Late Middle Ages · Europe · Politics

1415

Frederick of Hohenzollern Made Margrave of Brandenburg

1415

Sigismund transferred the Brandenburg electorate to the Nuremberg burgrave Frederick. The Hohenzollern dynasty's six-century occupation of that frontier march began quietly, with a paper transfer and a borrowed title. Five hundred years later his descendants would be Kaisers; eleven centuries later their palaces would be museums. The march itself was impoverished, and no one predicted this transfer would seed the dynasty that eventually unified Germany.