The Story of Nuremberg
by Cecil Headlam · English · Gutenberg #46401 · 513,268 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Story of Nuremberg
Author: Cecil Headlam
Illustrator: Helen M. James
Release date: July 24, 2014 [eBook #46401]
Most recently updated: November 28, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE STORY OF NUREMBERG ***
Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
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_The Story of Nuremberg_
_All rights reserved_
_First Edition, April 1899_
_Second Edition, September 1900_
_Third Edition, November 1901_
[Illustration: _Portrait of Albert Durer by himself, from the painting
at Munich._]
_The Story of_ Nuremberg
_by Cecil Headlam with Illustrations
by Miss H. M. James
and with Woodcuts_
[Illustration]
_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
PAGE
_The Origin of Nuremberg_ 1
CHAPTER II
_The Development of Nuremberg_ 35
CHAPTER III
_Nuremberg and the Reformation_ 55
CHAPTER IV
_Nuremberg and the Thirty Years War_ 93
CHAPTER V
_The Castle and the Walls_ 114
CHAPTER VI
_The Council and the Council-House. Nuremberg Tortures_ 150
CHAPTER VII
_Albert Durer and the Arts and Crafts of Nuremberg_ 171
CHAPTER VIII
_Hans Sachs and the Meistersingers_ 215
CHAPTER IX
_The Churches of Nuremberg_ 225
CHAPTER X
_Old Houses, Bridges and Wells_ 267
CHAPTER XI
_German Museum_ 275
CHAPTER XII
_Arms of Nuremberg_ 289
CHAPTER XIII
_Hotels, Itinerary, etc._ 294
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
Frontispiece. _Portrait of Albert Durer,
from the Painting by himself at Munich_
_The Heathen Tower_ 4
_Luginsland, Kaiserstallung, and Five-Cornered Tower_ 6
_Nürnberger Zeidler (Beefarmer) armed with crossbow_ 9
_Nassauer Haus_ 22
_The Pegnitz_ 27
_Oriel Window of the Parsonage_ 42
_Beautiful Well_ 57
_Frauen Thor_ 63
_Rothenburg_ 79
_Pellerhof_ 90
_The Castle from the Hallerthorbrücke_ 117
_Sinwel or Vestner Thurm_ 122
_The Walls and Ditch_ 139
_The Walls (Interior)_ 144
_The Rathaus. Old Window_ 155
_Henkersteg (Hangman's Tower)_ 165
_Albert Durer's House_ 173
_Albert Durer as a boy. From a drawing by himself
at the age of thirteen_ 179
_St. Anthony, from the engraving by Albert Durer.
Background of Nuremberg Scenery_ 189
_Sakramentshäuslein. Adam Krafft_ 203
_Nuremberg Spruchsprecher or State Poet_ 223
_Brautthüre, St. Sebalduskirche_ 232
_St. Lorenzkirche. From the river_ 241
_Hauptthor, St. Lorenzkirche_ 244
_St. Lorenzkirche. North side_ 246
_St. Lorenzkirche. Interior_ 251
_West Door, Frauenkirche_ 255
_House on the Pegnitz_ 268
_Fleischbrücke_ 271
_The Nuremberg Madonna_ 279
_The Seals of Nuremberg_ 291
_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.
[Illustration: THE HEATHEN TOWER]
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
[Illustration: LUGINSLAND, KAISERSTALLUNG, AND THE FIVE-CORNERED TOWER]
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
[Illustration: NÜRNBERGER ZEIDLER (BEE-FARMER) ARMED WITH CROSS-BOW]
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.
[Illustration: NASSAUER HAUS]
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 oenophilist 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
[Illustration: THE PEGNITZ]
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.
[Illustration: ORIEL WINDOW OF THE PARSONAGE]
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,
[Illustration: SCHÖNER BRUNNEN]
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 manoeuvers 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
[Illustration: FRAUEN THOR]
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
manoeuvre 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
[Illustration: ROTHENBURG]
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.
[Illustration: PELLERHOF]
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
[Illustration: THE CASTLE FROM THE HALLERTHORBRÜCKE]
adjoining it commands a splendid view to the north. There, too, on the
parapet-wall, may be seen the hoof-marks of the horse of the
robber-knight, Ekkelein von Gailingen, whose story we have already
narrated (p. 43). Here for a moment let us pause, consider our position,
and endeavour to make out from the conflicting theories of the
archæologists something of the original arrangement of the castles and
of the significance of the buildings and towers that yet remain.
Stretching to the east of the rock on which the Castle stands is a wide
plain, now the scene of busy industrial enterprise, but in old days no
doubt a mere district of swamp and forest. Westwards the rock rises by
three shelves to the summit. The entrance to the Castle, it is surmised,
was originally on the east side, at the foot of the lower plateau and
through a tower which no longer exists.
Opposite this hypothetical gate-tower stood the Five-cornered tower. The
lower part dates, we have seen, from no earlier than the eleventh
century. It is referred to as Alt-Nürnberg (old Nuremberg) in the Middle
Ages. The title of "Five-cornered" is really somewhat a misnomer, for an
examination of the interior of the lower portion of the tower reveals
the fact that it is quadrangular. The pentagonal appearance of the
exterior is due to the fragment of a smaller tower which once leant
against it, and probably formed the apex of a wing running out from the
old castle of the Burggrafs. The Burggräfliche Burg stood below,
according to Mummenhof, south-west and west of this point. It was burnt
down in 1420, and the ruined remains of it are supposed to be traceable
in the eminence, now overgrown by turf and trees, through which a sort
of ravine, closed in on either side by built-up walls, has just brought
us from the town to the Vestner Thor. The Burggrafs' Castle would
appear to have been so situated as to protect the approach to the
Imperial Castle (Kaiserburg). The exact extent of the former we cannot
now determine. Meisterlin refers to it as _parvum fortalitium_--a little
fort. We may, however, be certain that it reached from the Five-cornered
tower to the Walpurgiskapelle. For this little chapel, east of the open
space called the Freiung, is repeatedly spoken of as being on the
property of the Burggrafs. Besides their castle proper, which was held
at first as a fief of the Empire, and afterwards came to be regarded as
their hereditary, independent property, the Burggrafs were also
entrusted with the keeping of a tower which commanded the entrance to
the Castle rock on the country side, perhaps near the site of the
present Vestner Thor. The _custodia portæ_ may have been attached to the
tower, the lower portion of which remains to this day, and is called the
Bailiff's Dwelling (Burgamtmannswohnung). The exact relationship of the
Burggraf to the town on the one hand, and to the Empire on the other,
is, as we have already observed, somewhat obscure. Originally, it would
appear, he was merely an Imperial officer, administering Imperial
estates, and looking after Imperial interests. In later days he came to
possess great power, but this was due not to his position as castellan
or castle governor as such, but to the vast private property his
position had enabled him to amass and to keep.
As the scope and ambitions of the Burggrafs increased, and as the
smallness of their castle at Nuremberg, and the constant friction with
the townspeople, who were able to annoy them in many ways, became more
irksome, they gave up living at Nuremberg, and finally were content to
sell their rights and possessions there to the town. Besides the
_custodia portæ_ of the Burggrafs, which together with their castle
passed by purchase into the hands of the town (1427), there were
various other similar guard towers, such as the one which formerly
occupied the present site of the Luginsland, or the Hasenburg at the
so-called Himmels Thor, or a third which once stood near the Deep Well
on the second plateau of the Castle rock. But we do not know how many of
these there were, or where they stood, much less at what date they were
built. All we do know is that they, as well as the Burggrafs'
possessions, were purchased in succession by the town, into whose hands
by degrees came the whole property of the Castle rock.
Above the ruins of the "little fort" of the Burggrafs rises the first
plateau of the Castle rock. It is surrounded by a wall, strengthened on
the south side (_l_) by a square tower against which leans the
Walpurgiskapelle.
The path to the Kaiserburg leads under the wall of the plateau, and is
entirely commanded by it and by the quadrangular tower, the lower part
of which alone remains and is known by the name of Burgamtmannswohnung
(_r_). The path goes straight to this tower, and at the foot of it is
the entrance to the first plateau. Then along the edge of this plateau
the way winds southwards (_l_), entirely commanded again by the wall of
the second plateau, at the foot of which there probably used to be a
trench. Over this a bridge led to the gate of the second plateau. The
trench has been long since filled in, but the huge round tower which
guarded the gate still remains and is the Vestner Thurm (_r_).[23] The
Vestner Thurm or Sinwel Thurm (sinwel = round), or, as it is called in a
charter of the year 1313, the "Turm in der Mitte," is the only round
tower of the Burg. It was built in the days of early Gothic, with a
sloping base, and of roughly flattened stones with a smooth edge. It was
partly restored and altered in 1561, when it was made a few feet higher
and its round roof was added. It is worth paying the small gratuity
required for ascending to the top. The view obtained of the city below
is magnificent. The Vestner Thurm, like the whole Imperial castle,
passed at length into the care of the town, which kept its Tower watch
here as early as the fourteenth century.[24]
[Illustration: VESTNER THURM]
The well which supplied the second plateau with water, the "Deep Well,"
_Tiefer Brunnen_, as it is called, stands in the centre, surrounded by a
wall. It is 335 feet deep, hewn out of the solid rock, and is said to
have been wrought by the hands of prisoners, and to have been the labour
of thirty years. So much we can easily believe as we lean over and count
the six seconds that elapse between the time when an object is dropped
from the top to the time when it strikes the water beneath. Passages
lead from the water's edge to the Rathaus, by which prisoners came
formerly to draw water, and to St. John's Churchyard and other points
outside the town. The system of underground passages here and in the
Castle was an important part of the defences, affording as it did a
means of communication with the outer world and as a last extremity, in
the case of a siege, a means of escape.[25]
Meanwhile, leaving the Deep Well and passing some insignificant modern
dwellings (_r_), and leaving beneath us on the left the Himmelsthor, let
us approach the summit of the rock and the buildings of the Kaiserburg
itself. As we advance to the gateway with the intention of ringing the
bell for the castellan, we notice on the left the Double Chapel,
attached to the Heidenthurm (Heathen Tower, see page 3), the lower part
of which is encrusted with what were once supposed to be Pagan images.
The Tower protrudes beyond the face of the third plateau, and its
prominence may indicate the width of a trench, now filled in, which was
once dug outside the enclosing wall of the summit of the rock. The whole
of the south side of this plateau is taken up by the _Palas_ (the vast
hall, two stories high, which, though it has been repeatedly rebuilt,
may in its original structure be traced back as far as the twelfth
century), and the _Kemnate_ or dwelling-rooms which seem to have been
without any means of defence. This plateau, like the second, is supplied
with a well. But the first object that strikes the eye on entering the
court-yard is the ruined lime-tree, the branches of which once spread
their broad and verdant shelter over the whole extent of the quadrangle.
The Empress Kunigunde planted it, says the legend, some seven hundred
years ago. For once, when King Henry was a-hunting, he came in the
pursuit of a deer to the edge of a steep precipice, and this in the heat
of the chase he did not perceive, but would have fallen headlong had not
a lime-branch, at which he grasped in his extremity, stopped and saved
him. And he, recognising the special protection of the Most High, broke
off a twig of the lime-tree in remembrance of his wonderful
preservation, and brought it to his anxious wife, who planted it at once
with her own hands in the earth, and it soon grew into a beautiful
tree.
A modern staircase leads from the court to the rooms of the Castle. They
have been much spoilt by being rebuilt in
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