Marca Hispanica
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The Marca Hispanica (Spanish Mark or March) was a buffer zone beyond the province of Septimania, first set up by Charlemagne in 795 as a defensive barrier between the Umayyad Moors of Al-Andalus and the Frankish Kingdom. It came as the end result of three generations of fighting by his father and grandfather, against the Muslim Moors during their invasions of what was, in his grandfather's time, an independent portion of old Roman Gaul that finally acknowledged Frankish authority after the terrible defeat at Bordeux in 732. After Charles Martel defeated that Muslim army at the Battle of Tours in 732, he went on to win campaigns further driving them back in 736-737. His son Pippin retook Narbonne, and was planning to extend the defensive boundaries beyond Septimania, when he died. His son Charlemagne finished his work, creating a strong barrier between the Umayyad Emirate and then Caliphate of Iberia, and the Frankish Kingdom.
The title came to be applied to Catalonia before the start of the Reconquista, and indeed is sometimes used to mean this area alone. In its broader meaning, however, it refers to a group of early Spanish lordships created by the Franks, of which Andorra is the sole autonomous survivor. As time passed, these lordships tended to gain independence from Frankish imperial rule. After some vicissitudes, Charlemagne's son Louis took Barcelona from its Moorish emir in 801, thus anchoring Frankish power in the borderland between the Franks and the Moors. The count of Barcelona then became the principal representative of Frankish authority in the Spanish March, which included various outlying smaller territories, each ruled by a lesser miles with his armed retainers, who theoretically owed allegiance through the count to the Emperor, or with decreasing plausibility to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors. Each was the catlá ("castellan" or lord of the castle) in an area largely defined by a day's ride, the region dotted with strongholds becoming known by them, like Castile at a later date, as "Catalunya". Counties in the Pyrenees that appeared in the 9th century as appanages of the counts of Barcelona included Cerdanya, Girona and Urgell.
In the early 9th century, Charlemagne began to issue a new kind of land grant, the aprisio, which reallocated land belonging to the imperial fisc in deserted areas, and included special rights and immunities that allowed considerable independence of action. Historians have interpreted the aprisio both as an early form of feudalism and in economic and military terms as a mechanism to entice settlers to a depopulated border region. Such self-sufficient landholders would aid the counts in providing armed men in defense of the Frankish frontier. Aprisio grants (the first ones were in Septimania) emanated directly from the Carolingian king, so that they reinforced central loyalties, to counterbalance the local power exercised by powerful marcher counts.
But communications were arduous and the power center was far away. Primitive feudal entities developed, self-sufficient and agrarian, each ruled by a small hereditary military elite. The sequence in Catalonia exhibits a pattern that appears similarly in marches everywhere. The count of Barcelona is appointed by the king (Berà in 801), the appointment settles on the heirs of a strong count (Sunifred, fl. 844-848) and becomes a formality, until the countship is made hereditary (for Wifred the Hairy in 897) and finally the county is unilaterally declared independent (by Borrell II in 985). At each stage the de facto situation precedes the de jure assertion, which merely regularizes an existing fact of life. Certain of the counts aspired to the characteristically Frankish (Germanic) title "Margrave of the Spanish March", a "margrave" being a graf ("count") of the march. The early history of Andorra provides a fairly typical career of a smaller lordship in this area, the only modern survivor in the Pyrenees of the Spanish March.
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