The Story of Nuremberg

by Cecil Headlam

With the death of Henry V., which occurred in 1125, the Frankish or Salic Imperial line ended. For the Empire, though elective, had always a tendency to become hereditary and go in lines. If the last Kaiser left a son not unfit, who so likely as the son to be elected? But now a member of another family had to be chosen. The German princes elected Count Lothar von Supplinburg, Duke of Saxony. This departure was not without influence on the fortunes of Nuremberg. The question arose whether Nuremberg had belonged to the late Imperial house as private or imperial property. Did it now belong to the heirs of that house or to the newly-elected Emperor?

In fact, part of the possessions, which had passed from the Salian Franks to the heirs, Conrad and Frederick, Dukes of Swabia, of the house of Hohenstaufen, was now demanded back by Lothar as being imperial property. Nuremberg was numbered among these possessions and became the head-quarters of the war which followed between the Kaiser and the two brothers. In 1127 the town had to stand another siege—this time of ten weeks’ duration—whilst the Hohenstaufen brothers held it against Lothar. The siege was raised; but three years later the brothers had to give in. The Burg and town of Nuremberg were then given by the Emperor to Henry the Proud of Bavaria, a member of the great Wittelsbach family. He kept them till 1138, when Conrad having been elected King of the Germans, they went back in the natural course of things to the Hohenstaufen, who came once more to look upon the flourishing town as their own private property.

It was to the above-mentioned Kaiser Conrad that the chronicles attribute the foundation of the monastery of St. Ægidius, on the site of the chapel, St. Martin’s, which Charlemagne was reputed to have built. To Conrad also, with less show of likelihood, they ascribe the widening of the city. Widened the city has been more than once, as we can tell by the remains of walls and towers.[3] But the earliest fragment of these now extant—the lower part of the White Tower—dates only from the thirteenth century.

It seems to have been the policy of the Hohenstaufen Kaisers to favour Nuremberg. They often held their court here. The greatest of them—the greatest and wisest of the Kaisers since Charlemagne—Frederick I. Barbarossa, to wit, lived in the castle in 1166. It was he, in all probability, who built the Kaiserliche Burg, and erected, over the Margaretenkapelle, the Kaiserkapelle, a grander and more splendid chapel of marble, which was certainly completed in the twelfth century. Of the remarkable Double Chapel thus constructed we shall have more to say later on. Meanwhile we must content ourselves with calling attention to the very similar Double Chapel at Eger in Bohemia.

It was through Barbarossa that Nuremberg became connected with another of the great ruling families of the world.

“It was in those same years,” says Carlyle,[4] “that a stout young fellow, Conrad by name, far off in the Southern part of Germany set out from the old Castle of Hohenzollern (the southern summit of that same huge old Hercynian wood, which is still called the Schwarzwald or Black Forest though now comparatively bare of trees) where he was but a junior and had small outlooks, upon a very great errand in the world.... His purpose was to find Barbarossa and seek fortune under him. To this Frederick Redbeard—a magnificent, magnanimous man, holding the reins of the world, not quite in the imaginary sense; scourging anarchy down and urging noble effort up, really on a grand scale—Conrad addressed himself; and he did it with success; which may be taken as a kind of testimonial to the worth of the young man. Details we have absolutely none; but there is no doubt that Conrad recommended himself to Kaiser Redbeard, nor any that the Kaiser was a judge of men.... One thing further is known, significant for his successes: Conrad found favour with ‘the Heiress of the Vohburg Family,’ desirable young heiress, and got her to wife. The Vohburg family, now much forgotten everywhere, and never heard of in England before, had long been of supreme importance, of immense possessions, and opulent in territories, and, we need not add, in honours and offices, in those Franconian Nürnberg regions; and was now gone to this one girl. I know not that she had much inheritance after all: the vast Vohburg properties lapsing all to the Kaiser, when the male heirs were out. But she had pretensions, tacit claims: in particular the Vohburgs had long been habitual or in effect hereditary Burggrafs of Nürnberg; and if Conrad had the talent for that office, he now in preference to others might have a chance for it. Sure enough, he got it; took root in it, he and his; and, in the course of centuries, branched up from it, high and wide, over the adjoining countries; waxing towards still higher destinies. That is the epitome of Conrad’s history; history now become very great, but then no bigger than its neighbours and very meagrely recorded; of which the reflective reader is to make what he can....

“As to the Office, it was more important than perhaps the reader imagines. In a Diet of the Empire (1170) we find Conrad among the magnates of the country, denouncing Henry the Lion’s high procedures and malpractices. Every Burggraf of Nürnberg is in virtue of his office ‘Prince of the Empire’; if a man happened to have talent of his own and solid resources of his own (which are always on the growing hand with this family), here is a basis from which he may go far enough. Burggraf of Nürnberg: that means again Graf (judge, defender, manager, g’reeve) of the Kaiser’s Burg or Castle,—in a word, Kaiser’s Representative and Alter Ego,—in the old Imperial Free-Town of Nürnberg; with much adjacent very complex territory, also, to administer for the Kaiser. A flourishing extensive city, this old Nürnberg, with valuable adjacent territory, civic and imperial, intricately intermixed; full of commercial industries, opulences, not without democratic tendencies. Nay, it is almost, in some senses, the London and Middlesex of the Germany that then was, if we will consider it!

“This is a place to give a man chances, and try what stuff is in him. The office involves a talent for governing, as well as for judging: talent for fighting also, in cases of extremity, and, what is still better, a talent for avoiding to fight. None but a man of competent superior parts can do that function; I suppose no imbecile could have existed many months in it, in the old earnest times. Conrad and his succeeding Hohenzollerns proved very capable to do it, as would seem; and grew and spread in it, waxing bigger and bigger, from their first planting there by Kaiser Barbarossa, a successful judge of men.”

Nuremberg continued to receive marks of Imperial favour. The importance to which she had now grown is illustrated by the fact that Frederick II., son of Barbarossa, held a very brilliant Reichstag here in 1219, and on this occasion gave to the town her first great Charter.

The first provision of this Charter, by which the town is declared free of allegiance to anyone but the Emperor, is of special interest, seeing that it raises the question whether Nuremberg was really the private property of the Imperial family, or only owed allegiance to the Emperor as such. Probably Frederick did not intend to alienate Nuremberg from himself and his heirs as private individuals; but, regarding the empire as a permanent possession of his family, he intended by this clause to bind the burghers of Nuremberg more closely to his own personal service by freeing them from all feudal obligations to others.