The nobleman Werner von Parsberg served the imperial town of Nuremberg between 1430 and his death in 1455 as a mounted retainer and (from 1442) as the town’s imperial chief magistrate. In 1450 he carried Nuremberg’s standard in battle during the Second South German Towns’ War. This long record of close engagement with Nuremberg contrasts with the tradition of reading ‘town’ and ‘nobility’ in Germany as mutually exclusive and inherently antagonistic. In Parsberg’s time this was a position advocated by Nuremberg’s opponents amongst the territorial princes and rural nobility, and from the Enlightenment onwards a more rigid version of this dichotomy was projected back onto the late Middle Ages. This perceived opposition between ‘town’ and ‘nobility’ denied the possibility of meaningful cooperation between townspeople and rural nobles: all such relationships have consequently been described as the result of economic and political weakness on the part of the nobles concerned. Recent research, however, suggests that a re-examination of these relationships is necessary, and the case of Werner von Parsberg offers a model for such a reassessment. This article shows that Parsberg’s service for Nuremberg was not a symptom of weakness, but part of an assertive strategy to advance the independence from princely authority of his family’s lordship in the Upper Palatinate. Through this appreciation of the factors supporting town–noble cooperation in the late Middle Ages we are better able to understand the formation and development of the dialectic of town and nobility as a way of understanding German society.

中文翻译：

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纽伦堡的贵族仆人：中世纪晚期德国城镇和贵族之间的维尔纳·冯·帕斯伯格（Werner von Parsberg，卒于 14​​55 年）*

贵族维尔纳·冯·帕斯贝格在 1430 年至 1455 年去世期间为帝国城镇纽伦堡服务，担任随从和（从 1442 年起）担任该镇的帝国首席地方官。1450 年，在第二次南德城镇战争期间，他在战斗中携带纽伦堡的旗帜。这种与纽伦堡密切接触的长期记录与德国将“城镇”和“贵族”解读为相互排斥和内在对立的传统形成鲜明对比。在帕斯贝格的时代，这是纽伦堡的领地王子和农村贵族中的反对者所提倡的立场，从启蒙运动开始，这种二分法的更严格版本被投射到中世纪晚期。这种“城镇”和“贵族”之间的明显对立否定了城镇居民和农村贵族之间有意义的合作的可能性：因此，所有这些关系都被描述为有关贵族经济和政治软弱的结果。然而，最近的研究表明，有必要重新审视这些关系，而维尔纳·冯·帕斯伯格 (Werner von Parsberg) 的案例为这种重新评估提供了一个模型。这篇文章表明，帕斯伯格为纽伦堡服务并不是软弱的表现，而是推动其家族在上普法尔茨领主的王室权威中独立的自信战略的一部分。通过对中世纪晚期城镇与贵族合作的支持因素的理解，我们能够更好地理解城镇与贵族辩证法作为理解德国社会的一种方式的形成和发展。