False Waldemar

The wrong or incorrect Woldemar Waldemar († 1356 in Dessau, Anhalt ) was an impostor, who was enfeoffed 1348-1350 by Charles IV with the Mark Brandenburg.

Life

Woldemar was allegedly Jacob Roebuck and should have been a miller. His true identity is unknown to this day.

In the summer of 1348 he presented himself as an elderly pilgrims to the Archbishop of Magdeburg Otto as the old Brandenburg Margrave Woldemar ago, who had been 29 years previously buried. He pretended the burial of 1319 had only been staged, and that he had been in the meantime, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. After the supposed extinction of the Brandenburg Ascanians the Wittelsbach emperor Louis the Bavarian had given his own son Louis in 1323, the Mark Brandenburg.

This Woldemar quickly gained followers, especially among the princely rivals of the Wittelsbach family. He pretended to be a representative of the ancestral royal house askanischen whose lines in Saxony- Anhalt Wittenberg and supported him, hoping to take over the Mark Brandenburg after his death. Within a few weeks he was able to convince large sections of the Mark of on a Procession in honor. Charles IV also came the wrong Woldemar to the weakening of the Wittelsbach just right, which is why he on October 2, 1348 enfeoffed the " Ascanians " with the Mark Brandenburg. Few cities held on to the Wittelsbach family, so should Treuenbrietzen from this period have the prefix.

The wrong Woldemar was exposed in February 1350 as an impostor, Karl, who had meanwhile agreed with the Wittelsbach family (contracts of Eltville ), said to have been deceived, enfeoffed Ludwig again with the Mark Brandenburg and announced in March and April 1350 that Woldemar was not the rightful Margrave. Woldemar held since then on askanischen court in Anhalt -Dessau on where you life did him all honor court before he probably died in 1357 of natural causes.

Literary reception

1842 published Willibald Alexis his novel The wrong Woldemar. Most recently dedicated the novel The Last Ascanians by Horst Bosetzky (Frankfurt 1999), the events around the wrong Woldemar, the author sets up his own theory as to the identity of the alleged Ascanian.