The Electorate of Saxony (German: Kurfürstentum Sachsen, also Kursachsen), sometimes referred to as Upper Saxony, was a State of the Holy Roman Empire. It was established when Emperor Charles IV raised the Ascanian duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg to the status of an Electorate by the Golden Bull of 1356. Upon the extinction of the House of Ascania, it was enfeoffed to the Margraves of Meissen from the Wettin dynasty in 1423, who moved the residence up the Elbe river to Dresden. After the Empire's dissolution in 1806, the Wettin electors assumed the title of a King of Saxony.

After the dissolution of the medieval Duchy of Saxony, the name Saxony was first applied to a small territory on the middle Elbe river around the city of Wittenberg, which formerly had belonged to the March of Lusatia and about 1157 was held by Albert the Bear, the first Margrave of Brandenburg. When Emperor Frederick Barbarossa deposed the Saxon duke Henry the Lion in 1180, the Wittenberg lands belonged to Albert's youngest son Count Bernhard of Anhalt, who assumed the Saxon ducal title. Bernard's eldest son, Albert I, ceded Anhalt to his younger brother Henry, retained the ducal title and added to this territory the lordship of Lauenburg. His sons divided the possessions into the duchies of Saxe-Wittenberg and Saxe-Lauenburg. Both lines claimed the Saxon electoral dignity, which led to confusion during the 1314 election of the Wittelsbach duke Louis of Bavaria as King of the Romans against his Habsburg rival Duke Frederick the Fair of Austria, as both candidates received one vote each from the two rivaling Ascanian branches.

The Free State of Saxony (German: Freistaat Sachsen [ˈfʁaɪʃtaːt ˈzaksən]; Upper Sorbian: Swobodny stat Sakska) is a landlocked state of Germany, bordering Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with (18,413 square kilometres (7,109 sq mi), and the sixth most-populous (4.3 million) of Germany's sixteen states.

Located in the middle of an erstwhile German-speaking part of Europe, the history of the state of Saxony spans more than a millennium. It has been a medieval duchy, an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, a kingdom, a republic from 1918 to 1952 and then again from 1990.

The area of the modern state of Saxony should not be confused with Old Saxony, the area inhabited by Saxons. Old Saxony corresponds approximately to the modern German states of Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and the Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.

Sachsen is divided into three Direktionsbezirke — Chemnitz, Dresden, Leipzig — which are subdivided into 10 districts: