Angria

For the sunken atoll in India, see Angria Bank. Angria is also the name of a paracosm (fictional world) created and written about by English novelist Charlotte Brontë and her brother Branwell during their childhood.

Angria or Angaria (German: Engern) is a historical region in the present-day German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia. The chronicler Widukind of Corvey in his Res gestae saxonicae sive annalium libri tres denoted it as the central region of the mediæval Duchy of Saxony lying along the middle reaches of the Weser river between Westphalia and Eastphalia. Its name was derived from the Germanic Angrivarii tribe which had joined the Saxon tribal confederation, and it was centered on the town of Minden, see of a bishopric since 803.

The Angrivarii lands were conquered by Charlemagne during the Saxon Wars; according to the Royal Frankish Annals the Angrian commanders concluded a separate peace agreement with the Carolingian Empire near Bückeburg in 775. In the course of the deposition of the Saxon duke Henry the Lion by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa in 1180, most parts of Angria was attached to the Duchy of Westphalia held by the Archbishops of Cologne, while the Ascanian count Bernhard of Anhalt received the Saxon ducal title. The name Angria thereafter became obsolete. In the 13th century the central area on the Weser became the nucleus of the County of Hoya, which in 1582 was inherited by the House of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

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