These served gradually to extend the German _marches_ or
frontiers further and further, until in the year 1134 Albert the Bear,
count of Ascania, finally conquered the Vendes. The Slavic inhabitants
of this region were cruelly and completely destroyed; the country was
repeopled by German and Dutch colonists, and given as a fief by the
emperor to Albert the Bear, the first margrave of Brandenburg.
Brandenburg was the German form for _Brannibor_, the most considerable
of the Vendish cities, after which the country was called. The names
of places, many of them altered in a similar manner, are indeed the
only weak traces of the Vendish language once spoken in this part of
Germany. No tribe of the Vendes seems to have been so completely
extinguished; the present inhabitants of Brandenburg being of as pure
a German origin, as those of any other part of Germany.
The descendants of only two Vendish tribes have preserved their
language; and even these, from powerful nations spread over the
surface of at least 4800 geographical square miles, have shrunk into
the comparatively small number of scarcely two hundred thousand
individuals, now inhabitants of Upper and Lower Lusatia. Nearly all of
them are peasants; for the higher classes, even if Slavic blood
perhaps runs in their veins, are completely Germanized.
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