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.
