Lower Saxon

The Lower Saxons are the Low German-speaking people of the north-west German plain and heirs of the Old Saxons of the Migration Period. Charlemagne conquered them in the Saxon Wars of 772 to 804, and their land became the stem duchy of Saxony; its duke Henry the Fowler became German king in 919.

The Welf duchy fell when Emperor Frederick I deposed Henry the Lion in 1180; in 1235 Welf Otto the Child received the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg. The Lower Saxons' West Low German speech, descending from Old Saxon, served as the Hanseatic League's Middle Low German trading language.

From the late thirteenth century called Lower Saxony, in 1500 these lands became the Lower Saxon Circle of the Empire. The region adopted the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and in the eighteenth century the Welf Electorate of Hanover inherited the British crown, a personal union that ended in 1837; the 1815 Congress of Vienna recast the country into the Kingdom of Hanover, the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and the free cities of Hamburg and Bremen.