The Thousand-Year-Old City

Most Australians would know Nuremberg only as the German city of the megalomaniac Nazi Party rallies and the war-crimes tribunals that condemned the worst of the Nazi thugs (sans Hitler) to be hanged. Some readers might also be aware that, in the Middle Ages, Nuremberg was one of Europe’s greatest trading cities and that the Renaissance master painter Albrecht Dürer once lived there.

I happen to know a little more about this historic and industrial city in Franconia (northern Bavaria) because I attended high school there, in a Gymnasium right in the centre of the old city. Our music room was a former Gothic chapel, for which Dürer had painted his masterpiece The Adoration of the Holy Trinity that can now be admired in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum. Our art teacher, an accomplished painter himself, had copied this altarpiece, and our eyes would rest on the replica during boring music lessons.

Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque architecture surrounded our school. When I looked out of the classroom windows, I could see several church steeples, towers of city fortifications and, at a stretch, the tips of the Imperial Castle above the city. Almost next door, Martin Behaim had produced the world’s first globe, which you can still inspect in one of the city’s museums. Those historic buildings that had survived the bombing at least partially were being restored, a work whose progress we watched on our way to and from school. In my early teenage years, I assumed that everyone grew up in such a history-saturated environment.

That readers would know relatively little about Nuremberg has a lot to do with its history. It has always been predominantly a pragmatic, working city, not a glamorous princely or religious centre. In its day it produced great wealth, but relatively few abstract thinkers or memorable theorists. In their day, even artists like Dürer were considered mere craftsmen. With all its shortcomings of commercial opportunism and cultural pragmatism, Nuremberg’s history offers enlightening and, I believe, still relevant insights.

Unlike most major European cities, Nuremberg did not grow on the banks of a navigable river; merchants and princely delegations did not arrive by boat. Instead, the city was anchored below a mighty sandstone rock in the midst of the sandy, infertile Franconian plateau. It grew on both banks of the shallow Pegnitz River, useful only for water supply, to store live fish in floating cages, and to take away the effluents and detritus of the growing city. Nor could the city look back to a venerable age like Rome, Regensburg, Paris or London. It was first mentioned only in the mid-eleventh century.

By that time, virtually all land in the eastern part of Charlemagne’s Frankish kingdom, which had become the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, had been assigned as fief to some nobleman, and possibly reassigned down the ranks to lesser noble liegemen. The nobility were supposed to defend their subjects from outside aggression and keep internal law and order in exchange for labour, produce and increasingly also money taxes. In reality, the system often morphed into protection rackets at the expense of the populace. In that respect, conditions in the German lands were little different from what evolved in France, England and the Slavic kingdoms. But Germany was already on an atypical political trajectory: the nobility’s power structures became more and more decentralised, while the royal and imperial central power, for long an elected office in the gift of a few bishops and high lords, was becoming weaker and poorer. The royal dynasties in other European countries were embarked on centralisation and—eventually—fairly absolute power.

One factor in the particular German trajectory was the multiplication of free cities, which gained more and more sovereignty from their noble overlords. From the middle of the Middle Ages, the nobility-ruled German lands remained Dark Age areas of rent-seeking and wealth redistribution to the feudal lords and consequent underdevelopment and relative stagnation, whereas the free cities became centres of growing legal security, innovation and material dynamism, more and more bright lights of material and civilisational progress north of the Alps—and none more than in the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg. To quote Martin Luther: “Nuremberg shines throughout Germany like a sun among the moon and stars.”

As no kings or great lords made Nuremberg their fief and as it never became a bishopric or place of pilgrimage, its origins—and its very character, which persists to this day—are rooted in commerce and production based on sober work and bourgeois pragmatism. The place grew rapidly during the Middle Ages. Its wealth was built on solid, innovative craftsmanship and above all on long-distance trade—west–east from Burgundy and Alsace to Prague and Cracow, south–north from Venice and the Danube valley to Frankfurt, the Rhineland, the Low Countries, even London and the Hanseatic centres in northern Europe.

The horse-drawn trade required good long-distance roads, which the Nuremberg city government encouraged other jurisdictions to improve, sometimes by direct subsidies. The trade also required military escorts. As the city’s wealth and commercial outreach grew, it built up a sizeable, well-equipped mercenary force to accompany its trade caravans. It is revealing that these mercenaries were stationed in fortified villages some distance from the city; they were not allowed to enter the city walls armed. The city fathers obviously knew how to protect their power from surprise attack, and the family fathers were grateful for the protection of their daughters! The military also took a firm stance against robber barons. One of them, when captured and handed to the hangman, managed to escape on horseback. He enriched the German language forever, when, riding off, he yelled: “You can lick my arse!”

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the city gradually gained legal independence from its local feudal overlords. More and more, it ruled itself, by an oligarchy of the leading merchant patricians. At least, policy issues were debated in a circle of power holders, which excluded the possibility of a grossly incompetent hereditary nobleman. From early on, the city fathers understood that they had to keep the local burg grave (castellan) in check, and did so if necessary with guile and force. The castellans, who occupied a fortress above the thriving city, belonged from the late twelfth century to the house of Hohenzollern (who much, much later and by then pushed off to far-away Prussia, were to produce the obnoxious Kaiser Wilhelm). During the Middle Ages, the city fathers managed to obtain more and more independence from the Hohenzollerns. When one of them started to build threatening new fortifications above the city, the Nuremberg government quickly financed a taller tower next to his castle, with the result of mutual intimidation similar to the more recent Cold War nuclear standoff.

Eventually, the city’s administration and courts of law became entirely independent of the local overlords, not least because the Nurembergers targeted selective financial generosity over the heads of the local nobles directly at the Holy Roman Emperors. The emperors had to roam ceaselessly through their vast domains, and most of them were permanently short of funds, so that they appreciated the city’s generous gifts and occasional hospitality. In 1219, the emperor of the day granted the city the “Great Letter of Freedom”. It enabled the local authorities to issue their own coinage and impose their own customs duties, which they kept low to promote trade.

With stratagems reminiscent of what some cities nowadays do to attract the Olympic Games or climate conferences, medieval Nuremberg also lured some of the great talkfests of the day, the Imperial Diets, attended by the high princes of the realm. In 1356, Emperor Charles IV granted Nuremberg the “Golden Bull”, the guarantee that each new emperor’s first Diet would be held there. A few generations later, Nuremberg’s soft power was further enhanced when the imperial regalia—including Charlemagne’s fabled Iron Crown, which in reality was crafted a few generations after his demise—were placed in the permanent care of this Free Imperial City. Only persistent diplomacy, coupled with a policy to keep all nobility at arm’s length, could achieve these advantages and turn Nuremberg into the German Reich’s “unofficial capital”, yet one without a permanent, possibly parasitic court.

To earn the necessary wealth, the Nurembergers not only specialised in profitable long-distance trade, but also cultivated openness, both to gifted people and to useful ideas from abroad and to new, innovative ideas being developed at home. Nowhere did the medieval dictum that “city air makes you free” apply more to immigrants from rural bondage than in this dynamic place. Nurembergers were relatively early in adopting the novel Arabic numerals, as they did double-entry bookkeeping—an indication that accountability and the rational analysis of costs and benefits of decisions were becoming more widespread. They drew on nearby low-grade iron ore to develop a high-quality armaments industry—the best and most elegant swords, lances, sabres and body armour that a medieval knight might wish for were exported all over Europe.

Experimentation with new technical ideas was encouraged and admired. A local boy, Peter Henlein, invented the first portable watch (around 1510), which was called a “Nuremberg egg” and became a rip-roaring commercial success. Martin Behaim (as the name indicates, a descendant of an immigrant from Bohemia), who had returned home after serving the kings of Portugal as a mapmaker, earned acclaim for the globe he produced in his workshop. Soon after Johannes Gutenberg had invented movable letter printing, Nuremberg entrepreneurs mass-produced book manuscripts, which they sent by trusted local transport companies to merchants elsewhere for sale on commission. In those early days, it was left to the buyers to have the loose pages bound into books. The printing boom led to the construction of the first paper mill north of the Alps and stimulated the invention of new inks and paints. A long-lasting result of that specialisation is the famous local pencil brands such as Faber-Castell and Staedtler, whose products you can still buy in Australian shops. The painters and other craftsmen increasingly signed their works, an indication that individual awareness was spreading.

Another bourgeoning local craft was the production of measuring, surgical, dental, musical and other high-quality instruments. Not only were there tinkerers and inventors in town, but more importantly there was also a well-regulated system of apprenticeships, skill training and other forms of collective learning in place, which allowed the stock of useful knowledge to grow and inventions to be turned into profitable innovations. Vorsprung durch Technik (In the lead through technology) had its cradle in Nuremberg. Anyone interested can easily spend a fascinating day in Nuremberg’s excellent German National Museum, the biggest of its kind in Europe.

The merchants kept a firm hand on local craftsmen to ensure low prices. Every now and then discontent rose and uprisings occurred. Ordinary folk grumbled about the reign of the rich patricians, whom they called “pepper sacks”, but they also appreciated their many charitable organisations that helped the indigent, for example hospitals and foundling homes sponsored by rich families or merchant guilds. Pop culture also flourished. For example, local craft guilds sponsored the production of musical shows, such as the still famous “Mastersingers of Nuremberg”. The content of such spectacles would often have brought a blush even to the cheek of Rabelais, who at the time was making a name in Paris with his ribald writing.

Nuremberg’s citizens were of course good practising Christians, but their work and trade ethos—and their dedication to the solid pleasures of bourgeois life—ensured that they did not overdo their piety. The nearest bishop was at a suitable distance in Bamberg. The traditional Christian virtues were supplemented by cultivation of, and respect for, the bourgeois virtues, such as honesty, industriousness, parsimony, reliability, punctuality and compromise. The civic culture of medieval trading cities favoured trust, co-operation and low transaction costs. At a time when feudal courts judged people according to their social class and were slow and often corrupt, the official city courts cultivated the Law Merchant (lex mercatoria), which treated everyone as equal, kept the rules simple and decided expeditiously. The Nurembergers were not the only ones to develop such a favourable institutional system, but in many respects they were pioneers; and they “exported” their city’s institutions to places as far afield as Cracow, the royal city of Poland, which was profitably modernised by imitating ideas from the German west.

In the early Middle Ages, Nuremberg had been divided into two parts, separated by a flood-prone river flat. Here was the Jewish ghetto. In the middle of the fourteenth century, the desire to develop the city’s central area, as well as harsher church doctrines and xenophobia led to a pogrom and the expulsion of most Jews. Afterwards, the citizens decided to do penance by commissioning the German master builder Peter Parler, who also played a decisive role in erecting Prague’s splendid St Vitus Cathedral, to design and build the Gothic jewel of St Mary’s Church. Its clock, a mechanical masterpiece that displays the Electors circling the Emperor, still delights camera-toting tourists at noon. The ornate stonework designed to top the steeple was deemed so artistic that the city fathers decided to place it instead in the centre of a fountain on market square—again still delighting tourists.

Wherever a few generations of commerce and civic wealth creation have flourished, high artistic and cultural accomplishment follows. As elsewhere since antique Athens, a rising bourgeoisie dedicated resources to buy cultural excellence. Great master craftsmen and artisans, not only Dürer, were at the forefront of what latter-day art historians have called the northern Renaissance. Scientists and humanist theologians such as Philipp Melanchton  networked with contemporaries such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. Nuremberg’s publishing industry spread novel ideas throughout Central Europe. For example, Copernicus’s revolutionary treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres) could first be published here in 1543 thanks to the city’s relatively free intellectual atmosphere.

Here there are no frivolously opulent princely palaces, only the civic architecture of a wealthy, comfortable bourgeoisie. Public architecture represents a confident, wealthy city, but much of it remained utilitarian: the City Hall, the public weighing station, the city’s huge storehouses for grain and wine, the bridges across the river. Two rings of defensive city walls—the mighty outer ring nearly five kilometres long, longer than that of any other medieval European city—and its towers are still nearly intact—or rather intact again after the bombing raids of 1944 and 1945. Those parts of the fabric of the medieval metropolis which could be reasonably restored, were restored. But many parts of the historic city, one of the biggest of the age in Europe, are now of modern utilitarian design.

Unlike other rich cities such as Amsterdam, Augsburg and London, Nuremberg did not move from commerce and crafts to become a centre of large-scale banking. While the Augsburgers bankrolled the costly election of the Flemish-Spanish king to become Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and were never able to recoup the investment, and Amsterdam advanced big credits to diverse warring parties, the more sceptical Nurembergers confined themselves to giving judiciously measured gifts to obtain royal and imperial favours. Eventually, however, that caution made little difference when all Central European cities declined and the maritime West rose.

Nuremberg’s independent, pragmatic and sober civic culture and its distance from the increasingly corrupt Roman Church made it receptive to the teachings of Martin Luther. The city became an early convert to Protestantism, and—typical of its commercial proclivities—also a prompt sales agent of his sermons. The new art of printing was used to mass-produce his sermons, often embellishing them with illustrations. This did not always please Luther, who was a proud, powerful penman and is rightly credited with having done much to create modern High German. His handwritten material, when it reached the Free Imperial City, was given to the local typesetters, who sometimes, when his German grated with their own Franconian diction and word choice, “improved” on his texts. More than any contemporary author at loggerheads with his editors, Luther flew into rages, even travelling to Nuremberg to complain to the city authorities. Modern High German thus now owes a few terms to the local printers.

What drove Nuremberg’s medieval success comes to life when one studies the histories of the merchant families. The history buff in me made me read up on the fate of four generations of one typical commercial dynasty, who prospered from the late fourteenth to the early sixteenth century, the Landauer family. They built a great fortune and eventually used some of it to found an old-age home on the site where I attended high school. As part of this charitable foundation they commissioned their family friend Albrecht Dürer to paint his famous altarpiece.

The first known Landauer had been sponsored by an eminent merchant to become a naturalised citizen after moving to Nuremberg. He worked initially as a decorative painter. His sons, sons-in-law and grandsons turned to the opportunities of long-distance trade: selling textiles, spices, German wine and locally-made metal goods in Poland-Lithuania, and importing honey, pelts, wax and leather. Typically, they bought with cash, but often sold to their eastern clients on credit, a risky business that required good information and judgment. Transporting the goods was also risky, given the poor roads, robber barons, kidnappers and Hussite terrorists. But successful ventures often earned a 40 per cent profit. The business relied on a network of well-informed, trusted partners and friends, who regularly communicated information on prices, competitors and opportunities and who often acted as local compradores for the international traders.

When, with the assertion of Jagiellonian power in Poland-Lithuania during the fifteenth century, profit opportunities in the east became slimmer, the following generation of Landauers looked south and engaged in the weapons trade, including the growing industry of blunderbusses and muskets. This led to involvement in the metal trade (copper, lead, iron) and a little later in metal smelting and refining. The late-fourteenth-century scions of the family were among the wealthiest Nuremberg families, enabling them to make gifts to religious orders, commission works of art—some of which still awe the experts today—and start their own charitable foundation.

Their piece de resistance was the founding of the “Twelve Brothers’ House” to accommodate a dozen indigent Nuremberg craftsmen—who “had desisted from harlotry or drunkenness”—in their dotage, ensuring decent upkeep and company in exchange for their regular prayers. Admittedly, surreptitiously charging interest for loans and making huge commercial profits, which the Church disapproved of, were part of the Landauers’ business success. So they might as well invest in some reinsurance, delegating praying for their souls to honest fellow citizens and at the same time earning social respect and political kudos. The donors did not entrust the supervision of their charity to the Church, considering the city council the more honest trustees. Nonetheless, the Papal authorities in Rome, when apprised of this important foundation, directed the Nuremberg churches to protect and favour the undertaking. It existed till the conflagrations in the wars of religion put an end to it, and to much of Nuremberg’s wealth as well.

When the Reformation began, Nurembergers would have been aware of the costly shenanigans of the rulers of Spain, France and England, who tried to forge large centralised kingdoms. They would have disapproved, as such power-plays were inimical to more liberal governance and more secure individual wealth creation. Over their tankards of local beer or a meal of pork knuckles or the famous local bratwurst, the city councillors probably discussed the merits of playing occasional host to a ruler, but avoiding becoming a capital city with a permanent, costly court. While others might fight a War of the Roses or a Hundred Years’ War, Nurembergers would rather trade and tinker with new ideas.

What they did not know at the time was that Columbus’s discoveries and the consequent emergence of the maritime empires of Western Europe would soon turn their city into a backwater. When Nuremberg merchants in Antwerp were suddenly confronted with Portuguese competitors offering fresher peppercorns for half the traditional price, an ominous new age dawned—what latter-day Harvard management gurus would call a “great disruption”.

The wars of religion in the sixteenth century and the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth did much to lead to Nuremberg’s decline. But the city government also coped poorly with the new times. The guilds closed ranks, rigidly defending their privileges; protectionism did much to weaken the economy. Many of the old, successful attitudes and institutions seemed forgotten. The population halved between 1500 and 1800.

Historians of the nineteenth century who focused on rulers and wars and derided Germany as a “land of poets and philosophers”, depicted medieval Germany as weak, poor and backward. With their more recent interest in economic and social history, historians now often depict the medieval German lands as places of innovation and dispersed flourishing, a system of “competitive federalism” under a suitably weak imperial umbrella, in which city communities lived comparatively well-to-do and free lives. This more positive view may not apply to the purely agricultural backwaters, but it seems justified when one looks at the free cities, foremost among them Nuremberg.

After the Napoleonic cataclysm, the weakened city-state of Nuremberg was unceremoniously absorbed into the Kingdom of Bavaria; and the imperial regalia were relocated to Vienna, where they are still today. The integration of the city with its great history into upstart Bavaria sometimes still irks. You can hear some proud Franconians occasionally mutter that “Nuremberg earns, and Munich spends”. Yet, by the middle of the nineteenth century, when customs unions and early industrialisation offered opportunities for creative, hard-working people, the Nurembergers’ traditional cultural traits again began to serve them well. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Nuremberg became the high-tech industrial powerhouse of Bavaria. Names like Siemens-Schuckert in electrical engineering and MAN (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg) in transport equipment turned central Franconia into a booming region. Widening markets for traditional local products—for example lager, toys and gingerbread—added to rapid employment growth.

After the Great War and hyperinflation, the thousand-year-old city willingly allowed itself to be embraced by Hitler’s short-lived Thousand-Year Reich. During the war its industry and political reputation made Nuremberg a prime target for British and American bombers. The big medieval city was converted to rubble.

But not all was lost. Even early in the war, some people predicted a catastrophe and began to place the city’s arts treasures in safe storage. Army engineers somehow managed to be detained in Nuremberg and dismantled statues and altars in churches that were now “closed for restoration”. The mighty sandstone hill under the imperial castle had long been converted into a rabbit warren of beer-storage cellars, since local breweries were only allowed to produce as much beer as they could store (the German word is lagern) in cool caves within the city limits. Now, these cellars were surreptitiously equipped with ventilation and secure locks, stringent wartime rationing of necessary materials notwithstanding. The ardent Nazi police chief of Nuremberg, who of course became aware of what was going on and ought to have punished anyone who displayed such signs of defeatism, proved to be a Nuremberger first and a Nazi second. He turned a blind eye. The “Art Bunker” is now one of the most fascinating places to visit in Nuremberg.

Growing up in Nuremberg, I probably absorbed by osmosis some of its values and some of its extraordinary history. I became curious about the humanists because Philipp Melanchton had been a teacher in an earlier incarnation of my school. I was less taken by the nineteenth-century misanthrope Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was a teacher at our school from 1810 to 1816, before he became a protagonist of royal power and a mechanistic vision of history. He had castigated the pupils as lazy and ignorant. Historic justice is served, as a fine statue of Melanchton now stands in front of the school, but none of Hegel.

And, as I said, I was influenced by the Dürer replica in our music room. How come the original was in Vienna? In 1515 Dürer, when painting a now famous portrait of Emperor Maximilian, who regularly visited Nuremberg, unwisely showed His Majesty the Holy Trinity picture. His son and successor, Emperor Rudolf II, a rapacious art collector, suggested that the city fathers might want to “sell” him the much-admired altarpiece. Experienced in dealing with potentates, the city reluctantly obliged, simply appropriating the masterpiece in the chapel of a private foundation, over which they only had indirect supervisory rights.

Nowadays, Nuremberg is a stopping or embarkation point for the many river cruise boats en route from Amsterdam to Budapest, because the city now lies on the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, a fiscal frivolity built at huge expense by the Federal Republic over recent decades. The modern tourist trade has made Nuremberg one of the busiest passenger ports in Europe. While other cities were created by the river trade, Nuremberg became a city first, and navigation was brought here artificially and much, much later.