangement at Cheb (Eger) in 1389 that prohibited all leagues between cities while confirming their political autonomy.

During his long reign, Wenceslaus held a tenuous grip on power at best, as he came into repeated conflicts with the Bohemian nobility led by the House of Rosenberg.

Although Wenceslaus upon his father's death retained Bohemia, his younger half brother Sigismund inherited Brandenburg, while John received the newly established Duchy of Görlitz in Upper Lusatia.

In a conflict surrounding the investiture of the abbot of Kladruby, the torture and murder of the archbishop's vicar-general John of Nepomuk by royal officials in 1393 sparked a noble rebellion.

As Bohemian king he sought to protect the religious reformer Jan Hus and his followers against the demands of the Catholic Church for their suppression as heretics.

He then met Charles VI of France at Reims, where the two monarchs decided to persuade the rival popes, now Benedict XIII and Boniface IX, to resign, and to end the papal schisms by the election of a new pontiff.

Many of the princes were angry at this abandonment of Boniface by Wenceslaus, who had also aroused much indignation by his long absence from Germany and by selling the title of duke of Milan to Gian Galeazzo Visconti.

[2] Hus was eventually executed in Konstanz in 1415, and the rest of Wenceslaus' reign in Bohemia featured precursors of the Hussite Wars that would follow his death.

The four Rhenish electors, Count Palatine Rupert III and the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier, accused him of failing to maintain the public peace or to resolve the Schism.

He crossed the Danube and was escorted by John II of Liechtenstein via Mikulov back to Bohemia, meeting his supporters in Kutná Hora before moving on Prague, which he entered on Christmas.

Following her death on 31 December 1386 (according to an unproven legend "mangled by one of Wenceslaus' beloved deer-hounds"), he married her first cousin once removed, Sofia of Bavaria, on 2 May 1389.

Moreover, he probably suffered from alcoholism, which was brought to light in 1398 when he was unable to accept an invitation by King Charles VI of France for a reception at Reims due to his drunkenness.

[7] Wenceslaus died in 1419 of a heart attack during a hunt in the woods surrounding his castle Nový Hrad at Kunratice (today a part of Prague), leaving the country in a deep political crisis.