<b>Saxony (880-1871)<b>

After the division of the Carolingian empire in the Treaty of Verdun (843), the eastern part was relatively rudderless, with weak kings and internal strife as well as vicious border warfare against the Slavs. The duchy of Saxony was then the principal German state within the kingdom, and when the Carolingian family line died out, they were replaced by the Saxon Liudolfinger line. Soon after, the kingdom was elevated to an empire, and a new line of emperors sprung up: the Ottonian dynasty, starting with Otto I the Great.

As Otto I became more and more powerful, particularly after his victory of the Magyars at the battle of the Lechfeld (955), he had to rely less on his Saxon lands, and so he handed them over to the Billung family in 960. After one and a half century, this line went extinct, and Emperor Heinrich V in 1137 gave the territory to Heinrich the Proud, of the Welf family, a move he and his successors would soon regret. The Welfs were notorious troublemakers, starting a period of civil war that would last intermittently until the battle of Bouvines (1214), and was to seriously undermine imperial authority.

Heinrich the Proud's son was the most famous Welf: Heinrich the Lion, a clever and endlessly ambitious man, who also united Pommerania, Mecklenburg, Brunswick as well as Bavaria under his wing, becoming more powerful than Emperor Friedrich I Barbarossa. He founded Munich and Lubeck. Heinrich received the Imperial Ban in 1180, and the following year the great duchy of Saxony was divided into many pieces; many of its episcopal sees and cities became self-governing, leading to a flowering of religious as well as municipal art and architecture.

After the dissolution of "old" Saxony, the name Saxony was first applied to a small part of the ancient duchy situated on the Elbe around the city of Wittenberg. This was given to Bernard of Ascania, the second son of Albrecht the Bear. Bernard's son, Albrecht I, added to this territory the lordship of Lauenburg, and his sons divided the possessions into Saxe-Wittenberg and Saxe-Lauenburg. When in 1356 the Emperor Karel IV issued the Golden Bull, the fundamental law of the empire which settled the method of electing the German emperor, the duchy of Saxe-Wittenberg was made one of the seven electorates. The duke as elector thereby received the right to elect, in company with the other six electors, the German emperor. In this way the country, though small in area, obtained an influential position.

Old Saxony, meanwhile, continued to grow in importance, even if it was disorganised. It was home to a number of important bishoprics, such as Mnster, and its cities became wealthy and powerful. The Hanseatic League originated in part in the cities in Saxony and in part in cities established by the Saxon settlers who had moved east and expanded the German territory to Poland and, later, Lithuania. It was their drive against the Lithuanian pagans in the east that enabled the Teutonic Order to become as important as it did.

New Saxony's position as an electoral state forbade the division of the territory among several heirs. The importance of this stipulation is shown by the history of most of the German principalities which were not electorates. The Ascanian line of Saxe-Wittenberg became extinct in 1422. The Emperor Sigismund bestowed the country and electoral dignity upon Margrave Friedrich the Valiant of Meissen, a member of the Wettin line, an old and powerful family. Saxe-Wittenberg and the margraviates of Meissen and Thuringia were then united into one country, which gradually received the name of Saxony. Elector Friedrich the Valiant died in 1464, and his two sons made a division of his territories at Leipzig on 26 August, 1485, which led to the still existing separation of the Wettin dynasty into the Ernestine and Albertine lines. Duke Ernest, the founder of the Ernestine line, received by the Partition of Leipzig the duchy of Saxony and the electoral dignity united with it, besides the landgraviate of Thuringia; Albrecht, the founder of the Albertine line, received the margraviate of Meissen.
