"As to the Office, it was more important than perhaps the reader imagines. In a Diet of the Empire (1170) we find Conrad among the magnates of the country, denouncing Henry the Lion's high procedures and malpractices. Every Burggraf of Nürnberg is in virtue of his office 'Prince of the Empire'; if a man happened to have talent of his own and solid resources of his own (which are always on the growing hand with this family), here is a basis from which he may go far enough. Burggraf of Nürnberg: that means again Graf (judge, defender, manager, g'reeve) of the Kaiser's Burg or Castle,--in a word, Kaiser's Representative and _Alter Ego_,--in the old Imperial Free-Town of Nürnberg; with much adjacent very complex territory, also, to administer for the Kaiser. A flourishing extensive city, this old Nürnberg, with valuable adjacent territory, civic and imperial, intricately intermixed; full of commercial industries, opulences, not without democratic tendencies. Nay, it is almost, in some senses, the _London and Middlesex_ of the Germany that then was, if we will consider it! "This is a place to give a man chances, and try what stuff is in him. The office involves a talent for governing, as well as for judging: talent for fighting also, in cases of extremity, and, what is still better, a talent for avoiding to fight. None but a man of competent superior parts can do that function; I suppose no imbecile could have existed many months in it, in the old earnest times. Conrad and his succeeding Hohenzollerns proved very capable to do it, as would seem; and grew and spread in it, waxing bigger and bigger, from their first planting there by Kaiser Barbarossa, a successful judge of men." Nuremberg continued to receive marks of Imperial favour. The importance to which she had now grown is illustrated by the fact that Frederick II., son of Barbarossa, held a very brilliant _Reichstag_ here in 1219, and on this occasion gave to the town her first great Charter. The first provision of this Charter, by which the town is declared free of allegiance to anyone but the Emperor, is of special interest, seeing that it raises the question whether Nuremberg was really the private property of the Imperial family, or only owed allegiance to the Emperor as such. Probably Frederick did not intend to alienate Nuremberg from himself and his heirs as private individuals; but, regarding the empire as a permanent possession of his family, he intended by this clause to bind the burghers of Nuremberg more closely to his own personal service by freeing them from all feudal obligations to others.