Unnamed Germanic Princelings

In a kind of mock-Homeric simile, the narrator of Intruder in the Dust compares the "apostate sons of Beat Four" in Yoknapatawpha who move into Jefferson and marry "a town girl" to the "petty Germanic princelings [who] would come down out of their Brandenburg hills to marry the heiresses to European thrones" (133). It's not clear if Faulkner is thinking of any specific German noblemen. (Brandenburg was a province of Prussia until Prussia was abolished after World War II, when Brandenburg became a separate German state.)