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.

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.