eatest among us
began in a small way.

If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you
will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends
in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of
what is now the German Empire.

The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason
of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand
gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt
that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of
April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance,
by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory,
and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote
in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called because the
envoys sent to offer him the crown, found him on his estates in the
Hartz Mountains among his falcons), who fought off the Danes in the
northwest, and the Slavonians, or Wends, in the northeast, and the
Hungarians in the southeast, and established frontier posts or marks
for permanent protection against their ravages. These marks, or
marches, which were boundary lines, were governed by markgrafs or
marquises, and finally gave the name of marks to the territory itself.
The word is historically familiar from its still later use in noting
the old boundaries between England and Scotland, and England and
Wales, which are still called marks.

Henry the Fowler was also called Henry "the City Builder." After the
death of the last of the Charlemagne line of rulers, the Franks
elected Conrad, Duke of Franconia, to succeed to the throne, and he on
his death-bed advised his people to choose Henry of Saxony to succeed,
for the times were stormy and the country needed a strong ruler. The
Hungarians in the southeast, and the Wends, the old Slavonic
population of Poland, were pillaging and harrying more and more
successfully, and the more successfully the more impudently. Henry
began the building of strong-walled, deep-moated cities along his
frontier, and made one, drawn by lot, out of every ten families of the
countryside, go to live in these fortified towns. Their rulers were
burgraves, or city counts. Titles now so largely ornamental were then
descriptive of duties and responsibilities.

In the light of their future greatness, it is well to take note of
t