March (territory)


In medieval Europe, a march or mark was, in broad terms, any kind of borderland, as opposed to a state's "heartland". More specifically, a march was a border between realms or a neutral buffer zone under joint control of two states in which different laws might apply. In both of these senses, marches served a political purpose, such as providing warning of military incursions or regulating cross-border trade.
Marches gave rise to the titles marquess or marchioness.

Etymology

The word "march" derives ultimately from a Proto-Indo-European root *merg-, meaning "edge, boundary". The root *merg- produced Latin margo, Old Irish mruig, Welsh bro and Persian and Armenian marz. The Proto-Germanic *marko gave rise to the Old English word mearc and Frankish marka, as well as Old Norse mǫrk meaning "borderland, forest", and derived from merki "boundary, sign", denoting a borderland between two centres of power.
In Old English, "mark" meant "boundary" or "sign of a boundary", and the meaning only later evolved to encompass "sign" in general, "impression" and "trace".
The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia took its name from West Saxon mearc "marches", which in this instance referred explicitly to the territory's position on the Anglo-Saxon frontier with the Romano-British to the west.
During the Frankish Carolingian dynasty, usage of the word spread throughout Europe.
The name "Denmark" preserves the Old Norse cognates merki ''mǫrk up to the present. Following the Anschluss'', the Nazi German government revived the old name "Ostmark" for Austria.

Historical examples of marches and marks

Frankish Empire and successor states

Marca Hispanica

In the early ninth century, Charlemagne issued his new kind of land grant, the aprisio, which redisposed land belonging to the Imperial fisc in deserted areas, and included special rights and immunities that resulted in a range of independence of action. Historians interpret the aprisio both as the basis 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 emanated directly from the Carolingian king, and they reinforced central loyalties, to counterbalance the local power exercised by powerful marcher counts.
After some early setbacks, Emperor Louis the Pious ventured beyond the province of Septimania and eventually took Barcelona from the Moorish emir in 801. Thus he established a foothold in the borderland between the Franks and the Moors. The Carolingian "Hispanic Marches" became a buffer zone ruled by a number of feudal lords, among them the count of Barcelona. It had its own outlying territories, each ruled by a lesser miles with armed retainers, who theoretically owed allegiance through a count to the emperor or, with less fealty, to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors. Such territory had a catlá in an area largely defined by a day's ride, and the region became known, like Castile at a later date, as "Catalunya". Counties in the Pyrenees that appeared in the 9th century, in addition to the County of Barcelona, included Cerdanya, Girona and Urgell.
Communications were arduous, and the power centre was far away. Primitive feudal entities developed, self-sufficient and agrarian, each ruled by a small hereditary military elite. The sequence in the County of Barcelona exhibits a pattern that emerges similarly in marches everywhere: the count is appointed by the king, the appointment settles on the heirs of a strong count and the appointment becomes a formality, until the position is declared hereditary and then the count declares independence. At each stage the de facto situation precedes the de jure assertion, which merely regularizes an existing fact of life. This is feudalism in the larger landscape.
Some counts aspired to the characteristically Frankish title "Margrave of the Hispanic March", a "margrave" being a graf of the march.
The early history of Andorra provides a fairly typical career of another such march county, the only modern survivor in the Pyrenees of the Hispanic Marches.

Marches set up by Charlemagne

The province of France called Marche, sometimes Marche Limousine, was originally a small border district between the Duchy of Aquitaine and the domains of the Frankish kings in central France, partly of Limousin and partly of Poitou.
Its area was increased during the 13th century and remained the same until the French Revolution. Marche was bounded on the north by Berry, on the east by Bourbonnais and Auvergne; on the south by Limousin itself and on the west by Poitou. It embraced the greater part of the modern département of Creuse, a considerable part of the northern Haute-Vienne, and a fragment of Indre, up to Saint-Benoît-du-Sault. Its area was about its capital was Charroux and later Guéret, and among its other principal towns were Dorat, Bellac and Confolens.
Marche first appeared as a separate fief about the middle of the 10th century when William III, duke of Aquitaine, gave it to one of his vassals named Boso, who took the title of count. In the 12th century it passed to the family of Lusignan, sometimes also counts of Angoulême, until the death of the childless Count Hugh in 1303, when it was seized by King Philip IV. In 1316 it was made an appanage for his youngest son Charles and a few years later it passed into the hands of the family of Bourbon.
The family of Armagnac held it from 1435 to 1477, when it reverted to the Bourbons, and in 1527 it was seized by King Francis I and became part of the domains of the French crown. It was divided into Haute-Marche and Basse-Marche, the estates of the former being in existence until the 17th century. From 1470 until the Revolution the province was under the jurisdiction of the parlement of Paris.
Several communes of France are named similarly:
The Germanic tribes that Romans called Marcomanni, who battled the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries, were simply the "men of the borderlands".
File:Limes.saxoniae.wmt.png|thumb|The Limes Saxoniae was an unfortified limes or border between the Saxons and the Slavic Obotrites, established about 810
Marches were territorial organisations created as borderlands in the Carolingian Empire and had a long career as purely conventional designations under the Holy Roman Empire. In modern German, "Mark" denotes a piece of land that historically was a borderland, as in the following names:

Later medieval marches