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

administered. The Great Council was composed of
patricians, with a sprinkling of the more opulent of
the merchants and artificers. The Council of Thirty
was composed of patricians only.
Further, Nuremberg had a considerable
territory around it, of which it was the capital, and
which was amply studded with towns. Outside its
walls was a circuit of some hundred miles, in
which were seven cities, and 480 boroughs and
villages, of all of which Nuremberg was mistress.
When we take into account the fertility of the land,
and the extensiveness of the trade that enriched the
region, and in which all these towns shared, we see
in Nuremberg and its dependencies a principality
far from contemptible in either men or resources.
"The kingdom of Bohemia," says Gibbon, "was
less opulent than the adjacent city of Nuremberg."
Lying in the center of Southern Germany, the
surrounding States in defending themselves were
defending Nuremberg, and thus it could give its
undivided attention to the cultivation of those arts
in which it so greatly excelled, when its less
happily situated neighbors were wasting their
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