The Crown of Wild Olive / also Munera Pulveris; Pre-Raphaelitism; Aratra Pentelici; The Ethics of the Dust; Fiction, Fair and Foul; The Elements of Drawing

by John Ruskin

IX.

1320-1415.—Brandenburg under the Austrians.

A century—the fourteenth—of miserable anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its Kurfürsts, in deadly succession, making what they can out of it for their own pockets. The city itself and its territory utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns suffered much, any trade they might have had going to wreck. Robber castles flourished, all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Hamburg pedlars made for but to be robbed?"