Imperial diets once met where Nuremberg Castle still watches Franconia
Nuremberg is Bavaria’s second city and Franconia’s largest—about 546,000 people in 2024, Germany’s 13th-largest—on the Pegnitz. First mentioned in 1050 around an imperial castle, it became a Free Imperial City in the thirteenth century and frequently hosted diets and the Imperial Regalia.
Nuremberg, on the Pegnitz, is the second-largest city in Bavaria and the biggest in the cultural region of Franconia. Its 546,397 residents in 2024 made it Germany's 13th-largest city. It merges with Furth, Erlangen and Schwabach into a built-up area of about 1.4 million people, within a metropolitan region of roughly 3.6 million.
The first written record, from 1050, places an imperial castle here on the border between eastern Franconia and the Bavarian Nordgau. Lying on major trade routes, the town grew rapidly between 1050 and 1572. King Conrad III created the Burgraviate of Nuremberg, and in 1193 Frederick I of the House of Hohenzollern inherited it. The Hohenstaufen emperors steadily handed civil power to an imperial castellan and mayor instead, breeding lasting hostility with the burgraves. In 1219 Emperor Frederick II granted the Great Charter of Freedom, bringing town rights, direct subordination to the emperor, the right to mint coins and its own customs policy, and Nuremberg became a Free Imperial City.
Imperial diets met here from 1211 to 1543, more often than anywhere but Regensburg and Frankfurt, making the city an unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and the Imperial Regalia were kept here from 1424 until the empire ended. With Augsburg it was one of the two great trading cities on the route from Italy to northern Europe. In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance it was a centre of art, printing and science, home to figures such as Hans Sachs, Albrecht Durer, the globe-maker Martin Behaim and the composer Johann Pachelbel. In the 20th century its name became attached to the Nazi rallies and then to the postwar trials.
Today it is northern Bavaria's hub for transport, education and trade, with the state's second-busiest airport, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany's 11th-largest university, the new University of Technology Nuremberg and one of the country's biggest trade-fair organisers. Visitors come for the castle, Old Town and city walls, and it hosted matches in the 2006 FIFA World Cup.
Source: Nuremberg
