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The German ruler remained for centuries on the move, shifting from palace to palace, town to town, in a rather King Lear manner. This became a great source of shame to nineteenth-century German historians who saw itinerant monarchy as disgraceful and weak and the root of Germany’s misery. They came to focus on the ‘strong’ emperors, such as Otto the Great or Frederick Barbarossa, and treated the story as a tragedy whereby the failure of such imperially significant cities as Nuremberg, Aachen or Regensburg to become the German Paris doomed the Empire to enfeeblement and abasement. This rather spike-helmeted view of the world has for obvious reasons since been somewhat discredited.
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