At intervals of every 120 or 150 feet the interior wall is broken by quadrilateral towers. Some eighty-three of these, including the gate towers, can still be traced. What the number was originally we do not know. It is the sort of subject on which chroniclers have no manner of conscience. The Hartmann Schedel Chronicle, for instance, gives Nuremberg 365 towers in all. The fact that there are 365 days in the year is of course sufficient proof of this assertion! The towers, which rise two or even three stories above the wall, communicated on both sides with the covered way. They are now used as dwelling-houses. On some of them there can still be seen, projecting near the roof, two little machicoulis turrets, which served as guard-rooms for observing the enemy, and also, by overhanging the base of the tower, enabled the garrison to hurl down on their assailants at the foot of the wall a hurricane of projectiles of every sort. Like the wall the towers are built almost entirely of sandstone, but on the side facing the town they are usually faced with brick. The shapes of the roofs vary from flat to pointed, but the towers themselves are simple and almost austere in form in comparison with those generally found in North Germany, where fantasy runs riot in red brick. The Nuremberg towers were obviously intended in the first place for use rather than for ornament.
Parallel with the interior town wall there ran an exterior lower one, which, together with the former, enclosed a space, to which we have already referred, varying from fifty to twenty feet in breadth. We know very little about the original height and form of this exterior wall. It suffered many changes and can no longer be traced in its original shape. Experts hold diametrically opposite views both as to the use and the height of it. But that is the way of experts. We shall probably not be far wrong in concluding that this wall was originally a mere crenelated crowning[31] of the escarp of the ditch; that catapults were worked from the space enclosed by the two walls; and that the chief object of the outer wall and the enclosure was to prevent the enemy from working at the main, or inner, wall and towers with his rams and moveable turrets. Later, when the use and effectiveness of artillery developed and guns supplanted catapults in vigour as well as in fact, some time at the end of the fifteenth or the beginning of the sixteenth century, we may suppose that this old crenelated wall was removed, and the escarp wall of the ditch was raised and strengthened and provided with embrasures for large cannon, and rounded off on the outside so as to neutralise the effect of shot striking the face of the walls. In this form the exterior wall is well preserved, and can be seen at many places in the course of a walk round the outside of the town. At many points in the circumference, but chiefly where the fortifications are accessible (e.g. near the Frauen Thor) the parapets of this curtain-wall present a somewhat remarkable arrangement. The parapets, pierced with embrasures for cannon, are surmounted by timber hoards or filled in with brick and mortar, like the old English half-timbered houses. In these hoards (wooden galleries roofed in with tiles) arquebusiers and even archers, who were still employed at that period, might be placed. Pieces in battery were covered by these hoards just in the same way as pieces in the “‘tween decks” of a man-of-war. The crenelles of the hoards were closed by shutters opening on the inside, in such a way as to present an obstacle to the balls or arrows fired by the assailants placed on the top of the glacis.
The outer, like the inner wall was provided with towers. These were thicker in construction but lower and less numerous than the interior ones. They were placed at intervals of 200 to 250 feet and amounted in all to forty or thereabouts. The chief purpose of them was to flank and command the ditch and thus to prevent the enemy from building a dam across it. With this object they projected some distance into the ditch.
Simultaneously with the alterations of the exterior wall small bastion-like towers were also constructed, chiefly at places where the wall formed an angle, and where the enemy could not therefore advance in line. From these towers a searching fire could be maintained in all directions, sweeping both the ditch and the ground in front. The strong, low, semi-circular tower at the Haller Thor is supposed to be the oldest work of this description.
Lastly, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the large bastions which bring us in touch with modern ideas of fortification were built. We may instance the bastion adjoining the Neue Thor, called the Doktors Zwinger because the doctors had their summer garden there. And in 1613 the Vöhrderthor-Zwinger was added to the old town-wall. It was designed by Meinhard von Schönberg, and built by Jakob Wolf, the younger. But in 1871 this magnificent structure, with the armorial devices which decorated the four corners of it, was enclosed in the Vestner Thor Zwinger.
An account of the fortifications of Nuremberg would be incomplete if no mention were made of the Landwehr—a continuous line of defence which was thrown up at some little distance from the town about the middle of the fifteenth century, in the time of the first Marggravian war. The Landwehr was a ditch with an earthen parapet strengthened by stockades, barricaded at the crossings of the roads with obstacles and moveable barriers, and defended by blockhouses in which guards were always kept. The main object of this fortification was to afford shelter to the country people, and to secure them and their goods and cattle from the raids of the enemy. Only the merest fragment of the “Land-ditch” remains, viz., the Landgraben, running through the Lichtenhof meadow.
It will be gathered from these dry details that the chief note struck by the fortifications of Nuremberg is that of picturesque variety. The defences have been built at different times and form no stereotyped pattern. Walls, towers, and bastions of varying types and shapes, suggesting the ideas of different ages, succeed each other in pleasant confusion. The walls themselves, now high, now low, now with, now without roofing, here crenelated with narrow loopholes and arrow-slits, there fitted with broad embrasures for heavy guns, seem to be typical of the place and to suggest to us the recollection of her chequered career.
At the end of our long perambulations of the walls it will be a grateful relief to sit for a while at one of the Restaurations or restaurants on the walls. There, beneath the shade of acacias in the daytime, or in the evening by the white light of the incandescent gas, you may sit and watch the groups of men, women, and children all drinking from their tall glasses of beer, and you may listen to the whirr and ting-tang of the electric cars, where the challenge of the sentinel or the cry of the night-watchman was once the most frequent sound. Or, if you have grown tired of the Horn- and the Schloss-zwinger, cross the ditch on the west side of the town and make your way to the Rosenau, in the Fürtherstrasse. The Rosenau is a garden of trees and roses not lacking in chairs and tables, in bowers, benches, and a band. There, too, you will see the good burgher with his family drinking beer, eating sausages, and smoking contentedly.
CHAPTER VI
The Council and the Council House—Nuremberg Tortures
Da ist in dieser Stadt
Ein weiser, fürsichtiger Rath,
Der so fürsichtiglich regiert
Und alle Ding fein ordinirt.
—Hans Sachs, Lobspruch der Stadt Nürnberg.