a poem entitled: On Illicit Love, written among the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford (1775, Newcastle); The History and Antiquities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (2 vols., London, 1789), and many papers in the Archaeologia.
BRAND, SIR JOHN HENRY (1823 – 1888), president of the Orange Free State, was the son of Sir Christoffel Brand, speaker of the House of Assembly of the Cape Colony. He was born at Cape Town on the 6th of December 1823, and was educated at the South African College in that city. Continuing his studies at Leiden, he took the degree of D.C.L. in 1845. He was called to the English bar from the Inner Temple in 1849, and practised as an advocate in the supreme court of the Cape of Good Hope from that year until 1863. In 1858 he was appointed professor of law in the South African College. He was elected president of the Orange Free State in 1863, and subsequently re-elected for five years in 1869, 1874, 1879 and 1884. In 1864 he resisted the pressure of the Basuto on the Free State boundary, and after vainly endeavouring to induce Moshesh, the Basuto chief, to keep his people within bounds, he took up arms against them in 1865. This first war ended in the treaty of Thaba Bosigo, signed on the 3rd of April 1866; and a second war, caused by the treachery of the Basuto, ended in the treaty of Aliwal North, concluded on the 12th of February 1869. In 1871 Brand was solicited by a large party to become president of the Transvaal, and thus unite the two Dutch republics of South Africa; but as the project was hostile to Great Britain he declined to do so, and maintained his constant policy of friendship towards England, where his merits were recognized in 1882 by the honour of the G.C.M.G. He died on the 14th of July 1888. (See Orange Free State: History.)
BRANDE, WILLIAM THOMAS (1788–1866), English chemist, was born in London on the 11th of January 1788. After leaving Westminster school, he was apprenticed, in 1802, to his brother, an apothecary, with the view of adopting the profession of medicine, but his bent was towards chemistry, a sound knowledge of which he acquired in his spare time. In 1812 he was appointed professor of chemistry to the Apothecaries' Society, and delivered a course of lectures before the Board of Agriculture in place of Sir Humphry Davy, whom in the following year he succeeded in the chair of chemistry at the Royal Institution, London. His Manual of Chemistry, first published in 1819, enjoyed wide popularity, and among other works he brought out a Dictionary of Science, Literature and Art in 1842, on a new edition of which he was engaged when he died at Tunbridge Wells on the 11th of February 1866.
BRANDENBURG, the name of a margraviate and electorate which played an important part in German history, and afterwards grew into the kingdom of Prussia. During the early years of the Christian era, the district was inhabited by the Semnones, and afterwards by various Slavonic tribes, who were partially subdued by Charlemagne, but soon regained their independence. The history of Brandenburg begins when the German king, Henry the Fowler, defeated the Havelli, or Hevelli, and took their capital, Brennibor, from which the name Brandenburg is derived. It soon came under the rule of Gero, margrave of the Saxon east mark, who pressed the campaign against the Slavs with vigour, while Otto the Great founded bishoprics at Havelberg and Brandenburg. When Gero died in 965, his mark was divided into two parts, the northern portion, lying along both banks of the middle Elbe, being called the north or old mark, and forming the nucleus of the later margraviate of Brandenburg. After Otto the Great died, the Slavs regained much of their territory, Brandenburg fell again into their hands, and a succession of feeble margraves ruled only the district west of the Elbe, together with a small district east of that river.
A new era began in 1106 when Lothair, count of Supplinburg, became duke of Saxony. Aided by Albert the Bear, count of Ballenstädt, he renewed the attack on the Slavs, and in 1134 appointed Albert margrave of the north mark. The new margrave continued the work of Lothair, and Albert the Bear. about 1140 made a treaty with Pribislaus, the childless duke of Brandenburg, by which he was recognized as the duke’s heir. He took at once the title margrave of Brandenburg, but when Pribislaus died in 1150, a stubborn contest followed with Jazko, a relation of the late duke, which was terminated in 1157 in Albert’s favour. Albert was the real founder of Brandenburg. Under his rule Christianity and civilization were extended, bishoprics were restored and monasteries founded. The country was colonized with settlers from the lower Rhineland, land was brought under cultivation, forts were built, German laws and customs introduced, and gradually the woods and marshes were converted into lands of comparative fertility.
When Albert died in 1170, Brandenburg fell to his eldest son, Otto I. (c. 1130–1184), who compelled the duke of Pomerania to own his supremacy, and slightly increased by conquest the area of the mark. Otto’s son, Otto II., was the succeeding margrave, and having quarrelled with his powerful neighbour, Ludolf, archbishop of Magdeburg, was forced to own the archbishop’s supremacy over his allodial lands. He died in 1205, and was followed by his step-brother, Albert II. (c. 1174–1220), who assisted the emperor Otto IV. in various campaigns, but later transferred his allegiance to Otto’s rival, Frederick of Hohenstaufen, afterwards the emperor Frederick II. His sons, John I. and Otto III., ruled Brandenburg in common until the death of John in 1266, and their reign was a period of growth and prosperity. Otto III. Districts were conquered or purchased from the surrounding dukes; the marriage of Otto with Beatrice, daughter of Wenceslaus, king of Bohemia, in 1253, added upper Lusatia to Brandenburg; and the authority of the margraves was extended beyond the Oder. Many monasteries and towns were founded, among them Berlin; the work of Albert the Bear was continued, and the prosperity of Brandenburg formed a marked contrast to the disorder which prevailed elsewhere in Germany. Brandenburg appears about this time to have fallen into three divisions—the old mark lying west of the Elbe, the middle mark between the Elbe and the Oder, and the new mark, as the newly conquered lands beyond the Oder began to be called. When Otto died in 1267, the area of the mark had been almost doubled, and the margraves had attained to an influential position in the Empire. The Sachsenspiegel, written before 1235, mentions the margrave as one of the electors, by virtue of the office of chamberlain, which had probably been conferred on Albert the Bear by the German king Conrad III.
In 1258 John and Otto had agreed upon a division of their lands, but the arrangement only took effect on Otto’s death in 1267, when John’s son, John II., received the electoral dignity, together with the southern part of the margraviate, which centred around Stendal, and Otto’s Otto IV. son, John III., the northern or Saltzwedel portion. John II.’s brother, Otto IV., who became elector in 1281, had passed his early years in struggles with the archbishop of Magdeburg, whose lands stretched like a wedge into the heart of Brandenburg. In 1280 he was wounded in the head with a dart, and as he retained there a part of the weapon for a year, he was called “Otto with the dart.” He secured the appointment of his brother Eric as archbishop of Magdeburg in 1283, and was afterwards engaged in various feuds. Songs attributed to him are found in F. H. von der Hagen’s Minnesinger. Otto was succeeded in 1309 by his nephew, Valdemar, who, assisted by other members of his family, conquered Pomerellen, which he shared with the Teutonic order in 1310, and held his own in a struggle with the kings of Poland, Sweden and Denmark and others, over the possession of Stralsund.
In order to pay for these wars, and to meet the expenses of a splendid court, the later margraves had sold various rights to the towns and provinces of Brandenburg, and so aided the development of local government. John III. of Saltzwedel had shared his possessions with his brothers, but in 1303 they were reunited by his nephew Hermann, who purchased lower Lusatia in the same year. Hermann’s daughter Agnes married the elector Valdemar, and on the death of her only brother, John VI., in 1317, the possessions of the Saltzwedel branch of the family passed to Valdemar, together with Landsberg and the Saxon Palatinate, which had been purchased from Albert the
