Augsburg

Augsburg was a free imperial city, answering to the emperor alone and well placed on established trade routes; it held its status from 1276, and imperial diets met there.^7, 8

It was also a city of money. The Fugger and Welser merchant houses were based there, and the Fuggers lent to the Habsburg emperors from Frederick III to Charles V.^7, 8

Its metalworkers were already skilled: armourers from the fifteenth century, goldsmiths, and makers of mathematical and astronomical instruments, whose portable sundials were exported widely.^7, 8, 9

With Nuremberg, it made the watches of the sixteenth century. A drum watch of about 1520 to 1550 in the Walters Art Museum has an iron movement stamped with a pinecone, the Augsburg mark, and the verge drove them all.^{5, 10, 11}

The Antiquarian Horological Society dates the Augsburg clockmakers' guild to 1564, a year ahead of Nuremberg's. A clock in the Victoria and Albert Museum is signed in that year 'Jeremias Metzger, clockmaker, 1564, in Augsburg'.^3, 12

To become a master, a clockmaker had to make a masterpiece under the guild's rules. Surviving ones are astronomical table clocks with calendars, astrolabe dials and alarms: Johann Schneider's of 1625, made to the guild rules of 1577, and David Weber's of about 1653, with seven dials.^1, 2, 14

The work was divided. The V&A notes that Metzger made movements while goldsmiths and bronze-workers supplied the gilt cases, so the same case designs appear on clocks signed by other makers.³

Watches went on alongside the clocks: Christoph Schissler's drum watch of about 1550 to 1570 has a sundial in its lid for resetting it, and Nicolaus Rugendas the Elder made a watch of lapis lazuli and rock crystal about 1620.^15, 16

The city's speciality was the clock that moved. Hans Schlottheim built three clockwork galleons between 1585 and 1590, with an emperor and electors on deck, an organ inside and cannon that fired, and Veit Langenbucher made a musical clock with a spinet and an organ about 1625.^{4, 17, 18}

These were treasury pieces for princes, kept with automata, astrolabes and sundials in their cabinets of wonders. The V&A notes that a Metzger clock of 1564 now in Vienna is probably one in the inventory of Archduke Ferdinand II, who built rooms at Schloss Ambras for his collections.³

Schlottheim's ships went to the greatest courts. Wikipedia notes that the one now in the British Museum, long thought to be Rudolf II's, is now linked to the 1585 inventory of the Elector Augustus of Saxony in Dresden; the others are at Écouen and in Vienna.^4, 17

The Habsburgs' Ottoman neighbours appear in the work too: the Kunsthistorisches Museum holds an Augsburg figure clock of about 1580 to 1590 in which a pasha in a boat rolls his eyes while a rower pulls and a monkey bites an apple.²¹

The Frick Collection puts Augsburg's time as a centre of clockmaking between 1550 and 1650, and notes that its clocks, like others in Europe, kept poor time and were prized as luxuries.¹

War cut the city down. Wikipedia gives a fall in population from about 70,000 to about 16,000 after the Swedish occupation and the siege of the winter of 1634 to 1635 in the Thirty Years' War.⁸

The guild itself held the trade back, by the account of the Clockmakers' Museum record: its sixteenth-century rules stayed in force well into the eighteenth century, and Augsburg's clocks grew old-fashioned and hard to sell.²

The free city ended with the Holy Roman Empire: Wikipedia records that it passed to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806.⁸

Its clocks became museum pieces far from home. The V&A bought its Metzger clock in 1857 for £30, Octavius Morgan gave Schlottheim's galleon to the British Museum in 1866, and a Metzger table clock of 1568 came to the Metropolitan Museum as a gift of J. Pierpont Morgan in 1917.^{3, 17, 22}

In Augsburg the Maximilianmuseum, opened in 1855, shows the work of the city's clockmakers among more than sixty art trades, with the model chamber of mechanical models that Elias Holl set up in the town hall in 1620, by the museum's account.⁹