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Updated: May 2, 2025
They had not been, in late times, the successfulest Markgraves: territories much split up among younger sons, joint Markgraves reigning, which seldom answers; yet to the last they always made stout fight for themselves; walked the stage in a high manner; and surely might be said to quit it creditably, leaving such a Brandenburg behind them, chiefly of their making, during the Two Centuries that had been given them before the night came.
A Markgraf who writes Madrigals; who does sieges with an arrow in his head; who lies in a wooden cage, jeered by the Magdeburgers, and proposes such a cone of ducats: I thought him the memorablest of those forgotten Markgraves; and that his jolting Life-pilgrimage might stand as the general sample.
Waldemar was the last, or as good as the last, of the Ascanier Markgraves; and he, two years before Ludwig ever saw those countries, died in his bed, twenty-five good years ago; and was buried, and seemingly ended. Perkin Warbeck, POST-MORTEM Richard II., Dimitri of Russia, Martin Guerre of the CAUSES CELEBRES: it is a common story in the world, and needs no commentary now.
The year of that Magdeburg speech about the cone of ducats is 1278: King Edward the First, in this country, was walking about, a prosperous man of forty, with very LONG SHANKS, and also with a head of good length. Not the successfulest of Markgraves, especially in later times.
So that to our distressed imagination those poor "Markgraves of Witekind descent," our first set in Brandenburg, become altogether shadowy, intermittent, enigmatic, painfully actual as they once were. Take one instance, omitting others; which happily proves to be the finish of that first shadowy line, and introduces us to a new set very slightly more substantial.
The latest Austrian Kaisers, the latest Kings of Prussia, they are sons of these two men. We have said nothing of the Ascanier Markgraves, Electors of Brandenburg, all this while; nor, in these limits, can we now or henceforth say almost anything.
The Emperor himself was chosen, as we know, by three ecclesiastical electors, the Archbishops of Köln, Trier, and Mainz, and by four princes, the Pfalzgraf, called in English the Elector Palatine, the Markgraves of Saxony and Brandenburg, and the King of Bohemia. The princes and other potentates, owing immediate allegiance to the empire alone, were practically independent sovereigns.
And hence have come the innumerable Markgraves, Marquises, and such like, of modern times: titles now become chimerical, and more or less mendacious, as most of our titles are, like so many BURGS changed into "Boroughs," and even into "Rotten Boroughs," with Defensive BURGhers of the known sort: very mournful to discover. Once Norroy was not all pasteboard!
None of our Markgraves rose to the height of their Progenitor, Albert the Bear; nor indeed, except massed up, as "Albert's Line," and with a History ever more condensing itself almost to the form of LABEL, can they pretend to memorability with us. What can Dryasdust himself do with them?
I only know there was no battle on the subject; though at one time there was like to be such a clash of battle as the old Markgraves never had with their old Wends; not if we put all their battlings into one. Seckendorf's radiant brow has to pucker itself again: this fine project, of boiling the Kaiser's eggs by setting the world on fire, has not prospered after all.
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