Nuremberg

In the German speaking lands, six cities dominated printing: Cologne, Strasbourg, Leipzig, Basle, Augsburg, and Nuremberg.

In the years following the appearance of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible around 1455, printing spread through German speaking regions and other parts of Europe. The beginning of printing in Nuremberg is traced to the decade of the 1470s.

Charles’s Golden Bull of 1356 named Nuremberg as the city where newly elected kings of Germany must hold their first Imperial Diet, making Nuremberg one of the three highest cities of the Empire, along with Frankfurt, where kings were elected, and Aachen, where Emperors were crowned and which had been the capital of the old Frankish Empire. The royal and Imperial connection was strengthened when Sigismund of Luxembourg granted the Imperial regalia to be kept permanently in Nuremberg in 1423.