Alpha Book

The cynical Prussian king
remarked that 200,000 fighting men would have been a more useful
legacy, and, as events proved, he was right.

THE RISE OF PRUSSIA. THE HOHENZOLLERNS
[Sidenote: The Hohenzollern Family]
Next to the Habsburgs, the most influential German family in the
eighteenth century was the Hohenzollern. As far back as the tenth
century, a line of counts was ruling over a castle on the hill of
Zollern just north of what is now Switzerland. These counts slowly
extended their lands and their power through the fortunes of feudal
warfare and by means of a kindly interest on the part of the Holy Roman
Emperors, until at length, in the twelfth century, a representative of
the Hohenzollerns became by marriage burgrave of the important city of
Nuremberg.
[Sidenote: Brandenburg]
So far the Hohenzollerns had been fortunate, but as yet they were no
more conspicuous than hundreds of petty potentates throughout the
empire. It was not until they were invested by the Habsburg emperor
with the electorate of Brandenburg in 1415 that they became prominent.


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