From vegetarian meat substitutes to beach parties β find out what came from the Middle Ages! They saw themselves as at the helm of an Augsburg ascendant in the cadre of elite, wealthy, learned European cities. So when they learned that the Holy Roman Emperor would be in town soon, in they prepared.
Or rather, they prepared their daughter, Juliana, who had just turned three. Konrad and Margarethe devoted most of a year to forcing their toddler to memorize a Latin oration. She was to serve as an exemplar of what a fine, classical city Augsburg was, that even a little child, even a female child could be so well educated.
When her parents finally paraded her before the emperor to say her piece, Maximilian asked little Juliana what she wanted for her achievement. The answer? Just a dollβa toy to play with. Oh, and when Juliana died just a couple years later, Konrad and Margarethe repeated the same tricks on a smaller scale with their next daughter.
The wheel of fortune is a recurring theme in medieval literature and art: the goddess Fortuna, sometimes bald and sometimes blind, cranks her wheel around, cycling medieval people through the stages of fate: I will reign, I reign, I reigned, I have lost my kingdom.
Western Europe had lost the knowledge of how to use gears and cranks effectively. As this knowledge filtered back into the west from the Muslim world in the Late Middle Ages, one of its most visible and prestigious applications was the mechanical clock. Clocks and their components came to serve as markers of prestige, whether that meant a gorgeous city clock on a church or civic building, or a timepiece in the background of a royal portrait.
