| Notes |
- From Wilbur Hanson Kalb
Ulman Stromer was also the one who went to Emperor Charles IV on the behalf of the Free and Imperial City and demanded of him, “Is Nuremberg a Jewish city or a Christian city???” The Emperor did not have the intelligence and backbone to have him thrown to the dungeons for his rudeness so Nuremberg went back to being The City of the Christians, keeping Bavaria on its 1,900-year-long descent into the Holocaust.
Here’s the English translation of Ulman’s biography from the German Wikipedia to show what was life like for his brother, Franz the Elder, your ancestor, as a member of one of the richest and strongest of the Partizierfamilien of Nuremberg. Note the mentions of “The Golden Road” and “New Bohemia”.
Ulman Stromer was born as the twelfth of eighteen surviving children of the merchant from Nuremberg, Heinrich Stromer ( d. 1347 ) ( from the Stromer von Reichenbach ) and his second wife Margarete Geusmid ( Geuschmidtin, d. 1350 ).
He was apprenticed as a merchant in the family businesses in Barcelona [ then in the Principality of Catalonia, under the Crown of Aragon, now Spain ], Genoa [ then an independent republic ], Milan [ then an autonomous dominion of the Kingdom of Italy ] and Kraków and undertook his own business trips already to Kraków and Lwów [ then in Poland, now Lviv in the Ukraine ]. In 1358 Stromer married his first wife Anna Hegner ( d. 1365 ), the daughter of the richest owner of the forges and furnaces in Sulzbach [ = Sulzbach bei Amberg, identified by Lemmel as a town 8.6 miles northwest of Amberg and 31 miles east of Nuremberg, prospered as a stopover on “The Golden Road” between Nuremberg and Prague and also, from 1353 to 1373, as the capital of “New Bohemia”. It once belonged to the County Palatinate of the Rhine but, in 1349, Emperor Charles IV got it by marrying the Count’s daughter, Anna. ]. A year after her death, he took in 1366 the then 14-years-old Agnes Groland ( d. 1413 ) to the altar. In 1368 he acquired for 1,825 gulden a large estate on the Hauptmarkt, immediately north of the Frauenkirche ( Hauptmarkt 16 / Obstgasse 2 ) and built on it for about 2,000 gulden to a representative residence and Kauffahrerhof [ hostel for traveling mechants ].
From his own information Stromer began in 1360 with the recording of his Püchel von meim geslecht und von abentewr [ “Little Book of My Family and Adventures” ], in which he documented events in his family, the undertakings, but also the politics. In 1370 he took over, together with his brothers Peter and Andreas, the management of the Großhandelshaus [ store of wholesale goods ] of the family, whose shops ranged from Barcelona to Riga [ then a German city in the Hanseatic League, now as thoroughly Latvian as the rest of Latvia ] and Tana [ then a colony of Venetian and Genoese merchants in the lands of the Golden Horde, but now known as Azov, a town in Russia ].
From 1371 he was a councilor in the Inner Council of the Free and Imperial City of Nuremberg. Although he already held from 1396 the most important office in the City Militia as the Oberster Hauptmann [ Colonel-Captain ], he was already seen from the decade of the 1380s as the “Gray Eminence” ( Fleischmann ) in the Nuremberger Council. Since 1372 was he was, for 18 years long, the caretaker of the nunnery of St. Clara. During the War of the Cities of 1388, he acted successfully against Burggraf [ “Castle Count” = Burgrave ] Friedrich V ( 1395 – 1397 ) ; Ulman Stromer allied Nuremberg with the Schwäbisch-Rheinischen Städtebund [ “League of the Swabian-Rhenish Cities”, known in English as the Swabian League of Cities ]. In an inglorious way, he was probably also involved with the so-called Judenschuldentilgung [ cancellation of the debts owed to the Jews ] of 1388.
In 1390 he converted the Gleissmühle on the Pegnitz River to the Hadermühle ( Hader = “rags”, used to make paper ) as to the first paper mill north of the Alps. Therefore, even north of the Alps, the paper produced in relatively cheap mass production began to replace the expensive parchment made from animal hides. The oldest illustration of the ( at this time no longer active ) paper mill can be found in the Nuremberg Chronicle [ in the lower right corner of the traveller’s view of Nuremberg — the paper had to be made outside the City’s walls because the work was noisy and smelly. ]
Ulman Stromer was closely associated with the Wittelsbach Elector of the Palatinate Ruprecht II and his financial support contributed in 1400 to the fall of [ the King of Germany ] Wenceslaus ( [ reigned ] 1376 – 1400 ) and the election of the son of Ruprecht II, Ruprecht [ III ], as the King ( [ reigned ] 1400 – 1410 ). Ruprecht II was, during his visit to Nuremberg, a guest of Ulman Stromer and in 1401 his wife Elisabeth, the Burggräfin [ “Castle Countess” = Burgravess ] of Nuremberg ( 1358 – 1411 ) stood as the godmother for a granddaughter of Ulman.
The Nuremberger pestilience of the Winter of 1406 – 1407, in which less than eight members of the family, including Stromer’s son of the same name, had found Death, he himself fell on 3 April 1407 “on the Sunday after Easter [ am suntag nach ostern ]”.
|
1329 - 1407 (78 years)
[1] 
