CHAPTER II.THE ORIGINS AND TERRITORIAL FORMATION OF BRANDENBURG-PRUSSIA

THE CORE OF THE modern kingdom of Prussia is the historical electorate of Brandenburg and the duchy of East Prussia, which has given its name to the united Hohenzollern dominions. The acquisition and union of these two separate principalities laid the foundation, determined the character, and moulded the policy both of the nascent ruling house and of the expanding state. But long before members of the Hohenzollern were directly concerned with the areas lying round the lower or middle Elbe, or the dreary plain between the lower Vistula and the Pregel, Brandenburg and East Prussia had lived through a tangled and complicated existence of strife and achievement, of prosperity and power waning into anarchy and decay. If Berlin and Frankfort-on-the-Oder are Hohenzollern foundations, Danzig, Gnesen, Oliva, Marienburg, even royal Königsberg, enshrine memories, traditions and accomplished facts, of which the Hohenzollern rulers were the heirs not the authors. Brandenburg and East Prussia are not happy in having no history other than Hohenzollern history, but their chronicles, often as scanty in their produce and as misty in their atmosphere as the sandy flats of the Havel, the Spree and the Masurian lakes, remind us profitably that as there were Hohenzollerns, powerful and numerous in Germany, before they established a Hohenzollern state, so there was a Brandenburg and an East and West Prussia before Hohenzollerns set foot in either. This is only another way of saying that the founding of a line and the establishment of a principality are very different things from the making of a state. The history of Germany from the revival of the Holy Roman Empire by Charles the Great, through the long gallery of Saxon, Hohenstaufen, Luxemburg and Habsburg emperors to the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine or the ramshackle Federation vamped together by the diplomatists of Vienna in 1815, is bewilderingly rich in the creation of principalities, ecclesiastical as well as secular, and in the founding of princely lines from humble or dubious origins. The surface of Germany at any epoch is a complicated mosaic of these principalities, and the series of maps in our historical atlases provides an instructive and slowly shifting kaleidoscope of their evolution, amalgamation, separation, and dissolution. Out of one alone, Brandenburg-Prussia, has a national German state been