NUREMBERG IN 1500 HAD ABOUT 25,000 inhabitants, making it one of Germany's largest cities. Cities in other countries, such as London, with more than 50,000, Naples, with 230,000, or Paris, with 200,000, were bigger, but in Germany there were few cities at the time with more than 20,000 inhabitants. Nuremberg was surrounded by a thick wall intended to keep out hostile armies. It was ruled by a hereditary patrician class of merchants whose wealth came primarily from trade with other major European cities, particularly cities in Italy and the low countries; these patricians controlled all important aspects of city life, from detailed regulations concerning trade to military and judicial affairs.

Nuremberg was an imperial city, a so-called civitas imperialis or Reichsstadt, which meant that over the course of several centuries it had managed to win independence from any intermediary feudal lord and swore allegiance only to the Holy Roman Empire itself, the loose confederation of various states, principalities, and cities of which Germany then consisted. In an edict of 1219 Emperor Frederick II, grandson of the legendary Barbarossa (Frederick I), had sought to bind Nuremberg to him in loyalty by irrevocably declaring “that every citizen of this city shall have no other liege lord than Us and Our successors, the Roman kings and emperors.” This meant that Nuremberg had the emperor's blessing in its quest for independence from other feudal authorities; it repaid the emperor's beneficence with loyalty, money, and military assistance. As a way of thanking Nuremberg for its loyalty to the empire, Barbarossa's successor Emperor Sigismund decreed two centuries later, in 1424, during the proto-Protestant Hussite rebellion in Bohemia (1419–36), that the imperial insignia — the emperor's ceremonial crown, sword, orb, and so on, as well as various other relics believed to have religious and historical significance, such as the lance that pierced Christ's flesh during his crucifixion, a splinter from the cross on which Christ died, and a tooth of St. John the Baptist — should be removed from Bohemia, where they were then being kept, and where the Emperor believed they might be in danger from the Hussites, and placed permanently in Nuremberg.