In his survey of the world of the early Enlightenment, Peter Gay wrote: ‘Hamburg, one of many Free Cities in the German Empire, avoided the decay of most of the others by welcoming foreigners of all nationalities and giving them a place in civic and commercial affairs. The… Constitution of 1712, perhaps the least oligarchical urban charter of the age, reflected this liberal spirit and promoted it.’ Gay gives no source for his judgement, but it reflects nonetheless the views of a long line of Hamburg historians beginning around 1800 and culminating in the better-known work of Percy Schramm. After the toleration mandate of 1785, and in the context of the euphoric reforming zeal of the urban elite after the 1790s, the city's historians created a myth of a free mercantile republic whose present wealth and power derived from a long tradition of freedom and toleration. ‘In political and civil terms there is only one estate in Hamburg, the burgher estate’, wrote Johann Daniel Curio in 1802, ‘We are all citizens, no more and no less.’ A decade later Jonas Ludwig von Hess elaborated the myth when he declared: