Page:The Book of Orders of Knighthood and Decorations of Honour of All Nations.djvu/485

214 twenty in Brunswick, Anhalt, Mecklenburg and Lusatia, and thirty-four in Upper Germany. The number of the unmarried female members was twenty-three.

In 1450, the Knights in Franconia having represented to the Margrave Albert, brother of the Elector Frederick II., that the distance of their homes from the seat of the Order was too great for them to attend regularly the meetings of the society, it was arranged, by sanction of the Elector and of Pope Pius II., that the Chapel of St. George in the Cathedral of Anspach, should be declared a branch church, where all the Knights in the countries beyond the Thuringian Forest were to attend on festival days, though the nomination remained as before the privilege of the principal church.

The Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albert of Brandenburg, intended to introduce the Order of the Swan in the Baltic provinces; he, in consequence, contrived to procure from Pope Leo X., the permission of using his own private chapel as the second branch church of the Order. Albert's conversion to Protestantism, however, soon put an end to the scheme, and, with the progress of Luther, the Order entirely disdisappeared from Northern Germany, where it had existed for upwards of a hundred years, and its estates fell to the crown.

At the date of its extinction, the Order numbered three hundred and thirty-one members, among whom were twenty-four Princes, twenty-one Counts, eight Barons, nineteen Knights, and two hundred and twenty-nine nobles of both sexes.

The fall of the Order caused the decline of the Chapter in Brandenburg. In 1539, they were forbidden to supply the ranks by new members, and the consequence was, that, shortly afterwards, the only inmate of the deserted cloister, was the Provost of the Church, who at last died in the equally