the
information is not always reliable. The chronicles, like our own
peerage, are apt to contain too vivid efforts of imaginative fiction.
The chroniclers, unharassed by facts or documents, with minds "not by
geography prejudiced, or warped by history," can not unfortunately
always be believed. It is, for instance, quite possible that Attila,
King of the Huns, passed and plundered Nuremberg, as they tell us. But
there is no proof, no record of that visitation. Again, the inevitable
legend of a visit from Charlemagne occurs. He, you may be sure, was
lost in the woods while hunting near Nuremberg, and passed all night
alone, unhurt by the wild beasts. As a token of gratitude for God's
manifest favor he caused a chapel to be built on the spot. The chapel
stands to this day--a twelfth-century building--but no matter! for did
not Otho I., as our chroniclers tell us, attend mass in St. Sebald's
Church in 970, tho St. Sebald's Church can not have been built till a
century later?

The origin of the very name of Nuremberg is hidden in the clouds of
obscurity. In the earliest documents we find it spelt with the usual
variations of early manuscripts--Nourenberg, Nuorimperc, Niurenberg,
Nuremberc, etc. The origin of the place, we repeat, is equally obscure.
Many attempts have been made to find history in the light of the
derivations of the name. But when philology turns historian it is apt to
play strange tricks. Nur ein Berg (only a castle), or Nero's Castle, or
Norix Tower--what matter which is the right derivation, so long as we
can base a possible theory on it? The Norixberg theory will serve to
illustrate the incredible quantity of misplaced ingenuity which both of
old times and in the present has been wasted in trying to explain the
inexplicable.

Be that as it may, the history of our town begins in the year 1050. It
is most probable that the silence regarding the place--it is not
mentioned among the places visited by Conrad II. in this
neighborhood--points to the fact that the castle did not exist in 1025,
but was built between that year and 1050. That it existed then we know,
for Henry III. dated a document from here in 1050, summoning a council
of Bavarian nobles "to his estate Nourinberc." The oldest portion,
called in the fifteenth century Altnuernberg, consisted of the
Fuenfeckiger Thurm--the Five-cornered tower--the rooms attached and the
Otmarkapelle. The latter was burned down in 1420, rebuilt in 1428, and
called