Читать книгу History of Friedrich II of Prussia (All 21 Volumes) - Томас Карлейль - Страница 55

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Albert Achilles the Third Elector had, before his accession, been Margraf of Anspach, and since his Brother the Alchemist's death, Margraf of Baireuth too, or of the whole Principality—"Margraf of Culmbach" we will call it, for brevity's sake, though the bewildering old Books have not steadily any name for it. [A certain subaltern of this express title, "Margraf of Culmbach" (a Cadet, with some temporary appanage there, who was once in the service of him they call the Winter-King, and may again be transiently heard of by us here), is the altogether Mysterious Personage who prints himself "MARQUIS DE LULENBACH" in Bromley's Collection of Royal Letters (London, 1787), pp. 52, &c.:—one of the most curious Books on the Thirty-Years War; "edited" with a composed stupidity, and cheerful infinitude of ignorance, which still farther distinguish it. The BROMLEY Originals well worth a real editing, turn out, on inquiry, to have been "sold as Autographs, and dispersed beyond recovery, about fifty years ago."] After his accession, Albert Achilles naturally held both Electorate and Principality during the rest of his life. Which was an extremely rare predicament for the two Countries, the big and the little.

No other Elector held them both, for nearly a hundred years; nor then, except as it were for a moment. The two countries, Electorate and Principality, Hohenzollern both, and constituting what the Hohenzollerns had in this world, continued intimately connected; with affinity and clientship carefully kept, up, and the lesser standing always under the express protection and as it were COUSINSHIP of the greater. But they had their separate Princes, Lines of Princes; and they only twice, in the time of these Twelve Electors, came even temporarily under the same head. And as to ultimate union, Brandenburg-Baireuth and Brandenburg-Anspach were not incorporated with Brandenburg-Proper, and its new fortunes, till almost our own day, namely in 1791; nor then either to continue; having fallen to Bavaria, in the grand Congress of Vienna, within the next five-and-twenty years. All which, with the complexities and perplexities resulting from it here, we must, in some brief way, endeavor to elucidate for the reader.