The Morning the Sky Went to War Over Nuremberg
It was not yet five o'clock in the morning when the sky over Nuremberg began to burn. Men and women stepping into the cold April air stopped where they stood. Above the spires of one of the wealthiest and most literate cities in the Holy Roman Empire, the dawn had been invaded. Where the rising sun should have climbed alone, there were now globes and rods and crosses, some blood-red, some blue-black, some the colour of iron, and they were moving. To the people watching from the streets, it did not look like weather. It looked like a battle.
The account survives because of 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. That sheet, measuring roughly 26 by 38 centimetres, is today preserved in the print collection of the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich. It is the reason we know anything at all about what the city claimed to have seen. Without Glaser's press, the morning of 14 April 1561 would have vanished like every other forgotten dawn.
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