From the Diet of Worms to the Augsburg Confession - James Aitken Wylie

Chapter 5
Nuremberg
NUREMBERG three hundred years ago was
one of the more famous of the cities of Europe. It
invites our study as a specimen of those few
fortunate communities which, preserving a feeble
intelligence in times of almost universal ignorance
and barbarism, and enjoying a measure of
independence in an age when freedom was all but
unknown, were able, as the result of the
exceptional position they occupied, to render
services of no mean value to the civilization and
religion of the world.
The distinction and opulence which Nuremberg
enjoyed, in the fifteenth century and onward to the
time of the Reformation, it owed to a variety of
causes. Its salubrious air; the sweep of its vast
plains, on all sides touching the horizon, with a
single chain of purple hills to redeem the landscape
from monotony; and the facilities for hunting and
other exercises which it afforded, made it a
76