order, in her assertion of German unity the centre of the noblest of German aspirations. [Sidenote: =Rivalry between Brandenburg and Sweden in the Thirty Years’ War.=] When Frederick William succeeded his father in the electorate of Brandenburg in 1640 no one would have predicted that from that desolate discredited and divided state was to arise the hope of Germany. The policy of neutrality in the earlier years of the war, adopted not without a certain amount of shrewdness by George William in conjunction with his friend John George of Saxony, had broken down under the menace of the guns of Gustavus Adolphus and the invasion of Tilly. But the league between the Swedes and the elector could never be anything more than hollow, unless the former were prepared to surrender the rights of a conqueror over Pomerania. George William was the acknowledged heir of the old duke Boguslav. Pomerania, with its extensive seaboard, was just what Brandenburg wanted for her national development, and the Elector had been accustomed to look upon it as his own. The landing of Gustavus Adolphus changed the whole face of affairs in a moment. Pomerania became just as important to the Swedes as a basis of communication with Sweden and the Baltic, as it was to Brandenburg as a step in her aggrandisement. Why should the Swedes, who had saved the country from the hands of Wallenstein, surrender it tamely to George William who had not stirred one finger of his own free will on behalf of the Protestant cause? Naturally enough the Swedes stuck obstinately to their rights of conquest. Never would Oxenstjerna yield to the technical claims of Brandenburg, what Gustavus Adolphus had wrested from the enemy by force of arms. Never would Brandenburg abate her just and legal demands in the face of a selfish and brutal conqueror. So as time went on Sweden became far more the national enemy of Brandenburg than the Emperor had ever been. The unfortunate mark, lying as it did on the straight road between Bohemia and the Baltic, was harried alternately by the armies of both sides as the fortune of war ebbed and flowed. In 1635 George William accepted the treaty of Prague, but that gave no respite to his unlucky domain. In 1638, unable to find sustenance in the impoverished mark, he removed his court to Königsberg in east Prussia, where he died worn out with misery and failure in 1640, leaving his son Frederick William at the age of twenty the possessor of little land and many claims. [Sidenote: =Brandenburg at the accession of Frederick William, 1640.=]