For the purpose of electing Sigismund, Frederick had incurred considerable expense, amounting to some hundred thousand gulden. It is perhaps again fortunate for all concerned and for the honor of the venal empire that no bill of particulars specifying the uses of this fund is now available, if any was ever rendered. That Frederick, however, had not served Sigismund "_pour l'amour de Dieu_" is plain from the fact that he again took security for his advances. This time he was given the unhappy mark of Brandenburg which, as we have seen, had belonged to Jobst by virtue of a mortgage which Sigismund had never taken the trouble to discharge. If, then, the law of God is at all similar to the law recognized by men, Sigismund had no right to give and the ancestor of William II no legal right to accept that province. The right by which Frederick came into possession of this first state of the later German Empire was, consequently, a right quite different from rights generally recognized. This, therefore, must be that "divine right" which William II is so fond of proclaiming. At its best, the document of June 7, 1411, which gave the Hohenzollerns their first claim to their first province was in reality a mortgage to a piece of property of doubtful title, and if the rather florid style of that document seems to bring in the business transaction as something quite incidental, it is altogether similar to the forms in which other mortgages were couched in those days. That this was so is further evidenced by the fact that the Brandenburg cities looked upon Frederick as the holder of a mortgage and did homage to him "_zu seinem Gelde_"--"for his money"; that is, they recognized that they were bound to him only until he should be paid. The nobles did not do homage to him at all. After "the rain of margraves" of the previous decades, it is not strange that they should have been slow to recognize their latest overlord. Emperor William II is, therefore, quite right when he describes the mark of May, 1412, as devastated, unruly, and altogether unpromising. It could hardly have been otherwise. Before Frederick was invested with Brandenburg (and he was formally invested only after a further payment of 400,000 gulden), in 1417, his princely possessions included merely partial claims to smaller districts like Ansbach and Bayreuth, which he shared with his brother John. In spite of Frederick of Hohenzollern's devotion to the cause of religion, the Shakespearean motto, "Thrift, thrift, Horatio," may be taken to explain satisfactorily his conduct in this regard. That the nobles would be unruly he must have expected. His own activities and his acceptance of the mark had helped to make them so. Frederick's later service consisted in dispelling a confusion which he had helped to create.