Nuremberg, 1580. The city pays you well, dresses you well, and built your house on a bridge so that no honest citizen ever has to pass your door. You are the executioner — and, like most men of your trade, you are also the best healer in the city. This is one real day in that impossible life, reconstructed from the actual journal of Nuremberg's executioner Frantz Schmidt and from the court and guild records of the free imperial city: the patients at dawn, the market that parts around you like water, the son no guild will take, and the sealed letter that names tomorrow.

This is immersive, research-based history: no black hoods, no myths — the documented daily world of the man a city needs and cannot look at.

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Bridge
0:58 The Mark
2:05 The Healer's Door
3:30 The Market
4:52 The Gallows Field
6:19 The Son
7:33 The Summons
8:39 The Whetston

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

Joel F. Harrington, "The Faithful Executioner" (Frantz Schmidt's life and journal)
Joel F. Harrington (trans.), "The Executioner's Journal: Meister Frantz Schmidt of the Imperial City of Nuremberg" (UVA Press, 2016)
Kathy Stuart, "Defiled Trades and Social Outcasts: Honor and Ritual Pollution in Early Modern Germany"
Nuremberg city council ordinances; Henkerhaus (Executioner's House) museum, Nuremberg
The character of Meister Veit is a composite drawn from these sources; the condemned man and specific events of this day are representative, not a documented case.