False Waldemar

The False Waldemar (died 1356), also known as the Wrong Waldemar, was an impostor who from 1348 to 1350 was invested with the Margraviate of Brandenburg by Charles IV.

Life The legitimate Waldemar, Margrave of Brandenburg-Stendal was buried in 1319. After this supposed extinction of the Brandenburg House of Ascania, the Wittelsbach Emperor Louis the Bavarian awarded the March of Brandenburg to his own son Louis in 1320. Twenty-eight years later, in the summer of 1348 (or, according to Carlyle, twenty-five years in 1345 ) an elderly man claiming to be a returning pilgrim presenting himself to the Archbishop of Magdeburg Otto as the old Brandenburg Margrave Waldemar. He claimed the burial of 1319 had been staged, and that he had in the meantime been on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. This was allegedly Jacob Roebuck or Rehbuck, Willibald Alexis wrote his novel Der falsche Woldemar (The False Woldemar) in 1842. A more recent novel is Der letzte Askanier (The Last of Ascanians) by Horst Bosetzky (1997), which explores the events around the Wrong Waldemar, with the author adding his own theory as to the identity of the alleged Ascanian.