A few years later Frederick, in order to carry out his plans with regard to Italian lands, appointed his ten-year-old son as King of Rome and as his successor to the German Empire. Then leaving the young King in Germany under the guardianship of Bishop Engelbert of Cologne, he went to Italy, and was crowned Emperor by the Pope.
Young Henry held his court in Nuremberg in 1225. In the castle, in November, a double festival was celebrated—the marriage of the young King with Margaret, daughter of Duke Leopold of Austria, and of the brother of the bride, Duke Henry of Austria, with Agnes, a daughter of the Landgraf Hermann von Thüringen. At this double wedding, as some chroniclers aver, or at the wedding of Rudolph von Hapsburg (1284), as is more probable, a terrible catastrophe occurred. For just as the numerous assembly of nobles and ladies had begun to dance in the hall, the platform erected for spectators fell in, and about seventy nobles, knights, and girls were crushed to death.
It was certainly in the middle of this festival that the horrible news arrived that the Archbishop of Cologne, the young King’s adviser, had been murdered, from motives of revenge, by his nephew, Duke of Isenburg. “Such deeds were then very frequent,” says the Abbot Conrad von Lichtenau, “because the doers thereof hoped to obtain pardon by a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.”
Three days after his marriage the young King had to sit in judgment on the culprit at the Kaiserburg. Deeply moved, he asked the noble Gerlach von Büdingen for his opinion. Ought the murderer to be outlawed, there and then? Gerlach answered yes, for the crime was patent. Friedrich von Truhendingen opposed him violently, however, maintaining that the accused man ought to be first produced, as justice and custom demanded. Gerlach became enraged. The argument grew hot, and presently, in spite of the King’s presence, the supporters of either opinion seized their arms and came to blows. A fearful crush occurred on the stairs, which gave way under the weight of struggling humanity, and some fifty people were killed upon the spot. But the sentence of outlawry got itself pronounced, and a decree of excommunication followed from the Church.
This was but one example of the lawlessness of the times. Violence was not often so swiftly punished. Germany had fallen on evil days, and worse were in store for her. The absenteeism of her Emperors was producing its inevitable result.
One after another, the Emperors “had squandered their talents and wasted the best strength of their country in pursuit of a fancy, and never learned by the experience of their predecessors to desist from the dangerous pursuit. Instead of turning their attention to the development of their country, to the curtailment of the powers of the nobility, to the establishment of their thrones on enduring foundations, they were bewitched with the dream of a Roman-imperial world-monarchy, which was impossible to be realised when every nation was asserting more and more its characteristic peculiarities and arriving at consciousness of national and independent life. The Emperors were always divided between distinct callings, as Kings of Germany and Emperors of Rome. The Italians hated them; the popes undermined their powers, and involved them in countless difficulties at home and in Italy, so that they could not establish their authority as emperors, and neglected to make good, or were impeded in attempting to make good, their position as kings in Germany. The bat in the fable was rejected by the birds because he was a beast, and by the beasts because he had wings as a bird.”[5]
So it came to pass that when the line of Hohenstaufen went miserably out on the death of the ill-fated Conradin (1268), Germany was already involved in times of huge anarchy; “was rocking down,” as Carlyle puts it, “towards one saw not what—an anarchic Republic of Princes, perhaps, and of free barons fast verging towards robbery? Sovereignty of multiplex princes, with a peerage of intermediate robber barons? Things are verging that way. Such princes, big and little, each wrenching off for himself what lay loosest and handiest to him, found it a stirring game, and not so much amiss.”
Towns like Nuremberg, on the other hand, found it very much amiss. Fortunately many of them were rich and strong, and took the task of preserving peace and order to some extent into their own hands.
During the period of the Interregnum, as it was called (1254-1273), “die herrenlose, die schreckliche Zeit” of disturbance and lawlessness, when the electors—the bishops and princes of the land—could only agree in giving the crown to foreigners who would leave them alone and unhindered in their efforts to enlarge their powers and territories by fair or foul means, some curious transactions took place with regard to Nuremberg. There exists a document by which, in 1266, Conradin pledged to his uncle, Duke Ludwig of Bavaria, a number of possessions to raise money in order to pay back the loan which his former guardian had advanced to him, and which was used to acquire the town and castle of Nuremberg. The transaction is obscure. Possibly after the death of Conradin’s father, Conrad IV., Nuremberg was claimed by his executors as private property. In that case we may hazard the conjecture that the town resisted the claim, and that an appeal to arms was made. The money referred to may have been spent in conducting a siege.
This much is known for certain from a contemporary document, that when, in 1269, Duke Ludwig and his brother Henry, as heirs of Conradin, divided the Hohenstaufen inheritance between them, they took equal rights over Nuremberg. That may have been, however, merely a paper phrase. Imperial and private rights were apt to get confused in the minds of the Hohenstaufen. Nuremberg, at any rate, continues always to act as if she were a free town of the Empire. She was acutely conscious of the dignity of her charter. The great object for which the European towns, and Nuremberg among them, were all this time struggling was a charter of incorporation and a qualified privilege of internal self-government. Emperors and princes might try to get hold of a rich city like Nuremberg, and treat it as their private property, but, once she had won her charter, she was determined to remain a Reichstadt, and to enjoy all the privileges and liberties of a free city.