“In the same way that Jerusalem is the navel of the world, is Nurnberg the navel of Germany” is how Matthäus Dresser described the city in 1581. The astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus moved to Nurnberg in 1471 because there” …one can easily associate with learned men wherever they live. Because of the cosmopolitanism of its merchants, this place is regarded as the center of Europe”.

How did this city grow within 200 years from an imperial castle far from the main transport links, without a harbour and on famously poor soil into one of the three most important urban centres in Germany whose merchants were well regarded in all corners of the world, whose printers published the works of Europe’s leading intellectuals, whose artists were and remain of global renown and whose engineers produced breakthrough after breakthrough.

Let’s find out

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 153 – The rise of the city of Nürnberg, also published as episode 16 of Series 8: From the Interregnum to the Golden Bull, 1250-1356.

“In the same way that Jerusalem is the navel of the world, is Nurnberg the navel of Germany” is how Matthäus Dresser described the city in 1581. The astronomer Johannes Regiomontanus moved to Nurnberg in 1471 because there” …one can easily associate with learned men wherever they live. Because of the cosmopolitanism of its merchants, this place is regarded as the center of Europe”.

How did this city grow within 200 years from an imperial castle far from the main transport links, without a harbour and on famously poor soil into one of the three most important urban centres in Germany whose merchants were well regarded in all corners of the world, whose printers published the works of Europe’s leading intellectuals, whose artists were and remain of global renown and whose engineers produced breakthrough after breakthrough.

Let’s find out

But before we start let me once again tell you that the History of the Germans is advertising free thanks to the generosity of our patrons. Ad you can become a patron too by signing up on patreon.com/history of the Germans or on my website, historyofthegermans.com/support, And let me thank BJ B., Warren W., Corneliu D., GRAEME T H., James, Felix C. and Duane S. who have already signed up. And now back to the show

Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future pope Pius II and at the time cardinal legate in the empire wrote that quote “when comparing one nation with another, there is no reason to rate the Italian cities above the German ones. The German cities appear so youthful, as if they had been created and built just a few days earlier”. High praise indeed.

In the late 15^th century when this was written there were nearly 3,000 cities in the wider empire north of the Alps, not all of them comparable to Florence, Milan or Rome. Some had barely more than a few hundred inhabitants and served more as the lord’s castle than as trading metropolises. The ones he is likely to have referred to were the three largest and commercially most important ones, Cologne, Lübeck and Nürnberg.

So, let us take a look at whether the future pope and creator of his own ideal city, the lovely Pienza in Tuscany was exaggerating, and if not, how Germania turned from a land of impassable forests into a a landscape dominated by cities, large and small.

Nobody would have suggested that German cities, even the largest ones, in and  around the year 1200 could compete with a sophisticated and wealthy metropolis like Milan or Venice. To understand why such comparison was at all conceivable, we have to go back to the fundamental changes in the economic landscape since then.

One of the main axes of medieval German history had been the expansion eastwards we covered in Season 5. If you have not listened to it, the broad brush story is that from around 1150 onwards about 200,000 people moved from the densely populated regions of Flanders, Holland and the Rhineland into the lands east of the Elbe roughly equivalent to the area of the former east Germany. In a second roughly equal sized wave that began around 1250 German speaking migrants moved further east, into Silesia, Poland, Prussia, the western part of Bohemia, Hungary, modern day Romania and many more places.

The emigration was organised by professional Locatores who were employed by the local lords, some of them Germans, but often also Polish, Hungarian or Bohemian princes who were looking to cut down the forests and develop their land. They would offer the immigrants the opportunity to own a sizeable plot in a to be founded village or town in exchange for an initially low level of taxation. This process was in many ways similar to the opening up of the American West and had a similar impact on economic growth. By 1350 this process had been more or less completed. By then, almost all of europe had been brought under cultivation, either by colonists or by the existing population.

In parallel to this expansion eastwards, almost all of the land in the western parts of the empire that had so far been regarded as not attractive enough also got developed. What we can see from archaeology and the names of parcels of land is that by the 14^th century agriculture had been penetrating into areas where yields were truly marginal. Bogs have been drained and alpine valleys brought up to grow rye and barley. Vines was planted as far north as the valleys of the Ems, Weser and Oder, even in Prussia. At no point before or after was there more acreage used for agriculture in europe than in the 14^th century.

This indicates that by 1350 the population expansion that had began in the 10^th century should have reached its natural limits. Without a major improvement in agricultural production technique, the land was simply not able to feed any more people, except if there was a way to import food from areas that still produced surplus. And such areas did exist, in the lands further east. The Ukraine was a breadbasket not just today, but already then. As we heard in series 6, regions for instance along the Baltic coast geared up to provide foodstuff for the densely populated territories in the West. These foodstuffs included not just grain, but also salted herring and stockfish as well as beer, wine, honey and lots more.

We did discuss one  leg of this trade in quite some detail in the series about the Hanseatic League.  There was a similar leg of this trade on the east-west axis further south, initially along the Danube river and later across the middle of Germany along the key nodes of Leipzig and Nürnberg.

To put that into context, Germany’s largest city, Cologne consumed 5-7,000 oxen per year that were driven down 300km from Frisia and the Emsland, innumerable pigs were made to walk even further from Lorraine or Meissen to Cologne. Grain, which did not spoil so easily was transported across even larger distances.

The other set of commodities the western cities needed were metals, both precious metals like gold and silver as well as base metals like iron, copper, tin and lead. The 14^th and 15^th century is a time of innovations, in particular in armour and mechanics. For instance, cities took immense pride in their elaborate town clocks. These were initially operated as water clocks, but from the late 13^th century onwards these were replaced by mechanical clocks. By the middle of the 15^th century, there were over 500 mechanical clocks in operation on public buildings across europe. These new instruments required high quality iron or copper to work. And as we mentioned many times before, the great mineral reservoirs were in Bohemia, in Saxony, in Hungary and in Sweden. By the time of Margarete Maultasch the deposits of silver and base metals in Tirol were also going into production.

This rising demand for commodities changed the way things were transported. A merchant bringing luxury items like precious stones, silks or spices could carry his wares on horseback or on a mule train. Transporting tons of herring or grain across half of europe required either boats or heavy wagons. And that meant what was needed was new infrastructure. Sometimes cities needed to be connected to rivers by canals, like for instance the canal linking Lubeck to the Elbe that was built in 1398. Another example is the construction of the Via regia that started in the 13^th century and connected Kyiv and Moscow on one end  and Burges and Santiago de Compostela at the other.

These new trading connections shifted the centre of European trade eastwards from the 13^th century onwards. Whilst the German cities along the Rhine, in particular on the lower Rhine had been closely integrated into the European trading system, the new cities further east, such as Leipzig, Breslau, Krakow, Nürnberg and Regensburg were now linked into these pan-European commercial networks as well.

On top of these structural changes, the German cities benefitted from political events as well. In 1284 the trading fairs in Champagne that had been the key location where Italian purveyors of luxury goods met with Flemish cloth merchants, went into a surreptitious decline. One of the reasons for this was that king Philipp the Fair, he who had the Templars dissolved and had lifted Henry VII on the throne, had made a major economic policy mistake.  In an attempt to centralise France he placed heavy taxation on the Italian merchants coming to Champagne, waged war against the cities of Flanders; prevented their merchants from entering France and blocked the export of French wool. Within just 20 years, the once thriving fairs of Champagne had collapsed.

This foolishness was followed by the 100 years war that had been brewing for a long time but kicked off in earnest in 1337. The resulting devastation of in particular north eastern France disrupted the traditional routes from Italy to Flanders along the ancient roman roads from Marseille to Lyon, Reims, Troyes, Arras and then to Ghent and Bruges. 

The great beneficiaries of this blockage were the German cities. And not only those along the Rhine. Because more and more passes opened across the Alps, including the already mentioned Gotthard, wares now travelled directly north from Venice and Florence on the via imperii to Augsburg, Nürnberg and Leipzig and from there either to Flanders and France via Frankfurt or North to the Hanse world or even eastwards into Poland, Ukraine and Russia.

As for the fairs, these continued, just not in Champagne. The fair at Frankfurt took their role as the great place of exchange between East and West and North and South.

All these different megatrends, population growth, the colonisation of the east, the shifting trading patterns from luxury to commodities, the troubles and foolishness of French kings can explain a lot of what is happening here. But there is something else going on that is remarkable. If you remember when we looked at the foundation of Lübeck, there was a big question mark why this place, not necessarily at the geographically most promising corner of the Baltic could rise to such prominence against the competition from the already established city of Haitabu. Something about the people who moved there, the political and educational system must have helped to create this success.

And if you think Lübeck was a bit of a long shot, the other great trading city of the 14^th century, Nürnberg was an even more surprising story.

Nurnberg’s origins are a bit obscure. The city first appears as an imperial castle in 1050, during the reign of  emperor Henry III. The next time we hear about it is during the wars between Lothar III and the Hohenstaufen when the emperor besieged Konrad III in Nurnberg, unsuccessfully. That suggests that by then the castle had already become a sizeable fortress. Once Konrad III had become king, Nürnberg became a popular place for him to stay and was made the administrative centre of the imperial lands surrounding it. The administration was entrusted to a Burggrave which again indicates the significance of the location. From 1190 onwards the position of Burggrave was given to the counts of Zollern, direct ancestors of the Hohenzollern kings of Prussia and German emperors.

The Burgraves prove to be very apt operators and managed to expand their territory materially from their base on the castle of Nürnberg. Meanwhile a settlement grew up below the castle. Initially the merchants and artisans who came there mostly served the castle. The castle had by now become one of the central locations for the Hohenstaufen emperors. Frederick Barbarossa came here 12 times and held 5 imperial diets here. Sponsorship by the Hohenstaufen continued under Henry VI who expanded the castle.

The big step up came in 1219 under Frederick II. Frederick II granted the city and its merchants imperial protection and exemption from various tolls. In his reasoning the emperor noted that the town needed support because it had no vineyards, that its river, the Pregnitz wasn’t navigable  and that its soil was poor.

And he wasn’t wrong. Nurnberg had none of the advantages other successful cities had benefitted from. It had never been the seat of either a territorial prince or a bishop. It did not get a university before the 18^th century, it wasn’t on any major trading route before it forced the routes to go through their town, it had no harbour or quay where to land wares by ship, it had no natural resources and its land as well as the surrounding territory had sandy, poor soil. Even the forests that surrounded it would not have lasted long, had it not been regularly replanted.

How they became the foremost trading city in the southern part of the empire has been the subject of debate for a long time. One indicator may have been a document issued by Ludwig IV, the Bavarian in 1332. This charter references special trading rights and privileges for citizens of Nurnberg in over 70 other cities in the empire. If you remember the series about the Hanse, one of the great value propositions to its members had been special trading privileges in various placees. The difference here is that the Hanse gained rights for instance in Bruges by coordinated action across multiple cities that held a collective monopoly on certain key products. What Nurnberg managed was to acquire a similar position exclusively for its own merchants and that without a genuine monopoly position.

To understand how they got these, we have to look a bit under the hood of the Nurnberg  model. Again, if you remember the Hanse merchants were organised and operated through a system of social control. If you were a Hanse merchant in Riga and you traded with a colleague in Hamburg, you either had some family ties to and/or you knew each other well from time spent together at one of the Kontor houses in Novgorod or Bergen. Moreover, you would control your partner in Hamburg by having relationships with other merchants in Hamburg who would keep an eye out for prices, trends and unusual behaviours of your counterpart. In return you would do the same for these other merchants. Business dealings were also incredibly interlinked, with merchants constantly handling funds and wares on someone else’s behalf. And all that without double bookkeeping. Basically, the Hanse was a system built entirely on trust, and because of it, the Hanse firms rarely grew to become large operations. And there was no need for banks, as merchants would grant credit to each other.

Nurnberg was organised very differently. Its merchants operated much more like the illustrious Italian houses, the Bardi, the Peruzzi and later the Medici. That means each of the great Nurnberg families, the Pfinzing, the Mendel, Stromeir, Kress,  Rummel, Pirkheimer, Koler, Grantel and Imhof had their own system of connections and maintained their representative offices abroad. These firms weren’t just merchants, they were also bankers. They built relationships with kings, emperors and the territorial lords who they advised on finance and on the most important technology of the late middle ages, mining.

One of the place where they gained the strongest footholds was in the kingdom of Hungary. Nurnberg merchants received their first trading privilege there in 1357. For the next 50 years the Nurnberger and the Florentines competed for the right to exploit the rich silver, copper and gold mines of Hungary. Nurnberg won this contest, largely because they could organise the supply of competent miners from the Harz mountains and other mining centres and because they had developed the Saiger process, a secret method to separate silver from the copper ore. That was so important that king Sigismund decided to expel the Florentines, seize their money and grant Nurnberg a monopoly on mining in Hungary. That monopoly at some point covered 90% of European gold production and 30% of silver and copper.   

Mining and metalwork was an important industry in Nurnberg and its surrounding areas. They had access to iron ore from the upper palatinate and used wood from the surrounding imperial forests for the smelting. These woods needed to be replenished regularly, so the mining entrepreneur Peter Stromeier came up with the idea of sowing the cleared forests with fast growing spruce, the first attempt at sustainability in the otherwise quite rapacious Middle Ages. And the beginnings of the classic German needle forests we have today.

Another skill the ingenious Nürnbergers developed was a way to pump out so-called drowned pits, which again led to dramatic improvements in productivity.

But they did not stop at just mining the raw materials. Nurnberg was also the place where we find the first machines to draw wires. Wires are made by drawing thicker piece of metal through consecutively smaller holes. This was initially done by hand, but later by using watermills. By the way water and windmills too are something that only really took hold in the 14^th century. And wire was a crucial component in various other products, namely nails, needles, rivets, eyelets and mail shirts. Wire was also a key for the wire screens used in the production of paper, where Nurnberg was again taking the lead.  The quality of their products was such that it was exported all across europe and even into the Ottoman empire and Persia.

These basic industries laid the foundations for Nurnberg’s golden age in the late 15^th and early 16^th century when Peter Henlein produced the first ever watch, Albrecht Durer dazzled the world with his prints, Hartmann Schedel produced the Nuremberg chronicle that for the first time allowed people to get an idea what at least some cities looked like, it was the city where Martin Behaim produced the very first terrestrial globe and Kopernikus published his astronomical works claiming the sun and, not the earth sits at the centre of the solar system, etc., etc.

One of the reasons Nurnberg remained innovative for such a long time might have to do with the fact that the city uniquely had no guilds. The guilds of Nurnberg had rebelled against the elite of long distance merchants and upon the suppression of the revolt the emperor banned guilds from Nurnberg for good. Without guilds, intrepid inventors were able to pursue their ideas without constantly running up against rules designed to maintain a monopoly of the existing artisans.

The other advantage the absence of guilds had was to allow the creation of something they called the Verlagswesen. What that meant was that entrepreneurs could hire competent workmen or even trained artisans to produce goods on his behalf. The entrepreneur would provide the raw materials, the designs and would later sell the finished goods. The workman would be paid by the piece. This allowed for the rapid scaling up of production to an almost pre-industrial level. So by 1363 the city already contained 1,216 master artisans, a huge number relative to an overall size of about 20,000.

As for the cash that all this trading activity generated, it was mostly reinvested in the ever expanding projects and sometime lent to the rulers of the day. It was again our friend Ludwig IV who relied on the financial muscle of the Nurnberg patricians. His banker, Konrad Gross became indispensable in the various adventures of the Bavarian.

Banking and complex international finance required proper bookkeeping and this is again an area where the Nurnberg trading houses excelled. One of the oldest complete book of accounts in Germany comes from Nurnberg, dating back to 1304-1307 and the first one using Arab numerals dates back from 1389. Double bookkeeping was brought in from Italy and quickly took hold.

It is under Ludwig IV that Nurnberg rebuilds its link to the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. The city had hosted various diets during the Interregnum, but the Bavarian really put it on the map. He stayed in Nürnberg an astonishing 72 times and held a plethora of imperial diets there.

This close relationship with the rulers of the empire continued with Ludwig’s successor, Charles IV. Charles made Nurnberg one of the central locations of the empire when he issued his golden bull in the city and also established the rule that the very first imperial diet of a newly elected emperor was to be held in Nürnberg. The emperor Sigismund then entrusted the imperial regalia to the city of Nurnberg where they remained until the end of the Holy Roman Empire when they were brought to Vienna.

With all this enthusiasm for the city of Nurnberg, I have to mention a dark side to the story as well. Its success had attracted a large Jewish community. Jewish moneylenders were the only serious competition to the Nurnberg bankers since the Lombards had been kept out of most of Southern Germany thanks to imperial support. Moreover, the Jewish community had settled in an area of the city that was initially quite unattractive but by the middle of the 14^th century had become extremely desirable. The desire for this land, the wish to get rid of competition, together with the general European trend to persecute Jewish communities led to a number of pogroms, the first as part of the notorious Rintfleisch massacres of 1298 but then most severely during the mass murders in the wake of the black death.

The fact that Nurnberg did go through with these is particularly unexpected since jews were under the explicit protection of the emperor who had declared them his domestic servants, which meant any attack on a Jew was also an attack on the emperor himself. Nurnberg as a city particularly close to the emperor should have headed to this rule, but seemingly got away with breaking it.

I will not go through the rest of Nurnberg’s history, its decline in the 17^th and 18^th century, its resurrection as an emblem of Romanticism, the Nurnberg rallies, the destruction in world war II and the Nuremberg trials. This is a far too big chunk of history to deal with in the maximum 10 minutes left plus these topics will show up in the course of the show anyway.

One last thing though. Did Nurnberg indeed rival Florence, Venice or Milan, as Enea Silvio Piccolomini had claimed. I would love to be able to say yes, but then where is the duomo, the Uffizi and the doge’s palace. And there is also a kink in the future pope Pius II’s comment. He made it in the context of several German cities refusing to pay their dues to Rome, claiming poverty. So, I am afraid, it was just another case where the desire for cash made the church come up with claims that are at least subject to debate….

Now next time, which will again be unfortunately in two weeks, we will look at the opposite of the city of Nurnberg. Where Nurnberg is innovative and focused on the future, on money, industry and growth, the subject of our next podcast is looking towards the chivalric virtues of bravery, courtly love, crusades and haughty nobility. Yes, we will be talking about John, the blind king of Bohemia, the greatest chivalric hero of the 14^th century and holder of the title, most admired death of the middle ages.  I hope you will join us again. And before we go, just a quick reminder that the History of the Germans podcast is advertising free thanks to your kind support.  If you think this show is worth it, you can become a patron at patreon.com/historyofthegermans or at historyofthegermans.com