The facts as to the origin of Nuremberg are lost in the dim shadows of tradition.  When the little town sprang up amid the forests and swamps which still marked the course of the Pegnitz, we know as little as we know the origin of the name Nuernberg.  It is true that the chronicles of later days are only too ready to furnish us with information; but 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 the Walpurgiskapelle.  These constituted the Burggraefliche Burg—­the Burggraf’s Castle.  The rest of the castle was built on by Friedrich der Rotbart (Barbarossa),