The False Waldemar, also known as the Wrong Woldemar was an impostor who from 1348 to 1350 was invested with the Mark 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 WittelsbachEmperor Louis the Bavarian awarded the Mark of Brandenburg to his own son Louis in 1320. Twenty-eight years later, in the summer of 1348 an elderly man claiming to be a returning pilgrim presenting himself to the Archbishop of MagdeburgOtto as the old Brandenburg Margrave Woldemar. 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 False Waldemar was allegedly Jacob Roebuck or Rehbuck, possibly a journeyman miller. Thomas Carlyle wrote that he might have been in real Waldemar's employ where he could have learned his master's manners. This and other rumors are not more than speculation by contemporaries and chroniclers. His true identity is still unknown. False Woldemar quickly gained adherents, especially among the rivals of the Wittelsbach royals. He posed as a representative of the ancestral Ascanian Princely House, which he promised to help against the foreign and unpopular Bavaria. Within weeks the False Waldemar was able to convince a large portion of the Mark. Emperor Charles IV, on the defensive, invested the Wrong Woldemar on 2 October 1348 with the Mark Brandenburg. Only a few towns held on to the Wittelsbach. It was from this period that the town of Treuenbrietzen gained its prefix meaning faithful. Two years later, in April 1350, the False Woldemar was exposed as a cheat. Charles deposed him as because of an agreement with the Wittelsbach. From this time on, Woldemar held an Ascanian court at Anhalt-Dessau, where he retained courtly honor all his life, before he died in 1356 of natural causes.
In literature
in his History of Friedrich II of Prussia called False Waldemar "the wickedest and worst trouble of their raising", "a new goblin, where already there were plenty, in the danceround poor Ludwig ". Willibald Alexis wrote his novel Der falsche Woldemar in 1842. A more recent novel is Der letzte Askanier by Horst Bosetzky, which explores the events around the Wrong Woldemar, with the author adding his own theory as to the identity of the alleged Ascanian.
