AND OTHER FORTIFICATIONS[A]
BY CECIL HEADLAM
A glance at the map will show us that Nuremberg, as we know it, is
divided into two almost equal divisions. They are called after the names
of the principal churches, the St. Lorenz, and the St. Sebald quarter.
The original wall included, it will be seen, only a small portion of the
northern or St. Sebald division. With the growth of the town an
extension of the walls and an increase of fortification followed as a
matter of course. It became necessary to carry the wall over the Pegnitz
in order to protect the Lorenzkirche and the suburb which was springing
up around it. The precise date of this extension of the fortifications
can not be fixt. The chronicles attribute it to the twelfth century, in
the reign of the first Hohenstaufen, Konrad III. No trace of a
twelfth-century wall remains; but the chroniclers may, for all that,
have been not very wide of the mark. The mud and wood which supplied the
material of the wall may have given place to stone in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. However that may be, it will be remembered that
the lower part of the White Tower, which is the oldest fragment of
building we can certainly point to dates from the thirteenth century.
All other portions of the second wall clearly indicate the fourteenth
century, or later, as the time of their origin....
Beyond the White Tower the moat was long ago filled up, but the section
of it opposite the Unschlittplatz remained open for a longer period than
the rest, and was called the Klettengraben, because of the burdocks
which took root there. Hereabouts, on a part of the moat, the
Waizenbraeuhaus was built in 1671, which is now the famous Freiherrlich
von Tuchersche Brewery. Here, too, the Unschlitthaus was built at the
end of the fifteenth century as a granary. It has since been turned into
a school.
We have now reached one of the most charming and picturesque bits of
Nuremberg. Once more we have to cross the Pegnitz, whose banks are
overhung by quaint old houses. Their projecting roofs and high gables,
their varied chimneys and overhanging balconies from which trail rich
masses of creepers, make an entrancing foreground to the towers and the
arches of the Henkersteg. The wall was carried on arches over the
southern arm of the Pegnitz to the point of the Saumarkt (or
Troedelmarkt) island which here divides the river, and thence in like
manner over the northern arm. The latter portion o
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