It was in the second year of that final tribulation, marked above
as Period Third, that the Teutsch Ritters, famishing for money,
completed the Neumark transaction with Kurfurst Friedrich;
Neumark, already pawned to him ten years before, they in 1455, for
a small farther sum, agreed to sell; and he, long carefully
steering towards such an issue, and dexterously keeping out of the
main broil, failed not to buy. Friedrich could thenceforth, on his
own score, protect the Neumark; keep up an invisible but
impenetrable wall between it and the neighboring anarchic
conflagrations of thirteen years; and the Neumark has ever since
remained with Brandenburg, its original owner.

As to Friedrich's Pomeranian quarrel, this is the figure of it.
Here is a scene from Rentsch, which falls out in Friedrich's time;
and which brought much battling and broiling to him and his.
Symbolical withal of much that befell in Brandenburg, from first
to last. Under the Hohenzollerns as before, Brandenburg grew by
aggregation, by assimilation; and we see here how difficult the
process often was.

Pommern (POMERANIA), long Wendish, but peaceably so since the time
of Albert the Bear, and growing ever more German, had, in good
part, according to Friedrich's notion, if there were force in
human Treaties and Imperial Laws, fallen fairly to Brandenburg,--
that is to say, the half of it, Stettin-Pommern had fairly
fallen,--in the year 1464, when Duke Otto of Stettin, the last
Wendish Duke, died without heirs. In that case by many bargains,
some with bloody crowns, it had been settled, If the Wendish Dukes
died out, the country was to fall to Brandenburg;--and here they
were dead. "At Duke Otto's burial, accordingly, in the High Church