With enough of the like sort; which readers can conceive.
BURGGRAF FRIEDRICH III.; AND THE ANARCHY OF NINETEEN YEARS.
This same Friedrich III., Great-grandson of Conrad the first Burggraf, was he that got the Burggraviate made hereditary in his family (A.D.
1273); which thereby rose to the fixed rank of Princes, among other advantages it was gaining.

Nor did this acquisition come gratis at all, but as the fruit of good service adroitly done; service of endless importance as it proved.

Friedrich's life had fallen in times of huge anarchy; the Hohenstauffen line gone miserably out,--Boy Conradin, its last representative, perishing on the scaffold even (by a desperate Pope and a desperate Duke of Anjou); [At Naples, 25th October, 1268.] Germans, Sicilian Normans, Pope and Reich, all at daggers-drawn with one another; no Kaiser, nay as many as Three at once! Which lasted from 1254 onwards; and is called "the Interregnum," or Anarchy "of Nineteen Years," in German History.
Let us at least name the Three Kaisers, or Triple-elixir of No-Kaiser; though, except as chronological landmarks, we have not much to do with them.

First Kaiser is William Count of Holland, a rough fellow, Pope's protege, Pope even raising cash for him; till William perished in the Dutch peat-bogs (horse and man, furiously pursuing, in some fight there, and getting swallowed up in that manner); which happily reduces our false Kaisers to two: Second and Third, who are both foreign to Germany.
Second Kaiser is Alphonso King of Castille, Alphonso the Wise, whose saying about Ptolemy's Astronomy, "That it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice!" is still remembered by mankind;--this and no other of his many sayings and doings.

He was wise enough to stay at home; and except wearing the title, which cost nothing, to concern himself very little about the Holy Roman Empire,--some clerk or two dating "TOLETI (at Toledo)," did languidly a bit of official writing now and then, and that was all.