“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.