1330; Johann II. at Nurnberg, as yet only coming
to be Burggraf, by no means yet administering in Brandenburg; and Ludwig
junior seven years old in his new dignity there.

The Teutsch Ritters, after infinite travail, have subdued heathen
Preussen; colonized the country with industrious German immigrants;
banked the Weichsel and the Nogat, subduing their quagmires into
meadows, and their waste streams into deep ship-courses. Towns are
built, Konigsberg (KING Ottocar's TOWN), Thoren (Thorn, CITY of the
GATES), with many others: so that the wild population and the tame
now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and Lubeck Law; and all was
ploughing and trading, and a rich country; which had made the Teutsch
Ritters rich, and victoriously at their ease in comparison. But along
with riches and the ease of victory, the common bad consequences had
ensued. Ritters given up to luxuries, to secular ambitions; ritters no
longer clad in austere mail and prayer; ritters given up to wantonness
of mind and conduct; solemnly vowing, and quietly not doing; without
remorse or consciousness of wrong, daily eating forbidden fruit; ritters
swelling more and more into the fatted-ox condition, for whom there is
but one doom. How far they had carried it, here is one symptom that may
teach us.

In the year 1330, one Werner von Orseln was Grand-master of these
Ritters. The Grand-master, who is still usually the best man they can
get, and who by theory is sacred to them as a Grand-Lama or Pope among
Cardinal-Lamas, or as an Abbot to his Monks,--Grand-master Werner, we
say, had lain down in Marienburg one afternoon of this year 1330, to
take his siesta, and was dreaming peaceably after a moderate repast,
when a certain devil-ridden mortal, Johann von Endorf, one of his
Ritters, long grumbling about severity, want of promotion and the like,
rushed in upon the good old man; ran him through, dead for a ducat;
[Voigt, iv. 474, 482.]--and consummated a PARRICIDE at which the very
cross on one's white cloak shudders! Parricide worse, a great deal, than
that at the Ford of Reuss upon one-eyed Albert.

We leave the shuddering Ritters to settle it, sternly vengeful; whom,
for a moment, it has struck broad-awake to some sense of the very
questionable condition they are getting into.

Chapter XI. -- BAYARIAN KURFURSTS IN BRANDENBURG.

Young Ludwig Kurfurst of Brandenburg, Kaiser Ludwig's eldest son, having
come of years, the Tutors or Statthalters