The Imperial Crown

Produced by English translation produced by Michael Wooff
The Imperial Crown
A story by Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910)
On the fifty-third day of the siege, one and a half thousand years after the fall of Rome as a republic and nine hundred and seventy seven years after Odoacer the Barbarian had exiled the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus to the estate that had once belonged to Lucullus in Catania, Constantinople had fallen. God placed two empires and twelve kingdoms in the hands of the son of Murad, Mehmet the Second. What Christendom in its comatose dullness, tearing itself to pieces in wars of religion and feuds between peoples and their princes, had been unable to defend itself against, had now happened. The great bogeyman had finally arrived.
On Saint Lawrence's day in the year 1453 an old man sits in a narrow room in a house on the Banner Mountain in Nuremberg writing what we are about to read. The low window looks out on a small vegetable patch and up to the town wall beyond. The small room is bare and without any ornament, but the sun shines down on the garden, the day is pleasant and the sky is blue.
It is quiet and yet not quiet. The writer's room does indeed face the town and the streets, but a strange noise and a humming sound buzzes through the air and the brave old high protective walls and towers resonate most singularly. The writer's room is also filled with a humming and ringing and wondrous rushing. Someone insecure and not in control of their thoughts and their quill would find it hard today in Nuremberg to execute calligraphy with stylus, ink, paper and parchment.
The grey-haired old man now and again holds his head in his hands and listens to the ruckus, but it does not have the power to disturb him. His eye only looks to the sky for a moment with just a little less pensiveness. He does not, however, put down his quill for such trifles.
He has talent as a scribe and has something to say of lasting value despite the sounds and interplay of colours of the world outside.