The Story of Nuremberg

by Cecil Headlam

WE have seen how in gradual and piecemeal fashion the Council, as representative of Nuremberg, acquired the character of an imperial state on an equality with the reigning princes and territorial lords. The special mark of sovereign power, the higher jurisdiction, was accorded in perpetuity to the Nuremberg Council through an edict of Frederick III., 1459. The Council was composed originally of such burghers as the community saw fit to elect. But gradually it came about that only the moneyed classes, large merchants, large land-owners, and court-officials admitted to the citizenship took part in the election, and that, within this circle again, those who had already held office formed themselves into a specially privileged group. So there resulted in Nuremberg, as everywhere else, the formation of a special town-aristocracy of those families eligible to the Council, which in Nuremberg particularly, where the original suffrage soon had to give place to the Council’s right of self-election, developed into the most pronounced exclusiveness. The final result was the separation of the citizens into the governing families and into the remaining classes cut off from any influence upon the town government, and represented in general by the Trades Guilds. This antithesis, which existed in all towns, led everywhere, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, to violent conflicts; in our town, to the riots of 1348, to which we have already referred.

The families eligible to the Council composed the Patriciate, the origin of which can no longer be traced in detail. The Patricians were not, as often in other towns, burghers of long standing, for in the fourteenth century and later, even up to the beginning of the sixteenth century, it happened that foreign families settling here were at once accepted as eligible to the Council. This is a circumstance which does not at all correspond to the usual conception of the burgher exclusiveness in the Middle Ages; but on the contrary it betrays a certain liberality.

The Patricians appear with others of the nobility as witnesses to documents, and are not infrequently given precedence over the territorial nobility. They carried shield, helmet, and seal; their hatchments hung in the churches, they held fiefs from the princes, and were eligible to church dignities. The Patriciate, however, did not by any means occupy itself wholly with military service and knightly exercises. Many of them carried on wholesale businesses and manufacturing trades. This occurred pretty generally throughout the Middle Ages, as also in the sixteenth century, though their descendants denied that they were ever connected with trade.

As the burghers were in general capable of bearing arms, the governing families especially kept themselves in military practice. They led the armed burghers or the mercenaries in the wars of their country, and many of them obtained in the service of the Emperor, or elsewhere, the dignity of knighthood.

As early as the fifteenth century the Patrician families claimed the rights of knighthood and heraldry like territorial nobles. Probably the tourney held in 1446, on the occasion of a Patrician wedding, and represented in life-size stucco-work on the ceiling of the upper corridor in the Town Hall, by Hans Kuhn, 1621, was intended as a manifesto to this effect.

At any rate it is recorded that this tourney vexed the nobles very sorely, “as they opined, it did not become the Nuremberg families to tilt in noble conflict or to indulge in such knightly pastime; it was indeed generally held that this tourney had had no little influence in bringing about the great Margravian War which soon followed.” In the year 1481, and again in 1485, in the Heidelberg and Heilbronn tournament regulations, the Town Patriciate’s right of tourney was formally contested.

Though we do not know how their prerogative arose, we certainly find that by 1521 the number of actual Patrician families was limited to forty-three, whilst, by the end of the century, only twenty-eight are left eligible for the Council. They formed a close and very exclusive corporation, clinging very tightly to their fabricated privileges. “Anno 1521,” runs an old statute, “it was declared and set down by the Elders of the Town of Nuremberg which families have always from time immemorial danced and may still dance in the Town Hall.”

We cannot deny that the short-sighted policy so often pursued by Nuremberg to her own undoing was due to the narrow and selfish oligarchy thus formed. But if we blame them for the decay we must also give them full meed of praise for the ripening of the prosperity of Nuremberg. The truth seems to be that the government of oligarchies of this nature, formed, not of all the wealthy families, but of a Patrician order of certain families, is, owing to the varied interests of the remaining society over whom they rule, peculiarly difficult to overthrow. Moreover, it is at first likely to lead on the State to success and prosperity: for at first the prominence of particular families represents the triumph of the fittest, the rise of those best able to govern, to conduct commerce, to encourage industry and art. But when in the course of nature these families begin to decay and cling all the more obstinately to their rights, it is then that the weakness of the position appears and the State is involved in the ruin of its most degenerate members.

It is noticeable that many of the early measures of the Council bore a decidedly socialistic character. We may instance the establishment of public baths, and the storing up of corn against the time of famine, besides the foundation of a great town brewery, which is the origin of the famous Tucher brewery of to-day, and the keeping of public stallions to improve the breed of horses, a measure that resulted in Nuremberg becoming famous for its chargers. On the other hand, as an instance of the jealous tyranny of the Council, we may quote the case of Christoph Scheurl. When he, the “Oracle of the Republic” as he was called, threatened to appeal to the Imperial Chamber against a sentence of the Council they replied by torturing him in the cruellest fashion for three weeks.

The public attitude of the Councillors being of this somewhat grandmotherly kind, it is not surprising that they left the young members of their families very little liberty in placing their affections. Love affairs and marriage for love were in fact not regarded with favour. Girls were betrothed by their parents at eight years of age and married at fourteen, often to old men of sixty or seventy. A couple were very seldom permitted to initiate for themselves an affair of the heart. So when Leonhard Groland, against good manners and tradition, had begun a love affair with Catherine, daughter of Hans Hardörfer, and this was discovered, the precocious lover was punished with two months’ imprisonment and banished for five years from the town. When a father did allow his son to choose his own wife he very seldom allowed him to woo her. They tell us how when the young Paul Tucher said that he would like to marry Ursula, daughter of the late Albrecht Scheurl, his father did the wooing for him, and went to Andreas Imhof, her guardian, and these two “with unshaken calm and dignified respectability” arranged the dowry and settlements. The public betrothal took place first in the Rathaus and then in the house of the bride. The wedding, after many formalities, took place not in the church, but before the portal of the church,[32] and only after the marriage service was completed did the bridal pair enter the church to partake of the holy sacrament. After the service the bridal party danced in the morning and then, after dinner at the bride’s home (where it was customary for the pair to reside for a year), another dance took place in the evening; in the case of members of the Patriciate, in the Rathaus. These proceedings were regulated by laws by which the Council continually strove to repress the tendency to luxury and extravagance which always accompanies commercial prosperity.