The Saxons appear in Roman sources as raiders on the North Sea coast, and by the fifth century a part of them had crossed to Britain with Angles and Jutes, giving their name to Wessex, Essex, Sussex and Middlesex and contributing to what became the English. Those who remained held the country between the Elbe and the Rhine without kings, governed through an assembly of nobles, free men and dependants that met annually.
Charlemagne fought them for over thirty years, from 772 to 804, and the war was explicitly religious on the Frankish side. The capitulary issued for the conquered territory prescribed death for refusing baptism, for cremating the dead in the old manner and for eating meat in Lent, and the deportations and the mass execution reported at Verden in 782 belong to the same campaign. Widukind, the leader of the resistance, accepted baptism in 785.
The result was a Christian Saxony which within a century was producing its own religious literature. The Heliand, an Old Saxon poem of the ninth century, retells the gospel in the form and vocabulary of Germanic heroic verse, with Christ as a liege lord and the disciples as his retainers. In 919 a Saxon duke became king of the East Franks, and the dynasty that followed made Saxony the centre of the empire that had conquered it.