Culture, which had long abandoned the cloisters, came to settle in the towns. We have already seen that they were the centres of German Humanism and of the New Learning. The artists of the German Renaissance belonged to the towns, and their principal patrons were the wealthy burghers. The rich merchants displayed their civic patriotism in aiding to build great churches; in erecting magnificent chambers of commerce, where merchandise could be stored, with halls for buying and selling, and rooms where the merchants of the town could consult about the interests of the civic trade; in building _Artushöfe_ or assembly rooms, where the patrician burghers had their public dances, dinners, and other kinds of social entertainments; in raising great towers for the honour of the town. They built magnificent private houses. Æneas Sylvius tells us that in Nürnberg he saw many burgher houses that befitted kings, and that the King of Scotland was not as nobly housed as a Nürnberg burgher of the second rank. They filled these dwellings with gold and silver plate, and with costly Venetian glass; their furniture was adorned with delicate wood-carving; costly tapestries, paintings, and engravings decorated the walls; and the reception-room or _stube_ was the place of greatest display. The towns in which all this wealth was accumulated were neither populous nor powerful. They cannot be compared with the city republics of Italy, where the town ruled over a large territory: the lands belonging to the imperial cities of Germany were comparatively of small extent. Nor could they boast of the population of the great cities of the Netherlands. Nürnberg, it is said, had a population of a little over 20,000 in the middle of the fifteenth century. Strassburg, a somewhat smaller one. The population of Frankfurt-on-the-Main was about 10,000 in 1440.(49) The number of inhabitants had probably increased by one-half more in the decades immediately preceding the Reformation. But all the great towns, with their elaborate fortifications, handsome buildings, and massive towers, had a very imposing appearance in the beginning of the sixteenth century.