When rulers wish to secure political allegiances, they inevitably interact with social identities. In Margrave Albrecht I of Brandenburg-Ansbach, flattered by Enea Silvio Piccolomini as the ‘German Achilles’, we meet a fifteenth-century ruler who developed a substantial and significant strategy for harnessing social identities to his political ambitions. His rhetoric of antagonism between town and nobility borrowed from and sought to amplify and redirect existing discourses about ‘town’ and ‘noble’ identities in late medieval Upper Germany in the service of his political objectives. This article poses questions about the nature of Albrecht's rulership, and about the relationship between his discursive strategies and the identities through which they operated. How should we read the interaction between this particular instance of identity politics and the discursive formation of fifteenth-century ways of seeing German-speaking society?

In September 1440 Albrecht succeeded his father Friedrich of Hohenzollern as a prince of the Holy Roman Empire. He took the title of margrave by virtue of his father's status as margrave of Brandenburg, but his elder brother ruled Brandenburg itself. Albrecht's share of the inheritance was a part of the family's southern lands, centred on the town of Ansbach in Franconia. Within the Empire's highly decentralised political structures he had considerable autonomy, but he was also firmly anchored in the dynamic and competitive world of the secular and ecclesiastical princes. The lordship of these regional power brokers is commonly but somewhat misleadingly labelled ‘territorial’: the princes’ rule was spatially defined, but Albrecht's lordship, like that of any other prince, was an accumulation of highly localised lands and jurisdictions interspersed with the rights and claims of others. Amongst these neighbouring powers were imperial towns, de facto city states under the emperor's direct but nominal authority. Albrecht repeatedly clashed with the powerful town of Nuremberg, and there were fundamental antagonistic factors in the relationship between princes and independent towns: towns were often the economic (and in many ways political) centres of the regions which the princes otherwise controlled (or sought to control), and many princes had claims to authority over certain towns or denied towns the right to exercise any authority beyond their walls. The place of the towns in the wider imperial constitution was also highly contentious.