The Morning the Sky Went to War Over Nuremberg
It was not yet five o'clock in the morning on 14 April 1561 when, according to the only surviving account, the sky above Nuremberg filled with shapes. The city was one of the wealthiest and most literate in the Holy Roman Empire, a centre of metalwork, trade and printing, and its people were awake early. Where the rising sun should have climbed alone, witnesses were said to have seen globes, rods and crosses, some blood red, some blue black, some the colour of iron. The shapes were moving. To the people watching from the streets, it did not look like weather. It looked like a battle.
Everything we know about that morning comes from one man and one sheet of paper. Hans Glaser was a printmaker in Nuremberg, and within days of the event he produced a broadsheet: a single large page combining a hand coloured woodcut with a block of dense German text. The sheet measures roughly 26 by 38 centimetres. It is preserved today in the print collection of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, and it is the reason the episode is remembered at all. Without Glaser's press, 14 April 1561 would have passed like any other forgotten dawn.
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