Brandenburg Concertos me with the command to send Your Highness some pieces of my Composition: I have in accordance with Your Highness's most gracious orders taken the liberty of rendering my most humble duty to Your Royal Highness with the present Concertos, which I have adapted to several instruments; begging Your Highness most humbly not to judge their imperfection with the rigor of that discriminating and sensitive taste, which everyone knows Him to have for musical works, but rather to take into benign Consideration the profound respect and the most humble obedience which I thus attempt to show Him. Bach's reference to
Brandenburg-Schwedt Brandenburg-Schwedt Brandenburg-Schwedt was a secundogeniture of the Hohenzollern margraves of Brandenburg, established by Prince Philip William who took his residence at Schwedt Castle in 1689. By appanage, they administered the manors of Schwedt and Vierraden on the Oder river (Uckermark and Neumark) as well as Wildenbruch in Pomerania (present-day Swobnica, Poland). Though prosperous, the cadet branch never obtained Imperial immediacy. Because of a lack of money in the late days of the disastrous Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), the "Great Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg in about 1640 mortgaged the Schwedt region to the Baltic German noble Gustav Adolf von (Varrensback,