ABSTRACT
A pious legend relates that Joachim II, visiting the great Dr. Martin Luther at Wittenberg as a thirteen-year-old boy in company with his mother, already a secret convert to Protestantism and that the impression then received determined the whole future course of his life. When the new Elector Joachim assumed the ermine in his thirtieth year, he appeared to be a person devoid of sentiment, and little given to the tenderer emotions. Joachim employed an excellent architect, Caspar Theyss, to build him the hunting-box “Gruine-wald,” where the merry gunmaker’s widow spent many a night with her Royal lover. The younger brother, Hans von Kustrin, who by his father’s crazy arrangement ruled the New Mark, won far greater military distinction than his brother. Joachim I had been so foolish as to think that since the days of his father Albert Achilles the revenues of Brandenburg had increased sufficiently to support two separate Courts in the Mark.
