The Great Escape - Kaiserburg
High above the medieval city, the Kaiserburg once sentenced the robber knight Eppelein von Gailingen to hang from its battlements, but legend says he asked for one last ride on his horse, cleared the castle wall at full gallop, and mocked Nuremberg for another decade from the freedom of the countryside.
À propos de ce lieu
The Kaiserburg has dominated Nuremberg's skyline for nearly a thousand years, its sandstone towers watching over the trade routes that once made the city one of the wealthiest in the Holy Roman Empire. Those same roads were the hunting ground of Eppelein von Gailingen, a robber knight who raided merchant convoys heading to and from Nuremberg throughout the 1360s, bleeding the city's commerce and humiliating its magistrates. By 1369, the city had had enough: Eppelein was formally indicted and placed under imperial ban, and in 1372 his castle was razed. The legend that followed is the one that survived: condemned to hang from these very battlements, Eppelein allegedly asked for one last ride, galloped at the wall, and cleared it on horseback, dropping into the moat and riding away. The stone indentations still shown to visitors as his horse's hoofprints gave the city's enemies a proverb that stung for generations: 'The Nurembergers hang no one unless they have caught him first.' He was eventually caught drinking at an inn in Postbauer in 1381 and broken on the wheel at Neumarkt on 15 May of that year.
À retenir
- 1369 year — Nuremberg's court formally indicted Eppelein von Gailingen and placed him under imperial ban for raiding merchant convoys on the roads leading to and from the city.
- 1372 year — The city raised an army and razed Eppelein's castle to the ground, stripping him of his stronghold but failing entirely to capture the man himself.
- 1381 year — Eppelein was finally caught drinking at an inn in Postbauer and executed on 15 May 1381, broken on the wheel at Neumarkt, twelve years after his indictment.