From the Fury of the Norsemen Deliver Us 155culminating in a heavily wooded ridge, beyond which the ground falls
away steeply again. Here the perimeter ran just short of the crest, west to
east and on to the Weinberg, a hill forming the end of the ridge a little
way back from the Rednitz. Strong defensive outworks were constructed
at the top, including another substantial artillery battery as well as forti-
fications around the Alte Veste (Old Fortress), a ruined medieval castle
at the summit from which the whole camp takes its name.
Much more than usual is known about this camp, because after the
armies had moved away the Nuremberg authorities commissioned
cartographers to make a detailed plan, which is still in the archives.^3
Perhaps the most striking thing about the layout is its size, which con-
trasts sharply with the usual image of such camps as small and hope-
lessly overcrowded. Although not neatly rectangular the enclosure was
some three miles long, north to south along the Rednitz, and a mile
and a half wide, with ten miles of perimeter fortifications enclosing
an area of almost four square miles. To put this in perspective, this
is approximately half the area inside the modern city of Nuremberg’s
ring road, within which lives most of its population of half a million.
Looked at in another way, the three or four villages which were inside
Wallenstein’s camp have grown into the spacious modern communities
of Zirndorf and Oberasbach, with a combined population of 44,000,
the great majority of whom live inside the camp area, despite which
a significant part of it is still open farmland. For two months in 1632
the camp housed something like this number of soldiers, together with
a similar number of dependants and camp followers, as well as a great
many horses, so that while it was no doubt a bustling place it was prob-
ably not unmanageably congested. The Rednitz, the Bibert and another
stream, the Asbach, provided water, while for most of the time the camp
was not besieged so that there was relatively free access to the country-
side beyond.
The standard construction method for the fortifications (see Plate 7 in
this book) was to drive in large stakes and weave a six-foot-high fence
from saplings and the smaller branches of felled trees. Immediately
outside this a ditch was dug, the earth from which was piled up against
the front of the fence, while more stakes with their ends sharpened into
spikes were driven into the bottom. Inside the fence a step was built to
provide a platform for the musketeers, enabling them to fire over the
top but to reload in relative safety at the lower level. A local historian
has calculated that the ten-mile perimeter would have required the
felling of 13,000 trees and the excavation of 64,000 cubic metres of
earth (about 80,000 tonnes), and the whole task is said to have been