So much for the princes of the house of Anhalt during the period of the Reformation. No other reigning family could produce a brighter escutcheon during the troubles of the sixteenth century, and we saw how that escutcheon was preserved bright and brilliant during the centuries that followed, the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. If the title of Grand Duke does not depend on the number of square miles, surely no family has deserved that title so well as the ducal family of Anhalt. Beyond the sixteenth century, the history of Germany tells us little of the private character of the Anhalt princes, but we may look forward to new information which the Ducal Archives will yield if examined, as they have been of late by competent historians. Much useful work has been done during the last twenty-two years by a historical society established at Dessau. A Codex Anhaltinus has been published and much light has been thrown on transactions in which some princes of Anhalt had taken a prominent part. If during the time of the Crusades the names of the Ascanians are but seldom mentioned, there was a good reason for it. Bernhard of Clairvaux himself, wise man as he was with all his fanaticism, had persuaded them to turn their arms against the heathen on the eastern borders of Germany, rather than against the heathen who had conquered the Holy Land. Slavonic tribes, particularly the Wends and Sorbs, who were still heathen, were constantly threatening the eastern parts of the German Empire, the very ramparts of civilisation and Christianity, and it was felt to be absolutely necessary to drive them back, or to induce them to adopt a civilised and Christian mode of life. In 1134 Albrecht, commonly called Albrecht the Bear, had been invested by the Emperor Lothar with the Northern Mark, or the Mark Brandenburg, as his fief, in order to defend it as best he could against these Slavonic inroads. This Albrecht the Bear is the ancestor of the reigning Dukes of Anhalt, the present duke being his nineteenth successor. It was the same Mark Brandenburg which was afterwards to become the cradle of Prussia and indirectly of the German Empire. Albrecht’s influence was so great at the time that, after the death of the Emperor Lothar, he succeeded in carrying the election of the Emperor Konrad III., the Hohenstaufen, against the Welfic party, who wished to raise the Duke of Bavaria, Henry the Proud, to the Imperial throne of Germany. The Emperor rewarded Albrecht’s services by taking the Duchy of Saxony away from the Welfic Duke of Bavaria, and bestowing it on him. This led to a bloody war between the two claimants, and ended in the defeat of Albrecht. But though deprived again of his Saxon fief, Albrecht proved so successful in his own mark against the Sorbs and Wends that he received the title of Markgrave of Brandenburg, and as such became one of the Electors of the German Empire. All those fierce fights against the Slavonic races on