Jena, a town of Saxe-Weimar, at the Leutra's influx to the Saale, 14 miles by rail SE. of Weimar, and 31 NNE. of Saalfeld. It lies 518 feet above sea-level, engirt by steep chalk hills, of which the Hausberg (1069 feet) is crowned by the old Fuchsturm, and the Forstberg by a tower in memory of the Jena students who fell in the Franco-German war. It is still a quaint old-world place, with its ducal schloss, the 'Black Bear' inn where Luther halted on his flight from the Wartburg, and a church whose steeple is 311 feet high. Goethe here wrote his Hermann and Dorothea, Schiller his Wallenstein; and the houses of these and of other illustrious residents were marked with tablets in 1858, on occasion of the tercentenary of the university, when, too, was erected a bronze statue of its founder, the Elector John Frederick of Saxony. He founded it in 1547-58 to take the place of Wittenberg as a seat of learning and evangelical doctrine; and it soon attained a high reputation, though not its zenith till the days of Goethe's patron, Duke Karl August (1787-1806). To that period belong the names of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schiller, the Schlegels, Voss, Fries, Krause, and Oken; to our own, of Hase and Haackel. Jena now has 88 professors and lecturers, over 450 students, and a library of 200,000 volumes. In 1883 a memorial was erected of the Burschenschaft (q.v.). Pop. (1875) 9020; (1885) 12,017.
The battle of Jena is often applied as a collective name to two separate engagements fought on the same day, 14th October 1806—one at Auerstädt (q.v.), 14 miles to the north, between 30,000 French under Davoût and 48,000 Prussians under the Duke of Brunswick; the other, on the heights round Jena, between 70,000 Prussians under the Prince of Hohenlohe and 90,000 French under Napoleon in person. In both the Prussians were totally defeated; and their defeat entailed that utter prostration of the Fatherland which was typified two years later by the hare-hunt held on the battlefield of Jena by the French and Russian emperors. See works by Orloff (3d ed. 1876), Ritter (1885), and, for the battle, Goltz (1883).