John of Saxony
John of Saxony had translated the Divine Comedy before he had a throne. Under the name Philalethes, lover of truth, he published Dante in German between 1828 and 1849 with a commentary that scholars still cite, and he was fifty-two and known across Europe as a philologist when his brother's carriage overturned in Tyrol and made him king. He was a conservative, a jurist and an administrator, and his reign gave Saxony a modern civil code in 1863, two years before Prussia had one. Its defining decision was 1866. Beust, his minister, had spent a decade keeping Saxony on Austria's side of the German question, and when Prussia and Austria went to war in June the Saxon army withdrew into Bohemia under Crown Prince Albert to fight with the Austrians at Gitschin and Koniggratz. Prussian troops occupied Dresden within days. Bismarck wanted to annex the kingdom outright, as he annexed Hanover and Hesse-Kassel, and it was Austria's insistence at Prague and Napoleon III's at Berlin that kept Saxony on the map. The price, in the Peace of Berlin of October 1866, was membership of the North German Confederation, a war indemnity, and an army that became the Twelfth Corps of a Prussian-led force. John accepted, let Beust go to Vienna, and kept his crown. In January 1871 he was at Versailles when the German Empire was proclaimed, one of the kings who had fought Prussia five years earlier and now stood behind its king. He died at Pillnitz in October 1873. His Dante is still in print. He had reigned nineteen years, lost a war, and handed his son a kingdom whose borders had not moved.
- Lived: 1801 CE – 1873 CE
- Nationality: Saxon
- Roles: head_of_state, monarch
