The Saxons (Latin: Saxones, Old English: Seaxe, Old Saxon: Sahson, Low German: Sachsen) were a confederation of Germanic tribes on the North German plain, some of whom migrated to Great Britain during the Middle Ages and formed part of the merged group of Anglo-Saxons that would eventually carve out the first united Kingdom of England.[1] The Saxons were Ingvaeonic tribes, whose earliest known area of settlement is Northern Albingia, an area approximately that of modern Holstein. This area overlapped the area of the Angles, a tribe with which they were frequently closely linked. Saxons participated in the Germanic settlement of Britain during and after the fifth century, when the British-Celtic inhabitants of the isles were calling them Saxons or Garmani.[2] It is unknown how many migrated from the continent to Britain, though estimates for the total number of Anglo-Saxon settlers are around two hundred thousand.[3] During the Middle Ages, because of international Hanseatic trading routes and contingent migration, Saxons mixed with and had strong influences upon the languages and cultures of the North Germanic and Baltic and Finnic peoples, and also upon the Polabian Slavs and Pomeranian West Slavic people. The Continental Saxons living in what was known as Old Saxony appear to have consolidated themselves by the end of the 8th century. After subjugation by the Emperor Charlemagne a political entity called the Duchy of Saxony appeared. The Saxons long resisted both becoming Christians[9] and being incorporated into the orbit of the Frankish kingdom, but they were decisively conquered by Charlemagne in a long series of annual campaigns, the Saxon Wars (772 -- 804). During Charlemagne's campaign in Hispania (778), the Saxons advanced to Deutz on the Rhine and plundered along the river. With defeat came enforced baptism and conversion as well as the union of the Saxons with the rest of the Germanic, Frankish empire. Their sacred tree or pillar, a symbol of Irminsul, was destroyed. Charlemagne also deported 10,000 of them to Neustria and gave their now vacant lands to the loyal king of the Abotrites. Einhard, Charlemagne's biographer, says on the closing of such a grand conflict: The war that had lasted so many years was at length ended by their acceding to the terms offered by the King; which were renunciation of their national religious customs and the worship of devils, acceptance of the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and union with the Franks to form one people. Under Carolingian rule, the Saxons were reduced to tributary status. There is evidence that the Saxons, as well as Slavic tributaries such as the Abodrites and the Wends, often provided troops to their Carolingian overlords. The dukes of Saxony became kings (Henry I, the Fowler, 919) and later the first emperors (Henry's son, Otto I, the Great) of Germany during the 10th century, but they lost this position in 1024. The duchy was divided up in 1180 when Duke Henry the Lion, Emperor Otto's grandson, refused to follow his cousin, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, into war in Lombardy. During the High Middle Ages, under the Salian emperors and, later, under the Teutonic Knights, German settlers moved east of the River Saale into the area of a western Slavic tribe, the Sorbs. The Sorbs were gradually Germanised. This region subsequently acquired the name Saxony through political circumstances, though it was initially called the March of Meissen. The rulers of Meissen acquired control of the Duchy of Saxony in 1423 and eventually applied the name Saxony to the whole of their kingdom. Since then, this part of eastern Germany has been referred to as Saxony (German: Sachsen), a source of some misunderstanding about the original homeland of the Saxons, with a central part in the present-day German state of Lower Saxony (German: Niedersachsen).

• published: 05 Nov 2013
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