Saxonians II

Who Were the Saxonians?

The Saxonians were the descendants of the old Saxon tribal confederation that Charlemagne had spent more than thirty years subduing in the late eighth century. By the twelfth century the brutal christianization of their ancestors was a long memory, but the sense of being a people apart had not faded. They lived in the broad northern lowlands of the German kingdom, between the Rhine country to the west and the Slavic lands beyond the Elbe to the east, and they spoke a Low German speech that an Italian or a Bavarian could not follow. Saxony was one of the original stem duchies of the empire, and its dukes had often been among the most powerful men in Germany. In 1180 the most powerful of them all, Henry the Lion of the Welf family, was stripped of his lands by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa for refusing to support an Italian campaign, and the great duchy was broken up among his rivals. The people remained.

Homeland and Way of Life

Saxony was flat country, in places almost monotonously so. The North German Plain stretched from the dunes of the Baltic and North Sea coasts inland for hundreds of kilometers, broken only by low ridges, slow rivers, and great stretches of heath and bog. The soil was sandy and demanded heavy plowing, but where the land was good, around Hildesheim and along the foot of the Harz mountains, it produced reliable rye and oats. The Harz themselves were a different country, wooded and rich in silver, copper, and lead, and the mining towns of Goslar and Rammelsberg had been making the Saxon dukes wealthy since Ottonian times. To the north, the coastal Saxons fished, salted herring, and built the broad-bellied cogs that would soon carry Hanseatic cargoes from Bergen to Novgorod. Lübeck, refounded by Henry the Lion in 1159 on a site between two rivers, grew within a generation into the greatest port of the Baltic and the model for every Hanseatic town that followed.

Warfare, Power, and Limits

The Saxonians had a long tradition of stubborn infantry warfare. Their ancestors had fought Charlemagne on foot in the forests, and their twelfth and thirteenth century descendants still preferred a solid line of well-armed footmen to the cavalry charges that the French and the western Germans favored. Free peasants and townsmen could be called out for the duke's host, and the urban militias of cities like Brunswick and Magdeburg could put hundreds of mailed spearmen into the field. After 1180 the unified duchy was gone, and Saxon energy turned outward and eastward. In a long, slow process that German historians later called the Ostsiedlung, Saxon lords, peasants, and clergy crossed the Elbe into the lands of the Polabian and Pomeranian Slavs, founding villages on Slavic soil under German law and pushing the frontier of Latin Christianity steadily east. The Wendish Crusade of 1147 had given this movement a holy gloss; what followed was less crusade than colonization. By 1296, when the last duke of the old Saxe-Lauenburg line of the Ascanians died and the duchy fragmented further, Saxon settlers had reached as far as Silesia and the Baltic coast of what is now Estonia.

Beliefs, Customs, and Society

Christianity in Saxony had been imposed by force and then absorbed slowly, and even in the high Middle Ages something of the older world lingered in the corners. The great cathedrals of Hildesheim, Magdeburg, and Halberstadt, founded in Ottonian times, were among the oldest north of the Alps, and the Saxon bishops were great lords in their own right, often more powerful than the secular counts around them. Monasteries multiplied: the Benedictines of Corvey on the Weser, founded in the ninth century, were a center of learning that produced chronicles still read today, and the Cistercians arrived in the twelfth century and threw themselves into clearing forest and draining marsh in the eastern lands. Saxon law was codified around 1230 by a knight named Eike von Repgow into the Sachsenspiegel, the Mirror of the Saxons, the first great German law book written in the vernacular rather than Latin. It collected the customs of free peasants and townsmen, and its quiet insistence that even kings were subject to the law would echo in German legal thinking for centuries.

Contacts, Conflicts, and Legacy

The Saxonians sat on the empire's most important frontier. Behind them lay the old Carolingian heartlands; in front of them lay the Slavic and Baltic peoples, and beyond those the Russian principalities and the steppe. Saxon merchants pushed up the rivers and along the coasts into Pomerania, Prussia, and Livonia, often in the company of the Teutonic Order, and Saxon peasants followed with their plows. Lübeck and the other Saxon ports built the trading network that would soon take formal shape as the Hanseatic League, and the Low German speech of the Saxon coast became the working language of Baltic commerce from Bergen to Reval. At the same time, the partition of 1180 meant that the old duchy never regrouped. Saxon identity survived, but it was carried forward by cities, by law, and by language rather than by a single ducal court. By the time the Saxe-Lauenburg line ended in 1296, the heartland of the old stem duchy had become a patchwork of bishoprics, free cities, and small principalities, while the people who called themselves Saxons had spread halfway across the medieval north.