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Title: The Imperial Crown
Author: Wilhelm Raabe
Translator: Michael Wooff
Release Date: April 16, 2015 [EBook #48718]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE IMPERIAL CROWN ***
Produced by English translation produced by Michael Wooff
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.
Now we saw with amazement all around us the walls reaching up to
heaven behind which the Luxemburger had hidden the treasure he had
borrowed as his own property. We saw the three inner courtyards,
one upon the other, stretching up to the clouds. We saw the royal
residence in all its splendour before us and the clergy that served
it, the deacon, the four canons and the castle chaplains. We strode
from gate to gate, from one resounding drawbridge to another, as
far as the church of St Catherine where we all, pushed up close to
one another, knelt with the electoral prince in silent prayer before
we dared to approach the even greater inner sanctum, the chapel of
the Holy Cross.
Now all courtyards and passageways, all halls and rooms in the castle
were filled with German helmets, storm hoods, spears and swords.
Where formerly only the foremost men and noblest lords in Bohemia
were allowed to set foot, where even the king himself trod lightly,
today the least of men who had come out for the crown had more right
to be. In the king's private chambers Nurembergers laid their pikes
against the brightly painted walls or hung their axes on hooks on
richly gilded wainscoting.
There was still a drawbridge that had not been lowered, still a gate
barred with nine locks. This was the drawbridge that led to the
Church of the Cross. These were the nine locks that guarded the
crown of a Holy Roman Emperor. This drawbridge was lowered and these
locks were opened for no-one else normally apart from the king and
the guardians of the crown. Men in armour with drawn swords kept
watch here day and night.
But who today had a greater right to be admitted to this treasure,
King Sigismund or us?
At a signal from the electoral prince all our banners were lowered
and the raised drawbridge, which was still barring our way, now
came down. Then the nine locks on the gate were heard to clatter
open and we entered the sacred space in deep silence. From the
ceiling and the walls and pillars a red, green and blue fire shone
towards us. The place shone everywhere with the adornment of the
most precious stones and now only a high, artful golden grille
still separated us from the Holy of Holies.
Then I felt a heavy hand upon my shoulder. It was the armoured
hand and arm of my friend who had come up behind me.
We had supported each other whenever one of us had stumbled on
the way. We had covered each other with our shields and the
weapon of one had a hundred times turned away death from the
other, but what more can I say of myself and Michael Groland
other than that we were in the imperial army's procession to
Karlstein? Both of us were merely two drops in the stream and
all that we were able to experience on the way the whole army
likewise learned with pain or with pleasure, in glory or in
ignominy.
Suddenly here on the turret of Charles the Fourth's castle, in
the church of the Holy Cross, before the shrine in which the
imperial crown jewels were kept, we got our own lives back.
My friend and brother, Michael Groland, bent his mouth to my
ear and spoke softly: "Pray for my happiness. Here in this place,
after so much effort on our part to attain it, here before the
inner sanctum of the German people, pray for me that I might win
a crowning glory for myself one day!"
A lightning flash did not come out of the golden niche from the
lance of Saint Maurice or from the sword of Charlemagne to strike
my wild friend for his strange and daring words. But a deep down
shudder, a cold feeling and a fiery flame went through my legs.
At that moment however the castle deacon with his chaplains and
canons intoned a Gloria. All those present joined in the singing
and the pictures on the walls, the painted images set in precious
stones of all the stars of heaven in the lofty vault, the nobles
of the Empire swayed in the flaming red light that the evening sun
threw through the gaudy windows. Everything swayed around me
and never did the noise of the greatest battle ever amaze me as
much as this moment did. I said the prayer for my friend and for
the love of him before the imperial crown itself.
Tolle! Lege! Listen to the cries of the people from the churchyard
of Saint Sebaldus. The whole of the rest of the town is as silent
as the grave. All of Nuremberg's sins and vanities have gathered
together and fled to one spot. Listen how thousands are addressed
about their misery! That monk there in the pulpit is really going
deep into their hearts! They might well cry out, they might well
beat their breasts as the grim Franciscan calls them to penitence,
but what are the words he is shrieking in comparison to the sweet,
soft voice that spoke to me? Of what importance is what the monk
says in comparison with the warning I received in the days of my
youth?
The scribes in towns and monasteries have outlined the story of the
German people's collective grief such as they must have experienced
it subsequent to the disgrace perpetrated in Constance, have put it
down on parchment and paper outstandingly year by year, day by day
so that in future happier generations will be able to leaf through
the blood-spattered pages. Everyone knows how things were then in
the Empire, how a place for human happiness and peace of mind was
nowhere to be found other than behind the highest walls of the most
fortified towns, and even there only under the gravestones in
churches or the grass of churchyards. Everyone knows how the Hussites
victoriously and ever more victoriously came and went and how the
fiery glow that had risen from Lake Constance was not for many long
and dreadful years extinguished among the people of Germany. And
as it was for the citizens of the Empire, so also was it for the
imperial crown that found no resting place anywhere on its native
earth. The sword of Charlemagne had lost its power, the lance of
Saint Maurice no longer moved in its sheath to defend the splendour
of the Holy Germanic Roman Empire. Emperor Sigismund now had to
spirit away the crown jewels to Blindenburg in Hungary, to hide them
among the Huns. It was to Hungary then that my dear friend and
brother, the good knight Michael Groland of Laufenholz, was obliged
to escort them on behalf of the town of Nuremberg and he could not
refuse to render this service, even though, before the altar in the
Church of the Cross at the heart of the Luxemburger's Bohemian
citadel, he had just dedicated himself, in the joy of victory, to
the service of seeking another crown for himself.
By order of the electoral prince he was prevented from riding home
with us. His way took him to Hungary--for the sake of the Empire's
crown jewels he worked his way through ruin. Only in the year 1423
did he come back from Ofen in the depths of despair. But never
have greater honours been bestowed on a man by a woman than those
bestowed on him after he had sunk into misery and all the waves of
earthly wretchedness had swallowed him up. Truly he had won for
himself the crown as he called the highest virtue attainable!
As only a tiny group of healthy and fighting-fit men did we come
back from the army's journey to Bohemia and came once again to the
Laufer Gate in Nuremberg after Castle Karlstein and our town was
also glad of the few who came home and a civic reception was made
ready for us in the highest of spirits. As the councillors, the
citizens and the fairest damsels had escorted us as far as that
gate on our outward journey, so now they waited for us there and
I called out from my horse on reaching the gate to Mechthilde,
pale with fright at the absence of our friend, the good news that
Michael Groland had not been killed in the battle with the Hussites
but that he was still alive, as happy and courageous as ever, and
had only been called away to reap new honours.
The young lady bowed to us, hand on heart. We rode on through the
streets past St Egidia to the Herrenmarkt. And on the way a
hundred people at least reached out their hands to me while I was
still on the horse including Theodoros Antoniades the Greek. Our
army's journey lay like a bad dream behind us and well might we
enjoy our homecoming, for who was there in this throng of people
who had not forgotten on what poor and shaky grounds the splendour
of Nuremberg had been founded! Had the Greek from Chios not been
there on hand, even I might have forgotten that these strong men
and these high walls had not been thought strong or high enough to
trust them with the imperial crown jewels that we had rescued at
so high a cost.
Once we had reached the Herrenmarkt we each sought the comfort of
our own homes. I found on Banner Mountain all my friends and
relatives gathered and all most eager to hear what I had to tell
them of my struggle against the Hussites. The members of the
Grosse family too came to see us from the neighbouring house and
among them was Mechthild. Then I talked as if I were speaking to
the whole wide circle of devout men and women but, ultimately, I
was only talking to Mechthild and she understood that very well.
But I could not make known to her in that crowd of the curious
the most intimate thing that had been confided in me before the
crown of the great emperor Charlemagne in the Church of the Cross
in Castle Karlstein. I would have to save that up for a quieter
time when none of our friends and relations were turning round to
look at us. This time also came and then the white roses on the
cheeks of Mechthilde blushed red. Red they remained at the oath
Michael Groland had sworn before the crown and red they remained
through winter, spring and summer and they were a gift from God
to the pride and joy of the young, loving maid. Now there were
no more mysteries between myself and her and nor could there be.
But the fact that we knew of this mystery and the rest of the
world did not bound us to each other with chains of gold and in
the middle of that grey and devastated world we knew that our
greatest treasures were safe.
Truly that bold utterance, which the brave knight Michael had
whispered in my ear before the sanctuary of the German people
in Castle Karlstein, produced a fine and splendid resonance in
the breast of a certain quiet young lady that Michael Groland
had called his highest crown of all!
Now we lived again together as good neighbours through the winter
of 1422 and the spring and summer of 1423. And no fairy tale, no
golden legend was more full of wonders than that realm of bliss
that the young lady built up in silence. She was not in the least
anxious about her beloved. A wonderful unshakeable trust in the
fulfillment of all sweet hopes held her in its arms.
How could it have been wrong before God to have spoken proudly
and certain of victory those words that had been in the shimmering
light of the prize possessions of the German people? This love
was now well and truly covered by an imperial mantle, illuminated
by the crown of Charlemagne himself. There was no doubt in the
mind of Mechthilde Grossin that Charlemagne's sword and the holy
lance of St Maurice could not but lead her love safe and sound
through all dangers and that the solemn promise that had been made
in that high fortified place in Bohemia had made this love holy
and impossible to damage, beyond space and time.
Beyond space and time! There were no two ways about it! That
oath made in the Church of the Cross in Castle Karlstein defied
both space and time. That oath made before the holiest holy of
holies of the the Holy Roman Empire had borne bloom and fruit,
but, as far as this poor world went, the fruit had been lost in
misery and shame.
We later learned how the imperial crown jewels arrived with great
pomp and circumstance at the castle of Blindenburg, five miles
from the town of Ofen. Eberhard von Windek wrote how, on the
Wednesday before Christmas in the year 1422, the jewels had been
received with great delight there and installed. And our friend
and brother, the good knight Michael Groland of Laufenholz, was
present at the beginning of this new two-year stay for the jewels
abroad and we thought of him without a care in the world through
winter storms and snowfalls and also when spring arrived.
Spring was lovely that year. I pondered once more the Greek
texts of Master Theodoros Antoniades and the trust and happiness
of Mechthilde rubbed off on me. The hard work of learning the
noble language of the ancient Greeks was easier than ever to me.
Having said that, however, we no longer read Anacreon.
Bent over Homer's Iliad, the story of that epic war with Troy,
I fought once again in my head the battles I had fought with
the belligerent Hussites, and my old teacher, who had even more
hurt and atrocities to forget than I did, modestly praised me
for my aptitude. When summer came we once more had our desk
in that fair rose-filled bower up against Nuremberg's protective
city wall. We, that is to say the refugee from Chios and myself,
and now the maid came too, as in the days of her childhood, no
more shy and reserved, from the flowers, the sunshine and the
greenery of her own garden and sat there quietly all ears to
Homer's account of the various doings of noble Hector, fearless
Achilles and worthy Ajax and thought of the knight her friend
with music in her heart and awaited his homecoming from his
latest military expedition with love and fidelity.
The trees shed their blossoms over our writings. I cast my
parchment to one side in order to run after a multi-coloured
butterfly with Mechthild and even our master, the now grey
haired teacher, the old Greek banished and driven from his
homeland by a pagan foe, the homeless person, whose last ideal
abode, the glorious city of Constantinople, was now even more
at risk of violent assault and destruction than our German
homeland, laughed at our indiscipline and was able to smile at
our light and happy hearts.
Never had each blossom been so dear to me, each ray of sunlight
in the green foliage appeared so wonderfully bright as it did
that summer. My life drifted gently by between forgetfulness
and hope, through Homer's epic poem and Mechthild's happiness.
I no longer thought of that iron-clad time when I had fought
for a dream of gold.
Tolle! Lege! Tolle! Lege! Take and read. I heard these
words in the blowing of the autumn wind and, as with Saint
Augustine, I grew pale and "I wondered if these words were
part of a children's game, and I could not remember ever having
heard them before. Tears sprang in me and I got up and took it
to be a voice from God."
That autumn, in October of the year of Our Lord 1423, my friend
and good knight Michael Groland of Laufenholz came back to the
town of Nuremberg from Hungary as a poor, sick, lost soul, who
could now only use his sword as a staff to support himself and
the following relates how he came to arrive in this way.
It was a gloomy afternoon and I had sat on the window seat in a
curiously melancholic frame of mind, but not in my own room,
rather in the main room that connected with the street. I sat
there quietly, disinclined to work or study. Over the rooftops
and gable ends a strong wind blew, quickly driving grey clouds
through the sky, and people too were in a hurry in the streets,
for everyone wanted to be home. And yet I felt strangely ill
at ease in mine.
The walls pressed in on me, the ceiling sank and the wind that
was moving the embroidered pictures on the wall hangings and
making the weapons of my forebears hung on columns clink slightly
took my breath away more than the pear-shaped gag that a torturer
uses to stop the mouths of felons in a torture chamber. Then a
messenger came, a boy who looked in a hurry sent by my cousin,
Cecilia Stollhoferin. He caught his breath with difficulty and
delivered and spoke out a greeting from her in the name of God
and told me that, outside the New Gate, in the hospice for the
sick of Saint John, someone was waiting to speak to me. My cousin
was at that time what was termed the mother to the lepers--Mater
Leprosorum, the oldest of those do-gooding women of patrician
descent who, as a result of the edifying sermons of Master Nicholas
in the church of the Holy Ghost, had been the first to reach out
to these poor sick people for the sake of God as I have already
written in a previous sheet of this chronicle. This hasty summons
surprised me somewhat, yet I responded to it immediately with a
right good will and would, as any good person in Nuremberg would,
have done the same at any hour of day or night, irrespective of
whether the leper mother had summoned me from a wedding feast, a
baptism or a morgue to her higher service.
While I was despondent like this, my cousin's summons seemed to
me of all things the most bearable that could happen to me. The
pressure weighing down on my soul lifted at the seriousness of
this call for assistance. A grey sky and a bad mood no longer
had power to oppress me. I sent the messenger back with a warm
greeting to my cousin, put on a mantle as quickly as possible
over my dappled tunic and went out on that dark autumn day.
The human turmoil, into which I was straightaway admitted outside
in the street, released me completely from the attacks of my bad
demons. From the bay window of the Grossen house Mechthild waved
me a greeting with a friendly smile. I could well have marvelled
at myself being now quite a different person from the one I had
been only an hour before, but that I did not do, but berated
myself as a fool and walked on and on, past the ruins of Leininger's
citadel, to the New Gate.
On the way many a good friend greeted me and stopped me with a
"Where are you off to then?" When I told them where I was going,
they shrugged their shoulders and looked at the threatening clouds
and one or another of them invited me to this pub or that pub for
the night. As I knew that Master Theodoros would have no more need
of me that day, I accepted an invitation and promised myself a
lively evening for long after the night bell had sounded.
In this way I arrived before the gate and intended, despite all
that my cousin might present me with, to hold on to my good mood
come what may. But that day, which had failed to please me at
home, pleased me even less outside in front of the city wall. The
field there was bare and the trees stood stripped of leaves and the
wind, which had already been having its own way in the streets, had
no longer anything to cage it and tame it. It romped about and
went from place to place as it willed and scared dry dust into
violent swirls in the air and laughed disdainfully at the oncoming
dusk. I pulled my cloak more tightly around me and walked on in
a sprightly fashion to the Hospice of Saint John.
At that time there was only a sort of shed for the sick, erected
in 1323 next to the church by the Lords of Tezeln, out in the open.
The great Churchyard of the Holy Grave was not yet available. At
present anyone can go there and reflect upon the first gravestone
that shows Saint Sebastian bound to a tree trunk with an inscription
dating back to 1427:
This day there was an awful and piteous moaning;
Thirteen died including me in the house I was alone in.
Truly the great churchyard was not set up in vain at the time that
it was.
In the year 1423 the house of the sick stood next to the church,
both on their own in the middle of a field, surrounded by scant
undergrowth. The former of these two buildings was a low, long
drawn out edifice, away from which a wanderer was glad to turn his
face if he ever took the road that far into the country. The place
was, even in glorious summer, not a welcoming sight. Even the
year's fairest blossoms were impotent to ward off a shiver. But
today the sky was grey and black clouds were moving in over the
roof of the sick bay and black ravens flapped their wings around
it as on a high place where there were gallows. No living soul
could have pictured a worse ossuary.
There was also a hedge that stretched for a long way round the
house and where the Roman road came into it a door. A stone
cross had been put up near it and under the cross was a bench
also made of stone.
As I came nearer I saw two forms under the cross. On the bench
sat a man wearing a long brown habit like a Capuchin monk with
his head deeply bowed and completely covered with a hood. A few
steps away from him stood my cousin. She too had bowed her head
and was wringing her hands as if in some great grief. And four
steps in front of them, back in the direction of the road, a
sword had been stuck in the ground as a warning not to come any
nearer.
Already I knew now from a distance the likely meaning of all this
and why my cousin Cecilia had bid me come. But who the hooded
man was I had no idea. I stood still near the sword and said:
"Good day to you, cousin. I am at your service. For mercy's
sake, who is it?"
A sudden shudder shook me to the core, but I still did not know
what I was about to learn.
"Who is it, cousin," I asked for the second time. The old woman
sobbed and raised her hands up to the glowering sky. The man in
the monk's habit supported his hooded head on his left hand and
gestured with the other to the sword sticking upright in the
ground.
Then I had another shock--a shock to end all shocks--that shook
me body and soul. I looked at the sword and reeled backwards as
if hit by a battle hammer. The world I looked on grew confused
before my very eyes. I staggered and cried out, loudly I cried
out.
This was the sword, the trusty sword, which had so often and so
merrily made the old house on Banner Mountain shake. This was
the sword that had shone next to me in the pitched battle against
the Hussites, the trusty weapon that had helped to deliver the
imperial crown out of enemy hands! This was the sword of my
friend, my blood brother's sword! The bent hooded man on the
stone bench in the brown habit of a pilgrim was the proud knight
Michael Groland of Laufenholz, my brother, more than my brother,
my friend, my joyful classmate and comrade in arms, poor Michael
Groland!
I swayed on my feet, staggered and fell. I fell head first into
soft sand and heard a great thunder in my ear and a sound like
whistling, like the whistle of the serpent in the Garden of Eden,
in my chest. And when I got back up the awful spectre had vanished
from the bench and so had the sword from the ground. But my
cousin, the leper mother, was still standing next to me, wrapped
in her black cloak. But I had knelt down, grasped the hem of her
garment and shouted:
"Mother, it isn't so! Tell me it isn't so, mother!"
My cousin took one of her hands out of the folds of her cloak as if
she wanted to pull my hands away, but she only covered her eyes with
it and said with a deep sigh: "It is so! Who can fight against
God's will?"
Then she pulled me up and laid her arm on my shoulder and turned
round back in the direction of the town. I pulled myself away from
her and pushed her back brutally and ran to the door of Saint John's
Church sick bay. She ran after me, held me back and shouted over
the wind:
"Come, my son. I won't let you and neither will he let you. Let
it be. He has taken an oath on it. No-one must come near him from
the land of the living. My heart bleeds like yours, my son. But
he's right and we must act in accordance with his will."
I called out: "Michael! Michael!"
My only answer was the sound of the sharp, hissing wind through the
dry grass. My old, grey-haired cousin had to support me, the strong
young man, and lead me like a child back to the road leading to the
town. My feet were like a weight of iron and my knees like broken
reeds. My eyes beheld chaos.
Woe is me, what had become of the world? There loomed the hundred
ramparts and battlements, gables and towers of the great dear town
of Nuremberg and over there on the left the ruin of the citadel,
which the brave knight Michael had also helped to conquer for our
beloved community. Never had my eye other than with joy and hope
rested thereon, whatever the way I chose to take to get there. Now
there was nothing left of it. Had flames with a thousand red tongues
suddenly licked the roofs, surrounded the towers and, as in a rush
of wind born of an apocalypse, swallowed the town whole, my view of
what was there could not have witnessed greater annihilation.
I was horrified by Nuremberg, how it looked, how it lay there darkly
under the dark evening sky. Flames had already licked the citadel.
There it lay, already blackened by torches, with burst roofs, broken
towers, demolished walls! What did I care now if the town around it
still stood upright?
Everything mocked and laughed at me. No green leaf, no flower, no
ray of light had been left intact to comfort suffering humanity. It
was laughable that we had gone out to rescue a crown for an empire
that was no longer there. The Greek from Chios, my clever teacher,
Theodoros Antoniades, had done the right thing. He had fled from
his homeland before the last pillars and columns shattered and, in
this bad moment, I derived comfort from one thing only and that was
in the thought that I should do as he had and set off into the unknown
devoid of property, homeland, wishes and hopes.
It degraded me that I did not think once then of Mechthild Grossin,
but that too would come by and by.
We walked slowly and the Mater Leprosorum talked to me constantly,
but I heard little in my state of dizziness. But the little I did
hear was each time like a bolt of lightning on a thundery night.
The leper mother told me how the poor man had spoken to her softly
out of the blue before the sick bay of St John's Church.
In Ofen in Hungary leprosy fell on the German contingent that had
gone there with the crown. Many soldiers in the detachment had died
there, many others had simply stayed. Some had died on the way.
Only Michael Groland had got back home, supporting himself on his
knight's sword.
"Nobody knows him here in St John's hospice," said the cousin. "Even
his own mother would not know him any more. I did not recognize him.
You would not recognize him. God's hand has smitten him horribly.
Your friend has descended into hell, misery has buried him alive.
Today he has lost all the vanity of earthly desires. Tell me what
we should do, my son! His will is to remain missing. Will you comply
with it? Will you take upon yourself the burden of silence when it
comes to Mechthild?"
Mechthilde! Mechthilde! That was the name that pushed me even deeper
into the abyss and yet alone had the potential to redeem me. I began
to remember her name again.
I asked my cousin a direct question. "You did not recognize him, cousin
Cecilia, but you saw him. You are a mother to these lepers. You have
the answer. Is there any hope of him recovering? Is there any hope that
we can have him back again if we wait a year, two years, ten years?"
Cousin Stollhoferin lowered her head and thought about this for a long
time. We stood on the bridge at the New Gate and those who guarded it
had already uncovered their heads before the leper mother. My cousin
bowed to me and said: "God's will be done and He is wholly good as He
is wholly awesome. I will not mention the homecoming of her betrothed
to Mechthild."
Then I remembered that night, that sleepless night, that followed this
day of horrors and I weighed my strength to bear with discretion the
fate of my two friends through years to come.
"He can bear it!" said my cousin as if she could read the innermost
thoughts of my heart as from a slate. "He can bear it. He is a true
knight. He has fought for the crown of life and will attain it."
I too was able to bear it.
The summer air is still full of the wails that are buzzing about in
the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus. How this same air would tremble if
that wild and fiery Franciscan there could speak as urgently as the
drops of black ink now flowing from my quill pen down onto a white
sheet of parchment. From leaving my room to go to the hospice of Saint
John to coming back to it again my life had changed. Nothing was left
of the person who had gone out only two hours before. Everything now
seemed strange to me and when I lay there on my bed that night the
darkness was like a tombstone in a crypt. I lay awake all night without
being able to move. In the sick bay of Saint John my friend and brother
also lay awake among the legion of the lost and waited, as did I, for a
new day to dawn in abject misery.
And dawn broke, it was day and I could not understand how people went
back to their daily work. It came as a shock to me that people in Banner
Street did not stop and point to my house quite grief-stricken. I thought
that even my worst enemy would have done as much.
I only understood that people were going about the hard business of earning
a living when I saw my friend's poor betrothed, having stepped through the
narrow door of her house into the garden, wander calmly amid the autumnal
trees, over fallen branches through brown bushes. My teacher of Greek
Theodoros came and saw at a glance that I was ill and asked after me most
anxiously. He took leave of me shaking his head. Then a messenger came
from Konrad Senior and Peter Junior with a document. It demanded legal
support and advice from me because of a charitable foundation of these
gentlemen for an enclosed order of nuns, and this was a good thing, for
the act of doing this plunged me once more into the hurly-burly of a
working day and did not leave me without anything to do as my grief would
have wished. Other people whose futile needs and disputes I had to settle
and decide according to the rule of law in Nuremberg, came and went and
I was obliged to converse with them till evening and then night came round
again. This was a very good thing, but it did not save me from the dread
inspired by darkness.
On the second day after my meeting at the stone cross at the gate to Saint
John's Church I eventually came to the attention of my fair female next
door neighbour for the first time since then. I took it as good fortune
that Master Theodoros Antoniades had already been there before me and had
had misgivings about me being threatened by a serious illness. Mechthilde
was most understanding towards me and I had to laugh even with a broken
heart and I replied in a light tone that no bodily fragility oppressed me
and no hidden torment of love and no mean rejection had made my cheeks
pale so fast and furrowed my brow with such rapidity.
This was a time of change for me. These were days to make my bones rot
and crumble and the blood run thicker in my veins. By night and by day
I wandered through fields, gnashing my teeth as I did so in my struggles
with a gruesome ghost. The shadow of the hooded leper never once left
my side.
"If you force your way into his lostness, he will kill himself. He has
sworn he will!" said my cousin Cecilia. "He is a true knight. He wants
to bear his fate alone. His message to you through me is that you should
be happy, my son. You should think that he fell in battle or died in
Hungary. You should remember him amicably in the circle of your comrades
and not grieve for him."
"And what about Mechthild?" I asked. And cousin Cecilia waved me aside
and silently left me.
Friends and relations made more of me then than at other times of year,
but the hardest obstacle I had to overcome was Mechthilde's tender loving
care. November came and with it the first snow of winter. They danced
and feasted a lot and made a big thing of it in Nuremberg and pulled me
out of every hiding place and dragged me forcibly with threats to their
junketings to rid me of my fancies and to make my viscous blood flow
soundly and freely again. They had no idea what I saw in their banqueting
halls nor of what I was not permitted to talk about. Michael Groland's
sword, the sword of my friend and brother stood everywhere stuck in the
ground before me, stood to ward off every joy and every pleasure. How
could I reach out my own hand to the pretty, smiling girl who so friendlily
offered me hers so that I could dance with her? The sword stood everywhere
in my way, not just in the banqueting hall, but also in church, in lawyers'
chambers, in my own quiet room. I could not get past it--it stood there
on the defensive and all lust for life deserted me. There was no getting
away from that sword that my dear friend had once so happily and bravely
wielded.
The living corpse's bride to be was further transformed in her sweet trust
in God's goodness during November and December of that ill-fated year. She
too, in obedience to time-honoured custom, was not allowed to miss youthful
festivals and dances. Even she, a happy prisoner of hope, who would have
much preferred to stay behind in the peace and solitude of her little room,
had had to socialize and so we were always bumping into each other and her
fine trust and confidence made the frightful burden on my soul even heavier
from one day to the next. When she suddenly broke away from me, it was
like when a crossbow bolt is pulled from a wound in one's side and in the
red flow of blood that then spurts out the rubble and corpse-strewn waste
of the battlefield sinks around one, all is eclipsed and the whole world
vanishes before one's eyes.
Just before Christmas Mechthild came home beaming in all the fullness of
her happiness from the house of Sigmund Stromer where Barbara Stromerin
had made ready a festivity. Mysteriously and out of breath one of the
Grosse family maids summoned me that very same night to meet with her
young mistress. With her finger to her lips, half way between laughter
and tears, Mechthildis whispered to me that a great and precious piece
of news had gone from ear to ear in Herr Stromer's house among the female
guests. It was still a mystery, but still a truth for all that--the Holy
Roman Empire's crown, the sword and the mantle of Charlemagne was coming
back to Nuremberg; all the imperial treasures were returning to Nuremberg
as of right. There was no doubt about it. The Emperor wanted it, the
council knew about it and Barbara Stromerin had also known about it and
because of the good knight Michael Groland the great and splendid mystery
had circulated among the young women in the mayor's house, but without
his knowledge.
"It's the return of summer, my friend!" cried Mechthild. "Blessed be
the Emperor for returning the crown to our safekeeping. All my companions
kissed me and we females were more pleased about it than the mayor and
his aldermen. You be pleased about it too, dear friend, and shake off the
grief that oppresses you and which I should like to redeem you from with
my own heart's blood. Why do you not wish to be happy with your brother
and myself now that the good old days will soon be with us again and twice
the good fortune?"
The friends of Barbara Stromer really were the first ones in Nuremberg to
know of the planned return of the imperial crown jewels, for they, the
mayor and the Collegium Triumvirorum, the three most highly placed people
in the town, had held the key to these treasures formerly and the key to
the gate of the town and its banners.
Mechthild had brought the news home from the mayor's wife's get-together
as a great mystery and made me swear not to divulge it, although it had
spread from the party already throughout the town and was arousing the
highest degree of jubilation in every heart.
There it was then! What I had borne alone in deference to my unhappy
friend and the leper mother as long as I could keep it secret, had now
to come out and there were no dams to throw up against it. The great
honour that had fallen to my native town was the straw that broke the
camel's back of our misfortune and on the same night on which Mechthild
had returned in such bliss from Sigmund Stromer's house, I confided my
fear and my suffering to Master Theodoros Antoniades. Of the hundreds
of people that I knew and interacted with, he was the only one to whom
I wanted to and could disclose all the misery in my soul.
The homeless Greek listened to me silently and with a deeply furrowed
brow. Then he said this to me: "On the island of Chios, under the
burning rubble of my home town, I left behind the corpses of my wife
and my young sons and daughters. My homeland is perishing, has perished.
The imperial eagle of the Eastern Roman Empire circles the old walls of
great emperors with weary wings. There is no salvation for the great
city of Constantinople. I carry a dead language among foreigners and
when they are pleased with its beauty, the pain of loss I feel is that
much greater. I carry my pain in silence, my son, and wait to see what
God will do. The world is coming to an end not only for the ancient
might and splendour of Byzantium. Who will care much for the time of
its fall when it finally comes? The youngest of the young are prematurely
old. Why should they care? Who still wants to defend himself against
the inevitable Day of Judgement? I remember that day when the fair maid
came to us and drove you two young men out to fight in that futile
struggle. If you want me to, my son, I'll tell Mechthild what fate has
had in store for her."
I led my Greek schoolmaster to my cousin Cecilia Stollhoferin, the leper
mother, and the following morning all three of us went to see the betrothed
of Michael Groland, opened up for her the Book of the Dead and pointed to
the entry in letters of flame that determined her fate.
There comes to my ear a sound of trumpets and trombones which does not
accompany the shouting coming from the churchyard of Saint Sebaldus. Hark
to the bells once again, Saint Benedicta first and foremost! Yes, now the
Preacher Johannes has said what he had to say. The people of Nuremberg
process through the streets with psalms and litanies strewing ashes on
their heads in the darkest corners of their houses and tomorrow they will
resume their life of old. The noise of trumpets and trombones that imbues
the story of my own life comes from the day after the Feast of Our Blessed
Lady's Annunciation during Lent of the year 1424, for on this day the
German imperial crown came back to Nuremberg.
Sigmund Stromer and Sebaldus Pfinzing had been sent by the town council to
Ofen, to King Sigismund, and, in total confidentiality and secrecy the
King of Rome had handed over to them the regalia. So secret was this
transaction that no more than six people knew about it. And a week after
Candlemas the great regalia were loaded by Nuremberg's twin envoys onto
a waggon whose drivers thought they were carrying a load of the fish they
call sturgeon. It was only when they were a mile from Nuremberg that the
drivers learned just what an honour they had been found worthy of and,
getting off their horses with fearful reverence, they humbled themselves
in the dust and venerated the imperial regalia on their knees.
Bells and people singing! Woodwinds and trumpets! We all turned out
when the approach of the envoys and the treasure they were bringing with
them was rumoured. By the thousand and ten thousand--men and women,
greybeards and children, we went to meet the crown. A greater day since
records began has not been listed in the town's chronicles. Before all
others though the heavy laden came as they did every year on the feast
of the Arms of Christ, as long as the regalia were kept in the town's
care, to lay their sorrows down in front of Our Lord's weapons and to
pray for redemption. All sick people who could walk knelt with others
at the roadside and all those who suffered from anguish of mind threw
themselves down next to those who had only bodily ailments. There
were no distinctions made between people. No class of people was
allowed to take precedence over any other class. Before the crown,
sceptre, sword and orb of the holy German race, before the holy iron
of the lance that opened Christ's side, before the five thorns of his
crown of thorns all were accounted equal, all brothers and sisters in
this vale of tears we call the world. In the ranks of the young women
went the saddest of them, Mechthilde, to the Church of the Holy Ghost,
where, in the middle of the institution founded by her ancestor, Konrad
Grossen, in the garden frequented by the lepers, the holy regalia had
their dwelling formerly and where they were now to be housed again.
A hundred years before one slept there--a rich man, a poor man, a leper
himself, Konrad, one of the Hainzen, there in the spot where today the
imperial regalia of the German people rest safely. He was sleeping in
his garden under a linden tree and there came to him in sleep a dream of
a great treasure that lay in the ground owned by his forebears. And the
place where the treasure was was also shown to him and the leper went
there in his dream and followed a bright light leading him on. In order
to mark the spot that had been indicated to him he grabbed a handful of
leaves from the linden tree and put them where the treasure was buried.
Then he woke up and remembered. When he wandered round the garden full
of doubt and did not know if he should take things at face value, he
found there the little heap of linden leaves and recovered with it a
belief in the truth of his dream. His family came to visit him and
listened to his wonderful story with astonishment. Then they started
to help him dig up the ground. Konrad the leper made a promise to
God that he would use anything he found in the service of the poor and
sick, and behold: a great treasure really was excavated from the garden
of the Hainzen of Pegnitz and Konrad kept to his vow. The hospice and
the Church of the Holy Ghost were founded and built on the strength of
the subterranean treasure, and now the imperial crown reposes in the
place where the leper's hand and will pointed out to architect and
stone masons the site they were about to build on. The man stricken
with leprosy, as I have already mentioned elsewhere in this chronicle,
was henceforth known as Konrad the Great and, by way of an eternal
memorial to him, Emperor Ludwig the Bavarian gave him in his coat of
arms the twenty-four linden leaves together with the hill to which he
took them in his dream.
While Mechthild Grossin has made her way to the porch of the Holy Ghost
Church to wait for the crown, I too have gone with my companions and
others to the door of this church. Half a mile from the town we caught
sight of the waggon and its escort.
The horses were indeed imposing in their harnesses and went with heads
bowed as if they knew what they were pulling. And Sigismund Stromer
and Sebaldus Pfinzing walked bareheaded on the right and the left of
the waggon respectively. The armed escort rode in silence and it was
quiet too in the crowd coming out of the town. The people's songs of
praise fell silent and one could only still hear in the distance the
bells ring out from all the towers of Nuremberg. Those who were on
horseback got down and knelt at the roadside still holding on to the
reins. Everyone knelt down and we watched as the waggon that was
laden with so great a treasure and had come here all the way from
Blindenburg in Hungary slowly moved towards us. And when it had gone
past each of us got up off our knees once more, joined the procession
and once again intoned songs of praise. In the town all the bells
rang more and more brightly and joyfully and from its walls and towers
too thousands rejoiced. Then we saw quite clearly how great a passion
play old Nuremberg was playing host to within its noble walls. There
was a throng from the gates of the town through all the streets and
market places like a raging sea, but even where the throng was thickest
that day no harsh words or blows were proffered. No knife or sword was
loosened from its sheath. Each person felt a restraining hand on their
heart and the wildest among them let themselves be pushed into corners
and dead ends without complaint.
Thus we moved on with the crown through the streets to the square in
front of the Church of the Holy Ghost. How I felt in that great swell
of people pushing and shoving me willy nilly I cannot put into words.
I was in a tearful and yet sweet state of ecstasy. My soul was trapped
and earthbound and yet hovered high up over things of earth and there
was in me a feeling of a splendid pardon I was torn away from. And
then we arrived in the square in front of the Church of the Holy Ghost
where with a legion of young women, councillors and clergy the town's
most unfortunate inhabitants awaited the coming of the regalia.
No barrier had been erected. All the sick and suffering who wanted
to go had been allowed to go. And there they all were--the unclean
from Saint John's hospice, the homeless of Saint Martha's parish, the
poor of every charitable foundation. They are all permitted to touch
the casket of the living presence with their hands and to implore for
help, for no sanctuary is held to be more gracious than this one that
contains the crown of the German people and the trappings of Christ!
Tolle! Lege! The restraining hand that all of us felt on their
hearts suddenly glowed in mine like fire then froze like ice. With
outstretched arms the leper mother was making a way through the crowd
for a hooded man and, on the steps of the church, I caught a brief
glimpse of Master Theodoros near a pale female face. With beating
heart I now set down what happened next.
The people were like a wall separating me from the two lovers and
holding me upright. I had now lost sight of Master Theodoros, the
hooded Michael Groland and my cousin Cecilia. But I could still see
over the heads of the crowd the fair pale virgin on the steps in the
last rays of the setting sun standing in the middle of her family and
looking down at the waggon with the holy casket and the bad, horrific
legion of the lost and sick. A memory came back to me then of that
time when, in the Church of the Holy Cross in Karlstein castle, the
good knight Michael Groland had knelt down next to me in front of the
imperial crown and swore that he would gain the Empire's other crown,
the best wife from the best town in the Empire. And as this thought
came to me there was a cry of amazement and the crowd drew back and
in the evening light I saw Mechthilde smiling over the heads of the
people and waving at the lepers. I felt myself shiver with fright
and watched the maid climb down and vanish from under the red light
that stained the portal of the Church of the Holy Ghost, but a sudden
racket moved the people mightily. Under the porch the other young
women raised their arms and cried out. The councillors too rushed
forward and climbed down. I was dragged forward by a human surge
and an arm grabbed me just in time and pulled me away from horses'
hooves just as the imperial regalia were passing. The horses had
reared and kicked out, but Master Theodoros Antoniades had saved me
from their hooves and the feet of the crowd. And behold, and I saw
before the shrine that concealed the most holy relics of the German
nation that love truly is stronger than death, yes, even a fate worse
than death.
In vain my friend and brother tried to draw back to the gruesome
crush of his co-sufferers. The sword that had stood between him
and the world outside the hospice of Saint John had no power here
to protect him. In vain the grey-haired leper mother threw herself
in Mechthild's way and tried to push her back with outstretched arms.
In vain her relatives, her parents and her brothers rushed up to
her. No-one was able to hold Mechthild back. She advanced with a
firm step and placed both her arms on the shoulders of the lost one
and laid her fair pale cheek against the hair shirt covering his
chest. Healthy people drew back in fear whereas the lepers of
Saint John's sick bay pushed forward. Deep silence descended.
"Michael," declared Mechthild. "Michael, look, you hid from me,
but here on the holy ground of my forebears I have won you back for
myself. I knew this moment would come when no power on earth could
stop me. How else could I have put up with life? Will you not now
keep your promise to me, my friend? The promise that you made before
the imperial crown? Today before the same crown, I am reminding you
of it. The earth is on its last legs, but we, you and me, have
survived. You will not drive me from you! You'll not hide any
longer from your bride, from your wife!"
Gently and yet almost wildly and with great panache she threw back
his monk's hood from his brow and for the first time since we had
said goodbye to each other in Castle Karlstein, I once again looked
on my friend's beloved face. The scourge with which God punishes
nations had not been kind to the proud knight and his fine head was
dreadfully impaired. The leprosy that was eating away at his strong
arms and feet and his brave true heart had rendered his face terribly
old and gaunt and consumed all the fire in his eyes. And his hitherto
so solid feet could not support this poor leper longer in his mixture
of misery and unspeakable good fortune. He fell down onto the bright
form of his betrothed and she bent down towards him as if she were
comforting a child.
And because they were all well-informed now in Nuremberg about the
love between this couple and the cruel fate that they now shared, a
cry arose, an extraordinary cry. All of a sudden all the sick had
started to shout: "Lord, have mercy on us!" From the Church of the
Holy Ghost at the same time they had struck up with: "Gloria in
excelsis Deo!" The doors were thrown open and across from the high
altar lights and candles glimmered out into the night. The press
of people on all sides grew and a wave of them eddied round the
shrine containing the imperial crown jewels. In every street people
moved towards the portal of the Holy Ghost Church in droves as the
holy of holies was borne up the steps high upon the shoulders of its
chosen bearers. In the crowd no-one was in control of themselves any
more. I helped Cecilia Stollhoferin up from the ground and my Greek
master Theodoros and I protected her with our bodies. The beautiful
Mechthild was dragged off with the lepers and no longer visible when
the imperial crown was laid on the altar and one could finally look
for her. The storm and stress of the constant crush had slackened
off.
How we searched for her in the streets of Nuremberg! The cousins
and friends of the Grossen waited at the gates with drawn swords,
but hundreds of lepers in dark patches had now got as far as the
Church of Our Lady, were crossing the Herrenmarkt, going past the
Town Hall and across the wine market through the night back to the
New Gate. No-one in the course of that evening or that night was
able to glimpse the knight Groland von Laufenholz and the charming
Mechthildis in that awful procession.
At the New Gate I spoke to cousins and friends of the family. Truly
Brother Johannes Capistranus today in his pulpit has not shed his
heart's blood in his words as I did that night. With weeping and
gnashing of teeth the noble lords withdrew and noble ladies and young
ladies who were also related helped me to make sure that no wild
action was committed out of madness, impotence and grief.
When everything had calmed down, I followed alone the way that the
lepers had gone out of the town to the hospice of Saint John. It
was not quite dark, but there was still some light in the darkness
and when I came near to the stone cross, next to which the year
before a sword had stood in the ground, I made out a dark shape
sitting on the bench.
Shuddering I hesitated and called out to the shadow from afar.
Then a voice answered through the darkness: "Makarioi oi penthountes,
hoti autoi paraklethesontai! Blessed are those who mourn, for they
shall be comforted!"
It was the old faithful teacher, the homeless Greek man from the
island of Chios who spoke to me the words from Our Lord Jesus
Christ's Sermon on the Mount. I walked to him in silence and he
took my hand, said nothing else, but pulled me down to the stone
bench and pointed to the light streaming out of the windows of Saint
John's hospice.
There was a humming sound and a crowd both in the house and around
the house that was dreadful to hear and even worse to imagine during
the night like that. We sat there until after midnight in the cold
and dark and listened to the singing of lost souls and the sad tones
dying away towards dawn. We sat there numb to night, frost and cutting
wind. We sat there quietly, the Byzantine teacher and I, the old man
and the young one and there was no difference in our state of mind.
That was the night in which my whole life changed. Through the dirges
sung in Saint John's hospice I heard the sweet and childish voice as
Saint Augustine once did. From the earliest times onward down to the
present horrid time all that I experienced as I lived and breathed
went past me and behold, out of great suffering great peace grew.
Yes, I am a man and have become serene. The penance that Brother
Capistranus demanded of the people of Nuremberg today is not the
same as that imposed upon me by God's grace in the days of my youth
when we fought for the imperial crown and the imperial crown was
returned to us. I have witnessed with patience the barbaric noise
of earthly battles, with patience the passing play and change in
nature. Nevermore have I grieved when leaves in autumn turned to
grey and gold. I take too but a modest pleasure when a new spring
tempts forth fresh green grass to decorate the world. I have said
goodbye to fear and remained unswerving in my resistance to the
things that time has seen fit to torment me with.
Time's torments were appalling admittedly. Once more I rode out
against the Hussites and saw at Aussig Germans laid low. I came
home wounded from this bitter battle and found my friend and good
knight Michael Groland of Laufenholz no more in need of things of
earth. I encountered his wife in the streets, fine and upstanding
in the habit of a nun. She was supporting old Stollhoferin, the
leper mother and greeted me quietly. Foolish people made the sign
of the cross on account of her strange fate, but the time was at
hand when wise people too would envy her peace of mind. Mechthilde
Grossin had a great life and eventually succeeded to the title of
Mater Leprosorum. She picked up the name like a laurel wreath in
the miserable surroundings of Saint John's hospice from the floor
thereof and wore it like a crown till she died and there were many
who called her the imperial crown herself though that name never
got as far as her ears and would have had no meaning for her lofty
heart.
I saw much that was splendid: the wealth and the hubbub of Venice,
the ancient monuments of Rome and the sunshine and blue sea of
Naples. I became aware of everything with open eyes and, applying
my will and my knowledge to them, did not miss any of the things
that my daylight paths offered. I spoke before princes and the
senates of proud republics and my efforts for the health and good
of my noble home town did not go unrewarded. Now all that is
behind me. These are my twilight years.
In May of the year 1453 Constantinople fell into the hands of a
pagan foe. The half moon of Diana, the crest of Byzantium, stood
upon the Turkish field insignia against the cross of Christendom.
But the books and parchment rolls, written out laboriously by the
hands of monks and scribes, the noble manuscripts our good friend
Michael Groland, when we were young, elbowed off the table in the
garden bower, were put into the hands of humanity at large by the
new art of printing. Tolle! Lege!
Master Theodoros Antoniades was spared the experience of the total
collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire, but he saw the first printed
book and had wise things to say about it.
The Holy Roman Empire's crown is still in Nuremberg. Who will once
again bring honour to it in the world?
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