Saxony

The Electorate of Saxony was the Lutheran heartland state from 1356 to 1918, the vote that chose emperors and the shield of the Reformation. The Golden Bull of 1356 gave the Saxe Wittenberg duke one of seven electoral hats; when that line died the Wettins bought and married their way up, moving the capital to Dresden on the Elbe. Frederick the Wise hid Luther in the Wartburg after Worms in 1521, and his steadfast nephew John turned the whole land Lutheran by treaty right: cuius regio. Augustus the Strong, who could bend horseshoes and fathered hundreds of children, converted to Catholicism to win the Polish crown in 1697, ruling two countries and losing wars in both. Charles XII of Sweden occupied Dresden, Prussia coveted it openly, and in the Seven Years' War Frederick the Great used Saxony as his battlefield and his bank. The state survived by politeness and porcelain, Meissen's white gold paying for Augustus's palaces. In 1806, after Jena, Napoleon needed a reliable German ally east of the Rhine: he raised his Saxon collaborator to king, and the four and a half century electorate became a kingdom, which would lose half its land at Vienna for backing the wrong emperor to the end. As a kingdom Saxony stayed Napoleon's loyal German ally to Leipzig in 1813, and paid for it at Vienna with half its territory to Prussia. Reduced but cultured, it joined the German Confederation, then Bismarck's Empire in 1871 as its third state, its Dresden opera and Leipzig fairs outliving its army. The last Wettin king, Frederick Augustus III, abdicated in the German revolution of 1918, closing five and a half centuries of one family's rule.