THE FIRST GERMAN PAPER-MAKER. 



95 



paper-mills on their journeys to Italy, even though they may not 

 have had a real knowledge of the art. In any case it is not im- 

 possible that enterprising men of business had even before Ulman 

 Stromer conceived the plan of establishing paper-mills with the 

 help of Italian workmen ; for the expense of transporting paper 

 across the Alps must have made it very high, and there was 

 abundant prospect of making the enterprise profitable in the fact 

 that there were no paper-mills north of the Alps except in south- 

 ern France. We are, in fact, inclined to believe that a few paper- 

 mills existed in Germany at the end of the thirteenth and the be- 

 ginning of the fourteenth centuries. Thus, the paper on which 



Fig. 1.— Ulman Stkomer's Paper-mill. (From Scheclel's Buck der Chroniken of 1493.) 



the copy of a document of 1315 is written is a specimen of the 

 German Holbein's paper, for it bears as a water-mark an ox's 

 head, which, according to Gutermann, was the arms of the Holbein 

 family, whose paper-mill was standing at Eavensburg, according 

 to some in 1270, according to others in 1324. But the fact that 

 the Fabrianos also worked a similar water-mark into their paper 

 bears on the other side. It has not been possible to prove that 

 the Holbein paper-mills were in operation before the year 1407, 

 when the first authentic mention is made of a paper factory at 

 Ravensburg, and of the paper-makers Cunrat, Peter, and Stengli. 

 There were also paper-mills about 1347 at Au,near Munich, and in 

 1356 at Leesdorf in Lower Austria; but documentary evidence to 



