German Renaissance Name Generator

German names of the Renaissance (roughly 1450–1600) follow a recognisable pattern: a short pool of Christian given names paired with a hereditary surname that had only recently become fixed. Men were overwhelmingly Hans, Ulrich, Konrad, Heinrich, Jörg, Veit, Sebald or Wolfgang, often written in spoken forms like Hanns, Cuntz, Endres or Lienhard; women were Anna, Barbara, Margarethe, Ursula, Katharina, Magdalena, Apollonia or Kunigunde, and in documents frequently carried the feminine ending -in (Dürerin, Tucherin). Surnames came from trades (Schmid, Weber, Koberger), places (von Kulmbach, Stromer) or old patrician houses such as Tucher, Imhoff, Fugger and Welser.

Two fashions set the period apart from the Middle Ages. Humanists Latinised or Graecised their names, so Schwarzerdt became Melanchthon, Bauer became Agricola and Hausschein became Oecolampadius; and artists and craftsmen signed with a given name plus a trade or hometown, giving us Hans Holbein, Veit Stoss and Hans Süß von Kulmbach. Nobles kept the territorial 'von' and epithets like der Weise or der Bärtige.

The list below mixes documented figures from Nuremberg, Augsburg, Wittenberg, Basel and the Hanseatic north with invented names built on the same patrician, artisan and humanist conventions, so you can pick one for a novel, a living-history persona or a game set in the Holy Roman Empire.