ent of his brother
Eric as archbishop of Magdeburg in 1283, and was afterwards engaged in
various feuds. Songs attributed to him are found in F.H. von der Hagen's
_Minnesinger_. Otto was succeeded in 1309 by his nephew, Valdemar, who,
assisted by other members of his family, conquered Pomerellen, which he
shared with the Teutonic order in 1310, and held his own in a struggle
with the kings of Poland, Sweden and Denmark and others, over the
possession of Stralsund.

In order to pay for these wars, and to meet the expenses of a splendid
court, the later margraves had sold various rights to the towns and
provinces of Brandenburg, and so aided the development of local
government. John III. of Saltzwedel had shared his possessions with his
brothers, but in 1303 they were reunited by his nephew Hermann, who
purchased lower Lusatia in the same year. Hermann's daughter Agnes
married the elector Valdemar, and on the death of her only brother, John
VI., in 1317, the possessions of the Saltzwedel branch of the family
passed to Valdemar, together with Landsberg and the Saxon Palatinate,
which had been purchased from Albert the Degenerate, landgrave of
Thuringia. Valdemar thus gathered the whole of the mark under his rule,
together with upper and lower Lusatia, and various outlying districts.
He died childless in 1319, and was succeeded by his nephew Henry II.,
who died in 1320, when the Ascanian family, as the descendants of Albert
the Bear were called, from the Latinized form of the name of their
ancestral castle of Aschersleben, became extinct.

Wittelsbach dynasty.

Brandenburg now fell into a deplorable condition, portions were seized
by neighbouring princes, and the mark itself was disputed for by various
claimants. In 1323 King Louis IV. took advantage of this condition to
bestow the mark upon his young son, Louis, and thus Brandenburg was
added to the possessions of the Wittelsbach family, although Louis did
not receive the extensive lands of the Ascanian margraves. Upper and
lower Lusatia, Landsberg, and the Saxon Palatinate had been inherited by
female members of the family, and passed into the hands of other
princes, the old mark was retained by Agnes, the widow of Valdemar, who
was married again to Otto II., duke of Brunswick, and the king was
forced to acknowledge these claims, and to cede districts to Mecklenburg
and Bohemia. During the early years of the reign of Louis, who was
called the margrave Louis IV. or