Waldemar, Margrave of Brandenburg-Stendal

He was a son of Margrave Conrad of Brandenburg-Stendal and his wife Constance, eldest daughter of the Piast duke Przemysł I of Greater Poland. Waldemar was co-regent from 1302, and succeeded as margrave upon the death of his uncle Otto IV in 1308. File:Pomerania 14th-15th century (135770289).jpg|thumb|left|Pomerelia within a map of the State of the Teutonic Order in 1410 In 1307 Waldemar signed an agreement with the Swienca family ceding him the lands of Pomerelia (Gdańsk Pomerania), whereafter Brandenburg troops occupied Świecie, Tczew and all strategic locations up to Gdańsk (Danzig). In turn, the Polish king Władysław I called for the support of the Teutonic Knights, and after their takeover of Danzig, Waldemar by the 1309 Treaty of Soldin relinquished his claims on Pomerelia east of the Łeba River to the Teutonic Order for a payment of 10,000 silver Mark. According to the 1317 Treaty of Templin, the margrave had to surrender Stargard and Neubrandenburg to Mecklenburg. He also had to waive the previous Pomerelian acquisitions of Schlawe and Stolp, which passed to Duke Wartislaw IV of Pomerania. In 1319 Waldemar acquired the Silesian towns of Züllichau and Schwiebus. ==Family==

as part of the Siegesallee, 1900 In 1309 he married his cousin Agnes (–1334), a daughter of Margrave Hermann of Brandenburg-Salzwedel. The marriage remained childless. Waldemar was the last governing member of the Brandenburg line of the Ascanian House. With the death of his cousin John V in 1317, the younger Salzwedel line of the Brandenburg margraves became extinct. From 1318 Waldemar also acted as a guardian for his minor cousin Henry II, Margrave of Brandenburg-Stendal. His advance towards the Prussian lands was resumed more than 200 years later, when both Brandenburg and the Duchy of Prussia were under the rule of the Hohenzollern dynasty. After Waldemar's death, his wife Agnes secondly married Duke Otto of Brunswick-Göttingen in December 1319. When Waldemar's ward Henry II died in July 1320, the Brandenburg branch of the Ascanian house died out in 1320. As a reverted fief, the margraviate fell back to the Wittelsbach king Louis IV. In 1323, he enfeoffed his eldest son Louis with Brandenburg, ignoring the claims of the Ascanian princes of Anhalt. ==False Waldemar==

In 1348, an impostor appeared in the Archbishopric of Magdeburg and successfully claimed that he was Waldemar, returning from pilgrimage to the Holy Land after somebody else had been buried in his place. Quickly gaining support due to the rivalries between the Wittelsbach and Luxembourg dynasties, King Charles IV reinvested him for about two years before "the last Ascanian" was unmasked and fled to the Anhalt court in Dessau, where he spent the rest of his life. ==Ancestry==