Saxons

Saxons

Sahson
The Stem Duchy of Saxony
Regions with significant populations
Old Saxony, Frisia, England, Normandy
Languages
Old Saxon, Old English
Religion
Originally Germanic and Anglo-Saxon paganism, later Christianity
Related ethnic groups
Anglo-Saxons, Angles, Frisii, Jutes, Franks

The Saxons, sometimes called the Old Saxons, were the Germanic people of "Old" Saxony (Latin: Antiqua Saxonia) which became a Carolingian "stem duchy" in 804, in what is now northern Germany.^[1]

The political history of these inland Saxons, who were neighbours of the Franks, is unclear until the 8th century and the conflict between their semi-legendary hero Widukind and the Frankish emperor Charlemagne. They do not appear to have been politically united until about that time. Previous Frankish rulers of Austrasia, both Merovingian and Carolingian, fought numerous campaigns against Saxons, both in the west near the Lippe, Ems and Weser, and further east, neighbouring Thuringia and Bohemia. Later medieval sources referred to this eastern area as "North Swabia". Charlemagne conquered all the Saxons after winning the long Saxon Wars (772–804), and forced them to convert to Christianity, annexing Saxony into the Carolingian domain. Under the Carolingian Franks, Saxony became a single duchy, fitting it within the basic political structure of the later Holy Roman Empire. The early rulers of this Duchy of Saxony expanded their territories, and therefore those of the Holy Roman empire, to the east, at the expense of Slavic-speaking Wends.

Before the entry of Saxony into Frankish history, there is possibly a single classical reference to a smaller and much earlier Saxon tribe, but the interpretation of this text ("Axones" in most surviving manuscripts) is disputed. According to this proposal, the original Saxon tribe lived north of the mouth of the Elbe, close to the probable homeland of the Angles.^[2] What is more certain is that long before any clear historical mention of Saxony as a country, a related but possibly distinct or overlapping group of "Saxons" became important during the late Roman Empire, when the name was used to refer to coastal raiders who attacked from the north by, in a similar sense to the much later term Viking. These early raiders and settlers came from coastal regions north of the Rhine. They included Frisians, Angles and Jutes, as well as people from the coastal part of what came to be called Saxony.

One of the first writers to mention a country called Saxony appears to have been an Ostrogothic geographer of Italy named Marcomir. The much later Ravenna Cosmography which reproduces some of his reports uses the term "Old Saxony" to refer to the continental homeland of the British Saxons who the writer understood to have come from this Old Saxony with a leader named Ansehis. It describes the lands of this Old Saxony as lying on the ocean coast, between Frisia and the Danes. It contained the rivers "Lamizon", "Ipada", "Lippa" and "Limac", which are generally interpreted as the Ems, Pader, Lippe and Leine.

Today the Saxons of Germany no longer form a distinctive ethnic group or country, but their name lives on in the names of several regions and states of Germany, including Lower Saxony (German: Niedersachsen) which includes most of the original duchy. Their language evolved into Low German which was the lingua franca of the Hanseatic League, but has faced a long and gradual decline since the Late Medieval period as a literary, administrative and, to a significant extent, cultural language in favor of Dutch and German.