The Story of Nuremberg

All rights reserved
First Edition, April 1899
Second Edition, September 1900
Third Edition, November 1901

The Story of Nuremberg
by Cecil Headlam with Illus-
trations by Miss H. M. James
and with Woodcuts

London: J. M. Dent & Co.
Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedford Street
Covent Garden W.C.

1901

“Quaint old town of toil and traffic,
Quaint old town of art and song.”—Longfellow.

“Wenn einer Deutschland kennen
Und Deutschland lieben soll,
Wird man ihm Nürnberg nennen,
Der edlen Künste voll.
Dich, nimmer noch veraltet
Du treue, fleiss’ge Stadt,
Wo Dürer’s Kraft gewaltet,
Und Sachs gesungen hat.”
—Max von Schenkendorf.

“Nihil magnificentius, nihil ornatius tota Europa reperias.”
—Æneas Silvius.

To
Maurice Hewlett
in friendship
and
in admiration

PREFACE

I AM painfully aware of the defects of this little book, and still more painfully unaware of its errors. The best excuse for the mistakes that have surely crept in is the vast scope and variety of my subject—the story of the old mediæval town which was for long the centre of German industry and thought. But, for a guide-book, accuracy is above all things desirable, and I shall therefore be deeply grateful to the courtesy of any of my readers, who, having discovered any error or omission, will kindly point it out to me.

The sources from which I have drawn are far too numerous to acknowledge in detail. But in the matter of topography and architecture a more express note of indebtedness is due to the devoted labours of R. von Rettberg, A. von Essenwein, and Ernst Mummenhoff. Above all, I must pay my tribute of gratitude and acknowledgment to the enthusiastic erudition of Dr Emil Reicke,[1] whose mighty volume, Geschichte der Reichsstadt Nürnberg, is a mine of information from which I have freely quarried. Lastly, to those old chroniclers at whom I have sometimes laughed, but whose quaint phrases and legends may have saved these pages from too serious a dulness, I now hasten to make amends and to assure them that I am very conscious of my own inferiority as a storyteller.

The object of this book will have been in great part achieved if it succeeds in reviving the memories and quickening the affections of old lovers of Nuremberg; if it awakens a desire in those who have not yet known and loved her, to visit the old “White City,” and join the band of her worshippers.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

All the illustrations with the exception of the frontispiece, “St. Anthony” and “Albert Durer as a boy” have been drawn by Miss James, or cut in wood from the beautiful photographs by Captain Gladstone, R.N., to whose generosity the publishers are indebted for permission to reproduce the pictures in this volume.

The Story of Nuremberg

CHAPTER I
Origin and Growth

“In the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands
Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg the ancient stands.”—Longfellow.

YEAR by year, many a traveller on his way to Bayreuth, many a seeker after health at German baths, many an artist and lover of the old world, finds his way to Nuremberg. It is impossible to suppose that such any one is ever disappointed. For in spite of all changes, and in spite of the disfigurements of modern industry, Nuremberg is and will remain a mediæval city, a city of history and legend, a city of the soul. She is like Venice in this, as in not a little of her history, that she exercises an indefinable fascination over our hearts no less than over our intellects. The subtle flavour of mediæval towns may be likened to that of those rare old ports which are said to taste of the grave; a flavour indefinable, exquisite. Rothenburg has it: and it is with Rothenburg, that little gem of mediævalism, that Nuremberg is likely to be compared in the mind of the modern wanderer in Franconia. But though Rothenburg may surpass her greater neighbour in the perfect harmony and in the picturesqueness of her red-tiled houses and well-preserved fortifications, in interest at any rate she must yield to the heroine of this story. For, apart from the beauty which Nuremberg owes to the wonderful grouping of her red roofs and ancient castle, her coronet of antique towers, her Gothic churches and Renaissance buildings or brown riverside houses dipping into the mud-coloured Pegnitz, she rejoices in treasures of art and architecture and in the possession of a splendid history such as Rothenburg cannot boast. To those who know something of her story Nuremberg brings the subtle charm of association. Whilst appealing to our memories by the grandeur of her historic past, and to our imaginations by the work and tradition of her mighty dead, she appeals also to our senses with the rare magic of her personal beauty, if one may so call it. In that triple appeal lies the fascination of Nuremberg. For this reason one may hope to add to the enjoyment of those who may spend or have spent a few days in the “quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint old town of art and song,” by recounting the tale of her treasures, and by telling, however imperfectly, something of the story of her rise and fall, and of the artists whom she cradled. Many shall go to and fro and their knowledge shall be increased. Is not that the justification of a guide-book?

The facts as to the origin of Nuremberg are lost in the dim shadows of tradition. When the little town sprang up amid the forests and swamps which still marked the course of the Pegnitz, we know as little as we know the origin of the name Nürnberg. It is true that the Chronicles of later days are only too ready to furnish us with information; but the information is not always reliable. The Chronicles, like our own peerage, are apt to contain too vivid efforts of imaginative fiction. The Chroniclers, unharassed by facts or documents, with minds “not by geography prejudiced, or warped by history,” cannot unfortunately always be believed. It is, for instance, quite possible that Attila, King of the Huns, passed and plundered Nuremberg, as they tell us. But there is no proof, no record of that visitation. Again, the inevitable legend of a visit from Charlemagne occurs. He, you may be sure, was lost in the woods whilst hunting near Nuremberg, and passed all night alone, unhurt by the wild beasts. As a token of gratitude for God’s manifest favour he caused a chapel to be built on the spot. The chapel stands to this day—a twelfth-century building—but no matter! for did not Otho I., as our Chroniclers tell us, attend mass in St. Sebald’s Church in 970, though St. Sebald’s Church cannot have been built till a century later?

The origin of the very name of Nuremberg is hidden in clouds of obscurity. In the earliest documents we find it spelt with the usual variations of early manuscripts—Nourenberg, Nuorimperc, Niurenberg, Nuremberc, etc. The origin of the place, we repeat, is equally obscure. Many attempts have been made to find history in the light of the derivations of the name. But when philology turns historian it is apt to play strange tricks. Nur ein Berg (only a castle), or Nero’s Castle, or Norix Tower—what matter which is the right derivation, so long as we can base a possible theory on it? The Norixberg theory will serve to illustrate the incredible quantity of misplaced ingenuity which both of old times and in the present has been wasted in trying to explain the inexplicable. The Heidenthurm—the Heathen Tower of the Castle—is so called from some carvings on the exterior which were once regarded as idols. Wolckan maintains that it was an ancient temple of Diana. For those carvings, he says, represent the figures of dogs and of two male figures with clubs, who must be Hercules and his son Noricus. Hence Norixberg. After which it seems prosaic to have to assert that the “figures of dogs” are really lions, and the male figures are Saints or Kings of Israel, and certainly not heathen images. There is in point of fact no trace of Roman colonisation here.

Other ingenious historians, not content with imaginary details of heathen temples and sanctuaries, hint darkly of an ancient God—Nuoro by name—who, they say, was worshipped here and gave his name to the locality, but “of whom nothing else is known.” Some chroniclers drag in the name of Drusus Nero (Neronesberg) and refine upon the point, debating whether we ought not rather to attribute this camp to Tiberius Claudius Nero; and others, again, suggest that Noriker, driven out by the Huns, settled in this favourable retreat in the heart of Germany, and laid the foundations of Nuremberg’s greatness. All we can say is that these things were or were not: but they have no history. After all, why should they have any? But those who prefer precision to truth shall not go empty away.

“The Imperial fortress of Nuremberg began to be built fourteen years before the birth of Christ, the 9th of April, on a Tuesday, at 8 o’clock in the morning; but the town only twenty-six years after Christ, on the 3rd of April, on a Tuesday, at 8.57 A.M.”

Thus spake the Astrologer Andreas Goldmeyer, in his “Earthly Jerusalem.” And yet, as Sir Philip Sidney sings, some “dusty wits can scorn Astrology!”

Be that as it may, the history of our town begins in the year 1050. It is most probable that the silence regarding the place—it is not mentioned among the places visited by Conrad II. in this neighbourhood—points to the fact that the castle did not exist in 1025, but was built between that year and 1050. That it existed then we know, for Henry III. dated a document from here in 1050, summoning a council of Bavarian nobles “in fundo suo Nourinberc.” Of the growth of the place we shall speak more in detail in the chapter on the Castle and the Walls. Here it will suffice to note that the oldest portion, called in the fifteenth century Altnürnberg, consisted of the Fünfeckiger Thurm—the Five-cornered tower—the rooms attached and the Otmarkapelle. The latter was burnt

down in 1420, rebuilt in 1428, and called the Walpurgiskapelle. These constituted the Burggräfliche Burg—the Burggraf’s Castle. The rest of the castle was built on by Friedrich der Rotbart (Barbarossa), and called the Kaiserliche Burg. The old Five-cornered tower and the surrounding ground was the private property of the Burggraf, and he was appointed by the Emperor as imperial officer of the Kaiserliche Burg. Whether the Emperors claimed any rights of personal property over Nuremberg or merely treated it, at first, as imperial property, it is difficult to determine. The castle at any rate was probably built to secure whatever rights were claimed, and to serve generally as an imperial stronghold. An imperial representative, as we have seen, took up his residence there.[2] Gradually round the castle grew up the straggling streets of Nuremberg. Settlers built beneath the shadow of the Burg. The very names of the streets suggest the vicinity of a camp or fortress. Söldnerstrasse, Schmiedstrasse, and so forth, betray the military origin of the present busy commercial town. From one cause or another a mixture of races, of Germanic and non-Germanic, of Slavonic and Frankish elements, seems to have occurred amongst the inhabitants of the growing village, producing a special blend which in dialect, in customs, and in dress was soon noticed by the neighbours as unique, and stamping the art and development of Nuremberg with that peculiar character which has never left it.

Various causes combined to promote the growth of the place. The temporary removal of the Mart from Fürth to Nuremberg under Henry III. doubtless gave a great impetus to the development of the latter town. Henry IV., indeed, gave back the rights of Mart, customs and coinage to Fürth. But it seems probable that these rights were not taken away again from Nuremberg. The possession of a Mart was, of course, of great importance to a town in those days, promoting industries and arts and settled occupations. The Nurembergers were ready to suck out the fullest advantage from their privilege. That mixture of races, to which we have referred, resulted in remarkable business energy—energy which soon found scope in the conduct of the business which the natural position of Nuremberg on the South and North, the East and Western trade routes, brought to her. It was not very long before she became the centre of the vast trade between the Levant and Western Europe, and the chief emporium for the produce of Italy—the Handelsmetropole in fact of South Germany.

Nothing in the middle ages was more conducive to the prosperity of a town than the reputation of having a holy man within its borders, or the possession of the miracle-working relics of a saint. Just as St. Elizabeth made Marburg so St. Sebaldus proved a very potent attraction to Nuremberg. We shall give some account of this saint when we visit the church that was dedicated to him. Here we need only remark that as early as 1070 and 1080 we hear of pilgrimages to Nuremberg in honour of her patron saint.

Another factor in the growth of the place was the frequent visits which the Emperors began to pay to it. Lying as it did on their way from Bamberg and Forcheim to Regensburg the Kaisers readily availed themselves of the security offered by this impregnable fortress, and of the sport provided in the adjacent forest. For there was good hunting to be had in the forest which, seventy-two miles in extent, surrounded Nuremberg. And hunting, next to war, was then in most parts of Europe the most serious occupation of life. All the forest rights, we may mention, of woodcutting, hunting, charcoal burning and bee-farming belonged originally to the Empire. But these were gradually acquired by the Nuremberg Council (Rat), chiefly by purchase in the fifteenth century.

In the castle the visitor may notice a list of all the Emperors—some thirty odd, all told—who have stayed there—a list that should now include the reigning Emperor. We find that Henry IV. frequently honoured Nuremberg with his presence. This is that

Henry IV. whose scene at Canossa with the Pope—Kaiser of the Holy Roman Empire waiting three days in the snow to kiss the foot of excommunicative Gregory—has impressed itself on all memories. His last visit to Nuremberg was a sad one. His son rebelled against him, and the old king stopped at Nuremberg to collect his forces. In the war between father and son Nuremberg was loyal, and took the part of Henry IV. It was no nominal part, for in 1105 she had to stand a siege from the young Henry. For two months the town was held by the burghers and the castle by the Præfect Conrad. At the end of that time orders came from the old Kaiser that the town was to surrender. He had given up the struggle, and his undutiful son succeeded as Henry V. to the Holy Roman Empire, and Nuremberg with it. The mention of this siege gives us an indication of the growth of the town. The fact of the siege and the words of the chronicler, “The townsmen (oppidani) gave up the town under treaty,” seem to point to the conclusion that Nuremberg was now no longer a mere fort (castrum), but that walls had sprung up round the busy mart and the shrine of St. Sebald, and that by this time Nuremberg had risen to the dignity of a “Stadt” or city state. Presently, indeed, we find her rejoicing in the title of “Civitas.” The place, it is clear, was already of considerable military importance or it would not have been worth while to invest it. The growing volume of trade is further illustrated by a charter of Henry V. (1112) giving to the citizens of Worms Zollfreiheit in various places subject to him, amongst which Frankfort, Goslar and Nuremberg are named as royal towns (oppida regis).

We may note at this point, however, that the Chroniclers declare that the town fell into the hands of the enemy, through the treachery of the Jewish inhabitants and was plundered and burnt. By this destruction they account for the absence of all earlier records, and are left at liberty to evolve their theories as to the history of previous days. They add that when the town was rebuilt (1120) the Jews chose all the best sites for their houses, and retained them till they were driven out. The first statement was an easy invention. The second, very probably true in effect, points to the reason—commercial jealousy—but does not afford an excuse for the shortsighted and unchristian persecution of the Jews which disfigures the record of the acts of Nuremberg.

With the death of Henry V., which occurred in 1125, the Frankish or Salic Imperial line ended. For the Empire, though elective, had always a tendency to become hereditary and go in lines. If the last Kaiser left a son not unfit, who so likely as the son to be elected? But now a member of another family had to be chosen. The German princes elected Count Lothar von Supplinburg, Duke of Saxony. This departure was not without influence on the fortunes of Nuremberg. The question arose whether Nuremberg had belonged to the late Imperial house as private or imperial property. Did it now belong to the heirs of that house or to the newly-elected Emperor?

In fact, part of the possessions, which had passed from the Salian Franks to the heirs, Conrad and Frederick, Dukes of Swabia, of the house of Hohenstaufen, was now demanded back by Lothar as being imperial property. Nuremberg was numbered among these possessions and became the head-quarters of the war which followed between the Kaiser and the two brothers. In 1127 the town had to stand another siege—this time of ten weeks’ duration—whilst the Hohenstaufen brothers held it against Lothar. The siege was raised; but three years later the brothers had to give in. The Burg and town of Nuremberg were then given by the Emperor to Henry the Proud of Bavaria, a member of the great Wittelsbach family. He kept them till 1138, when Conrad having been elected King of the Germans, they went back in the natural course of things to the Hohenstaufen, who came once more to look upon the flourishing town as their own private property.

It was to the above-mentioned Kaiser Conrad that the chronicles attribute the foundation of the monastery of St. Ægidius, on the site of the chapel, St. Martin’s, which Charlemagne was reputed to have built. To Conrad also, with less show of likelihood, they ascribe the widening of the city. Widened the city has been more than once, as we can tell by the remains of walls and towers.[3] But the earliest fragment of these now extant—the lower part of the White Tower—dates only from the thirteenth century.

It seems to have been the policy of the Hohenstaufen Kaisers to favour Nuremberg. They often held their court here. The greatest of them—the greatest and wisest of the Kaisers since Charlemagne—Frederick I. Barbarossa, to wit, lived in the castle in 1166. It was he, in all probability, who built the Kaiserliche Burg, and erected, over the Margaretenkapelle, the Kaiserkapelle, a grander and more splendid chapel of marble, which was certainly completed in the twelfth century. Of the remarkable Double Chapel thus constructed we shall have more to say later on. Meanwhile we must content ourselves with calling attention to the very similar Double Chapel at Eger in Bohemia.

It was through Barbarossa that Nuremberg became connected with another of the great ruling families of the world.

“It was in those same years,” says Carlyle,[4] “that a stout young fellow, Conrad by name, far off in the Southern part of Germany set out from the old Castle of Hohenzollern (the southern summit of that same huge old Hercynian wood, which is still called the Schwarzwald or Black Forest though now comparatively bare of trees) where he was but a junior and had small outlooks, upon a very great errand in the world.... His purpose was to find Barbarossa and seek fortune under him. To this Frederick Redbeard—a magnificent, magnanimous man, holding the reins of the world, not quite in the imaginary sense; scourging anarchy down and urging noble effort up, really on a grand scale—Conrad addressed himself; and he did it with success; which may be taken as a kind of testimonial to the worth of the young man. Details we have absolutely none; but there is no doubt that Conrad recommended himself to Kaiser Redbeard, nor any that the Kaiser was a judge of men.... One thing further is known, significant for his successes: Conrad found favour with ‘the Heiress of the Vohburg Family,’ desirable young heiress, and got her to wife. The Vohburg family, now much forgotten everywhere, and never heard of in England before, had long been of supreme importance, of immense possessions, and opulent in territories, and, we need not add, in honours and offices, in those Franconian Nürnberg regions; and was now gone to this one girl. I know not that she had much inheritance after all: the vast Vohburg properties lapsing all to the Kaiser, when the male heirs were out. But she had pretensions, tacit claims: in particular the Vohburgs had long been habitual or in effect hereditary Burggrafs of Nürnberg; and if Conrad had the talent for that office, he now in preference to others might have a chance for it. Sure enough, he got it; took root in it, he and his; and, in the course of centuries, branched up from it, high and wide, over the adjoining countries; waxing towards still higher destinies. That is the epitome of Conrad’s history; history now become very great, but then no bigger than its neighbours and very meagrely recorded; of which the reflective reader is to make what he can....

“As to the Office, it was more important than perhaps the reader imagines. In a Diet of the Empire (1170) we find Conrad among the magnates of the country, denouncing Henry the Lion’s high procedures and malpractices. Every Burggraf of Nürnberg is in virtue of his office ‘Prince of the Empire’; if a man happened to have talent of his own and solid resources of his own (which are always on the growing hand with this family), here is a basis from which he may go far enough. Burggraf of Nürnberg: that means again Graf (judge, defender, manager, g’reeve) of the Kaiser’s Burg or Castle,—in a word, Kaiser’s Representative and Alter Ego,—in the old Imperial Free-Town of Nürnberg; with much adjacent very complex territory, also, to administer for the Kaiser. A flourishing extensive city, this old Nürnberg, with valuable adjacent territory, civic and imperial, intricately intermixed; full of commercial industries, opulences, not without democratic tendencies. Nay, it is almost, in some senses, the London and Middlesex of the Germany that then was, if we will consider it!

“This is a place to give a man chances, and try what stuff is in him. The office involves a talent for governing, as well as for judging: talent for fighting also, in cases of extremity, and, what is still better, a talent for avoiding to fight. None but a man of competent superior parts can do that function; I suppose no imbecile could have existed many months in it, in the old earnest times. Conrad and his succeeding Hohenzollerns proved very capable to do it, as would seem; and grew and spread in it, waxing bigger and bigger, from their first planting there by Kaiser Barbarossa, a successful judge of men.”

Nuremberg continued to receive marks of Imperial favour. The importance to which she had now grown is illustrated by the fact that Frederick II., son of Barbarossa, held a very brilliant Reichstag here in 1219, and on this occasion gave to the town her first great Charter.

The first provision of this Charter, by which the town is declared free of allegiance to anyone but the Emperor, is of special interest, seeing that it raises the question whether Nuremberg was really the private property of the Imperial family, or only owed allegiance to the Emperor as such. Probably Frederick did not intend to alienate Nuremberg from himself and his heirs as private individuals; but, regarding the empire as a permanent possession of his family, he intended by this clause to bind the burghers of Nuremberg more closely to his own personal service by freeing them from all feudal obligations to others.

A few years later Frederick, in order to carry out his plans with regard to Italian lands, appointed his ten-year-old son as King of Rome and as his successor to the German Empire. Then leaving the young King in Germany under the guardianship of Bishop Engelbert of Cologne, he went to Italy, and was crowned Emperor by the Pope.

Young Henry held his court in Nuremberg in 1225. In the castle, in November, a double festival was celebrated—the marriage of the young King with Margaret, daughter of Duke Leopold of Austria, and of the brother of the bride, Duke Henry of Austria, with Agnes, a daughter of the Landgraf Hermann von Thüringen. At this double wedding, as some chroniclers aver, or at the wedding of Rudolph von Hapsburg (1284), as is more probable, a terrible catastrophe occurred. For just as the numerous assembly of nobles and ladies had begun to dance in the hall, the platform erected for spectators fell in, and about seventy nobles, knights, and girls were crushed to death.

It was certainly in the middle of this festival that the horrible news arrived that the Archbishop of Cologne, the young King’s adviser, had been murdered, from motives of revenge, by his nephew, Duke of Isenburg. “Such deeds were then very frequent,” says the Abbot Conrad von Lichtenau, “because the doers thereof hoped to obtain pardon by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”

Three days after his marriage the young King had to sit in judgment on the culprit at the Kaiserburg. Deeply moved, he asked the noble Gerlach von Büdingen for his opinion. Ought the murderer to be outlawed, there and then? Gerlach answered yes, for the crime was patent. Friedrich von Truhendingen opposed him violently, however, maintaining that the accused man ought to be first produced, as justice and custom demanded. Gerlach became enraged. The argument grew hot, and presently, in spite of the King’s presence, the supporters of either opinion seized their arms and came to blows. A fearful crush occurred on the stairs, which gave way under the weight of struggling humanity, and some fifty people were killed upon the spot. But the sentence of outlawry got itself pronounced, and a decree of excommunication followed from the Church.

This was but one example of the lawlessness of the times. Violence was not often so swiftly punished. Germany had fallen on evil days, and worse were in store for her. The absenteeism of her Emperors was producing its inevitable result.

One after another, the Emperors “had squandered their talents and wasted the best strength of their country in pursuit of a fancy, and never learned by the experience of their predecessors to desist from the dangerous pursuit. Instead of turning their attention to the development of their country, to the curtailment of the powers of the nobility, to the establishment of their thrones on enduring foundations, they were bewitched with the dream of a Roman-imperial world-monarchy, which was impossible to be realised when every nation was asserting more and more its characteristic peculiarities and arriving at consciousness of national and independent life. The Emperors were always divided between distinct callings, as Kings of Germany and Emperors of Rome. The Italians hated them; the popes undermined their powers, and involved them in countless difficulties at home and in Italy, so that they could not establish their authority as emperors, and neglected to make good, or were impeded in attempting to make good, their position as kings in Germany. The bat in the fable was rejected by the birds because he was a beast, and by the beasts because he had wings as a bird.”[5]

So it came to pass that when the line of Hohenstaufen went miserably out on the death of the ill-fated Conradin (1268), Germany was already involved in times of huge anarchy; “was rocking down,” as Carlyle puts it, “towards one saw not what—an anarchic Republic of Princes, perhaps, and of free barons fast verging towards robbery? Sovereignty of multiplex princes, with a peerage of intermediate robber barons? Things are verging that way. Such princes, big and little, each wrenching off for himself what lay loosest and handiest to him, found it a stirring game, and not so much amiss.”

Towns like Nuremberg, on the other hand, found it very much amiss. Fortunately many of them were rich and strong, and took the task of preserving peace and order to some extent into their own hands.

During the period of the Interregnum, as it was called (1254-1273), “die herrenlose, die schreckliche Zeit” of disturbance and lawlessness, when the electors—the bishops and princes of the land—could only agree in giving the crown to foreigners who would leave them alone and unhindered in their efforts to enlarge their powers and territories by fair or foul means, some curious transactions took place with regard to Nuremberg. There exists a document by which, in 1266, Conradin pledged to his uncle, Duke Ludwig of Bavaria, a number of possessions to raise money in order to pay back the loan which his former guardian had advanced to him, and which was used to acquire the town and castle of Nuremberg. The transaction is obscure. Possibly after the death of Conradin’s father, Conrad IV., Nuremberg was claimed by his executors as private property. In that case we may hazard the conjecture that the town resisted the claim, and that an appeal to arms was made. The money referred to may have been spent in conducting a siege.

This much is known for certain from a contemporary document, that when, in 1269, Duke Ludwig and his brother Henry, as heirs of Conradin, divided the Hohenstaufen inheritance between them, they took equal rights over Nuremberg. That may have been, however, merely a paper phrase. Imperial and private rights were apt to get confused in the minds of the Hohenstaufen. Nuremberg, at any rate, continues always to act as if she were a free town of the Empire. She was acutely conscious of the dignity of her charter. The great object for which the European towns, and Nuremberg among them, were all this time struggling was a charter of incorporation and a qualified privilege of internal self-government. Emperors and princes might try to get hold of a rich city like Nuremberg, and treat it as their private property, but, once she had won her charter, she was determined to remain a Reichstadt, and to enjoy all the privileges and liberties of a free city.

One interesting and important result this period of lawlessness had. The towns began to band themselves together in leagues—Der Rheinische Städtebund, 1254, was the first of these—for the purpose of defence against the plunder and rapine of the robber-knights, who had formerly been held in check to some degree by the sword and authority of the Emperors, but who now swooped down from their fortresses as they pleased on the merchants travelling from town to town, and robbed them or levied on them heavy tolls. Nuremberg joined this league: and it is in a document (1256) welcoming the entrance of Regensburg (Ratisbon) into the league that we first find mention of the Rat or Council of burghers joined to the chief magistrate as an institution representative of the community. Since the Charter of 1219, almost the whole administration of justice—government, police and finance—had been centred no longer in the Burggraf, but in the chief magistrate (Schuldheiss) of the town. But, by the same charter, Nuremberg was now to be taxed as a community. From the natural necessity and apprehensions of the situation, the burghers felt the need of a representative body to sit with and to advise the magistrate, who was, originally at any rate, a King’s man and officer of the Burggraf. So it came to pass that the bench of judges who assisted the Schuldheiss in his judicial work, a bench composed of the most powerful and influential citizens, gradually acquired the further function of an advising and governing body, and finally became independent of the magistrate. Little by little, by one charter after another, by gradual and persistent effort, the Rat gained the position of landlords and Territoriiherren. But, as the Council gained power, the great families began to arrogate to themselves the sole right of sitting on it. A close aristocracy of wealth grew up more and more jealous of their fancied rights. Such was the origin of the constitution of Nuremberg—a constitution which in later times offers a striking resemblance to that of Venice.

At last the Interregnum came to an end. It was mainly through Burggraf Frederick III. of Nuremberg that Rudolph von Hapsburg succeeded to the Empire. For this and other service the Burggraviate was made hereditary in his family. Under Rudolph the strong and just, who, after the demoralising period of anarchy, worked wonders in the way of tightening, whether with gloved hand or mailed fist, the bonds of imperial unity, a brilliant gathering of princes assembled at Nuremberg for the Reichstag in 1274. The chronicles are full of stories to illustrate the character of their modern Solomon on this occasion. The following example will suffice:—

A merchant complained that he had given his host a purse of 200 silver marks to keep, but the host denied having received them. The Emperor thereupon summoned the landlord and several citizens. They all came, naturally enough, in their best clothes. The landlord, in particular, wore a costly cap, which, as he stood before the Emperor, he twisted nervously in his hand. Rudolph took it from him and, putting it on, exclaimed that it would become even an Emperor. Then he went into the next room—apparently forgetting all about the cap. The landlord meanwhile was detained. The Emperor sent the cap to the landlord’s wife, with a request in her husband’s name that she should give the bearer that sack of money she knew about. The ruse succeeded, and whilst the landlord was emphatically asserting his innocence to the Emperor, the sack of money was produced to confound him. The wretch had to atone for his crime by the payment of a heavy fine.

One other record of Kaiser Rudolph’s presence at Nuremberg we have. It is illustrative of the violence of those times. In 1289 a grand tournament was held in honour of the King. In the course of it Krafft von Hohenlohe had the misfortune to run his spear through the neck of Duke Ludwig von Baiern, and the latter died of the wound. In consequence of this mischance such strife arose between the followers of the Duke and those of the Kaiser that the Council had to take measures for the defence of the town. They barred the streets with chains and garrisoned the Rathaus as well as the towers and walls. Luckily the quarrel was smoothed over and no further disturbance took place.

A few years later Graf Adolph von Nassau succeeded Rudolph. Once in 1293 and twice in 1294 he held his court in Nuremberg and ratified all the privileges of the town. To him and to his race legend ascribes a great share in the building of the Lorenzkirche. “But,” says Dr Reicke, “there is as little ground for this assertion as for the unfounded belief that the Schlüsselfelderische Stiftungshaus, so called because it belonged to the institution founded by Hans Karl Schlüsselfelder who died in 1709, and now known as the Nassauerhaus, was once in the possession of the Counts of Nassau.” This house which stands at the corner of the Carolinenstrasse was built, according to Essenheim, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. According to the earliest existing records it belonged, with the house to the west of it, to a branch of the Haller family, long since extinct. The figure on the well at the east end of this house, which represents King Adolph of Nassau, belongs to the year 1824. To-day the crypt of the house has been turned into a Weinhaus, and there, in a vaulted cellar wreathed with yew, the diligent œnophilist will be rewarded by the discovery of some rare vintages.

The new King Albert held his court at Nuremberg in 1298. His arrival brought many days of splendour and festivity to the town. For the King had his wife Elizabeth crowned by the Archbishop Wigbold of Cologne in St. Sebalduskirche. Six thousand guests assembled on this occasion. There was no accommodation in the houses for so vast a gathering of strangers, many of whom, in spite of the wintry weather, had to camp out under canvas in the streets.

It was about this time that one of the fearful periodical persecutions of the Jews—persecutions as unchristian as uneconomical—broke out over all Franconia. It was said that in Rothenburg the Jews had pounded the Host in a mortar and that blood had flowed from it. On the strength of this fabulous sacrilege a fanatic, called Rindfleisch, led a “crusade” against the unfortunate people. In Würtzburg the Jews were burnt and massacred in crowds and utterly extirpated. Many from the surrounding country sought refuge in Nuremberg, where they were hospitably received by their fellow-believers and were at first protected by the Rat. Rindfleisch and his bands of murderous fanatics were then at a safe distance. But, as these drew near, the hatred of the Jews, which had long smouldered among the people, broke out into flame. The Jewish quarter was then in the centre of the town, a very advantageous position. Their houses reached from the market where their synagogue stood, on the site of the present Frauenkirche, to the Zotenberg, the present Dötschmannsplatz. Rich as a community, though they counted, then as ever, both the greatest and the least among their number, they were envied for their possessions and hated as people of a foreign faith. Nuremberg, like all the neighbouring towns except Regensburg, became the scene of murder and brutality. A hundred thousand Jews were the victims of a fearful death. The persecution continued till King Albert, in spite of the unpopularity of the proceeding, came to Franconia and put a stop to it, punishing the instigators and laying a heavy fine upon the towns.

In 1308 Albert was murdered by his nephew, John of Swabia—Parracida. The story of this murder is introduced, it will be remembered, at the end of Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. After seven months’ interval, Henry VII., Count of Luxembourg, was elected king. He, in the following year, held his court in Nuremberg, before departing to be crowned Emperor at Rome, in the midst of battle and strife with the Guelphs. Dating from Pisa, 1313, Henry granted Nuremberg a very important charter. Here are some of its provisions:—

(1) The Imperial magistrate at Nuremberg shall protect the imperial or principal roads and have the right of way.

(2) Once a year the Magistrate shall pledge himself before the Council to exercise impartial justice towards rich and poor, to judge and to arrange all matters with the counsel of the Schöpfen (Bench of judges).

(3) The Burgomeister and judges are given complete control over the markets, trade, and means of preserving order.

(4) The Burg is not to be separated from the town.

Generally, one may say, this Charter confirms and extends the self-governing privileges of the town. The magistrate is still an imperial officer, but his position is in acknowledged dependence on the Council, into whose hands the regulation of trade and the preservation of order are entrusted. Moreover, in another provision, the citizens are clearly protected against trial by outside authorities, and against arbitrary imprisonment.

Scarcely had he marked his appreciation of Nuremberg in this way, when Henry was poisoned whilst besieging Siena. On his death, discord broke out in Germany. We will avoid, as far as possible, stepping on to the quaking bog of Reich’s history. Suffice it to say that one party elected Frederick, the beautiful son of Albert, and grandson of Rudolph von Hapsburg. The other and stronger party chose Ludwig von Baiern, of the Wittelsbach family. Nuremberg stood by Ludwig. A long war ensued, till the great battle of Mühldorf ended the struggle. Ludwig’s victory was in great part attributable to the timely arrival of the Nuremberg cavalry, under Burggraf Frederick IV.

“To us this is the interesting point: At one turn of the battle, tenth hour of it now ending, and the tug of war still desperate, there arose a cry of joy over all the Austrian ranks: ‘Help coming! Help!’—and Friedrich noticed a body of horse in Austrian cognisance (such the cunning of a certain man), coming in upon his rear. Austrians and Friedrich never doubted but it was brother Leopold just getting on the ground; and rushed forward doubly fierce; and were doubly astonished when it plunged in upon them, sharp-edged, as Burggraf Friedrich of Nürnberg,—and quite ruined Austrian Friedrich! Austrian Friedrich fought personally like a lion at bay; but it availed nothing. Rindsmaul (not lovely of lip, Cowmouth so-called) disarmed him: ‘I will not surrender except to a Prince!’—so Burggraf Friedrich was got to take surrender of him; and the fight, and whole controversy with it was completely won.”—Carlyle.

It was after this battle that the Kaiser, when eggs were found to be the only available provision in a country eaten to the bone, distributed them with the legendary phrase that still lives on the lips of every German child—

“Jedem Mann ein Ey
Dem frommen Schweppermann zwey.”

“To every man one egg and to the excellent Schweppermann two.” Schweppermann was one of his generals, and it seems probable that he was a Nuremberg citizen.

The story of how Ludwig shared his kingdom with his noble prisoner and united with him in such cordial affection that they ate at the same table and slept in the same bed, forms one of the best known and most romantic episodes in German history.

Nuremberg, who had helped Ludwig with money and men, reaped her full reward. Ludwig showed great affection for her, staying continually within her walls (1320-1347), residing usually not in the castle, but with some distinguished citizen. Hence, and because the city stood by him throughout his quarrel with the Pope, he gave her many charters, confirming and increasing the rights and privileges of the burghers. He gave her permission, for instance, to hold a fair fourteen days after Easter for a month, and to issue her own decrees regarding it. From this arose the practice of the Easter Fair which still takes place. He granted her, also, freedom of customs in Munich, thus helping her trade. She already enjoyed a mutual Zollfreiheit with Berne and Heilbronn. All this amounts to evidence of the steadily increasing trade of Nuremberg. Already, in the beginning of the fourteenth century, her trade with Italy was considerable, in spite of the robber-knights and imperial requisitions. No paper privileges were, indeed, of much value, however often renewed, unless supported by power to resist the robber-knights who, from their castles, descended on the rich caravans of the peaceful merchants. That trade flourished now as it did, shows that the knights did not have matters all their own way. If the Emperors did little to preserve order in the empire, the towns were now fortunately strong enough and independent enough to protect themselves. When the knights proved too troublesome, the

citizens attacked their fortresses and burned them, and hanged the robbers from their own towers. There is, for instance, a document extant (1325) in which Ludwig grants immunity to the citizens of Nuremberg for having destroyed the castle “Zu dem Turm,” which belonged to one Conrad Schenk von Reicheneck, a robber-knight, and promises the castle shall never be rebuilt. Nor did the towns despise the advantages of combination. In 1340 we find Nuremberg entering into a league, for mutual protection and the maintenance of peace, with the Dukes of Bavaria, with Würzburg, Rothenburg, etc., and a number of spiritual and temporal lords.

But if Nuremberg waxed in power and independence under the favour of Ludwig, the Burggraf also had claims on the King. To him therefore was given the office of Chief-Magistrate (Schuldheiss) and certain revenues from the town. This was not at all to the taste of the burghers. They grew restive under the Burggraf’s abuse of justice, and finally managed to buy back the office from him through the agency of their rich citizen Conrad Gross, with whom the King often stayed. Conrad Gross was an early specimen of that fine type of merchant princes who contributed so much in later days to the glory of Nuremberg. Barter—trade in kind—was now giving place to trade done with money drawn from the German mines. The merchant prince began to raise his head. Whereas the trader had hitherto been despised as a shopkeeper by the free-knights, the merchant, who could indulge in luxury of dress and household furniture, now began to look down on the knights as impecunious robbers. The time was at hand when the Italian Æneas Sylvius could write:—

“When one comes from Lower Franconia and perceives this glorious city, its splendour seems truly magnificent. When one enters it, one’s original impression is confirmed by the beauty of the streets and the fitness of the houses. The churches of St. Sebald and St. Laurence are worthy of worship as well as admiration. The Imperial castle proudly dominates the town, and the burghers’ dwellings seem to have been built for princes. In truth, the kings of Scotland would gladly be housed so luxuriously as the ordinary citizen of Nuremberg.”

It was Conrad Gross who, “longing to change his worldly goods for heavenly ones,” founded, in 1333, the “New Hospital of the Holy Ghost.” Within the church is the tomb of the founder. Additions were made to the hospital and church at the end of the fifteenth century. What is called the south building was erected on two arches over the water. In the courtyard of the hospital is a little chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, founded by George Ketzel in 1459. The church itself was restored in the seventeenth century, from which period dates the stucco work of the chancel. These things the visitor will see and appraise for himself. Meantime the following beautiful legend concerning the founder is worth recording:—

A man of the family of Heinzen, afterwards called “Great” (Gross), fell asleep one day in his garden beneath the shade of a lime tree. He dreamed that he found a large treasure there, but had no spade with which to dig for it. To mark the place, therefore, he took a handful of leaves and laid them on the spot where the treasure was buried. When he awoke and walked round the garden, he came to a spot where it seemed that someone had purposely scattered lime leaves on the ground. Then he remembered his dream, and, since he thought the dream had not come to him without some reason, he called his men to help him, and vowed that if he found anything he would help the poor and sick with it. And indeed he found so great a treasure of silver and gold that he became very rich, and founded therewith the Hospital of the Holy Ghost.

Ludwig had been a good friend to Nuremberg, and therefore when Karl IV.,[6] the enemy of Ludwig and friend of the Pope, succeeded him, the new Kaiser was regarded with some apprehension. Karl, however, was very gracious to Nuremberg, and gave her new privileges, for he was eager to secure the loyalty of her citizens. He confirmed the rich burghers in their offices, and succeeded in winning over the patricians to his side. But it was at this time that a desire for a more democratic form of government began to manifest itself throughout the towns of Germany. The lower classes showed signs of restiveness, and evinced a desire to have a voice in the counsels of their town. The patrician families had engrossed all the rights. The proceedings of the Council were secret, and no account of the money which passed through their hands was forthcoming. The administration of justice rested entirely with them. Complaints were loud that the rights of the poor and the artisans did not receive proper attention. The pride of the hereditary patrician Councillors had become notorious. The sturdy independent craftsmen began to murmur against this state of affairs. They felt they were entitled to a place in the government of the town, which they supported by their industry and, in war, with their arms. They were ready at last to take steps to secure that place. When their demands were refused by the patricians, bloodshed and strife resulted. In Rothenburg, Regensburg, and Munich the patricians were successful in retaining the Council in their own hands. And so it was with Nuremberg. But of the details of the great revolution which broke out there at the beginning of Karl’s reign little is known. The artisans, it seems, were staunch and faithful to the memory of Ludwig. He had, says one of the chroniclers, won their adherence by his popular manners and by giving them the right of having their own drinking clubs. The change of policy on the side of the Council who embraced the cause of the Luxembourg (Caroline) party enabled the artisans, who were loyal to the Bavarian (Wittelsbach) family, to make a bid for a share in the government of their town. The Council, with promises of redress of grievances, tried to stem the revolt. But it was too late. In alarm they called in the aid of Karl, and Karl sent a peace-maker who came and went in vain. Some of the Council then fled the town. The chroniclers go so far as to say that a surprise of the Council—a regular coup d’état—was planned for a particular day, but that the Council was warned in time. Though the Rathaus was stormed and the gates of the town occupied, “the birds had flown.” They had escaped from the town by all sorts of curious devices.

This story may have sprung from the unchastened imagination of the chroniclers, but we know as an historical fact that on June 4, 1348, the rebels opened the gates to soldiers of Ludwig, Markgraf of Brandenburg, eldest son of the late Emperor. He was excommunicated (for Karl was the Papal nominee) as his father had been. The city when it received him shared in his excommunication. The clergy tried to escape from the tainted city, but the people, having shut the gates, compelled them to read mass. A copy of a certificate from the Bishop of Clure to the clergy, testifying that they had only held mass under compulsion, is still extant.

The rebels, then, were for the moment successful: the old Council was abolished and a new one chosen, which was composed mainly of artisans, but did not exclude all the old Councillors. Their chief work of innovation was to allow the artisans to form Guilds. On the whole the new Council was not a success. Prosperity is a cynical but convincing test of a government. Confusion and disorder obtained, and commerce was affected by the lack of police and the little real power of the Council. The finances of the town suffered accordingly. The partisans of the old régime refused to contribute.

It was therefore a good thing for Nuremberg when, in 1349, the opposition of the Wittelsbach party broke down, and terms were made which left Karl master of the situation. Nuremberg passed into his hands, and he proceeded to restore the status quo ante there. A new Council[7] was elected, and the ringleaders of the conspiracy were banished with their families.

CHAPTER II
Development of Nuremberg

“Nürnberg’s Hand
Geht durch alle Land.”
—Old Proverb.

KARL IV. proceeded to confirm the privileges of the town for a cash consideration. That was the way of mediæval monarchs. We have seen that the finances of Nuremberg were not at this moment in a very flourishing condition. There is little doubt that the heavy payment she was called upon to make to the King was one of the chief causes which led to the great persecution of the Jews which soon broke out.

The Jews are first mentioned in Nuremberg in 1288. They were then personally free. They could hold land and live after their own laws. Medicine was their chief profession; for money-lending—at first without interest—was originally the business of the monasteries. It was one of the most unfortunate results of the Crusades that they stirred up feeling against the Jews. Persecutions began, and a change took place in the personal position of the Jews. They had now to wear a special dress and to cut their beards, whilst the Christians luxuriated in beards as long as they could possibly grow them. When the Christians were no longer allowed to take interest for money lent, the Jews stepped in, being under their own laws, as money-lenders. In many places they were forbidden to follow any other profession than that of usury. By a charter of the Hohenstaufen another important change was wrought in their condition. They were made directly subject to the King and Empire (Königliche Kammerknechte). For this protection they had to pay a tax direct to the Imperial treasury. Their riches grew in spite of all sorts of commercial disabilities, and with them grew the value of this tax. One good result of this was that it interested the King in their favour. He did not care to see his golden geese slain, and their property confiscated by the towns. In Nuremberg it was possible for the Jews to become citizens on the payment of a certain sum of money. In 1338, it appears from an old Burgher list, there were 212 Jewish citizens. Ten years later, when the Black Death was devastating Europe, it was said that the Jews had poisoned the wells and purposely propagated the plague in order to annihilate the Christians. They were accused of all sorts of sacrilege and unnatural crimes. A frightful persecution broke out. All along the Rhine thousands of them were burnt at the stake.

The Austrian poet Helbing echoed the public sentiment, during a later persecution, when he exclaimed, “There are too many Jews in our country. It is a shame and a sin to tolerate them. If I were King, if I could lay my hand on you, Jews, I tell you in truth I would have you all burnt.” And this is the opinion of the humanist, Conrad Celtes, in his praise of Nuremberg:—

“Exscindenda protecto gens aut ad Caucasum et ultra Sauromatas perpetuo exilio releganda, quæ, per universum orbem in se totiens iram numinum concitat, humani generis societatem violans et conturbans.”

At Nuremberg there were other reasons for the outbreak. In old days the Jews had been told to build their houses in the modern Dötschmannsplatz. Their synagogue stood on the site of the present Frauenkirche. Hence the space between the Rathaus and the Fleischbrücke was all the market-room the Christians had. The increasing numbers and prosperity of the Jews, in this, the best site of the town, was very distressing to observe. So it came to pass that in 1349, on the strength of a document signed by Karl, in which he undertakes to ask no questions if anything should happen to the Jews at the hands of the people or the Council, the Christians pulled down the Jewish houses, and made the two large market-places, called to-day the Hauptmarkt and the Obstmarkt. Between these they built, to the glory of God, the beautiful Frauenkirche. As for the Jews, “The Jews were burnt on St. Nicholas’ Eve, 1349,” is the laconic report of Ulman Stromer, chronicler.[8] The modern Maxfeld is supposed to have been the scene of this atrocity. Such is the origin of those picturesque market-places, where to-day beneath the shadow of St. Sebald’s shrine, St. Mary’s church and the stately Rathaus, the Beautiful Fountain pours its silvery waters, and the peasants sell the produce of the country, sitting at their stalls beneath huge umbrellas, or leading the patient oxen which have drawn their carts to the city.

We have mentioned above the grievances of the artisans at this period. It must not be supposed that they were altogether down-trodden and miserable. Pecuniarily they must have been comparatively well off. For from this time, up to the middle of the Thirty Years War, the Nuremberg workmen flourished in reputation and execution. Their numbers were large; their work was distinguished for its beauty and durability. Their metal work in particular was famous; and they maintained its excellence for a long while, fostered by the system of masters and apprentices, which in this case led to a real desire to reach or improve upon a high standard of sound and artistic work. Even to-day you can hardly walk ten yards in Nuremberg without coming upon some perfect piece of ironwork, such as the railings round the wells or in front of the Frauenkirche. In the German Museum[9] there are two rooms full of locks and hinges, which, if once seen and studied by the modern manufacturer of inferior wares, should almost certainly make him cease from his evil ways. Or, if the reader wish for an example of the wide gulf which separates the good from the indifferent, let him secure a genuine specimen of those old waterpots (Butte), in which women so picturesquely carry water on their backs from the wells, and compare it with a modern imitation. These old workmen took a pride in their work. They were not, however, for that reason contemptuous of a little relaxation. They had their general holidays. We know Victor Hugo’s description of All Fools’ Day in Notre Dame de Paris. And here, in Nuremberg, we find the butchers and cutlers asking and obtaining from Karl the right to hold a carnival, and to dance in silks and velvets like the great families. This right was afterwards extended to all the trades. Schembartläufer the carnival was called. Every year the dance took place. By degrees the great people began to take part in it. The good burghers were very fond of dancing, as we shall have further occasion to notice. In time all sorts of rites and ceremonies grew up round the celebration of this holiday, which not even the presence of the enemy or the plague could induce the artisans to omit. Like Don’t-care Hippocleides, they would dance. Masks were worn, spears and crackers carried, and a special costume designed for each year. Popular songs and pasquinades were sung and published. Personalities of course were rife. In 1523, for instance, a man appeared dressed in “Indulgences.” Not a little rough buffoonery of one sort or another found place. To conclude the proceedings, a so-called “Hell,” made of fireworks, was let off in front of the Rathaus. And so to bed, as Pepys would have written.

The influence of the Reformers proved fatal to indulgence in this sort of wild hilarity. The celebration of the carnival was finally forbidden in 1539, much to the annoyance of the people.

In 1349 Karl issued from Nuremberg the declaration of public peace (he was always an eager promoter of Landfrieden—public peaces) for Franconia—to last for two years. In this arrangement Nuremberg was accorded the same standing as other Imperial cities and received, under Karl, equal political rights with the princely and other communities. A board of representatives of each town or district was to sit periodically at Nuremberg and see to it that the peace was kept. Whilst the King tried to preserve order in this way, peace leagues were also common in these times of feuds. So we find Nuremberg joining the league of the Swabian towns.

It was at Nuremberg that Karl, when he returned from being crowned at Rome (1356), held a famous Reichstag and issued the Golden Bull, so-called from the golden seal, or bulla, appended to the deed, which determined the method of electing the emperors and reduced the number of electors to seven. The place where the first twenty-three articles of this important law were published is still known as the house “Zum Goldenen Schild,” in the Schildgasse. The old custom by which the newly chosen Kaiser held his first Reichstag at Nuremberg was made law by the Golden Bull—a law in later times frequently ignored. By the Golden Bull, also, towns were forbidden to league together, which was a very burdensome provision secured by the influence of the princes, but, luckily for the towns, not able to be enforced.

The Golden Bull, acknowledging, as it did, the power and increasing the territorial rights of the great princes, and rousing the envy of those who were not made electors, held in it the seeds of the dissolution of the Empire. It encouraged, in effect, all the petty princes to exceed their powers and to encroach on the rights of the towns. The Nuremberg Burggraf was no exception to this rule. From this time forward he is continually coming into conflict with the town. The quarrel began over the Geleitsrecht, right of convoy and customs. The Emperor in 1357 gave to the Burggraf certain rights of way which enabled him to exact toll from the merchants on their way to Frankfort. Now this was a direct infringement of the charter given them a few years before forbidding all unjust or unusual taxes. They appealed on the strength of this and the Kaiser revoked the right. But the question crops up again and again. A little later we find the Kaiser, in recognition of his indebtedness to the Burggraf for past services, giving him the office of Chief Magistrate of the town together with large revenues therefrom. The town, anxious to have the magistracy under its own control, wished to buy it from the Burggraf. The Kaiser, with a view to sharing the proceeds, raised the price at which it was to be sold, so that in 1385 the town had to redeem the magistracy and taxes for the exorbitant sum of 8000 gulden.

Karl, as far as one can make out, tried to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare, first helping the town and then the Burggraf, partly because he was indebted to both for their aid, and partly because the issue of a new charter was a proceeding which brought cash into the Imperial treasury. For directly or indirectly charters were always paid for. This accounts to some extent for the mass of contradictory decrees which survive to perplex the modern historian. Such a little compliment as the following, for instance, which we find at the end of a charter dated 1366, had doubtless its origin in a cash transaction:—

“The Emperor is accustomed to live and to hold his court in his Imperial town of Nuremberg, as being the most distinguished and best situated town of the Empire here in the land.”

The relations between the Burggraf and the town continued to be so strained that they almost came to blows in 1367 over the building of a wall. This wall was run up in forty days by the citizens, completely cutting off the approach from the castle to the town, and thus protecting the town from all hostile attacks of the Burggraf. The quarrel thereby occasioned dragged on for ten years before it was settled by an Imperial decree. Much to the chagrin of the Burggraf, the Kaiser, in deciding the dispute, unexpectedly favoured the town. We can hardly be surprised that the Burggraf, still smarting from this humiliation, was inclined to interpret as an act of aggression the building by the citizens of the tower “Luginsland” (1377),[10] which, besides commanding, as its name implied, a wide view of the surrounding country, would serve also as a watch-tower whence the actions of the Burggraf might be observed and forestalled. “Man pawet in darümb das man darauf ins marggrafen purk möcht gesehen,” says one chronicler.

Before all this, the future King Wenzel had been born in Nuremberg and baptised in St. Sebalduskirche. The chronicles say that at the baptism of the Imperial child—with whose birth Karl was so pleased that he remitted the Imperial taxes of the town for a year—the font was not clean, and that, as the baptismal water was being warmed in the Parsonage, a fire broke out and the whole of the choir adjoining it was burnt down. Only the beautiful (fourteenth century) oriel window remained uninjured by the flames.[11] The present parsonage was built by Pfinzing, the author of the Theuerdank, of whom more anon.

On the day of the baptism it is recorded that the Emperor displayed to the people from the gallery over the door of the church the Imperial insignia and relics which he had brought from Prague to the new Frauenkirche.

This Wenzel, or Wenceslas, of whom we have spoken, succeeded his father when he was but seventeen. Half-idiot, half-maniac, addicted to drunkenness and hunting, he was not the man to restore order in an Empire which had already fallen into a state of chaos. He was one of the worst Kaisers and the least victorious on record. He would attend to nothing in the Reich, “the Prague white beer and girls of various complexions being much preferable,” as he was heard to say. The result was that his reign was a period of feuds, the golden era of free or robber knights. Club-law, or Faustrecht, as it was called—the right of private warfare—was the order of the day. The history of Nuremberg resolves itself into the police-news of the period, the record of the sallies and outrages of such knights as Ekkelein von Gailingen, whose headquarters were at Windsheim, some thirty miles off, and who was the Götz von Berlichingen of the fourteenth century. The old castles which the traveller sees from time to time on the banks of the Rhine, or on the ravines and large brooks which flow into it, were then no picturesque ruins, rendered interesting by the stories which were told about their former inhabitants, but constituted the real and apparently impregnable strongholds of this robber-chivalry.

On the east wall of the castle, near the Five-cornered Tower, they will show you to this day two hoof-shaped marks, which are said to be the impressions left there by the hoofs of Ekkelein (or Eppelein) von Gailingen’s gallant steed. For this freebooter, Ekkelein, who had long been feared, admired, and even credited with magical powers, was at length captured by the Nuremberg burgher-soldiers and condemned to death. Shut up in the castle, he pined in the dungeon until the day arrived on which he was to expiate his crimes with his life. When he was brought out into the yard for execution, he begged, as a last request, that he might be allowed to say farewell to his favourite horse and his servant Jäckel. The beautiful charger, neighing with pleasure, was brought. Ekkelein put his arm round its neck and embraced it lovingly.

“If only, before I die, I might once more feel myself on his back!”

So natural and so harmless did the request seem that his wish was granted. His groom placed the saddle and bridle on the horse, who, when his master mounted, shook his mane for joy. At first the faithful creature moved gently and proudly in the circle of the guard, looking round him and snorting. When Ekkelein patted his powerful, smooth neck, the muscles of the noble animal grew larger and the veins of his flanks swelled at the touch of the master’s hand. He spurned the ground, raised his fore-feet and threw himself forward into a thundering gallop. Lightly and gently the spur of the rider touched his sides: he rushed furiously round the court. Guards and jailors shrank back before the stones which his hoofs threw high into the air. But the gate was secure and escape not to be thought of. Then, whoever is able to read the eyes of dumb beasts might have seen flaming in those of Ekkelein’s charger a lament like this: “How, my noble master? Shalt thou die here? Shall thy knightly blood flow ignominiously in this miserable place! Shall I never again carry thee into the battle, or bear thee through the defiles and the forests, and never more eat golden oats out of thy brave hand! O my master, save thyself! Trust in me and my strength and the impossible shall become possible.” The horse raised himself. The knight struck both spurs into his sides, held breath and, stooping low, embraced with both arms the neck of the faithful steed, from whose hoofs showered sparks of fire. Before the burghers could stay them, before the guards could lift a finger, before breath could be drawn, the desperate spring was made and man and horse were over the parapet which overhung the moat 100 feet below. They leaped not—as it appeared to the incredulous eyes that peeped at them from the top of the battlements—to their destruction; for, after a huge splash and struggle in the waters of the fosse, horse and rider rose again to the surface, and, long before the drawbridge could be let down and his captors could pursue him, Ekkelein was away in the deep forest, galloping on his brave steed, well on the road to the impregnable castle of Gailingen. The dent made by the horse’s hoofs in the stones below is there to this day. Can we wonder if the story went round that it was his Satanic majesty who had presented the bold knight with this wondrous steed, the better to facilitate the various little errands with which he had entrusted him?

Fortunately for the burgesses of Nuremberg not every free-knight could rely on such diabolic means of succour, so that they were able to defend themselves with energy and success against the noble and aggressive freebooters. The Council saw to it that the fortifications were continually strengthened and they did not despise the aid of the newly-introduced blunderbuss.[12] Indeed, even in the field the burgesses and their mercenaries showed themselves a match for the free-knights. So confident was Nuremberg in her own resources that at first she refused to join the great league of all the Rhenish towns founded in 1381, but three years later she came in. Though the great princes of the Empire were very jealous of such leagues, the Kaiser managed to patch up a union, with himself at the head, between this league and the princes, and called it the “Heidelberg Union” for the maintenance of peace. However a year or two later the Dukes of Bavaria, jealous as ever of the towns, broke loose, and seized the Archbishop Pilgrim von Salzburg, a friend of the towns, and some Nuremberg merchants. The Kaiser, instead of taking strong measures at once, pursued his usual policy of shilly-shally. But in January 1388 a strong army of the League started from Augsburg, ravaging all Bavaria with fire and sword. To this army Nuremberg contributed some mounted mercenaries, and at the same time marched an army of her own—8000 strong, a very large army for those days—against Hilpoltstein, but without success. The war resolved itself into a struggle between the interests of the princes and of the towns. The towns failed to hold together, and paid the penalty in failure. They had commenced hostilities vigorously, but Nuremberg set the example of wavering. In a year or so she made peace on no very favourable terms, consenting to pay heavy indemnities. Still, the general result of the war, though the towns were not successful, was not to lower the status of the towns. So far as Nuremberg was concerned the administration of the war had been carried on by a Committee of the Rat—the Kriegsrat, which henceforth became permanent. As to the expenses, they were in part defrayed by a wholesale seizure of Jews and confiscation of their property. This disgraceful proceeding was done by the League in general (1385, and again in 1390), and countenanced by the Kaiser. Here is a characteristic story of that very feckless Kaiser, which will show how fit he was to govern the German Empire.

Wenzel, the story runs, demanded from the Nuremberg Council the key of the Stadtthor. The Council, though very loth to do so, gave him the key, on condition that he would grant them a request in return. The Kaiser consented. When he graciously inquired what it was they demanded, the Burgomeister asked for the key back again! The Kaiser was so enraged that he slapped the Burgomeister on the cheek, and rode off in a royal huff to Rothenburg. In revenge, on St. Margaret’s Day, when the consecration of the Schlosskapelle was celebrated, he allowed his followers to plunder the booths of the fair held round about the castle.

Wenzel, in fact, let things go their own gait in the Empire. Knights plundered and traders quarrelled as they would. The Kaiser indulged in bouts of drinking, in long hunting forays, and in insane fits of rage. At last the princes began to dispense with his presence. They called a Reichstag at Frankfort and sent to him demanding a regent. Then Wenzel roused himself, returned to Nuremberg, and proclaimed a public peace (1397). A crusade against the turbulent knights in the valley of the Pegnitz was undertaken and proved successful. Their castles were taken and Wenzel forbade them to be rebuilt. This was but a momentary outburst of energy on his part. He soon resumed his old indifference. In 1400 the discontent of the princes came to a head. Wenzel was deposed: Ruprecht von der Pfalz was chosen King and, after some cautious hesitation, was finally accepted by the towns.

In a charter confirming her privileges Ruprecht granted to Nuremberg the care of the Reichsburg at all times, and made the town independent of the Burggraf in the time of feud,—excused them, that is, from assisting him in his little wars. Nuremberg gave Ruprecht active support in the proceedings against Wenzel; her chief exploit being the capture of Rothenburg after a siege of five weeks. When Ruprecht died (1410) Jobst and Sigismund were competitors for the Kaisership, Wenzel too striking in with claims for reinstatement. Both the former were elected, so that Germany rejoiced in as many Kaisers as Christianity had Popes. Happily Jobst died in three months, and Sigismund, chiefly through the faithful and unwearied diligence of Burggraf Frederick VI. of Nuremberg, became Kaiser, “an always hoping, never resting, unsuccessful, vain and empty Kaiser. Specious, speculative, given to eloquence, diplomacy, and the windy instead of the solid arts: always short of money for one thing.” This last fault affected Nuremberg in more than one way. In the first place it necessitated the borrowing of heavy loans from her. Throughout the fourteenth century and onwards the Kaisers asked and received very large loans (pleasantly so-called) from Nuremberg. Wenzel, Ruprecht and Sigismund demanded ever larger and increasingly frequent donations. Sometimes, but not very often, the citizens were rewarded by the concession of a charter or the ratification of some procedure on their part. But the price was, of course, out of all proportion to the value of the thing purchased. As an example of these dealings we may instance the “loan” exacted by Sigismund in 1430, which amounted to 9000 gulden, besides other requisitions in the same year. One sees, at any rate, that Nuremberg must have been sufficiently full-blooded to endure being bled in this manner. But it was this same impecuniosity on the part of the Kaiser which led him to sell outright, for a total sum of 400,000 gulden, the Electorate of Brandenburg, with its land, titles and sovereign electorship and all to Burggraf Frederick, who already held it in pawn. This step was, in its immediate results at least, distinctly advantageous to Nuremberg. Clever and energetic, the Burggraf set about suppressing the robber-knights and establishing order.

Burggraf Frederick on his first coming to Brandenburg found but a cool reception as Statthalter. He came as a representative of law and rule; and there had been many noble gentlemen of the Turpin profession helping themselves by a ruleless life of late. Industry was at a low ebb, violence was rife; plunder and disorder everywhere; trade wrecked, private feuds abounding; too much the habit of baronial gentlemen to live by the saddle, as they termed it; that is by highway robbery in modern phrase. At first the Burggraf tried gentle methods, but when he found the noble lords scoffed at him, calling him a “Nürnberger Tand” (Nuremberg Toy), and continued their plunderings and other contumacies, then with the aid of his Frankish men-at-arms, neighbouring potentates and artillery—one huge gun, a twenty-four pounder, called Lazy Peg (Faule Grete), is mentioned—he set to work, and in a remarkably short period established comparative peace and order.[13]

That was a piece of work highly acceptable, we may be sure, to the merchants of Nuremberg. Were they not concerned in bringing fish and wool from the North, to exchange them in Italy and Venice for the silks and spices of the East?

In 1414 we catch a glimpse of the sombre figure of John Huss, the reformer, the Bohemian successor of Wiclif, passing through Nuremberg. The people here seem to have sympathised with his views. He explained his position to the clergy and council, and they invited him to return to them if he fared successfully at Kostnitz. But there he met his martyrdom. His supporters, the down-trodden peasantry of Bohemia, thereupon rose in a revolt, which Empire for a long while utterly failed to suppress. Nuremberg had exhibited no great enthusiasm against heretics. Though, in 1399, she had burnt six women and a man for heresy, yet she had given Huss a warm welcome. But the devastation wrought by the Hussite army alienated all sympathy, and on the suppression of the “heretics,” Nuremberg joined in the universal rejoicings of all steady-going merchants. She had taken occasional part in the Hussite wars; but chiefly through paying money instead of sending a proper contingent of men—a fact which illustrates the narrow, selfish and lazy policy of the town communities where the Empire was concerned. It was impossible for the Emperor to keep order with insufficient means of police. For the Emperor got not a foot of German territory with his Imperial crown. He was merely the feudal head, and as such found it very hard to get troops or money from the German people. Most of the members of the Empire—petty princes and Imperial towns alike—were concerned chiefly not with the ordering of the Empire but with becoming sovereign in their own territories. There was very little feeling of Imperial unity. If the Empire did not do its duty by the towns, the towns did very little for the Empire, beyond supplying money.

The Nurembergers were energetic enough when it came to fortifying their town on the approach of the victorious Hussites (1430). The grim heretics advanced ravaging and destroying the country, depopulating the towns. Night and day, men, women and children worked at the walls, striving to render the place impregnable. But the danger passed away. Thanks to the Markgraf Frederick, who bought them off very cheaply, the Hussites returned, for the time, in peace to their homes.

Sigismund succeeded in being crowned at Rome in 1433, and on this occasion he knighted Sebald Behaim, of the great Nuremberg family of that name, and gave to Nuremberg a charter confirming her privileges and giving her the right to keep the Imperial jewels, insignia, and sacred relics for ever. These were brought with great pomp and rejoicing to the Church of the Holy Spirit (Neuenspital) and there they were kept and jealously guarded till 1796. They were shown with much ceremony once a year to the people. This occasion was a very popular festival down to the Reformation days. But in 1523 the relics were shown for the last time.

Frederick the Third we shall only mention for the sake of the picturesque ceremonial which occurred when he held his first Reichstag at Nuremberg, at Easter 1442. The Kaiser rode in at the Spittlerthor. In the middle of the street where he had to pass St. Jakobskirche a table was spread on which, besides a crucifix, were placed the heads of St. Sebald and St. Cyprian. The Kaiser dismounted, took the cross from the Abbot of St. Ægidius and kissed it.

Thereupon one of the holy skulls was placed on the Kaiser’s head, whilst the priests and choristers in surplices and birettas sang responses. The Kaiser and his retinue and all the priesthood then made a solemn procession to the Sebalduskirche. Here the Kaiser worshipped on his knees before the altar. The priest read the special collect over him, and, taking a handful of flax and tow, lighted it and, as it burnt, exclaimed in a loud voice, “Most illustrious Kaiser, sic transit gloria mundi.” Then the chorus of priests burst out into the strains of the Te Deum, and the Kaiser went his way in the world—a compromising Emperor who slept through a long reign to the no small detriment of Germany.

We must not think of the Nurembergers as altogether given up to trade and merchandise. They were capable of being stirred up into the deepest religious enthusiasm. I know not what reception they gave to the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, who (1451) came preaching through Germany, and passed through Nuremberg selling “Indulgences” like a cheap-jack, lowering his price from time to time to get rid of his stock. But the monk, Capistranus, a great preacher, who came in the following year, created so tremendous a sensation by his eloquence and by miracles which he wrought that the people, we are told, flocked in crowds, laden with their new-fashioned pointed shoes, their Schlitten (sledges—harmless enough one would have thought—but they were regarded as extravagant luxuries), and thousands of dice and cards, and burnt them all in the market-place.

Next year they were stirred again by the terrible news that the Turks had taken Constantinople. Eleven hundred burghers seized their arms and went as Crusaders to help the Hungarians in Belgrade against the infidel Turk.[14] But they did not do great deeds. Scarce a third of them returned at Christmastide. The rest had died of hardship or of disease. This gave the Council a distaste for Crusades. They took to discouraging the preachers who came to beat up recruits against Hussites or Turks. The town, it was found, had to support the widows and children of the dead Crusaders.

The preachings of the firebrand Johannes Capistranus had another evil result. The Jews since the persecution in 1349 had not been much molested, though continually squeezed for money by both Kaiser and Council. But the increase in their numbers, the riches they had accumulated through usury, and the eloquence of this monk all tended to rouse religious hatred.

“The hatred against the Jews is so general in Germany,” writes Froissart in 1497, “that the calmest people are beside themselves when the conversation turns on their usury. I should not be surprised if on a sudden a bloody persecution broke out against them all over the country. They have already been forcibly expelled from many towns.”

After many half resolves, the Council determined to ask Maximilian to drive these “sucking leeches” from the town. Reluctantly he consented.

“Their numbers have increased too much. Under pretext of loans they have given themselves up to a dangerous and detestable traffic of usury. Many honourable citizens, deceived by their devices, are so deeply in debt that they see their private honour and their very means of existence threatened. For these reasons the Jews are invited to quit the town altogether within a period fixed by the Council. They are permitted to take with them their moveable property, but henceforth none of them shall have the right to reside in Nuremberg.”[15]

On the 10th of March 1499, driven from their homes amid the curses of the Christians, the Jews left Nuremberg with groans and lamentations, never to dwell there again till 1850. Maximilian sold their houses to the Council. Their churchyard was built over, their tombstones used for building the Corn Exchange—(die Waage). But no persecution, no repression, no laws forbidding commercial transactions between Christian and Jew, could ever subdue that despised but indomitable race. Most of them found refuge in Frankfort; but some years later, with the encouragement of the Markgrafs of Brandenburg, many of them settled at Fürth, which speedily became a serious commercial rival to Nuremberg, and remains to this day as prosperous as her neighbour.

One curious and interesting result this expulsion had. In order to supply the place of the money-lenders the Emperor ordered a Leihaus or State Pawnshop to be built, where money was to be advanced at a moderate percentage on property to people in difficulties. It was to be run at cost price, or, if there were any surplus, it was to go to the State. This was an imitation of the Italian system (Monte di Pietà) already in vogue at Augsburg—a system not without interest to the Englishman of to-day.

During the Thirty Years War, the Jews in Fürth, oppressed by the Imperial troops, asked to be received back into Nuremberg. Some of the Council were ready to comply, on the receipt of a large payment, but the majority refused to have the “damaging rascals” within their walls.

So long did the hostility towards the Jews survive here that it was not till 1800 that the regulation was done away with by which, in order to stop a day in Nuremberg, a Jew had to pay a personal tax of 45 kreuzer, and, in addition, had to be accompanied by a guard, for he was not allowed to walk in the streets alone. This guard was usually an old woman, who followed her Jew everywhere for the consideration of 15 kreuzer.

CHAPTER III
Nuremberg and the Reformation

“Trading Staple of the German World in old days, Toyshop of the German World in these new, Albert Dürer’s and Hans Sachs’ City.”—Carlyle.

WE have watched the dawning sun of Nuremberg’s greatness rise over the forest till now it has reached the Mittags-quarter. We have seen, to change the metaphor, the little foundling of the swamps grow year by year till at last she has arrived at the full strength and beauty of womanhood. For it was under Maximilian that Nuremberg reached her prime: it was under him and his successors that the greatest of her sons flourished. She was lavish as a princess in the adornment of her person. Once in 1447, and again in 1491, for instance, we find her voting some 500 florins to gild the Beautiful Fountain (Schöner Brunnen), which had been placed in the Hauptmarkt 1385.[16] She was already adorned with those churches which in her old age are still her brightest jewels.

Once completed, these churches were not regarded merely as houses of prayer, but rather as the books of God, where the divine history of the Redemption might be read and illustrated. The Christian fervour of the artists led them to give their best and sincerest work to the decoration of them. So that in the course of time the churches came to represent for the people museums constantly open, historic galleries of sacred art, to which one masterpiece after another was added.

“From daily admiration of them an æsthetic sense was formed in the minds of the young, and thanks to them the artists found repeated opportunities for exercising their art. Orders from private individuals or public bodies abounded. Every well-to-do family, every corporation was eager to do honour to God by the presentation of some gift to his holy dwelling-place: some offered a picture, a statue, a window, or an altar-piece; the portraits of the families themselves,[17] as portraits of the donors, were placed at the feet of the saints. When the artists represented themselves in paint, bronze, wood, or stone, they gave themselves the humble attitude of suppliants: in those of their compositions which contain numerous personages they always choose the humblest place for themselves; often, like Adam Krafft in the tabernacle in the Church of St. Lorenz, they appear in their working clothes, tools in hand, in the attitude of servants.”[18]

Whilst such men as Adam Krafft and Peter Vischer were giving their life-work to the beautifying of the churches, sculpture and painting also were turned to the adornment of domestic and public life. The mansions of the merchant princes still bear witness to the wealth of the burgesses, and to the vigour of the artistic impulse of this period. Every house, apart from architectural splendour, was decorated with a painting, whether of some symbol or the patron saint of the family. The very aspect of the streets spoke to the importance of the rôle which art played in the life of the town. The influence of the town reacted no less surely on the art of the period. Albert Durer, for instance, in spite of his wide experience always speaks in his art, like his master Wolgemut, in the Nuremberg dialect. The intense patriotism and the deep religious feeling which formed so intimate a part of the lives of the citizens are reproduced in their art and literature,

giving the greatest examples of them the added charm of locality. Their love of science was no less genuine than their love of art. In June 1471, a few weeks after the birth of Albert Durer, Johannes Muller, (surnamed Regiomontanus in allusion to Königsberg, his native village) the great mathematical genius, “the wonder of his generation,” took up his abode at Nuremberg, making her the true home of physical and mathematical science and contributing mightily to her reputation as “the capital of German art, the most precious jewel of the Empire, the meeting-place of art and industry.” “I have chosen Nuremberg for my place of residence,” he writes, “because there I find without difficulty all the peculiar instruments necessary for astronomy, and there it is easiest for me to keep in touch with the learned of all countries, for Nuremberg, thanks to the perpetual journeyings of her merchants, may be counted the centre of Europe.” Inspired with the eager desire to know everything, so characteristic of his age, he was equally desirous to impart his knowledge. We may trace to his influence Durer’s book on geometry and his beautiful chart of the heavens. Muller introduced popular science lectures, and organised the manufacture of astronomical and nautical instruments. His most famous pupil was Martin Behaim the constructor of the first globe and the adventurous navigator, whose monument (1890) may be seen in the Theresien Platz. Behaim in 1492 indicated on his terrestrial globe the precise route followed six years later by Vasco da Gama when he doubled the Cape of Good Hope. It was Behaim, too, who suggested to Magellan the first idea of the strait which bears his name. Behaim’s famous globe is kept in the Behaim House, which is in the Ægiden Platz, next to the house of Koberger, the printer, and opposite the statue of Melanchthon (by Burgschmiet, 1826).

Maximilian, “the last of the knights,” had taken a considerable part in the government before he succeeded his father in 1493. The Nurembergers, who always had an eye for a strong man, had already shown their loyalty to him. He had stayed amongst them at the house of Christopher Scheurl (father of the famous Dr Scheurl), and whilst there would seem to have amused himself light-heartedly enough. When about to depart, we are told, he invited twenty great ladies to dinner; after dinner, when they were all in a good humour, the Margraf Frederick asked Maximilian in the name of the ladies to stay a little longer and to dance with them. They, it is said, had taken away his boots and spurs, so he had no choice. Then the whole company adjourned to the Council House, several other young ladies were invited, and Maximilian stayed dancing all through the afternoon and night and arrived a day late at Neumarkt where the Count of the Palatinate had been expecting him all the preceding day.

As Emperor, Maximilian stayed at the Kaiserburg. A brilliant assembly attended his first Reichstag. Masques, dances, tourneys and so forth are recorded with gusto by the chroniclers. The Emperor, they say, entertained all the ladies of the town at dinner and provided them with two hundred and forty sorts of dishes. No wonder he was popular!

Nuremberg was not allowed to be content with supplying Maximilian with partners in the ball-room. In 1499 she had to support him in his disastrous war with Switzerland. The Nuremberg contingent was under Willibald Pirkheimer and Wolf Pömer. Beautifully dressed in red and white uniforms these soldiers earned the reputation of cowardice and treachery. Such imputations were, let it be confessed, not unfrequently cast upon Nuremberg courage; but on this occasion the Emperor took their part and refuted the charge.

Nuremberg knew at any rate how to fight her own battles. Throughout this period we find her engaged in continual quarrels with the Markgrafs of Brandenburg. The Burggraf Frederick once made Elector, had parted with the Burggrafship, sold it, all but the title, to the burghers in 1427. But principalities and territories were retained in that quarter, and about these, and their feudal rights and boundaries and tolls, endless trouble arose. Some fifty years later actual furious war resulted between the Elector Albert Achilles and the jealous citizens—a war in “which eight victories are counted on Albert’s part—furious successful skirmishes they call them; in one of which Albert plunged in alone, his Ritters being rather shy, and laid about him hugely, hanging by a standard he had taken, till his life was nearly beaten out. Eight victories, and also one defeat wherein Albert got captured and had to ransom himself. The captor was one Kunz of Kauffungen, the Nürnberg hired General at the time, a man known to some readers for his stealing of the Saxon princes (Prinzenraut, they call it), a feat which cost Kunz his head.”[19] Such quarrels continued, for the Markgrafs did not relinquish their efforts to extend their powers. Details it would be wearisome to give, but they illustrate the general family tendency of the Hohenzollern. It is characteristic that they were generally successful in their claims (all cases, it was now decided, arising from Nuremberg property outside the walls were to be tried by the Landgericht, of which the Markgraf was president), and based on this success still greater claims in the future.

The memoirs of Götz von Berlichingen furnish us with an interesting account of the Battle of the Forest of Nuremberg (1502), which affords a good example of the sort of thing continually occurring in those days.

Towards the end of May it was rumoured in the town that warlike preparations were being made in Ansbach, the headquarters of the Markgraf. The feelings of the citizens were still further roused by the fact that the Markgraf had taken under his protection an enemy of Nuremberg. The day of the Affalterbacher Fair was at hand. The prospect seemed so threatening that the Council sent a specially large contingent—2000 men, with a “Wagenburg” and cannon under the command of the Magistrate Hans von Weichsdorf, Wolf Haller, and Wolf Pömer—to escort their citizens who went to attend the fair. An accidental explosion of powder when they were starting seemed ominous. At home they kept a small force under Ulman Stromer, who drew up between the Frauen- and Spitler-Thor. On the day of the fair, the Markgraf appeared with a large force of knights, Swiss and local soldiery. Amongst them was Götz von Berlichingen, who was only twenty-two years of age. The following manœuvers then took place. In the morning some sixty horsemen were seen driving off the cattle about a quarter of a mile south of Nuremberg. Ulman Stromer thereupon marched out and took up a strong position, under protection of his guns, and drove the horsemen back into the woods, “for they did not find it very amusing: it is not everybody who likes to hear the cannon roar,” says Götz. The retreat of the enemy enticed Ulman Stromer to follow them with his carts and cannon into the wood. Suddenly he came upon the Markgraf Casimir with his main army. Though outnumbered, the Nurembergers did not lose their courage, but fired with such effect that the riff-raff of the enemy

cleared off, leaving the knights and Switzers to do battle. Under cover of a strong fire, “so that nothing could be seen for smoke,” Stromer tried to form a “Wagenburg” (waggon fortress), by having the carts driven round so as to form a circle about the men and guns, hoping to be able to wait in this extemporised fort till reinforcements should arrive from Affalterbach. Götz boasts that it was he who prevented this manœuvre from being executed. For he killed one of the drivers, and so interrupted the completion of the circle. The Brandenburgers were thus enabled to rush in, and compelled the citizens to take to flight. At this juncture the reinforcements came up, but it was too late. A general rush for safety to the town took place. On the bridge over the moat there was so great a crush of refugees that many were forced over into the water. Luckily the cannon on the Frauen Thor kept the Markgraf at a safe distance. Within the town a terrible panic had occurred. Götz, indeed, says that the place could easily have been taken—a statement not very easy to believe. At any rate, the Markgraf did not attempt it, but marched back to Schwabach to hold a service of thanksgiving, whilst the Nurembergers revenged themselves on the peasants whom they had taken prisoner. Intense indignation was felt and expressed against the Markgraf: prisoners were torn to pieces in the streets. At last a curious peace was arranged, to begin on July 1st, but not before. Each side tried to damage the other as much as possible before that day came, and the Council, in order to get in a good final blow, burned the Markgraf’s castle of Schönberg at the last moment. A peace thus inaugurated did not, as may be imagined, produce any lasting good feeling between the two parties. In the very next year fresh trouble arose over one Heinz Baum, a Nuremberg citizen who had come down in the world and been put into prison by his creditors. As soon as he was released, he left the town, threw up his citizenship, and, after writing various threatening letters to the Council, he surprised Hans Tucher, a Nuremberg patrician, when riding out to his country seat, and kept him prisoner till he was ransomed. With the Markgraf’s secret support, Baum proceeded to seize and keep in the stocks till ransom was paid all the citizens he could lay his hands on. Though the Emperor outlawed him, he pursued his way unhindered, protected by the Markgraf, till 1512, when Nuremberg bought off his chief supporter, and Heinz Baum retired to Bamberg, where he died poor but unpunished.

The importance of Nuremberg was still further enhanced by the part she took in the war of the Bavarian Succession. In 1503 George the Rich of Bavaria had died without male issue. According to the feudal right, his lands ought to have gone to the male heir, but, hating as he did his natural successors, his cousins Albrecht of Bavaria and Wolfgang, he had made his daughter his sole heiress, and married her to her cousin Ruprecht (third son of the powerful Philip, Elector of the Palatinate), whom he adopted as his son and made governor of a great part of the country. On the death of Duke George, Ruprecht succeeded, but Albrecht and Wolfgang raised such strenuous protest that the Emperor, after repeated attempts to arrange a compromise, was obliged to outlaw Ruprecht and all his supporters, his father the Elector Philip included. War was the inevitable result. The Emperor and other princes, amongst whom was the Markgraf of Brandenburg, gave their support to Albrecht, who promised them a share in what was conquered. Many of Philip’s possessions were close to Nuremberg. Albrecht was therefore able to entice her to fight for him, promising her in return for her aid 40,000 gulden, with all the Palatinate towns and the value of all George’s towns that she might manage to take. With the aid of three special cannon, called the Owl, the Falcon, and the Fishermaid, capable of shooting balls of 263 pounds weight, the Nuremberg army captured a considerable number of Palatinate towns. But even after the deaths first of Ruprecht and then of his brave widow, who had carried on the struggle like another Margaret of Anjou, the war still dragged on on behalf of their little sons, and the Palatinate party were actually getting a little the best of it when, at a Reichstag in Cologne, Maximilian at length arranged a successful compromise.

Nuremberg was allowed to keep what she had taken, and now had more land than any other free town in the Empire. It was a doubtful blessing. She was involved in constant wars to keep it, in further quarrels with the Markgraf over the rights of Fraisgericht,—of jurisdiction in matters of life and death in the newly acquired towns, and she had to pay largely increased contributions to the Empire. Altogether she was impoverished rather than benefited by her new property.

We have now to trace the story of the celebrated feud with Götz von Berlichingen—the warrior knight, the chivalrous and charitable, the brave, free-booting noble, Götz of the Iron Hand. Such is the character Goethe gave him when he centred in him, as the heroic champion of the privileges of the Free Knights, the interest of his Shakesperian drama. Truth, however, compels us to declare, that though men like Götz or Franz von Sickingen, the Robin Hoods of Germany, had the qualities of a certain rough justice and courage, they were, for the rest, wholly undeniable brigands. The love of destruction, disorder, and rapine, and the hatred of authority were their chief motives. They used their rights as pretexts for violence and devoted themselves to brigandage as to a legitimate vocation and organised industry. They were, indeed, little better than leaders of bands of robbers, the wolves of civilisation.

“One day,” says Götz, “as I was on the point of making an attack, I perceived a pack of wolves descending on a flock of sheep. This incident seemed to me a good omen. We were going to begin the fight. A shepherd was near us, guarding his sheep, when, as if to give us the signal, five wolves threw themselves simultaneously on the flock. I saw it and noted it gladly. I wished them success and ourselves too, saying, ‘Good luck, dear comrades, success to you everywhere!’ I took it as a very good augury that we had begun the attack together!”

It was in 1495 that Maximilian, ever anxious to promote peace and order within the borders of his Empire, abrogated by edict the right of private war under the penalty of the ban of the Empire—a penalty which involved the dooms of outlawry and excommunication. Thus the “last of the Knights” gave the death-blow to the chivalry of the Middle Ages. Hitherto every German noble holding fief directly from the Emperor had been on his own property a petty monarch, as it were, subordinate to the Imperial authority alone. These proud military barons,—an ever-increasing host of petty lords, since the rule of inheritance in Germany was division among the male heirs—esteemed above all other privileges the right of making war on each other, or on the towns, with no other ceremony than that of three days’ notice in writing (Fehdebrief). The evils and dangers of this privilege are clear, but they were left untouched by the Golden Bull. With the advance of civilisation, which was ever opposed to the feudal system, this Faustrecht had come to be regarded as intolerable by such princes, bishops and free towns as suffered from the consequent disorder of the country and the marauding expeditions of the free-knights. For the residence of every baron had become, as we have seen, a fortress from which, as his passions or avarice dictated, a band of marauders sallied forth to back his quarrel or to collect an extorted revenue from the merchants who presumed to pass through his domain. Princes and bishops, abbots and wealthy merchants of the towns banded together, therefore, to enforce the new ordinance and to suppress the petty feudatories, who, like Götz, struggled to maintain their privilege and independence. Under Sigismund various efforts had been made to suppress the harrying of the knights and many robber-nests on solitary rocks were taken. When taken the robbers, especially those of the lower class, were made short work of and dealt with in various ways—ways best illustrated by a visit to the torture chambers of the castle. There was one Hans Schuttensamen, for instance, on whose head the Council put a price. A citizen of Bamberg came forward and claimed the reward, saying he had shot him. After he had received the money his story was found to be a stretch of the imagination and he was burnt accordingly. Ten years later (1474) the robber also got burnt.

So bitterly were these knights hated and feared that even the great tourneys, such as the one recorded in 1446,[20] when all the neighbouring nobles came in from the surrounding country and tilted and displayed their skill and valour in the market-place, were very unpopular with the peace-loving burghers.

Nuremberg, then, joined the Swabian League to suppress such knights as chose still to indulge in the forbidden Club Law or Faustrecht. It was not long before she came into direct collision with Götz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand. Götz, who had a fine gift for chastising the gutter-blooded citizens of a free town, had long been anxious to try conclusions with the men of Nuremberg. He carried out his intention on a very futile pretext. The Nurembergers, it seems, had pursued and fought in the adjacent woods some unknown knights, who had refused, when challenged, to give their names as honest knights and fled. Now, some years after, Hans von Geislingen, brother of one George, who was the Squire of Eustace of Lichtenstein and was killed on this occasion, demanded blood-money for his brother, and on being refused, he seized some Nuremberg citizens and merchants’ caravans. He was outlawed, but this did not prevent Götz von Berlichingen from helping him. George, he declared, had been his page (a statement that had the defect of being untrue), and he demanded a large sum of money in compensation. When this was refused Götz did not send an Absagebrief, or letter of notice of war, but merely a note saying that he was considering, with his friends, how to get compensation. His bitterness was further increased by the action of the Council, who shortly afterwards decapitated Sebastian von Seckendorf, a knight who had long been a source of annoyance, and whom they had at last been successful in catching. Suddenly, and without warning, Götz and his friends swooped down on a party of fifty-five Nuremberg merchants who were travelling back from the fair at Leipzig, under the escort of the Bishop of Bamberg. These he plundered and took prisoners as they were crossing the Rednitz, near Forcheim. Götz did not treat his prisoners too gently, but used the art of torture to persuade them to offer huge ransoms. The news of this seizure caused consternation and surprise in Nuremberg. Götz’s letter of notice came only nine days later to the Council. Spies were sent out to discover his whereabouts: the town was prepared for a siege, and 800 mercenary soldiers were hired. Götz was outlawed. But the Council were accused of being slack to avenge, what they called “a handful of small merchants, not of patrician families,” and Maximilian was not willing to be plunged into an Imperial war “to recover a merchant’s sack of pepper.” What he did do was to attempt to bring about one of his favourite compromises. The Markgraf was appointed to arbitrate, and his award was that Nuremberg should pay a certain sum. As is not unusual in the case of arbitrations, the money was not paid. Götz, laughing at the sentence of outlawry that had been passed upon him, protected by the princes who resented peace and order in an Empire, continued to ravage, burn and pillage, until the Swabian League was renewed, at the end of 1512, to keep the “eternal peace,” at which Maximilian aimed. Nuremberg once more joined the League, on Maximilian’s injunction, though she distrusted the alliance with the Markgraf thereby involved. The League, however, decided in January 1513 to take strong measures to repress the outlawed nobles and to destroy the castles of the robber-knights. But the Emperor objected, and said that he wanted to arrive at a peaceful compromise with Götz. The Nurembergers replied that they would be content if the latter paid over a sum of money sufficient to compensate the merchants for the losses they had suffered. At the same time they took prisoner a robber-knight who was a friend of the Markgraf, and to procure his release the Markgraf promised to arrange peace for them with Hans von Geislingen. This he succeeded in doing. Götz, however, remained at war, proud and obstinate in spite of all mediation. Again and again the League threatened war, the Emperor temporised, and Götz plundered, until at last Maximilian got it arranged that Götz should pay 14000 florins damages. These were subscribed chiefly by his supporters, such as the Bishop of Würzburg, who also persuaded him to cease from his career of robbery.

Maximilian died in 1519. He had shown himself a good friend to the Nuremberg artists. No doubt his patronage and his keen interest in art and literature had been partly responsible for the good work of this period. He was himself an author, for he had a considerable share in the Weisskunig and the Theuerdank—the latter, a poem which describes allegorically the private life and ideals of the Emperor, being chiefly executed by Melchior Pfinzing, his secretary, the Provost of St. Sebald’s and builder of the Parsonage. Of the artists, he frequently employed Peter Vischer and Veit Stoss, whilst he showed the greatest appreciation of Albert Durer, to whom he gave a pension of 100 florins. When at Nuremberg in 1512 Maximilian with the aid of Willibald Pirkheimer and others, planned a colossal Holzschnittwerk, or wood-cut picture, “The Triumph,” in which he himself was, as usual in the works of art he inspired, to be idealised as the greatest of princes. Durer was to draw part of it. Ninety-two blocks did Durer design for the Triumphal Arch in the course of the next two years. Amongst other works for this patron we may mention The Triumphal Car, the Crucifixion, and the ornamental borders of the famous Book of Hours. Finally when Maximilian held the diet at Augsburg in 1518, Durer, who was one of the commissioners sent by the town of Nuremberg, drew the Emperor’s portrait from the life, “in the little room upstairs in the palace.” From this sketch he painted the picture now at Vienna, another version of which is in the German Museum at Nuremberg. Durer was as good a courtier as artist. Melanchthon tells us how Maximilian was endeavouring to draw a design which he wished Durer to carry out, but kept breaking the charcoal in doing so. Durer took the charcoal and, without breaking it, easily finished the drawing. Maximilian, somewhat vexed, asked how this was, to which the artist replied, “I should not like your Majesty to be able to draw as well as I. It is my province to draw and yours to rule.” Aliud est plectrum, aliud sceptrum. The hand that wields the sceptre is too strong for the brush.

Maximilian was, in many aspects of his character, a typical product of the Renaissance. Nuremberg had felt the full force of the revival of learning, the new stimulus in art and literature which was being brought to the West from Constantinople by the Jews and Greeks who had been driven out by the Turks. Not a few of the knights and pilgrims, too, must have passed through Nuremberg on their return from the Crusades, and her growing commerce with the East and West and Italy would tend to keep her in touch with the developments which were taking place in the world of ideas, and which were tending inevitably towards the Reformation. She had been among the first to welcome and to practise the new “German art” of printing. Between 1470, when Johann Sensenschmidt had brought Gutenberg’s invention to Nuremberg, and the end of the century, twenty-five printers received the rights of citizenship. Johannes Regiomontanus printed here in 1472 his Kalendarium Novum. But Anthoni Koberger was the most celebrated man in the trade. Over two hundred different works, mostly in large folio, were issued from his twenty-four printing presses before 1500. The “prince of booksellers,” as one of his contemporaries calls him, he had agents in every country, and sixteen depôts in the principal towns in Christendom. The first work of art which left his presses was a magnificent illustrated Bible, published in 1483, and printed from blocks he had obtained from Henry Quentel of Cologne. But, besides the Bible and theology, the press poured forth a stream of literature of every kind, spreading new ideas with unexampled rapidity, and giving expression to thoughtful criticism or popular satire of established abuses. Under such influences as these it was felt that a new era of progress was at hand. Nuremberg, stimulated by the education of self-government and of commercial intercourse, did not fail to produce such independent humanists as Conrad Celtes, Dr Scheurl, Lazarus Spengler, Albert Durer, Willibald Pirkheimer, who could write as well as read, and preach as well as applaud the doctrines of necessary reform. She was, in fact, one of the first towns to express sympathy with Martin Luther, when he nailed his ninety-five theses on the church door of Wittenberg, in protest against what Erasmus had called “the crime of false pardons,” the sale of Indulgences, to which Leo X. had resorted in order to raise money for a little war.

Luther came to Nuremberg in the course of the next year (1518) and stayed in the Augustinerkloster. His friend Leirck, we are told, had to buy him a new cowl, in order that he might appear in fitting costume before the Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, where he was summoned to answer for his heresies. None the less the Cardinal received at Nuremberg a great welcome next year, and Luther’s followers continued at present to perform the rites and cling to the old forms of the Church. Reform, not revolution, was what they still hoped for. But the stream of events carried them rapidly with it. Willibald Pirkheimer, thanks to a satire against Eck, the bitter opponent of Luther, was included in 1519 in the Papal Bull, by which Luther was excommunicated. The Council, annoyed by the excommunication of Pirkheimer and Lazarus Spengler (Clerk of the Council), refused to interfere with the printing and publishing of Luther’s works, and gradually passed over to his side. To show how little they respected this decree of excommunication, they actually sent Spengler to represent the town at the Diet of Worms. For Charles V. held his first Reichstag (1521) at Worms, and not at Nuremberg, because of an outbreak of plague there. (Outbreaks of plague were not uncommon at Nuremberg, nor were they surprising. For all refuse was always thrown into the Pegnitz on the understanding that “the river would eat up all the dirt.”) It was at this Diet of Worms that Luther made his Confession of Faith, and fought single-handed against Pope and Emperor the great battle for the right of freedom of conscience. When, as the result, the ban of the Empire had been passed upon him and all his works, and the report was abroad that violent hands had been laid on him, Albert Durer, who had followed him from the first, wrote in his diary, expressing at the same time the opinion of the nation; “Whether he lives or whether he has been murdered, I know not; but he has suffered for the Christian faith and has been punished by the unchristian Papacy.” That, too, was the opinion of all the more important men in Nuremberg. Cautious in expressing their feelings at first, after a time the people boldly showed their dislike of monasteries and their approval of the new movement.

“Wake up! Now may the dawn be seen;
And singing in a thicket green
I hear a tuneful nightingale,”

wrote Hans Sachs, in a poem which had no small influence in forwarding the reformation movement. So, in many of his later prose dialogues, he upholds liberty of conscience and freedom of opinion in religious matters. The Council, in deference to the Emperor, made a bare pretence of stopping the publication of Lutheran writings. So half-hearted were they that the Papal Legate demanded that stronger measures should be taken, and that Lutheran preachers should be imprisoned. But the Council pursued its policy of keeping the peace between both parties, taking a middle course and siding with neither reactionary nor revolutionary. That policy could not be pursued for long. The Council had to yield, not unwillingly, to public opinion. At a meeting of representatives of the towns at Rothenburg, held there in 1524 because forbidden by Imperial edict to meet at Spires and to discuss religious matters, Nuremberg was very bold and “gave three brave Christian reasons” why they should not obey this edict. She organised a further meeting of the towns at Ulm, and for herself began to determine on a new form of worship. The Sacrament was now administered in both kinds, and Mass was read in German, with Lutheran omissions, by the Prior of the Augustin Monastery. Both the Parish Churches followed his example. The Council excused themselves for allowing this by saying that they did it to avoid an uproar among the people. The Bishop of Bamberg held an inquiry, and summoned the officiating priests before him. They denied his power to judge them, and his sentence of excommunication was practically ignored. Other towns followed the example of Nuremberg, and imitated her Lutheran services. Meanwhile the dislike of the people for monasteries and nunneries broke out more vehemently. The air was full of satires and cartoons directed against nuns and monks. Hans Sachs was not silent on this point. At last the Council ordered these institutions to be handed over to the guidance of the Lutheran preachers. Charitas Pirkheimer, the virtuous and accomplished abbess of the Klarakloster, friend and correspondent of Durer and sister of Willibald, has left us in her memoirs a touching account of the manner in which she was torn from her beloved convent, over which no breath of scandal had ever passed, and which contained many of the daughters of the best families in Nuremberg. These memoirs are well worth looking at by those who care to see the other side of the question, and to make the acquaintance of a beautiful and fascinating character. Unfortunately we have no space in this little book to deal with them here.

Shortly after this an organised discussion between the representatives of the old and new orders of religious belief was held before the Council. One by one, twelve points of doctrine were put to the heads of the Lutheran, Carmelite, Augustin and Dominican bodies, and each answered after his kind. The Catholic party finally claimed that the decision between them should be referred to the University; but Osiander, declaring that God’s word was the only salvation, wound up the discussion with a bold and eloquent speech, and called upon the Council for an immediate decision. The Council gave their vote for the Lutheran case, and thus formally threw in their lot with the Reformation. The following year saw a whole series of decrees from the Council carrying out Lutheran principles. Thus, chiefly no doubt in deference to the popular demand—for these were the days of the terrible Peasant wars—the property of the priests was ordered to be taxed. There was little violence. The influence of the gentle Melanchthon, who came to Nuremberg in 1525, did much to smooth down any tendency to brutality, or harsh treatment of the monks and nuns. Even in the first flash of religious excitement education was not neglected. The educational movement inaugurated by Luther’s letter to the towns asking them to found schools, met with eager support at Nuremberg. Through the agency of Hieronymus Paumgärtner and Spengler, Philip Melanchthon was induced to come and assist at the founding of a new gymnasium for secondary education. No expense was spared, and Melanchthon brought a brilliant staff of teachers with him. The institution was established in the buildings of the Ægidienkloster. But the school languished. Nuremberg, after all, was a town of shopkeepers, and, though some were ready to pay for masters, few were ready to pay, or spare the time, for their sons’ higher education. The school was at last moved to Altdorf, and grew into the University there. The present gymnasium was refounded in 1633. Melanchthon’s statue, mentioned above, stands in front of the building erected in 1711 on the site of the old monastery which together with the church was burnt down in 1699. Conrad III. is said to have built the church for the Benedictine Order in 1140. Three chapels remain—the Eucharius, the Wolfgang, and the Tetzel chapels, of which the first is the oldest, and affords an interesting example of the transition style (see p. [260]).

The Council all this time had a difficult part to play: it had to show itself both strong and conciliatory. When the Peasants’ War broke out, Nuremberg, the capital of Franconia, was not unaffected by it though

she suffered less than her neighbours—Rothenburg for example. But the new-found spiritual freedom preached from Lutheran pulpits was likely to be misinterpreted by the lower classes in the town, as it had been by the peasants outside, and construed into temporal licence. The Council, therefore, whilst striving not to cause any irritation, had to take strong measures to repress the outbreaks which occurred within the walls, when the peasants, whom Götz von Berlichingen had joined, were ravaging and rioting through the country in their barbarous struggle for emancipation. First of all the Council very wisely expelled Thomas Münzer, the mad, well-meaning fanatic and agitator, and then promised the peasants to remain neutral, as long as they did not ravage her territory or tamper with her citizens. Still, for a few months, Nuremberg was in imminent danger. She might have fallen into the hands of the rebels at any moment in the May of this year (1525). The Council, realising the peril, remitted some of the tithes, as a sop to the peasants, and sent urgent appeals for aid to the Swabian League. But the thunder-cloud passed by without breaking over Nuremberg, and she, to her credit be it recorded, when the revolt was crushed, was not slow to speak on behalf of towns like Rothenburg which had taken the side of the peasants. The result of her intervention was to preserve for us the walls and fortifications of Rothenburg. The illustration shows the towers and gateways there which recall the White Tower and Lauferschlagthurm at Nuremberg.

In the later developments of the Protestant revolution, we find Willibald Pirkheimer warmly supporting Luther with his pen, when Zwingle, denying the Real Presence, treated the Sacrament as symbolic, and was violently denounced by Luther for this view. Pirkheimer, however, was no blind follower of Luther. He, remembering his sister’s case, thought the monasteries and convents too hardly treated, and he saw, what Luther failed to see, that the peasant risings were the inevitable results of such times of upheaval and repression. He grew soured and disappointed with Luther. Like Scheurl, and, as he says (1528)—

“Like Durer, I was at first a good Lutheran. We hoped things would be better than in the Roman Church, but the Lutherans are worse. The former were hypocrites: the latter openly live disgraceful lives. For Justification by Faith alone is not possible. Without works faith is dead. Luther, with his bold, petulant tongue, has either fallen under a delusion, or else is being led astray by the Evil One.”

However, in spite of splits, the wave of Protestantism was not diminishing. The answer to the Emperor’s order that stringent measures should be taken against the Lutheran heresy, and that the Edict of Worms should be carried out, was, that the towns, under the leadership of Nuremberg, banded themselves together with the Lutheran princes, and at the Diet of Spires (1526) it was decreed that “Each State should, as regards the Diet of Worms, so live, rule, and bear itself as it thought it could answer to God and the Empire.”

From this decree, which was an acknowledgment of the temporary breakdown of Roman Catholicism, resulting from the Emperor’s quarrel with the Pope, came the division of Germany into Catholic and Protestant States. Next year, when the Bishop of Bamberg commanded the priests of Nuremberg to observe the Roman Catholic ceremonies, the Council, whom he asked not to interfere with the carrying out of his order, were able to point to this Edict. In order, however, to be secure from the Swabian League, which was hostile to the new teaching, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, and other towns, bound themselves together and protested against any interference, on the part of the League, in religious matters.

But in 1529 the Emperor had settled his quarrel with the Pope and returned to his loyalty to Rome. Taking advantage of this, the Papal party succeeded in passing a decree in the Reichstag confirming the Edict of Worms. The Lutheran princes protested against the decree, and so earned the name of “Protestants.” The Protestant communities assembled in Nuremberg, and sent a representative to the Emperor, who was in Italy, to complain. The Emperor, however, took a firm tone with them and declared the dispensation of Spires at an end. Philip von Hessen and other zealous leaders were now very eager to make a firm stand and to form a Protestant union against this fresh attempt to suppress the new teaching. But the Lutherans could not bring themselves to work with the Zwinglians. The influence of Luther and Osiander was sufficient to deter Nuremberg from joining in such a scheme. Wisely or not, she refused to belong to any union which might bring her into conflict with the head of the Empire. But, though she said she would not take up arms, she knew her own mind in religious matters. At a Reichstag held at Augsburg (1530) the Emperor was to be present. Owing to the exertions of the Nuremberg Council, the Evangelical party united to send the celebrated “Confession,” or statement of Lutheran doctrines, which was drawn up by Luther and Melanchthon, signed by Nuremberg and Reutlingen, and read to Charles. The representatives of Nuremberg also took with them a confession of faith, drawn up under the direction of the Council by Nuremberg theologians. A peaceful solution of the question was what they aimed at: a recognition of religious freedom brought about by argument, not by arms. For this reason, and because she had a great distrust of the Protestant princes (“The princes are princes,” it was said, “and if anything happens they will withdraw their heads out of the noose and leave the towns in the lurch”) Nuremberg would not join “the league of Schmalkalden,” formed by the Protestant princes to defend themselves from that crushing of the Lutheran heresy by the Imperial power, which the Diet now threatened. This league, in spite of Luther’s protest against opposition to the civil power, would have led at once to war, had not a Turkish invasion of Austria diverted Charles’ attention. Something like a religious truce was proclaimed, and Nuremberg sent a double contingent of men to help Charles.

It was, perhaps, in recognition of this proof of loyalty that Charles, on his way to Regensburg in 1541, held the Reichstag at Nuremberg for the first time. The town on this occasion was in a great state of festivity. The roads were strewn with sand; festoons and hangings brightened the streets which were lined by 5000 armed citizens. Bells were rung and cannon fired as Charles, clothed in black, with a felt hat on his head, rode into the town, beneath a magnificent red velvet canopy held by eight members of the Council in turn. He passed beneath a triumphal arch which had been erected near Neudörfer’s house, in the Burgstrasse. In the Rathaus a solemn act of homage was performed, and the Emperor confirmed all the privileges of the town. Costly gifts were lavished on him; fireworks were let off from the bastion then being built (see p. [115]). The Council, in fact, though they would concede nothing, even at the Emperor’s request, on the religious question, showed themselves loyal and conciliatory. The bells of the principal churches were ordered to be rung at noon, to remind all good Christians to pray for protection against the Turks, the arch-enemies of Christianity. This ringing, called Betläuten, still takes place.

The Civil War, which was the inevitable result of the formation of the Schmalkalden League, had only been postponed. The Emperor and the Catholic princes tried to reduce the Protestant princes to obedience, with the aid of Spanish soldiery, soon after the death of Luther. Though Charles had said he was going to attack the princes and not the towns, the northern towns promised help to the princes. Nuremberg, however, determined to obey the Emperor; she strove, in fact, to pursue, so far as possible, her usual policy of inactive neutrality. Money was paid to the Emperor: but, when urgent appeals for help came from the princes, the Council sent them privately a sum of money, but would take no further step for the Evangelical cause at present. The sympathy of the majority was, indeed, with the League, but they shrank from risking all the great wealth and privileges of the town for the common welfare and for the freedom of religious belief. Nürnberg trage auf beiden achseln was the bitter sneer of the day. The temper of her citizens was sorely tried when the Emperor’s ill-behaved Spanish troops were quartered on them. Still, money was supplied loyally enough to the Imperial treasury. In religious matters they remained steadfast, politely but firmly forbidding the Emperor’s Confessor to read Mass to the nuns in the Katharinenkirche.

The result of Charles’ campaigns against the princes was to leave him apparently more powerful than any Emperor since Charlemagne. We can hardly wonder if, in the Reichstag of 1547, he tried to get himself recognised as supreme head of the Empire, not only in political, but also in religious matters. A year later he appointed a Commission which published the “Interim,” establishing a half-and-half religion for all not of the Roman Catholic faith. It was called the strait-waistcoat of German Protestantism. Papacy was thereby almost reintroduced. The work of Luther seemed entirely undone. This attempt at repressing Evangelical teaching roused the Nurembergers. Sermons thundered from the pulpit, and the Council was severely criticised. None the less they accepted the “Interim.” Osiander resigned his post and shook the dust of Nuremberg from off his feet. Others followed his example. But, in spite of protest, the Catholic reaction was, for the moment, successful. It could not last. The Spanish yoke was in itself intolerable. In 1552 the revolt of the princes, in alliance even with France, began. The Council pursued its old policy of neutrality—a policy destined this time not to pay. Money was contributed to the princes: devotion to the Emperor was expressed. So they thought they were safe. But the Markgraf of Brandenburg, Albert Alcibiades, who had declared for the Protestant cause, held only to the princes’ manifesto, that those who were not for them were against them. He turned his eyes on his old enemy, and seized the merchant-trains that were leaving the city in fancied security. Then, suddenly in May, he appeared with a strong force before Lichtenau—a castle and mart belonging to Nuremberg. The place fell into his hands, was burnt and razed to the ground. Next day he sent a message, bearing the Bourbon arms, to express his surprise that he had received no help from Nuremberg. In the name of the King of France and of the allied princes who “purposed to bring back and keep liberty in the dear Fatherland, and to establish a right and true Christian religion,” he demanded whether the town intended to join the league against the Emperor or not. She referred to her dealings with the princes. But the Markgraf, ignoring this subterfuge, moved on the city, and the Council, seeing that he was set on war, determined to stand a siege, and strained every nerve to strengthen the fortifications. The princes, indeed, remonstrated with the Markgraf; but in vain. He advanced, ravaging the villages, taking castles, burning and plundering all he could lay his hands on in his drunken and murderous march. When he arrived beneath the walls of Nuremberg, a truce of eight days was arranged till the Markgraf could hear from Francis I. of France. Meanwhile he busied himself with throwing up entrenchments. But before the eight days had expired, he opened fire on the city. Some cannon-shots struck the Ægidienskirche, in which a service was being held. One house in the Ægidiensplatz still bears the marks of shot that struck it on this occasion, says Dr Reicke. Meanwhile Nuremberg was not slow to defend herself. Her citizens returned the fire with energy, and made some successful sallies. Gold they seem to have used as well as steel; for the Markgraf, after one or two experiments, declared that he would hold no more parleyings with the Nurembergers, for that they had tried to corrupt one of his commanders.

The position of Nuremberg was now very serious. No help was to be expected from any quarter. When, therefore, the towns of Franconia and Swabia came forward at last to act as intermediaries, she welcomed them with every feeling of relief, and was easily persuaded to join, nominally, at any rate, the league against the Emperor. The Markgraf’s casus belli was now gone; but his demands knew no bounds. He insisted on a huge indemnity and the right to garrison the town. In face of this, continued resistance was the only course for Nuremberg. The siege began again with renewed vigour. The Markgraf, who boasted, between his curses, that murder and burning were his favourite pastimes, now thoroughly enjoyed himself. He destroyed, in this war, 3 monasteries, 2 small towns, 170 villages, 19 castles, 75 estates, 28 mills, and 3000 acres of wood. The position of Nuremberg thus became more and more difficult. Her trade and buildings were suffering severely: the forest was being burnt down. The lukewarmness with which she had espoused their cause made it not worth while for the princes to relieve her. The Markgraf, on the other hand, had received numerous reinforcements, and had won over the neighbouring towns to his side. At last, therefore, Nuremberg yielded on these terms (June 9, 1552):—

(1) She was to join the League on the same terms as Augsburg and the other towns.

(2) She was to demand no compensation for injuries inflicted.

(3) She was to pay a large indemnity in cash and war material.

(4) The Markgraf was to give back all the castles, etc., which he had taken.

(5) Matters in dispute between the two parties were to be decided by a commission of princes.

So, for a moment, ended this disastrous war, only to break out again with variations in the following year, until the Emperor, who had entered into treaty with the League, declared the Markgraf outlawed and bade the four Rhenish electors to carry out the sentence. For the Markgraf had refused to enter into this treaty, which, seeing that the money and lands he had won in the name of religion and liberty were not guaranteed to him by it, he denounced as a betrayal of the German nation and carried on the war on his own account. His power was broken at last in a battle with the allies near Schwarzach.

Nuremberg paid a douceur to the Emperor and was excused from her obligations to the Markgraf, whose lands were sequestered. It is amusing to find that, in spite of this, the Markgraf’s rightful heir, George Frederick, succeeded him and actually obtained through the Emperor compensation from the allies for the damage done to his property. Hence arose a fresh series of quarrels with Nuremberg.

The hatred of Nuremberg for the Elector Albert is expressed in the unsparing satire of Hans Sachs, in which the full bitterness of ruthless patriotism finds vent. This poem is of so violent a nature that the Council suppressed it, but a copy is still preserved in the library. It was written in 1557 after the Markgraf’s death, and describes the descent into hell of this “blütiger Kriegsfürst.” A spirit appears to Hans and bids him accompany him for the purpose of seeing how the soul of a bloodthirsty warrior goes to—heaven,

“Ich will dir zeigen ein Kriegsfürsten
Den allezeit hart nach blut ward dürsten
Welcher schier das ganze Deutschland
Mit Krieg erweckt—hat durch sein hand
Wollauf rund kom bald mit dar
Schan wie sein sel gen Himmel far,”

and shows the reception the Markgraf gets there from the soldiers he has not paid, the citizens and peasants, with their wives and children, whom he has robbed and ruined, and the wretched men whom he has forced to murder the helpless and innocent.

The result of the treaty we have mentioned above was that the “Interim” was revoked. Religion was declared free. Three years later came the peace of Augsburg, with its legal recognition of the Protestant States and its system of toleration—cujus regio, ejus religio—not of the sort to avert the evils of the Thirty Years War.

Nuremberg was now at last at peace and kept on good terms with the new Emperor. But the Hapsburg emperors seldom visited her. In 1570, however, the Emperor Maximilian II. was welcomed with such pomp and jubilation as had greeted Charles V. On this occasion the records mention the novelty of an elephant bearing a gold and grey canopy with a Moorish mahout. Again we are told that when the Emperor Matthias, then King of Bohemia, stayed in the town in 1612, on his way to be crowned King of Rome, he was lodged, not in the Castle but in the Ægidienplatz. The house of Martin Peller was intended for his residence, but to this the King’s chamberlain objected on the ground that the Queen did not care for that style of architecture and decoration. This house, on the north side of the Ægidienplatz, is a very fine specimen of rich Florentine, Renaissance building. It is interesting to observe how the façade has been adapted to the old German high-pitched roof. It was built in 1605 by Jakob Wolff, and is now used for the art and furniture show-rooms of Herr J. A. Eysser. Within will be found a grand hall, court and staircase, carved and decorated in the same rich style, and upstairs a beautifully panelled room.

The policy of the town during this period was purely defensive. The wars with the Markgraf had cost Nuremberg dear, and she now set herself to recover from their disastrous effects. Her history for the next few years is a record of peace and of commercial and architectural activity. The great new building of the Rathaus was begun in the year 1622 by Jakob Wolff, the younger. The outbreak of the Thirty Years War prevented it from ever being really completed.

With regard to religious matters peace was preserved outwardly. Whilst the struggles between the Catholics and Protestants and Lutherans and Calvinists and various other sects were being stubbornly fought out elsewhere, the Nuremberg Council was content to forbid the propagation of false doctrines by word or writing. Cujus regio, ejus religio. They rejected the Konkordienformal drawn up at Magdeburg and directed against Melanchthon and his followers. And in 1573 they, in conjunction with the Markgraf, published a sort of Confession of Faith, consisting of various Lutheran and other theological works, which was signed by the clergy and accepted as a sort of rule for the churches. It was called the Nuremberg Konkordienbuch—Libri Normales—and every priest was required to swear to conform to it.

Perhaps one of the most important occurrences for Nuremberg, in connection with these theological matters, was the founding of the University of Altdorf (south-west of Nuremberg). Joachim Camerarius, we are told, suggested to Joachim Haller, the superintendent of the Nuremberg schools, that he should form a new school on the pattern of the monastic schools in Saxony, at which youths were prepared for the University. This school was to be outside the town, so that there should be no distractions to interfere with the work of the students. The Council approved of the scheme. The school was founded and endowed, and Melanchthon’s institution at St. Ægidien’s was moved there. In 1622 the Emperor raised it to the rank of a University. Among the most famous of its alumni was Goethe’s grandfather. Leibnitz received his degree as doctor-of-law, and Oberst von Pappenheim and the great Wallenstein matriculated there. But whilst Pappenheim became rector for a short period, Wallenstein, by reason of his wild excesses, was requested to leave after a residence of five months. The University, however, after a chequered career, fell at last on evil days: the new University of Erlangen proved too powerful a rival on her borders, and in 1809 the old University of Altdorf was by royal order abolished.

CHAPTER IV
Nuremberg and the Thirty Years War
Wallenstein—Gustavus Adolphus—Kaspar Hauser.

THE Catholic Reaction was now in full swing. With the determination of Catholicism to regain her ancient dominion came the Thirty Years War, the last and cruellest of the religious wars, which deprived Germany of, some say, half her population, and turned a comparatively rich and prosperous country into a barren desert.

The violence of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria towards the town of Donauwörth (1607), “which had been put under Ban of the Empire for some fault on the part of the populace against a flaring Mass-procession which had no business to be there,” filled the free-towns and Protestant communities with dark forebodings of approaching disturbance. An Evangelical League, “The Union,” was formed by the towns and princes for the purposes of self-defence against any attacks on religious freedom. Nuremberg joined it in 1610. This step was, of course, distasteful to the Emperor, but Nuremberg was left no choice in the matter. For the bishops of Bamberg and Eichstätt had forced the Nuremberg Evangelical subjects, living in their dioceses, to revert to the old religion. The Catholic communities formed a counter-league. Only a signal was wanted to make the opposing parties draw swords; and in 1618 the Bohemian resistance to the suppression of the Evangelical religion gave the signal for that bloody war, in which Nuremberg was to endure her full share of suffering. But, first, for a long time she endeavoured to pursue her old policy of neutrality, keeping peace with both parties and remaining subject to the Emperor. Meantime, as one after another of the Catholic generals passed through, men were quartered on Nuremberg in ceaseless relays, and she was bled of money and provisions. The treasury was depleted; trade disorganised; and the peasantry suffered cruelly.

In 1629 Ferdinand II. thought the time had come to strike a determined blow for Catholicism, and he published an Edict of Restitution, giving back to the Roman Catholics all the ecclesiastical property and institutions which had been handed over to the Evangelists by the Treaty of Passau and the Peace of Augsburg. This brought matters to a crisis. But even yet Nuremberg did not follow the example of Magdeburg and make a firm stand against religious aggressions. Even when Gustavus Adolphus, the Protestant champion, the Lion of the North, had landed on the Pomeranian coast, and made secret proposals of union with her, she turned a deaf ear to him, and received, with princely honours, Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, the Catholic General, when on his way to Memmingen. But at a convention of the Evangelical communities at Leipzig, called together by the Elector of Saxony, she did sign a complaint to the Emperor with regard to religious oppression, and also an agreement of the communities to help each other in case of need, and to prevent the unbearable quartering of troops and other exactions of the Emperor. Then in 1631 came the fall of Magdeburg. The subsequent horrors of that two-days’ sack struck terror into the hearts of Protestant Germany. Nuremberg gave in at once to the demands of the Emperor. She denounced the Leipzig Convention, dismissed her soldiers, and paid the money required of her. In spite of these concessions, she had reason to fear that the freedom of the town would be forfeited. Tilly’s defeat at Breitenfeld, however, prevented the Emperor from carrying out his expressed intention. Inspired by that victory of the Swedes, the Council plucked up courage to refuse almost all Imperial contributions. If they had consulted the wishes of the citizens, they would have joined Gustavus Adolphus forthwith. They still hankered after neutrality, however, and even when Gustavus Adolphus informed them that he would treat neutrals as enemies, they would only promise to be true to the Evangelical faith. The Swedish King continued to press them, and, still in the hope of being able to keep in favour with the Emperor, they sent a sum of money. But Gustavus Adolphus demanded their full and open support. They were still torn between the fear of offending the Emperor and the desire of securing Gustavus’ aid. A sharp and menacing letter arrived. At last it was decided to send envoys to Würtzburg with instructions to draw up a treaty, if there was no help for it. The result was that Nuremberg and Bayreuth drew up a treaty with Gustavus Adolphus (October 1631), in which money was promised, and it was arranged that a special alliance should be concluded in two months’ time. They agreed to put their resources at his disposal, and to stand by him to the last, whilst he on his side promised to succour them in all danger, and to relieve them if besieged. In November they renounced their allegiance to the Emperor, and lost not a moment in arming themselves. It was not too soon, for the cloud of war which had long been hanging over Franconia broke at last. Tilly took Rothenburg on October 30th, and on the 8th of November Lichtenau surrendered. Negotiations with him were opened by Nuremberg, to gain time, but, when he found how strongly fortified and garrisoned the town was, he drew off. He returned next year, but attempted nothing, for Gustavus Adolphus was now drawing near, to whom Nuremberg, after much shilly-shallying, was persuaded, by dint of threats, to send 1500 men with arms and ammunition. In March 1632, the King, leaving his army near Fürth, entered the town by the Spittlerthor amidst the heart-felt enthusiasm of the people, who had never approved of the pusillanimous policy of the Council. The Defender of the Protestants received a splendid and affecting welcome. The Patricians rode out to meet him before the gates. They presented him with four cannons and, amongst other works of art, two silver globes supported by figures of Atlas and Hercules respectively, which are still to be seen in the Museum at Stockholm. “Tears of joy streamed down the cheeks of bearded men as they welcomed the deliverer from the north, whose ready jest and beaming smile would have gone straight to the popular heart even if his deserts had been less. The picture of Gustavus was soon in every house, and a learned citizen set to work at once to compose a pedigree by which he proved to his own satisfaction that the Swedish King was descended from the old hereditary Burggrafs of the town.”[21] The same day, with further reinforcements from Nuremberg, he went on his way south to deliver Donauwörth.

Three months later Wallenstein, breaking up from Bohemia, directed his whole force upon Nuremberg, which thus became the chief scene in that drama immortalised by Schiller in his trilogy of plays. For no sooner did Gustavus hear that Wallenstein with the Imperial army was marching against her than, mindful of his pledge and eager not to sacrifice so valued an ally, he summoned all his reinforcements and set out to the relief of Nuremberg. Thus beneath her walls the Protestant King and the inscrutable Catholic general were to be brought face to face at last. The citizens had for some time past been anxiously increasing their fortifications, storing provisions, and enlisting soldiers. Now, between June 21st and July 6th, under the direction of Hans Olph, the Swedish engineer, and with the aid of Gustavus’ army, an entirely new ring of earthworks was constructed enclosing the suburbs. Men and women, soldiers, burghers and peasants, laboured night and day at these entrenchments, which were provided with many small bastions and redoubts, and defended by over 300 cannon. Round them was dug a moat eight feet deep and twelve feet wide. Very few traces of these fortifications, which were removed soon after 1806, can be found to-day. In the Swedish camp lay some 20,000 veterans, for whom 14,000 pounds of bread were supplied per diem. Within the city was a population of at least 65,000, of whom 8000 were fighting men, 3000 of these being armed citizens. Such were the resources with which Gustavus hoped to do battle with Wallenstein’s gigantic army of 60,000 men and 13,000 horse. His preparations were not yet complete when Wallenstein appeared, July 1, at Schwabach. Had he consulted the wishes of Gustavus or listened to the advice of the Elector of Bavaria, Wallenstein would have attacked the Swedes at once. But, though superior in numbers, he would not pit his newly enrolled troops against the veterans of the Swedish King. He preferred to entrench himself in a strong position on the hills above Fürth, and to starve his enemy out. By the 6th of July he had completed a camp, which, if not so skilfully engineered as that of the Swedes, was, thanks to the natural advantages of the ground, almost impregnable. This vast camp, nearly eight miles round, stretched from the left banks of the Rednitz, from Stein, over the stream of the Biebert, and enclosed the villages of Zierndorf, Altenberg, Unterasbach, and Kreutles. Every house and village and advantage of the ground was turned to account and utilised for defence. The ruin of an old Burgstall—the Alte Veste—a castle which had been destroyed in 1388 during the great Städtekrieg by the Nurembergers, formed the most important outwork. Here, where the hill is at its highest, was the northernmost point of the camp, and from this fortress on the steep, wooded ridge across four miles of clear plain, through which the little Rednitz winds its course, Wallenstein gazed sternly on the climbing roofs and splendid mansions, the gabled houses and innumerable turrets of the beleaguered city. To-day, a modern tower, some eighty feet high, rears its head above the woods that crown the hill, and the adjoining inn is a favourite place of resort with the inhabitants of Fürth and Nuremberg. But some few traces of the old fortress and of Wallenstein’s entrenchments may yet be found, and he who loves “to summon up remembrance of things past” will find food enough for his imagination when he attempts to reconstruct the scene of that terrible encampment.

For terrible it was both to besiegers and besieged. Gustavus was cut off from his base of supplies in the Upper Danube and Rhine by this great entrenched camp south-west of Nuremberg, and all the roads leading into Franconia were scoured by Wallenstein’s light Croatian cavalry. Though provisions had at first been plentiful, the resources of the city were soon strained to the uttermost by the influx of peasants who had fled for refuge from the country. The mills and bakeries were unable to supply bread fast enough to the starving inhabitants, so that mobs fought outside the bakers’ shops in their desperate haste for food. Famine laid hold of the city first, then of the Swedish, and finally of the Imperial camp. And in the path of famine followed, as ever, pestilence. Pestilence in July, in a mediæval city, crowded with grim soldiers, grown shrunken and meagre, with starving women and whitefaced children—it would require the pen of a Flaubert or a Zola to describe. Worse than all for Gustavus to bear, when want came to be felt in the army, there came the relaxation of that discipline on which he had prided himself. The citizens complained that his Swedish troops were behaving like Austrian banditti. Sending for the chief Germans in his service, the King rated them soundly in a famous oration. Never was his Majesty seen before in such a rage.

“They are no Swedes who commit these crimes,” he said truly enough, “but you Germans yourselves. You princes, counts, lords, and noblemen, are showing great disloyalty and wickedness on your own fatherland, which you are ruining. You colonels and officers, from the highest to the lowest, it is you who steal and rob everyone, without making any exceptions.

“You plunder your own brothers in the faith. Had I known that you had been a people so wanting in natural affection for your country, I would never have saddled a horse for your sakes, much less imperilled my life and my crown and my brave Swedes and Finns. It is your inhumanity towards your mother-country that has tarnished the glory of my victorious subjects. My heart is filled with gall when I see anyone of you behaving thus villainously. For you cause men to say openly, ‘The King, our friend, does us more harm than our enemies.’ If you were real Christians you would consider what I am doing for you, how I am spending my life in your service. I came but to restore every man to his own, but this most accursed and devilish robbing of yours doth much abate my purpose. I have given up the treasures of my crown for your sake, and have not enriched myself so much as by one pair of boots since my coming to Germany, though I have had forty tons of gold passing through my hands.

“Enter into your hearts, and think how sad you are making me, so that the tears stand in my eyes. You treat me ill with your evil discipline; I do not say with your evil fighting: for in that you have behaved like honourable gentlemen, and for that I am much obliged to you. Take my warning to heart, and we will soon show our enemies that we are honest men and honourable gentlemen.”

Again when informed that a soldier had stolen a cow, he turned a deaf ear to him as he pleaded for his life, for

“My son,” he said, “it is better that thou shouldst expiate thy offence by the sacrifice of life than that thy crime should draw down the vengeance of the Almighty upon me and thy gallant comrades; for though I consider every soldier in the light of a child, yet I am destined to perform the duties of a judge, no less than those of a parent.”

So for two weary months plague, famine and wounds did their fell work inside and out. The hospitals were full to overflowing. The graves could not be dug fast enough to hold the dead. The countless victims of hunger and pestilence lay for days in the trenches, poisoning the air. In the streets were strewn the half-decayed bodies of men and horses, eaten of pigs. But if the Protestants suffered so did the Imperialists. And always Wallenstein sat implacable on the height refusing to join battle, waiting grimly till starvation should have done its work and the sack of Magdeburg could be repeated. For Gustavus must either attack Wallenstein in his impregnable position or march away the city to its fate. The arrival of reinforcements, which increased the King’s army to 50,000 men, determined him to make a general assault on the Alte Veste and the northern side of the camp. It will be clear to anyone who examines the ground that this was an almost impossible undertaking, the forlornest of forlorn hopes. What desperate courage could do was done. For ten hours the Swedes stormed undaunted against fearful odds and with fearful losses. Three times they got actual footing in the Burgstall itself; three times they were hurled back. At last Gustavus, who had had a piece of the sole of his right boot shot off, and had always been in the thickest part of the fight, dragging the cannon to points of vantage and aiming them with his own hands, was obliged to relinquish the desperate enterprise. “We have done a stupid thing to-day,” was his comment. For the first time in his life, indeed, he was conquered, because he was not conqueror. But Wallenstein’s claws were cut: he had suffered little less than Gustavus in the fight round the Alte Veste. Nuremberg was saved for the present, for Wallenstein was in no condition to prosecute a siege. After fifteen days, therefore (September 8), Gustavus, unable to stay for lack of supplies, and failing to entice the enemy into battle on the plain, marched away into Thuringia, and two months later, on the field of Lutzen, he fell in the moment of victory when he had defeated his old enemy. Before that, however, ten days after he had departed, and a week after Wallenstein had broken up his camp, Gustavus came back to Fürth and looked at what had been the enemy’s position. It is said that he had breakfast on the round stone table still to be found at the Alte Veste, and known as the Schweden Tisch. Once more, in October, he returned, drove the Imperial troops out of the Nuremberg territory, and took his last farewell of the town.

The Treaty of Westphalia brought the Thirty Years War to an end in 1648, but not before the interruption of commerce and the extraordinary exertions she had made had reduced the resources of Nuremberg to a very low ebb, and saddled her with a load of debt from which she never recovered. When at last peace was announced, the festivals with which she celebrated it reflected the last splendour of the once prosperous city. Karl Gustav, as representative of the crown of Sweden, gave a magnificent dinner—the “Friedensmal”—in the Rathaus to celebrate this occasion. The Council ordered a Neptune with nymphs and dolphins, designed by Christoph Ritter, and figures modelled by Georg Schweigger, to be placed in the middle of the market-place. It was, for some reason, placed in the Peünt-hof. It was sold in 1797 to Paul of Russia to raise money.

Another incident which is recorded of these days of rejoicing is as follows: When peace was proclaimed with France, Octavio Piccolomini was staying in the Pellerhaus, and he gave a dance to the peasants. Now a rumour was circulated that all the boys who appeared on hobby-horses before his house on the following Sunday would get a silver coin. They assembled accordingly, and when he heard the reason of this extraordinary parade, he told them to come next Sunday, and then gave them each a four-cornered medal—still to be seen in numismatic collections—with a picture of a hobby-horse, and the date 1650 on it.

Through the peace of Westphalia Nuremberg with the other free towns obtained full political equality with the princes of the Empire. Their representatives, who before only had a voice in the discussions, now enjoyed the full right of voting. But, in spite of this, the political importance of Nuremberg began to disappear. Her sovereignty, her right of peace and war, were recognised. But she became a quiet and obedient attendant of the Reichstag in Regensburg, paying her quota of men and money, and supporting the Hapsburg interests.

Her energy, in fact, had been exhausted. The census of her citizens in 1622 amounted to 40,000; in 1806 to 25,000. With the decrease in her population, her prosperity decreased. The load of debt accumulated during the Thirty Years War weighed her down. Her trade, like that of Augsburg and all the other German towns, went from bad to worse. Dislocated during the war, it could not recover now. Chief among the causes of decay must be counted the circumnavigation of the Cape of Good Hope. Prior to that, all merchandise from the East was obliged to travel overland into Europe and came for distribution by way of Germany. Nuremberg then naturally became the chief entrepôt. Now she suffered, with Venice, from the discovery of this new channel of commerce. The Venetians had boasted that thanks to them Nuremberg had come from nothing to be the richest town in Germany. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the German quarter in Venice since the days of the Crusades, still bears witness to their connection with the German traders, and, in Nuremberg, winged lions on many of the houses still record the same fact.

Other and more avoidable causes contributed to the decrease of Nuremberg trade. She adopted an exaggerated system of protection, and levied exorbitant taxes on goods brought into or through the country.

In the old days every good thing had been said to come out of Nuremberg (Was gut sein sollte, wurde aus Nürnberg verschrieben); now the output of her manufactures was foolishly limited by rules. In some trades, for instance, only the son or the husband of a widow of a master might become a master craftsman. Hence many failed to find employment, and set up in the surrounding country as competitors. The selfish and misguided prejudices of the trades led also to the exclusion of the Protestant weavers who had been exiled from France or Flanders, and who, finding asylum elsewhere, soon became rivals of the shortsighted Nurembergers.

The Council, too, suffered and aided the common degeneration. A narrow, effete, and selfish oligarchy, it became more tyrannical as it became more incompetent. The authors of libels and satires, criticising it, were rewarded with lifelong imprisonment. More and more the patrician families drew together and separated themselves from the common people. They clung closer to their exclusive privileges as they became less worthy of them. Endeavouring to become more like the landed nobility, they began to abandon business, and withdrew from the State the capital and brains which had formerly made it prosperous. They grew, indeed, in their false pride, so ashamed of trade that they said that no Nuremberg patrician had ever had to do with business! So a proud and poor nobility came to take the place of rich and patriotic merchant princes. Some even gave up their rights of citizenship and went to live on their property outside Nuremberg, thus still further weakening the Council and quarrelling with it over rights of taxation.

From war, also, Nuremberg suffered. Besides her own private bickerings with the Markgraf, she felt the wars with France, the war of the Austrian succession, and suffered still more in the Seven Years War.

In 1786 a fresh struggle arose between the Council and the town over a new tax which it was sought to impose without consultation. The citizens made a fruitless complaint to the Imperial Court. Then the Council appealed to the Diet, saying that the town was overtaxed. An inquiry into her finances showed that Nuremberg was heavily in debt and practically bankrupt. There had been a large yearly deficit since 1763. A commission to economise and to govern was appointed from both Councils, and in 1794 an arrangement was confirmed by the Emperor by which the larger Council was to consist of 250 members (70 of whom were to be patricians), chosen by the smaller Council. The citizens, however, were not contented, complaining that they were still not properly represented.

Meanwhile an event had occurred which drove another nail into the coffin of the free Imperial city. In 1791, Charles Alexander, Markgraf of Brandenburg, Ansbach and Bayreuth, died childless, and the government of his principalities passed to Prussia, together with the old claims of the Franconian line of the Brandenburg house. A minister, Graf Karl August von Hardenberg, the famous chancellor, was appointed to rule these lands. In the name of the King of Prussia he asserted his right of supremacy over all the territory up to the gates of the town itself. The oldest claims of the Burggräflichen times were reasserted by the Prussians. Nuremberg was powerless to resist. Even so her troubles were not yet ended. A Prussian army had occupied Fürth on July 4, 1796, and in August a vanguard of the French victorious army, which was swarming over South Germany, entered Nuremberg on the 9th of August. The scenes of the Thirty Years War were repeated. The country was ravaged, and the town called upon for contributions. It was impossible to comply at once with these demands. Eighteen citizens were therefore taken away to France as hostages. When, a few weeks later, the French army withdrew, after the Archduke Karl’s victory, a fresh contribution was demanded. In despair the town almost unanimously decided to seek union with their old enemy, the King of Prussia. But he refused this Grecian gift, for the debt of the town was enormous. Then the Council turned to the Emperor and offered to accept an Imperial commission, which introduced some financial reforms. But the year 1800 brought more French troops into Nuremberg, who were a further strain upon her resources.

Even after the Peace of Pressburg the long agony of the Imperial free city was continued, till in 1806 by a decree of Napoleon, in the 17th article of the Rheinbund Act, it was laid down that “the town and territory of Nuremberg be united to Bavaria with full sovereignty and possession.” On the 6th of August 1806, Emperor Francis abdicated, and the Holy Roman Empire, “which was a grand object once, but had gone about in a superannuated and plainly crazy state for some centuries back, was at last put out of pain and allowed to cease from the world.”

Since then the story of Nuremberg is swallowed up in the history of United Germany. She has shared and still shares in the growing prosperity of the new Empire. The first railway in Germany was opened in 1835 between Nuremberg and Fürth. Her hops, her toys, her cakes, her railway-carriages, her lead-pencils, are they not known the world over? New buildings have sprung up on every side of her: the suburbs are themselves great manufacturing towns. The population has grown to 170,000. These are all things on which she may most sincerely be congratulated; but whatever her prosperity in the present or the future, her golden age, we feel, is in the past. She is Albert Durer’s and Hans Sachs’ city.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

We began by hinting that the atmosphere of Nuremberg is mediæval, that of a city of legend. We will close this account of her history with the brief narration of her last, her nineteenth century myth. For we cannot pass over in silence the curious case of Kaspar Hauser.

At a time when Europe was still dripping from the douche of sentimentality in which it had been bathed by the sorrows of Werther and the romanticism of Byron, Kaspar Hauser appeared suddenly in Nuremberg. His astonishing story achieved a European celebrity. The history of this impostor has recently been placed once more before the public by the Duchess of Cleveland,[22] with the object of clearing her father from imputations which would have been ridiculous if they had not been so impudent. Charity, and the facts of the case, enable us to add with regard to Kaspar himself, that if he was an impostor he was also half a lunatic; for we can trace in the records of his career, among other symptoms of a diseased brain, the mania of persecution, an over acute and perverted sense of smell, a restless love of notoriety, and an ineradicable habit of lying.

On Easter Monday, May 1828, a lad of seventeen, dressed like a countryman, appeared outside the Neue Thor, and asked, in the low Bavarian dialect, his way to the Neue Thor Strasse.

He had with him two letters in one envelope addressed to “The Captain of the 4th Squadron of the Schmolischer Regiment, Neue Thor Strasse, Nuremberg.” They ran as follows, in handwriting exactly similar to Kaspar’s:—

“Honored Sir,—I send you a lad who wishes to serve his King truly; this lad was brought to me on Oct. 7, 1812. I am a poor day labourer, with ten children of my own; I have enough to do to get on at all. His mother asked me to bring up the boy. I asked her no questions, nor have I given notice to the county police that I had taken the boy. I thought I ought to take him as my son. I have brought him up as a good Christian, and since 1812 I have never let him go a step away from the house, so no one knows where he has been brought up, and he himself does not know the name of my house or of the place; you may ask him, but he can’t tell you. I have taught him to read and to write; he can write as well as myself. When we ask him what he would like to be, he says a soldier, like his father. If he had parents (which he has not) he would have been a scholar: only show him a thing and he can do it.

“Honoured Sir, you may question him, but he don’t know where I live. I brought him away in the middle of the night; he can’t find his way back.”

Dated, “From the Bavarian Frontier; place not named.”

The second letter ran thus:—

“The boy is baptized, his name is Kaspar; his other name you must give him. I ask you to bring him up. His father was a Schmolischer (trooper). When he is seventeen send him to Nuremberg to the 6th Schmolischer Regiment; that is where his father was. I beg you to bring him up till he is seventeen. He was born on April 30, 1812. I am so poor, I can’t keep the boy; his father is dead.”

In answer to the Captain’s questions the lad would only reply: “My foster-father bade me say, ‘I don’t know, your honour.’” The result was that he was placed in a prison cell in the castle. That was neither a fair nor a judicious proceeding. The garbled story of a wild man, a wronged man, quickly spread through the town. Feigning at first an intense fear and animal stupidity, it seems probable that Kaspar picked up from the visitors who discussed his history in his presence the suggestion of the marvellous tale which he presently told, and which made so tremendous a sensation. It was a tale demonstrably false on the face of it—of a life spent in close and solitary confinement in a cell, without knowledge of his kind or acquaintance with the outside world.

Here is his story as he told it to the Nuremberg magistrates, and as it found acceptance in credulous quarters.

“All his life,” he said, “had been spent in a cell 6 or 7 feet long, 4 feet wide, and 5 feet high, and always in a sitting posture; the only change in which was that when awake he sat upright, but leant back on a truss of straw when he slept. There were two small windows, but they were both boarded up, and as it was always twilight he never knew the difference between day and night. Nor did he ever feel hot or cold. He saw no one, and no sound of any kind ever reached his ear. Each morning, when he awoke, he found a pitcher of water and a loaf of rye bread by his side. He was often thirsty, and when he had emptied his pitcher, he used to watch to see whether the water would come again, as he had no idea how it was brought there. Sometimes it tasted strangely and made him feel sleepy. He had toys to play with—two wooden horses and a wooden dog, and he spent his time in rolling them about, and dressing them up with ribbons.

“One day a stool was placed across his knees, with a piece of paper upon it: an arm was stretched out over his shoulder, a pencil put into his hand, which was taken hold of, and guided over the paper. ‘I never looked round to see whom the arm belonged to. Why should I? I had no conception of any other creature beside myself.’ This proceeding was repeated seven or eight times: the arm was then withdrawn, but the stool and paper left behind. He tried to copy the letters he had been made to trace, and pleased with this new occupation, persevered till he had succeeded. Thus it was that he learned to write his name. About three days afterwards—as far as he could judge—the man came again and brought a little book (a prayer-book which was found on him). This was placed on his knees and his hand laid upon it; then, pointing to one of the wooden horses, the man kept on repeating the word ‘Ross’ (horse) till he had learned to say it after him. According to his own account, this was the first time in his life he had ever heard a sound of any kind, as the man came and went noiselessly. Then, in the same fashion, he was taught two sentences—‘In the big village, where my father is, I shall get a fine horse.’ ‘I want to be a trooper as my father was’—which he repeated by rote, of course without understanding them. When his lesson was learnt the man went away, and he began playing with his toys, making so much noise that the man returned and gave him a smart blow with a stick, which hurt him very much.

“‘After that I was always quiet.’ The last time the man came it was to take him away. His clothes had been changed while he slept; a pair of boots were now brought and put on; he was hoisted up on the man’s shoulders, and carried up a steep incline into the open air. It was night-time and quite dark. He was laid down on the ground, and fell asleep at once. When he awoke, he was lifted upon his feet, and placed in front of the man, who, holding him under the arms, pushed forward his legs with his own, and showed him how to walk. But the pain and fatigue were very great, and he cried bitterly. The man said impatiently, ‘Leave off crying at once, or you shall not get that horse;’ and he thereupon obeyed. Then he was again lifted up and carried; again dropped asleep, and again he woke to find himself lying on the ground. This was repeated over and over again. There were the same painful attempts to walk; the same floods of tears, checked by the same threat; and then the same rest on the ground, with ‘something soft’ under his cheek. By degrees he began to walk alone, supported by the man’s arm, though at first only six steps at a time. The sunshine and fresh air together dazzled and bewildered him, and he scarcely took note where they went. They never travelled on a beaten track, but generally on soft sand; never went up or down hill, or crossed a stream. Sometimes he attempted to look about him; then the man instantly desired him to hold his head down. His clothes were once more changed; but the man, even while dressing him, stood behind him, so that he might not see his face. The two sentences he had learned were again and again impressed on his memory as he went along, the man always adding impressively, ‘Mind this well.’

“He also said, ‘When you are a trooper like your father, I will come and fetch you again.’

“The journey cannot have been a long one, as he only took food once; he himself computed it had lasted a day and a night.

“Finally the letter was put into his hands with the words: ‘Go there—where the letter belongs;’ and the man suddenly vanished from his side. He found himself alone in the street of Nuremberg—having never till then perceived that he had entered the town, or, in fact, seen it at all. He was quite dazed and helpless, but someone kindly came and took charge of him and his letter.” ...

So great was the interest caused by this story, which easily roused the sympathy of the illogical—people are always readier to sympathise than to inquire—that Kaspar was (July 1828) formally adopted by the town of Nuremberg. An annual sum of 300 florins was voted for his maintenance and education. He became the idol of society. It was openly hinted that he was the legitimate son of the reigning House of Baden, who stood in the way of the next in succession, and would have been long since in his grave had he not been rescued by a faithful retainer, who kept him in close confinement to conceal him from his pursuers. In the course of a year or so, however, the interest in him began to wane. His tutor, who had at first been delighted with him, was beginning to find him out. Kaspar, in fact, was both cunning and untruthful. One day a particularly gross instance of his deceitfulness came to his tutor’s knowledge. The same morning Nuremberg was electrified by the news that Kaspar’s life had been attempted in broad daylight, and actually under his tutor’s roof. A man, he said, with a black handkerchief drawn across his face, had suddenly confronted him, and aimed at him a blow with a heavy woodman’s knife, crying, “After all, you will have to die before you leave Nuremberg.” The voice was the voice of the man who had brought him to the town. He described him accurately. But no such man could be traced.

The wound was very slight. Almost certainly it was self-inflicted, with the object of stimulating the flagging public interest by a new and romantic incident. That at any rate was its effect. Pamphlets by the dozen appeared, and in 1832 President von Feuerbach published his “History of a Crime against a Human Soul,” which moved all hearts by the pathos and eloquence with which it pleaded the cause of the mysteriously persecuted “Child of Europe.”

But the Nurembergers were no longer eager to continue their allowance to the boy, so Lord Stanhope, who had always befriended him, now came forward, and made himself responsible for his education and maintenance. The rest of Kaspar’s life is somewhat dismal reading. He had to endure the process of being found out by successive people at successive places, for he had all the astuteness but also all the vanity of a lunatic. Once again, it appears, he attempted to reawaken the flagging interest of the public. At Ansbach he tried to repeat his Nuremberg success, and to confirm the existence of the mysterious persecutor who was supposed to haunt him. But this time he failed. Once more he got stabbed, but instead of a slight, he inflicted on himself a deadly wound. Now though he had taken much trouble to make the conditions of the affair as mysterious and misleading as possible, a long judicial investigation resulted in the irresistible conclusion that “no murder was committed.” At Ansbach stands the tomb of the poor deluded and deluding “Child of Europe,” a monument of folly not all his own.

“Hic jacet
Casparus Hauser
Ænigma sui temporis
Ignota Nativitas
Occulta Mors,
1833.”

CHAPTER V
The Castle, the Walls and Mediæval Fortifications

“Aufwärts Ich mit dem Alten ging
Nach einer königlichen Veste,
Am Fels erbauet auf das Beste;
Manch Thurm auf Felsvorsprüngen lag,
Darin ein kaiserlich Gemach.
Geziert nach meisterlichen Sinnen
Die Fenster waren und die Zinnen;
Darum ein Graben war gehauen
In harten Fels.”
—Hans Sachs.

NUREMBERG is set upon a series of small slopes in the midst of an undulating, sandy plain, some 900 feet above the sea. Here and there on every side fringes and patches of the mighty forest which once covered it are still visible; but for the most part the plain is now freckled with picturesque villages, in which stand old turreted châteaux, with gabled fronts and latticed windows, or it is clothed with carefully cultivated crops or veiled from sight by the smoke which rises from the new-grown forest of factory chimneys.

The railway sets us down outside the walls of the city. As we walk from the station towards the Frauen Thor, and stand beneath the crown of fortified walls three and a half miles in circumference, and gaze at the old grey towers and picturesque confusion of domes, pinnacles and spires, suddenly it seems as if our dream of a feudal city has been realised. There, before us, is one of the main entrances, still between massive gates and beneath archways flanked by stately towers. Still to reach it we must cross a moat fifty feet deep and a hundred feet wide. True, the swords of old days have been turned into pruning-hooks; the crenelles and embrasures which once bristled and blazed with cannon are now curtained with brambles and wallflowers, and festooned with virginia creepers; the galleries are no longer crowded with archers and cross-bowmen; the moat itself has blossomed into a garden, luxuriant with limes and acacias, elders, planes, chestnuts, poplars, walnut, willow and birch trees, or divided into carefully tilled little garden plots. True it is that outside the moat, beneath the smug grin of substantial modern houses, runs that mark of modernity, the electric tram. But let us for the moment forget these gratifying signs of modern prosperity and, turning to the left ere we enter the Frauen Thor, walk with our eyes on the towers which, with their steep-pitched roofs and myriad shapes and richly coloured tiles, mark the intervals in the red-bricked, stone-cased galleries and mighty bastions, till we come to the first beginnings of Nuremberg—the Castle. There, on the highest eminence of the town, stands that venerable fortress, crowning the red slope of tiles. Roofs piled on roofs, their pinnacles, turrets, points and angles heaped one above the other in a splendid confusion, climb the hill which culminates in the varied group of buildings on the Castle rock. We have passed the Spittler, Mohren, Haller and Neu Gates on our way, and we have crossed by the Hallerthorbrücke the Pegnitz where it flows into the town. Before us rise the bold scarps and salient angles of the bastions built by the Italian architect, Antonio Fazuni, called the Maltese (1538-43).

Crossing the moat by a wooden bridge which curls round to the right, we enter the town by the Thiergärtnerthor. The right-hand corner house opposite us now is Albert Durer’s house. We turn to the left and go along the Obere Schmiedgasse and the row of houses labelled Am Oelberg, till we arrive at the top of a steep hill (Burgstrasse). Above, on the left, is the Castle, and close at hand the “Mount of Olives” Sculpture (see p. [201]).

We may now either go through the Himmels Thor to the left, or keeping straight up under the old trees and passing the “Mount of Olives” on the left, approach the large deep-roofed building between two towers. This is the Kaiserstallung, as it is called, the Imperial stables, built originally for a granary. The towers are the Luginsland (Look in the land) on the east, and the Fünfeckiger Thurm, the Five-cornered tower, at the west end (on the left hand as we thus face it). The Luginsland was built by the townspeople in the hard winter of 1377. The mortar for building it, tradition says, had to be mixed with salt, so that it might be kept soft and be worked in spite of the severe cold. The chronicles state that one could see right into the Burggraf’s Castle from this tower, and the town was therefore kept informed of any threatening movements on his part. To some extent that was very likely the object in view when the tower was built, but chiefly it must have been intended, as its name indicates, to afford a far look-out into the surrounding country. The granary or Kaiserstallung, as it was called later, was erected in 1494, and is referred to by Hans Behaim as lying between the Five-cornered and the Luginsland Towers. Inside the former there is a museum of curiosities (Hans Sachs’ harp) and the famous collection of instruments of torture and the Maiden (Eiserne Jungfrau), to which we shall refer at greater length in the next chapter. The open space