The Wettins began their rise as margraves of the Eastmark and the Meissen Mark on the eastern edge of the Reich in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a process that continued in the thirteenth century with inheritance of the landgravate of Thuringia and the imperial district of Pleissen. Toward the end of the totally au courant Wettin lordship over what had become the kingdom of Saxony, scholars examining the roots of the Wettins focused not on alleged ancestral bloodlines, but rather on the office of Margrave of Meissen. This approach brought Margrave Conrad the Great into focus. The early Wettins were not 'social climbers' in the classical sense of that term. When Dietrich I and his son Dedo I appear in literary sources in the late tenth century, they already belonged to the elite kinship group of the East Saxon magnates, from which the Reich's regional officials were recruited in the tenth and eleventh centuries.