The Saxons are a Germanic people, ethnolinguistically attached to the Westic branch. They are first mentioned by the Egyptian astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy in the 2nd century CE. He then locates their lands in Jutland, and what roughly corresponds to present-day Schleswig-Holstein from where they seem to have extended to the south and west.
In the island of Britain
Some of them, along with Angles, Jutes and Frisians, invaded Britain in the early Middle Ages.
According to English tradition and as reported by Bède the Venerable, the first of them would have been led by two brothers, Hengist and Horsa and would have come at the instigation of the Breton king Vortigern, around 450, in order to defend the island. of Brittany against the Picts, a non-Romanized native tribe. Archeology, for its part, attests to the presence of Germanic mercenaries around London from the first years of the 5th century.
Be that as it may, the arrival of the Saxons and the political turmoil relating to the breaking up of Roman Britain into numerous kingdoms resulted in a dark period, which English historiography has recorded as the Dark Ages (literally, " dark ages”). Massive depopulation, linked to the calamities of war and epidemics, also seems to have favored the Germanization of the ancient Roman province in the 5th century.
Probably from the 6th century, the Saxons constituted four kingdoms in the south of the island:Essex, Sussex, and Wessex (respectively Saxon lands of the East, South and West) as well as Middlesex , more ephemeral since it was annexed to the land of the Angles, England (England). On the whole, the Saxons also showed a fairly strong resistance to Christianity, which reached the kingdom of Kent at the beginning of the 7th century, under the influence of the Roman missionary Paulinus.
If from the 7th century the presence of Bretwaldas, sorts of "over-kings" is attested among the Anglo-Saxons of Great Britain, it was only in the 10th century that a Saxon dynasty, namely that of Wessex, finally imposed on the island during the reign of Alfred the Great and for a short time until the Norman invasion.
The language of the Saxons gave birth to Old English, Old English, and continues today in the Low Saxon dialect.
The majority of the Saxons, however, remained on the continent, where they were still a pagan nation in the eighth century despite the efforts of Anglo-Saxon missionaries. Many of the latter, in fact, came to the continent, mostly from Northumbria, and professed their faith in Germania in the hope of converting their "brothers" who remained in error:the best known are Willibrord (657? - 738? ) and Saint Boniface (680 - 755), who evangelized the Frisians.
At the very end of the 8th century, the Saxons of Germania were incorporated into a duchy of Saxony. Charlemagne - following the annual campaigns he led, from 772 to 804 - imposed baptism on them:the Saxon leaders, as well as their people, became Christians, probably to win peace like the most famous of them. them:Widukind, long fierce opponent of the wave of Christianization that occurred in the orbit of the kingdom of the Franks (read Frankish Germania).
According to Carolingian custom, the Saxons were then compelled to pay tribute and, like the Slavic peoples of the Abodrites and Wendes, they subsequently had to provide troops to their suzerain.
The Dukes of Saxony ruled Germany in the 10th century but their kingdom was dismantled in 1180.
The House of Saxony ruled over two states:the Kingdom of Saxony and then Thuringia, which later became the Duchy of Saxony.
Subsequently, the Duchy of Saxony became an "electorate of Saxony" in the Germanic Empire, and was then split into a duchy and an electorate. Several duchies then coexisted with the electorate:the duchies of Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Saxe-Lauenburg, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Hildburghausen.
The territory known as the Kingdom of Saxony from 1806 to 1918, and which is located in the south-east of Germany, owes its name to the acquisition of the Duchy of Saxony by the Margrave of Meissen in 1423 and is actually beyond the Saxon lands.
The Transylvanian Saxons
Saxon settlers emigrated in the 13th century to Transylvania, in present-day Romania, where they constituted a community of around 250,000 souls at the beginning of the 20th century.
Some left at the end of the Second World War and this movement continued in the 1970s and 1980s because of the Romanianization policy carried out by the Ceauşescu regime. Most of them left Romania for Germany in the early 1990s ending 800 years of history.
Current Saxons
Three Länder of today's Federal Germany owe their names to the Saxons:Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Lower Saxony
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