Chapter I: Part 1

The Imperial Crown

A story by Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910)

On the fifty-third day of the siege, one and a half thousand years after the fall of Rome as a republic and nine hundred and seventy seven years after Odoacer the Barbarian had exiled the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus to the estate that had once belonged to Lucullus in Catania, Constantinople had fallen. God placed two empires and twelve kingdoms in the hands of the son of Murad, Mehmet the Second. What Christendom in its comatose dullness, tearing itself to pieces in wars of religion and feuds between peoples and their princes, had been unable to defend itself against, had now happened. The great bogeyman had finally arrived.

On Saint Lawrence's day in the year 1453 an old man sits in a narrow room in a house on the Banner Mountain in Nuremberg writing what we are about to read. The low window looks out on a small vegetable patch and up to the town wall beyond. The small room is bare and without any ornament, but the sun shines down on the garden, the day is pleasant and the sky is blue.

It is quiet and yet not quiet. The writer's room does indeed face the town and the streets, but a strange noise and a humming sound buzzes through the air and the brave old high protective walls and towers resonate most singularly. The writer's room is also filled with a humming and ringing and wondrous rushing. Someone insecure and not in control of their thoughts and their quill would find it hard today in Nuremberg to execute calligraphy with stylus, ink, paper and parchment.

The grey-haired old man now and again holds his head in his hands and listens to the ruckus, but it does not have the power to disturb him. His eye only looks to the sky for a moment with just a little less pensiveness. He does not, however, put down his quill for such trifles.

He has talent as a scribe and has something to say of lasting value despite the sounds and interplay of colours of the world outside.

Tolle! Lege! Take and read! Let us see what Saint Augustine has to say on the subject: "I heard come from a neighbouring house a soft and gentle voice repeating itself as if a boy or girl were speaking: Tolle! Lege! Take and read! And my face was drained of colour and I wondered if these words were part of a children's game but could not remember ever having heard them before. And, suddenly, tears came to my eyes and I stood up interpreting this as a voice from heaven!" That's it in a nutshell! Thanks to this great privilege, by the grace of God, I too heard this siren voice, half that of a child, half that of a messenger of the Most High and discovered the Logos that made sense of worldly hubbub and gave me peace. Like Augustine I no longer breathed the air of bread and circuses, of the military might of the Emperor and his erstwhile glory nor indeed the splendour that once was Rome.

I heard and saw--things wonderful to tell of and describe. While I was still young I saw a bright light in the gloom. While I was still young my life also underwent a change.

What does the great bell Benedicta in the church of Saint Sebaldus want with its solemn tolling? What do the other bells in all the belltowers of my home town want by ringing so? I can hear their tones, both near and far, intermingle with each other. I can hear my brothers and sisters making their way through streets and marketplaces singing psalms and plaintive hymns. I hear the people tramp like the roar of a faraway river breaking its banks.

To the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus, to the sound of its iron clapper voice they stream as one: Vox ego sum vitae, voco vos, orate, venite! (I am the voice of life, I am calling you to pray, come!) Friar Johannes Capistranus is standing in the stone pulpit outside the walls of the church to preach about the pagan victory, the fall of the Eastern Empire, the coming of the Anti-Christ and the end of the world. His call to repentance has been tolled out by all the bells. In all the towns through which he has passed people have lit fires and thrown on them with cries and sobs their ephemeral vain things: dice and board games, little bells and sledges, quilted hoods and pointed shoes. This they will do today too in Nuremberg, rid themselves a hundredfold of aids to sensuality and find themselves beset by courtly love and the pride of life yet again tomorrow as they were yesterday and are today.

Truly this zealous Franciscan friar speaks well. The whole of Christendom, to whom he addresses himself, has learnt that. He does not speak to bandy words with the foolish and the weak. He tugs at the heartstrings of the strongest man. He spares no-one. He grips men in armour so that even their iron breastplates become no more than the flimsy garment that a woman wears. He seizes them and those who wear crowns on their helmets must get down on their knees like the women who have come here from the cradles of their children, like the young women who have been weaving garlands and gathering bunches of flowers, who have come here from their spindles and their looms. Brother Johannes speaks well. He drowns out the sound of the bells, but how could he drown out the gentle voice that once spoke to me?

I have no more board games and dice games, pointed shoes and modish clothes to throw into the flames. I do not need to jostle with the others at the church of Saint Sebaldus. How potent the words of that fiery monk Johannes Capistranus though! The great unrest he has caused in the feelings of the people in this town has laid hold of me too. I have not been able to defend myself against them and so here I sit on St Lawrence's day in the year of the fall of Byzantium and write down what I experienced in my youth when the crown belonging to the German people was almost lost and when I too was led to fight for it along with others. While the town heaves and swells and thunders like a far-off sea, I am writing what the gentle voice once said that set me so soon on the way through life and that penetrated both my ear and heart in the wildest and the most anarchic of times.

I am from an old and resourceful Nuremberg family. I studied, not without diligence and understanding, law in Prague before moving to Leipzig when the Hussite heresy began to trouble us. I wielded my sword for my town and the Empire, had command of the town of Gleven in hard-fought battles and was the town's envoy to the Republic of Venice and to the Queen of Naples, Joanna the Second. Marsilio Ficino called me his friend and Cosimo de' Medici took me into his Platonic Academy in Florence. I am master of my own body and master in my own house. I am a wealthy man and am tired of life.

Tired of life? Perhaps not, but I have had many long years of experiencing it and Brother Johannes at St Sebaldus today has nothing to tell me.

Truly I am not tired of life, but like the saintly bishop of Hippo, Aurelius Augustinus, I know that the games of grown-ups are called business and, as I early rejected the games of my youth, so I have now foresworn the games of adults. I am now at peace by the grace of God.

At peace! I am still pleased with my great and splendid alma mater, its art and its cleverness, the favour and the fame it enjoys among nations. I take pleasure in remembering the beauty of the world, how, for instance, I can bring to mind the shining of the Tyrrhenian sea in the sunshine even today. I take pleasure in the noble men and women who have met with me under Germany's sky as well as that of Italy. Truly I have seen much in the world, truly I have lived and live still. Only today it is not of the earth's splendour I write under this tolling of bells occasioned by one who is preaching atonement at the church of Saint Sebaldus.

With heartfelt devotion I have always supported my home town and it has been second to no other town for me no matter how fair the laurel groves that town was steeped in. Others may boast of their Arno and the blueness of their Adriatic. I prize the town of my father and my mother. It has always lain quietly inside me when I thought of them along life's byways. I hold dear in this place and in this hour the town that was there to witness the birth of Mechthild Grossin.

When I was young my father's house was full of people, full of life. That life has gradually faded and grown silent, one voice after another. My parents are dead and my brothers and sisters too. I have been left on my own and my footfall in this old house is the only one now that those of a veritable host of friends and relations have gone to echo on the stairs and in the passages and rooms. And so too I am excluded from those rooms which once were full of cheerful noise and overlook the gaudy street. I sit once again in that room that was mine as a boy and after, when I was a student in Prague. A narrow space is enough for me, a bare wall preferable to one that has been decorated. I love my garden more than the tumultuous streets and the treetops that come up as far as my windowsill give me more pleasure than the parades of noble and not so noble families, of the councillors and clergy of this gracious town of Nuremberg.

I have left the proud rooms of the front of the house with their decorations, ornaments, carvings and weapons on display to the spiders and the maids. It is my youth that has brought me in old age back to my tiny schoolroom. It is my garden and the garden in which Mechthild Grossin played as a little girl and strolled in as a young woman that have brought me back here.

But I did not live alone then in the small room. In the year 1390 the knight Hans Groland with his brother Ulrich had placed his Laufenholz stables in the town of Nuremberg on the open market and both brothers had sworn that neither they nor any of their descendants would sell the property to anyone other than a citizen or a citizeness of Nuremberg. When in 1392 the great bell of Saint Sebaldus was blessed, both brothers had already died and Hans's son, Michael Groland, became my father's ward and was brought to our home as no-one else wanted to take him in. My father's guardianship extended to little more than the wild young squire himself for the Groland family had managed their affairs badly from of old and for the last scion of their race little remained of ancient property rights. His parents, however, had held the stables in perpetuity from the time of Emperor Ludwig the Second of Bavaria.

The wild young squire Michael was my friend and Mechthild Grossin grew up to be his bride. Their voices too are silent now and their footsteps no more heard. Tolle! Lege! Tolle! Lege!

From the time of Conrad Hainzen onwards, who was called Conrad the Leper and then Conrad the Great, no more imposing family has arisen in Nuremberg and on the strong tree with a hundred branches no fairer blossom than Mechthild Grossin whose father on Banner Mountain was my father's neighbour. For me it is a miracle, even if it is not one, that today, withered and grey, I can overlook the window of the fair maid's summer garden, while she departed this life many years ago as she left her room in all her youthful beauty.

Yes, she left and no-one was able to stop her--not her father, not her mother, not the might, power and reputation of the great town nor those of her great and honourable family.

She listened to the voice of love and followed the promptings of her forefather. Tolle! Lege!

It was a one-year-old child that was brought to my father in his home and grew to be like a young eaglet that fell out of its parents' nest and was taken home by a beekeeper under his arm. My father learnt the hard way what it is to feed a bird of prey. But I, who was only slightly older than Squire Michael, took pleasure in having a good playmate until we were both eligible bachelors and had gone from being playmates to being friends for life until death came to part us.

Yes, we were boys in the time of the wild and merry king Wenceslas and the way things stood in the Empire at that time and the feuds the town had on its hands with Heinrich von Buchteck, Georg von Wichsenstein, Sybold Schelm of Bergen and dozens of other thorns in its side, even the careworn face of my father, the keeper of the public purse who had to keep an eye on the town's treasure, seals and documents, could often not repress with its grim lines the youthful merriment in the house on Banner Mountain. And that fateful day in Rense that brought to a wondrous end the splendour of King Wenceslas on German soil was really not able to put paid to the splendour of o u r youth.

In the year of Our Lord 1400 Mechthild Grossin was born into this vale of tears in the house next door to us. In the reign of King Ruprecht Squire Groland von Laufenholz and myself became young men.

Look at that sun! It lies like gold over the grey wall of the town and the turret of the watchtower opposite my window. In my north-facing room it cannot of course penetrate, but I see it as I saw it in the days of my youth. Why is the monk at Saint Sebaldus preaching about the end of the world? The world won't come to an end because Constantinople has fallen into the hands of the heathen, because the Holy Roman Empire's fortresses are threatened, because poor mankind wanders into sin as it has to wander in pain and inexpressible misery! A friendly swaying moves the trees of my youth. They bow to each other over the gates that separate neighbours' gardens. The unsteady shadows of branch and leaf dance on the ground. The happy birds hop and flutter in the treetops. The summer flowers of my youth bloom in my garden and in the gardens of my neighbours. The world defends itself today as it did in olden days through beauty and loveliness against the words of the angry monk. Tolle! Lege! Take and read and understand rightly and take care not to attribute a false meaning to the word that is opened up to you and stands for your life and the life of your contemporaries!

When Michael and I had become young men and played our part in torchlit dances and bearded masques, our neighbour's little girl slipped through the green hedge and came shyly and yet deliberately to the bower where we first sat with our teacher Theodoros Antoniades, exiled from Chios, whose evil star had led him, to prove a real blessing to me, to Nuremberg. In his flight from the Turks he had only been able to take with him a few rolled-up parchments and books he had written himself and his language, which was like a revelation to me and fell on my soul like a rainbow. I helped the homeless refugee to live and he taught me his Greek tongue and tried to teach it to my friend and would perhaps have managed it if the child had not stuck her curly little head into the green bower. Master Theodoros was just drawing his first gamma on the table with a piece of chalk when the child appeared and Greek went out of the window for the wild child Michael Groland von Laufenholz. He caught up the child with a laugh, lifted her, made much of her and disrupted the lesson in no uncertain way. I told him off severely, but he laughed all the more and the girl got no further than the alphabet. But his fate was decided thereby and so was mine.

The little girl came to every lesson that we held in the garden and, though Michael did not continue to annoy us any further, he seated his little friend on his knee and she, Mechthild, learnt more from Master Theodoros Antoniades than Michael did, for she listened attentively and quietly enough to him and watched with big, earnest eyes the careworn face of the wise, banished teacher. After the lesson she ran more or less wild admittedly and she and Michael Groland chased each other through the garden round bushes and trees so that all the neighbours stuck their heads out of their windows and women and young women working for the owner of the House of the Golden Shield leaned on their garden fence in happy astonishment and witnessed smiling the game between the young child and the grown-up one. Even the ancient landlady, the owner's old mother in the House of the Shield, who was newly married when the Emperor and his Empire's representatives had held council in the presence of the Golden Seal, who had knelt before the house's altar next to the Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, even she came, supported by her staff and her granddaughter's arm, to the fence and took pleasure in the pleasure evinced by the two youngsters.

Tolle! Lege! This old mother, Anna Grundherrin, on whom such a great honour was bestowed by Emperor and Empire, took upon herself an even greater honour after in the cause of mercy and humility. She was the first Mater Leprosorum, the first patroness of the lepers, Usslingerin's first helper, and as I am writing not of the Emperor or the Empire, but of myself and my own family, no more need be said of the Golden Seal, but a lot about the lepers, and truly I have a sad right to, as will be recognized after I have put this quill down tonight.

In the year of Our Lord's Grace 1394 the hearts of Christians first turned to lepers hereabouts. At that time there was a pious preacher in the town, Master Nicholas at the Holy Spirit Hospice. He it was who first succeeded, with God's help, in waking the hearts of the people in Nuremberg. He began in his church to preach sermons for the lepers and made a loud appeal for charitable actions to alleviate this great, inexpressible misery and appealed above all to kindly women, stirred their hearts and they responded to his call.

The first three devout women to turn up were: the Usslingerin, then Anna Grundherrin from the Golden Seal and then Anna Weidingin. They started by feeding the lepers, for three days in Holy Week to begin with--Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday. And others followed their example and then others and a shining work of charity came out of it. Then more than two thousand lost ones came to the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus where the fiery friar Johannes Capistranus is now holding forth and sat down in an orderly fashion at table and a foundation was enthusiastically founded then for all time, the Leprosy Foundation, and tasks were assigned as by right and because they were cheap to be carried out by women. The eldest woman was named the Mother of the Sick.

Everything sprang up in a wave of enthusiasm! And although in the breasts of women a slight flame remained, the interest of the council soon waned in light and heat and finally went out in the year 1401. Then there arose because of overcrowding a decree whereby lepers should no more be allowed into the town, that the healthy should be protected from them, and the Lord Himself must intervene from heaven so that the good works and words of Master Nicholas of the Holy Spirit Hospice should not cause even greater grief than they already had.

The Lord acted speedily and sharply and sent sickness to the town without the lepers being there and sent plagues that had never happened before in human memory. Sick people ran through the streets like the mad, for the scourge robbed them of sense and reason and there was no distinction between rich and poor, high-born and low-born and sane and insane.

The Lord in heaven acted sharply and once again in churches sermons were preached on behalf of the lepers, and every pulpit orator reproached his now penitent congregation with what he described as God's punishment for cruelty to those who could not help themselves. It was therefore soon public as well as personal opinion that it should be decided and openly proclaimed that the lepers be released from their hovels outside the walls and again be allowed to beg for alms inside the town. Mistress Anna Grundherrin replaced the Usslingerin now as the Mother of the Sick.

Mistress Anna did not watch much longer the game between Mechthild and Michael. She departed this life and received a state funeral. Our children's games also hastened to their end. The time came for both me and Michael von Laufenholz to be packed off to university in Prague and we remained there of our own volition, each in his own way, right up until 1409.

Now everybody knows what happened in that year, how the quarrel between Realists and Nominalists was finally decided, how King Wenceslas approved the use of German as a medium of instruction at the new university of Prague founded by the Emperor Charles the Fourth and how we left it, along with five thousand foreign teachers and students and broke with the cream of the cream of that famous school. But what was in deadly earnest for some of us was for others an enjoyable game and to these, who laughed the thing off, belonged my good roommate Michael and a great deal of ink could be spilled in describing all the things he got up to on the great procession from Prague to Leipzig. So that nothing should be lacking to the new university that graced the old one, Squire Michael Groland von Laufenholz came with us to Leipzig and Margrave Friedrich the Serious had to welcome him along with the others and could like it or lump it as he chose.

But in Leipzig too Michael stayed my good and faithful friend and persevered for me and with me in our scholarly life until the following year 1410. Then both of us went back home where we found all our nearest and dearest still living including our Greek teacher Theodoros Antoniades. Mechthild Grossin was now ten having just outgrown her nanny, but, without a word of a lie--pulcherrima puella infans!

And once more the old game between this child and the squire started up. The rest of us, who all regarded the girl with cordial affection and took pleasure in her beauty, were all with almost cheerful jealousy pushed away by the crazy student and warrior from his chosen one. The chosen one, however, responded to his wondrous display of affection wholeheartedly and clung to her handsome friend with heart and mind totally.

It was a frequent cause of laughter, but the two did not lead each other astray and it would be a matter of great tenderness how affection grew from day to day, changed and yet remained the same until the year 1415 when Squire Michael Groland von Laufenholz performed his first duty for the town and for a further five years afterwards was lost to the friendship and neighbourliness on Banner Mountain.

On 20 October 1414 the Bohemian cleric Jan Huss arrived in Nuremberg with an imperial escort on his way to the Council of Constance. He was well received and had fastened to all the church doors in the town the following notice in German and in Latin:

"Jan Huss is journeying to Constance where, with God's help, he will defend to the end the beliefs he has held, still holds and always will hold."

And the call for disputation was immediately echoed. Master Albert, the parish priest of Saint Sebaldus, held enthusiastic dispute with his Bohemian counterpart for a full four hours till they had both come to a peaceful conclusion. And then Master Jan, with a happy memory of the good reception he had received in Nuremberg, continued on his way to the Council of Constance, to incarceration and burning at the stake. Around the time of the council my good friend, Squire von Laufenholz, went missing. In the following year, 1415, the town council of Nuremberg represented by Peter Volkhamer and the preacher at the church of Saint Lawrence, Johann von Hollfeldt, along with his factor, Ulrich Teuchsler, prepared itself to go to Constance too. Squire Groland from Gleven went with them from the town square as the leader of their military escort. He delivered them to Constance happy and intact, was knighted by the Emperor Sigismund himself and lost himself in Italy till the year 1420.

The men our town council had sent to Constance came home and told what they knew. My wild friend conveyed his thanks to the town for soundly nurturing him, a thanks bordering on tongue-in-cheekness, for he added that he hoped to pay them back twice and three times over. All they had to do was to be patient and to wait willingly. How it would come about, he would be the first to admit that he did not know himself. But time would fortunately attend to these matters, so that all would come good in the end.

At this all heads were thoroughly shaken. But I for my part knew best how the land lay in my friend's feelings and thoughts. I had been the one closest to how the young eagle had pulled at his chains from the day on which that unfledged nestling had been brought to my father's house for the first time.

Now we sat alone, the Greek tutor Theodoros Antoniades and I, in a small room during winter, in the bower during summer and Michael Groland never once disturbed us by pushing parchments across the table with his elbow and getting Mechthild to look at the handwriting on them and laughing: "The world today is still as merry as it was a thousand years ago! A whole sack full of your Aristotle, Master Theodoros, does not outweigh it. Laugh at them, child, these sullen fools, laugh and get bigger and wait for me. We'll show this peevish world then that we can still earn a wreath of flowers for ourselves on Judgement Day with a brave heart and a merry mind!"

Mechthildis means heroine, mighty female warrior, and there is no other name among men that has so noble a sound as this one! I have grown old and see each year how the youth and the beauty of women come to pass anew. But no bud, as far as my eyes can reach, has opened to a blossom that was more sweet-natured and more beautiful than that which grew to fullness in the great neighbouring garden among sisters awaiting there the crowning glory of its fate.

And it grew and unfolded while my brave friend was absent abroad in the pursuit of feats of arms and knightly adventures. And what we had all thought of in the final analysis as a children's game became serious with a gravity that stretched far beyond our poor life on earth. What my friend had spoken of laughingly as fidelity and perseverance, Mechthild had stored up in her heart and had waited for my friend patiently and quietly. It came as a wonder to us all, for none of us knew anything about it until the night of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude in 1420 when the sweet mystery was revealed in the light of fires and the noise of weaponry.

In the night of Saints Simon and Jude 1420 Christoph of Leining, the dependent of Duke Ludwig the Bearded of Ingolstadt, captured the walled town of Nuremberg with cunning and force after having beforehand concluded a secret pact with the council of which few were aware, although a thousand voices shouted the news of it to the rest of the world afterwards.

Christoph of Leining conveyed his respects to the council to the effect that the town need not stir. He, Sir Christopher, was coming to inflict defeat on the local counts and the best that could come out of such a feud could only be a positive thing for the inhabitants of Nuremberg.

Not only did the council not stir, but it did something else, over which the citizens of Nuremberg kicked up before Emperor and Empire no little fuss. Namely, as the hordes of their enemies lay hidden in ambush under their walls, the council prepared for citizens of both sexes a dance at the town hall and a most merry and most extraordinary dance night it was too. At that time the elders, the town fathers did not take for truth the gossip of the elderly and none of the young suspected to what ends the strings behind their backs were being put to. We had not wondered in the slightest at the sudden urge for entertainment that had come over the town's leaders, upper classes and the whole strict Collegium Septemvirorum but had caught hold of pleasure by the wing without question as young people do. We had gone out to team up with the fairest maidens in the town and I had led off with Mechthild, the fairest of them all. The men of the citadel, tempted by the noise of kettledrums and music away from their fortress, we scarcely paid attention to, although we were only too happy otherwise with their swords, clubs and spears. The soldiers of the local counts looked like our greybeards and how they, while the dancers turned, strained to listen to events in the fortress we had no inkling of.

Only once after that did I see Mechthild more beautiful than that night of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude in the year 1420. That was on another day when the setting sun shone on the portal of the Church of the Holy Ghost before the shrine that bore the Imperial Crown and nightfall followed at once upon that glorious brilliance.

On that eve of Saints Simon and Jude she appeared in the joyous splendour of her youth and as she elegantly slipped smiling through the winding movements of the round dance in the glare of lights and torches, there was not a single eye that did not follow the most beauteous child in Nuremberg with joy and pride. I think that even those old men standing there and waiting in such deadly earnest spared a glance and a word for that fair maiden.

But the hour has come that Christoph Leininger has already discussed with the council and he has been as good as his word. Suddenly, with the general merriment at its height, there has been a great shock, a flaring up, a trembling has descended on the feast. A more undisciplined noise has added itself to the brass and wind sections of the band. People have cried out in the streets. Before anyone realised, the red glow from the vanquished citadel came through the windows and over the pale with fear faces of the guests of Nuremberg's honourable council.

Those in the know, the veterans, sprang up from their seats and cried "Victory!" and "Freedom!" The swords of young men flashed above the wreathed heads of young women and all the town's bells sounded the alarm and the call to arms waking both children and the sick. Men ran out into the streets with their weapons to help the council and Christoph Leininger to win this dangerous game.

The feast and the dance in the town hall then came to an end it has to be admitted, but another wilder feast and dance began. Those burgers who, in their mocking and disdainful way, had stooped to spoiling and offending the people's joy, were thrown to the floor in the middle of the council chamber and disarmed. They might well have cried out "Treachery!" but the town would rightfully rejoice when the townsfolk learned just what, on this night, that roll of the dice had been for.

Only a few years later Baron Friedrich, who became the first Elector of Brandenburg sold the burnt-out ruin of the citadel of Nuremberg complete with all accessories lock, stock and barrel and all rights included to the Forest of Sebald and Lorenz reserving to himself only the right of asylum and escort and the free movement of his subjects. And thus no-one could show a greater right to the happiness of that night in Nuremberg than Nuremberg itself and the Emperor. But I will say no more of that, only that on that very same night of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude along with Christopher of Leiningen another knight, who had gone missing, climbed over the wall, sword in hand, to do great service to the town as he had promised: my dear friend and brother Michael Groland of Laufenholz, the wild squire Groland, for whom our neighbour's beautiful daughter had been waiting in that little garden since they had played together as children!

Through the hubbub of the town, down the lane that led to the castle, from the citadel in flames, danced, swinging their drawn swords and their clubs, with torches in their hands, the first of the happy conquerors. Wave after wave of the excited populace palpitated through the mayoral function room and we had enough to do stopping old and young women from being crushed. The town elders had got up from their raised seats and were happily stroking their grey and white beards, nodding contentedly to anyone they knew in the crowd. It was a long time, however, before one of them could make himself heard over the overwhelming din. This only happened when, borne on the shoulders of citizens, the first of the Leininger's messengers were carried in, and then I felt how Mechthildis's arm, which was linked to mine, suddenly trembled. The young woman had just recognized her friend in the heaving turmoil over the heads of the crowd, backlit by the red reflection of the burning castle. My heart too rejoiced at the unexpected sight. Then all became silent in the room before the mighty voice of the knight Michael Groland of Laufenholz. Our friend then proclaimed the deed that had just come to pass in fine detail, but the blare of trumpets and hooters blocked it all out again. Friendship and affinity led us to the knight and so it was that on that wild night male friend and female friend were again reunited for the first time in years and wonderful days ensued in the wake of this wonderful reunion.

Groland had rendered good service to the town of Nuremberg and the town acknowledged it gratefully. But if he had slipped into the heart of Mechthild almost as he had into Nuremberg Castle, now he had to lay siege to her heart all over again before she was able to confess that she had given it to him already while still a child. This is the way women are and figures among the wiles that preserve beauty and loveliness on earth in the midst of the anger, quarrels and rages endemic to the times. However bad and bloody it may seem to be around us we were quiet and happy and at ease in our twenty first and twenty second springs.

Groland von Laufenholz now no longer elbowed us in the bower to spoil our handwriting so that he could put a blooming life onto the table in its place. The young woman stayed chastely in her garden, hidden by thick foliage, and only seldom did her outer garments shine from a distance through the green. But our Greek teacher Theodoros Antoniades of Chios had just translated the poems of Anacreon into Latin and read them out to us and had no more attentive listener than my once rumbustious friend Michael Groland. He stole from me then many a good sheet of first-rate parchment and I laughed when I came upon him sitting there, tearing his hair out, trying to write German verse like Wolfram von Eschenbach, Walther von der Vogelweide and Heinrich Frauenlob that the women of Mainz carried on their shoulders to his grave and on whose tombstone they shed so much precious wine that the church overflowed with it and men wrang their hands and tore their hair out.

Thus we lived, truly, during those early days of the Hussite Wars! And it was Mechthild who ushered us out of this unworldliness into the world as it really was then--devastated, bloody, in flames-- and led us to fight for the imperial crown.

We had, as German men are apt to do, suddenly forgotten everything to do with the present moment. We saw and heard nothing else apart from our present happiness. We scarcely took in that already Johannes Ziska of the Chalice, the captain of the Taborites so help them God, had taken the field against us and, tired and frustrated, we paid scant attention to the strange and great events that were occurring within the very walls of our own home town. And truly there were wonderful things afoot in it.

Already in 1421 Cardinal Brando Placentius di Regniostoli, the papal nuncio, had come to Nuremberg to await, with the electoral princes and the princes, the arrival of the Emperor. But Emperor Sigismund, held back by an emergency, had had to establish a temporary court in Wesel and only came to Nuremberg the following year, in 1422, to set up a judgement seat and then, of course, there was an elegant assembly on hand.

While Michael and I read the poets of ancient Greece with Master Theodoros, the electors of Mainz, Trier and Cologne rode in, the Elector Palatine, the Electoral Prince of Saxony and Friedrich von Hohenzollern, the Elector of Brandenburg also came and with them, behind them and in front of them, a countless throng of princes and prelates, barons and knights and some emissaries from imperial free towns besides. In St Sebaldus Hermann von Neunkirchen, the head of the Chapter of the Holy Cross, said high mass. A crusade against the Hussites was called for and the papal legate, the Cardinal di Regniostoli, placed the flag of the crusade into the hands of the Emperor himself. The Emperor then put, along with the banner, a sword in the hands of Friedrich the First as a sign he should lead the imperial army and rescue the imperial crown.

What a ringing of bells there was in Nuremberg! And, as the bells rang and resounded in the air, the hidden gate opened that led from the big garden of our neighbour into ours and through the narrow, hedged-off path came the young woman who, as a little girl, had so much more happily slid through the hedge's foliage, and now arose, serious and proud, and raised us up from where we were sitting like the appearance of an angel from heaven.

She stood before us angrily and spoke uninhibitedly. Groland and I became tense and stayed on our feet, but the homeless refugee from Chios, Master Theodoros Antoniades, covered his face with both hands and his tears rolled down it between his fingers.

"Do you not know what has happened to the imperial crown?" the young woman cried. "How can you sit here and while away the time with foreign signs and words in a dead language while the crown, sceptre and sword of your own living people is so hard pressed by an enemy of whom we knew nothing before we ourselves, through our own stupidity, made him great? What good are you doing while Emperor and Empire and all the people are crying out for help to recover the crown that Charlemagne wore on his sanctified head in Aachen? Master Theodoros, tell them that today they need to have their armour on if they want to protect their women, their children, their homes from death, disgrace and pulling down, if they do not want to be exiled, strangers in a foreign land! How long will the golden headband of the Emperor Constantine still shine forth, you men of Byzantium? Did you Greeks not fight for the preservation of his crown as was right and fitting? Woe unto your wives and daughters had they not thrust a sword into your hand while there was still time!"

At this point Mechthild broke off her discourse with loud weeping, but my crazy friend, the doughty knight Michael, lay down at her feet and he too with tears in his eyes kissed the hem of her garment. She though lightly touched his head and ran off. The exiled Greek among us picked up his writings with trembling hands and his knees were shaking. Like one pierced with a crossbow bolt he looked at us and said:

"Woe unto you if you do not hear what your children, the weaker sex and the graves of your ancestors shout in your ears---woe indeed!"

And he too withdrew in giddy haste from the bower. In this way Michael Groland and I were won over to the struggle for the imperial crown.

In the middle of turbulent Bohemia, where the Berounka flows, stood the proud castle that the Emperor Charles, the Fourth of that name, whom Bohemians idolized, had built and called after his own name--Karlstein. There, next to the Bohemian crown jewels, lay the much greater treasures of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne's crown, his sceptre, sword and orb along with the Holy Lance which had pierced the side of Our Lord and Saviour and all the rest. And they lay there contrary to right and what had been promised.

Against right and what had been promised, for having broken the promise he had given to the electoral princes that they would always be kept safe in either Nuremberg or Frankfurt, the Luxemburger had sneakily taken them to Castle Karlstein because all good fortune and favour was owed to Bohemia and to the German part of his empire, whose head he was and whose increaser he was ever to be, he granted little or nothing other than the crumbs that fell from Bohemia's table.

From the year 1350 onwards ancient treasures had lain in Castle Karlstein, which in 1422 men of Prague had besieged and overrun with wave upon wave of armed might so as to bring the Holy Roman Empire's crown into their possession and totally humiliate the German people and there was hardly anything else one could say once they had made themselves masters of those holy relics.

The heart of Nuremberg was most enamoured of the coat, sword and sceptre of Charlemagne, for it was the greatest honour for that dear town that it had formerly been singled out as the repository of the crown jewels and to have them back again everyone in Nuremberg, no matter how lacking in sense or obtuse he might be, would have gladly laid down his life to his last drop of blood.

And so it was, after emperor and empire had placed themselves in the hands of Nuremberg's council and citizens, that the following were conscripted-- two hundred footsoldiers, thirty cavalrymen, and Elector Friedrich of the state of Brandenburg undertook to provide thirty snipers for the crusade so that there was a mighty press of all these young heroes within the city walls.

In response to our maiden's fine exhortation we too, Michael Groland and I, went with the others and in the first days of September of the year 1422 we sat there all three of us for the last time together, hopeful and happy, amusing ourselves with bright thoughts about an uncertain future. What Michael and Mechthilde had promised each other could be said with certainty however. Their thoughts were of the brightest and their promise was one of sublime happiness if the imperial crown could be rescued from our terrible foe.

It was not long before we were with the army. Our friends and relations gazed after us from the Laufer Gate and from the walls and we often, as we rode out, turned our heads and looked back at the high wall where the fair maid waved her scarf and next to her stood our Greek master, Theodoros Antoniades, on the parapet with his careworn head supported by his hand, lost in painful thoughts of his own harassed homeland.

And so, for the first time, I came to bear arms for the Empire in the army's vanguard as its bannerman and truly a great honour was vouchsafed to him who was permitted to take for himself a part in this trial and tribulation.

This was the cruellest war I have ever seen and the territory that we were crossing through looked for all the world as if the end times had come to it. All the villages and most of the towns had been reduced to fire-blackened rubble. The fields were strewn with bones and corpses. The Lord went before the Hussite armies to punish the sins of the world as a cloud of smoke by day and a column of fire by night. All colour paled before the hot breath of the Taborites and there was nothing left over behind it apart from waste land and darkness. And in the middle of that wilderness, that howling wilderness, we knew that the high castle was situated that was unlawfully concealing the crown jewels of our people, though they were now being watched by good watchmen. With hot breath and panting chest we ranged abroad to set the watchmen free and rescue the crown.

We came to Saaz to begin with, not that it did us much good, for the German nation was indeed fated not to have much luck in the course of this brutal war. The great sin committed at Konstanz had to be atoned for and it was!

Brother Johannes Capistranus, take note: Constantinople has fallen now into the hands of the pagans. The eastern Roman Empire has vanished, but we saved the German imperial crown, we, the citizens of the noble town of Nuremberg, and Friedrich of Hohenzollern, the first electoral prince of Brandenburg, who led us and bore on his shoulders the golden shrine that hid the sceptre and the sword of Charlemagne, helping to take them away from Karlstein, which the foreigner had built as a prison for the greatest treasure of the German nation.

We came to Saaz to begin with, not that it did us much good. There was a Herr von Plauen in the army, who wanted to set fire to this stronghold of the Hussites with doves and sparrows to which he attached burning twigs. But the birds, driven by pain, fluttered back to our own camp and set that on fire so that we had to withdraw from the town and the Taborites claimed yet another great victory. They shouted after us from the walls. Swollen by the influx of the detachment of Count Ludwig of the Palatinate we moved on through the wood, engaged in constant combat, day after day.

Shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder we went on, leaving brave and dear comrades in arms wounded and dead behind us with each step we took. The wounded held their hands out after us and waved goodbye, but none of them stretched out their hand to hold back those who were advancing. The worst of them fought with their last ounce of strength for the imperial crown and the one behind made a superhuman effort to push the one in front into the way forward, grim though it was. We rode and fought as in a fever. We laughed at the arrows that flew at us from the depths of the forest, from behind each bush and rock. Feverish eyes shone, arms and fists had a twofold increase in force and the smaller the army became, the more splendidly the belief rose up in each chest in the final success of our enterprise. We were all willing to die for Charlemagne's crown jewels and therefore, as no-one paid death any attention, we had our way this time and broke through the enemy hordes, through the wicked unfamiliar forest, crossed over streams and mountains and beheld Castle Karlstein as the first crusaders looked upon the battlements of the holy city of Jerusalem!

First there was a cry and then a great silence. The wild wood before us thinned out and from on high the golden crosses of the tower that hid our treasure trove looked down on us. Another cry went up from the declivity at our feet where the Hussite encampment stretched out and we saw and heard them working at fever pitch with heavy rifles, mangonels and grappling ladders. We saw too the guardians of the Holy Roman Empire's treasure on the high walls of the citadel and Elector Friedrich turned, brandishing his sword, and waved.

Then we broke out of the wood down into the valley to where the Hussites were encamped, following the electoral prince, an angry river of fire. There we fell upon the Taborites and flung our torches at their tents and trampled on their bodies through the thick smoke and flames. Already we had fought our way to the steep cliffs bearing the mighty castle on top of them and saw above us, above the smoke and the throng of the castle watch the waving of the imperial flag, heard the cries of joy of the crown's guardians on the battlements and over and above all the noise of battle, solemn and sonorous, the exalted tolling of the bell of the Holy Cross, the tolling of the bell that swings over the shrine erected to contain the Holy Roman Empire's imperial crown jewels.

The battle did not last long. We choked all those who would not yield to us. We beat these men from Prague and drove them back from the walls that they had so ruthlessly attacked. We won the one and only piece of luck that German arms had had in that dreadful war against the continental followers of Wycliffe's doctrines. We rescued for the German people its holy of holies from the utmost degradation at the hands of foreigners and brought it out of Bohemia that it might enjoy better days unmolested in our empire.

The men of Prague fled and we pressed on up the steep path. Those above us stretched out their tired hands to us from the battlements. We saw them kneeling and we saw them dancing in their watchtowers, those brave guardians of Charlemagne's crown. We pressed on up the steep and narrow path, each of us in harness lifted and shoved by those climbing up behind. We climbed up to the bronze gate, which had stood up so long and so well to the attack by the Hussites. Prince Friedrich, who had led us so ably to the imperial crown, let his bloody battleaxe dangle and took his helmet from his head. The bronze gate opened to him and to us. The first of us fell back now to join those behind them in sudden shyness and holy dread. Our army came to a standstill having redeemed Charlemagne's orb and sceptre. We saw the first inner courtyard full of sick and wounded guardians. We saw the healthy with battle fatigue and weakened by hunger. We had arrived with our leader, the electoral prince of Brandenburg, at the right time. May that always be true in all the centuries to come till the world really does come to an end!

They called down health and blessings on us as they stretched out to us their drooping arms and embraced the vanguard of our relieving army with heaving chests.

Health and blessings, yes. For us that was a truly blessed and elevated moment. A great silence fell yet again in close proximity to us, so that only the light clink of armour and the jingling of weapons could be heard and out of the valley ascended the never ending victory roar of thousands of German men who had accompanied us on this journey, but could not share the honour of being the first to enter the citadel.