How did Saxony move from here to here and back again?

raharris1973

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Okay, historically Saxony "moved" across Germany, starting in the northwest, disappearing there (replaced with names like Brunswick and Hanover), showing up in eastern Germany, and then ending up re-emerging in northwest Germany under the modified name of "Lower Saxony"

how'd that happen? And do the different Saxonies east and west have any special dialectic, ethnic, lineage or folkloric associations with each other any stronger than between any other two parts of Germany?

Saxe_primitive.jpg
 

raharris1973

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...now here in 1945, the name pops up close to its old spot for the first time since the medieval era- just with the prefix "lower" (nieder) added.

2000px-Deutschland_Lage_von_Niedersachsen.png
 
Initially, Saxony was located in the region of modern Lower Saxony, where the Saxons lived. Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony, was a great rival of the Hohenstaufen Emperors, so once he died his lands got broken up. The western part, where his Welf descendants continued to rule, became the Duchy of Brunswick-Luneburg (Braunschweig-Lüneburg), the bulk of which eventually developed into the electorate/kingdom of Hanover.

The eastern strip along the Elbe maintained the name of Saxony. It broke up into three pieces, from north to south: Saxe-Lauenburg, Anhalt, and Saxe-Wittenberg. Saxe-Wittenberg ended up acknowledged as the successor to Saxony's electoral title. It got inherited by the Wettins, margraves of Meissen, even further up the Elbe. Since Saxe-Wittenberg was the most prestigious part of their domain, they adopted Saxony as the name for their whole realm.

(The Wettins ruled not just the modern state of Saxony, but also Thuringia. In Thuringia, the lands got divided up more thoroughly among cadet lines, leading to such houses as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, which, reckoning strictly patrilineally, is the most recent reigning house in both Portugal and Britain.)

The northern part of Electoral Saxony / the Kingdom of Saxony got eaten off by Prussia in the nineteenth century, so the state is even farther from its roots than it was before the French Revolution.

At no point during this was the name "Saxony" ever fully divorced from its North Sea coast meaning, so the original region came to be called "Lower Saxony" to differentiate it from the new area for the moniker.
 
Some parts of southeastern England - settled by the Saxon parts of the Anglo-Saxons - also have names derived from "Saxony", but the sheer amount of sound shifts involved made them almost unrecognizable today.
 

raharris1973

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I think the map attached here representing status around 1100 represents the missing link between Saxonies. In this map, eastern marches (with names like Thuringia and Meissen) are clearly subordinated to Saxony, which extends to basically the Oder-Neisse line, thereby encompassing stem duchy Saxony/Lower Saxony & what became Wettin electoral Saxony.

mcd_awh2005_0618376798_p372_f1.jpg
 
Darn. I have two old German historical atlases, and neither of them shows Thüringen and Meissen as connected with old Sachsen, unlike the clear map above. :(
 
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