Inmedieval Europe, amarch ormark was, in broad terms, any kind ofborderland,[1] as opposed to a state's "heartland". More specifically, a march was a border betweenrealms or a neutralbuffer 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 ofmilitary incursions or regulating cross-border trade.
Marches gave rise to the titlesmarquess (masculine) or marchioness (feminine).
The word "march" derives ultimately from aProto-Indo-European root *merg-, meaning "edge, boundary". The root *merg- producedLatinmargo ("margin"),Old Irishmruig ("borderland"),Welshbro ("region, border, valley") andPersian andArmenianmarz ("borderland"). TheProto-Germanic*marko gave rise to theOld English wordmearc andFrankishmarka, as well asOld Norsemǫrk meaning "borderland, forest",[2] andderived frommerki "boundary, sign",[2] 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".
TheAnglo-Saxon kingdom ofMercia took its name fromWest Saxonmearc "marches", which in this instance referred explicitly to the territory's position on the Anglo-Saxonfrontier with theRomano-British to the west.
During the FrankishCarolingian dynasty, usage of the word spread throughout Europe.
The name "Denmark" preserves the Old Norse cognatesmerki ("boundary")mǫrk ("wood", "forest") up to the present. Following theAnschluss, the Nazi German government revived the old name"Ostmark" for Austria.
In the early ninth century,Charlemagne issued his new kind of land grant, theaprisio, which redisposed land belonging to the Imperialfisc in deserted areas, and included special rights and immunities that resulted in a range of independence of action.[3] Historians interpret theaprisio both as the basis offeudalism 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 Frankishfrontier.Aprisio grants (the first ones were inSeptimania) emanated directly from the Carolingian king, and they reinforced central loyalties, to counterbalance the local power exercised by powerful marcher counts.[citation needed]
After some early setbacks, EmperorLouis the Pious ventured beyond the province ofSeptimania and eventually tookBarcelona from theMoorishemir in 801. Thus he established a foothold in the borderland between the Franks and the Moors. The Carolingian "Hispanic Marches" (Marca Hispanica) became a buffer zone ruled by a number of feudal lords, among them thecount of Barcelona. It had its own outlying territories, each ruled by a lessermiles with armed retainers, who theoretically owed allegiance through a count to the emperor or, with lessfealty, to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors. Such territory had acatlá ("castellan" or lord of the castle) in an area largely defined by a day's ride, and the region became known, like Castile at a later date, as "Catalunya".[citation needed] Counties in thePyrenees that appeared in the 9th century, in addition to theCounty of Barcelona, includedCerdanya,Girona andUrgell.
Communications were arduous, and the power centre was far away. Primitivefeudal 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 (from 802), the appointment settles on the heirs of a strong count (Sunifred) and the appointment becomes a formality, until the position is declared hereditary (897) and then the count declares independence (by Borrell II in 985). At each stage thede facto situation precedes thede jure assertion, which merely regularizes an existing fact of life. This isfeudalism in the larger landscape.[citation needed]
Some counts aspired to the characteristically Frankish (Germanic) title "Margrave of the Hispanic March", a "margrave" being agraf ("count") of the march.[citation needed]
The earlyhistory of Andorra provides a fairly typical career of another such march county, the only modern survivor in the Pyrenees of the Hispanic Marches.[citation needed]
Theprovince of France calledMarche (Occitan:la Marcha), sometimesMarche Limousine, was originally a small border district between the Duchy of Aquitaine and the domains of the Frankish kings in central France, partly ofLimousin and partly ofPoitou.[4]
Its area was increased during the 13th century and remained the same until theFrench Revolution. Marche was bounded on the north byBerry, on the east byBourbonnais andAuvergne; on the south by Limousin itself and on the west by Poitou. It embraced the greater part of the moderndépartement ofCreuse, a considerable part of the northernHaute-Vienne, and a fragment ofIndre, up toSaint-Benoît-du-Sault. Its area was about 1,900 square miles (4,900 km2) its capital wasCharroux and laterGuéret, and among its other principal towns wereDorat,Bellac andConfolens.[5]
Marche first appeared as a separate fief about the middle of the 10th century whenWilliam III, duke of Aquitaine, gave it to one of his vassals namedBoso, who took the title ofcount. In the 12th century it passed to the family ofLusignan, sometimes alsocounts of Angoulême, until the death of the childlessCount Hugh in 1303, when it was seized by KingPhilip IV. In 1316 it was made anappanage for his youngest sonCharles and a few years later (1327) it passed into the hands of thefamily of Bourbon.[5]
The family ofArmagnac held it from 1435 to 1477, when it reverted to the Bourbons, and in 1527 it was seized by KingFrancis I and became part of the domains of the French crown. It was divided into Haute-Marche (i.e. "Upper Marche") and Basse-Marche (i.e. "Lower 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 theparlement of Paris.[5]
Several communes of France are named similarly:
The Germanic tribes that Romans calledMarcomanni, who battled the Romans in the 1st and 2nd centuries, were simply the "men of the borderlands".
Marches were territorial organisations created as borderlands in theCarolingian Empire and had a long career as purely conventional designations under theHoly Roman Empire. In modern German, "Mark" denotes a piece of land that historically was a borderland, as in the following names:
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From the Carolingian period onwards the namemarca begins to appear in Italy, first theMarca Fermana for the mountainous part ofPicenum, the Marca Camerinese for the district farther north, including a part ofUmbria, and the Marca Anconitana for the formerPentapolis (Ancona). In 1080, themarca Anconitana was given in investiture toRobert Guiscard byPope Gregory VII, to whom theCountess Matilda ceded the marches ofCamerino andFermo.
In 1105, theEmperor Henry IV investedWerner with the whole territory of the three marches, under the name of theMarch of Ancona. It was afterwards once more recovered by the Church and governed by papal legates as part of thePapal States. The Marche became part of theKingdom of Italy in 1860. AfterItalian unification in the 1860s,Austria-Hungary still controlled territory Italian nationalistsstill claimed as part of Italy. One of these territories wasAustrian Littoral, which Italian nationalists began to call theJulian March because of its positioning and as an act of defiance against the hated Austro-Hungarian empire.
Marche were repeated on a miniature level, fringing many of the small territorial states of pre-Risorgimento Italy with a ring of smaller dependencies on their borders, which represent territorialmarche on a small scale. A map of theDuchy of Mantua in 1702 (Braudel 1984, fig 26) reveals the independent, though socially and economically dependent arc of small territories from theprincipality of Castiglione in the northwest across the south to the duchy ofMirandola southeast ofMantua: the lords ofBozolo,Sabioneta,Dosolo,Guastalla, the count ofNovellare.
In medievalHungary the system ofgyepű andgyepűelve, effective until the mid-13th century, can be considered as marches even though in its organisation it shows major differences from Western European feudal marches. For one thing, thegyepű was not controlled by a Marquess.
TheGyepű was a strip of land that was specially fortified or made impassable, whilegyepűelve was the mostly uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land beyond it. Thegyepűelve is much more comparable to modernbuffer zones than traditional European marches.
Portions of thegyepű were usually guarded by tribes who had joined the Hungarian nation and were granted special rights for their services at the borders, such as theSzékelys,Pechenegs andCumans. A ban on settlement north ofNiš by theByzantine Empire in the twelfth century helped to establish uninhabited marchland between the empire's territory and Hungary.[6]
The Hungariangyepű originates from theTurkishyapi meaningpalisade. During the 17th and 18th centuries these borderlands were called Markland in the area of Transylvania that bordered with the Kingdom of Hungary and was controlled by a Count or Countess.[7]
In addition to the CarolingianMarca Hispanica, Iberia was home to several marches set up by the native states. The future kingdoms ofPortugal andCastile were founded as marcher counties intended to protect theKingdom of León from theCordoban Emirate, to the south and east respectively.
Likewise, Córdoba set up its own marches as a buffer to the Christian states to the north. TheUpper March (al-Tagr al-A'la), centered onZaragoza, faced the easternMarca Hispanica and the westernPyrenees, and included the Distant or Farthest March (al-Tagr al-Aqsa). TheMiddle March (al-Tagr al-Awsat), centred onToledo and laterMedinaceli, faced the western Pyrenees and Asturias. TheLower March (al-Tagr al-Adna), centred onMérida and laterBadajoz, facing León and Portugal. These too would give rise to Kingdoms, theTaifas ofZaragoza,Toledo, andBadajoz.
Denmark means "the march of theDanes".
InNorse, "mark" meant "borderlands" and "forest"; in present-day Norwegian and Swedish it has acquired the meaning "ground", while in Danish it has come to mean "field" or "grassland".
Markland was the Norse name of an area in North America discovered by NorwegianVikings.
The forests surrounding Norwegian cities are called "Marka" – the marches. For example, theforests surrounding Oslo are calledNordmarka,Østmarka andVestmarka – i.e. the northern, eastern and western marches.
In Norway, there are – or have been – the counties:
In Finland,mark occurs in the following placenames inSatakunta:
InVärmland inSweden,Nordmark Hundred was the frontier area near the border to Norway. Almost all of it is now a part ofÅrjäng Municipality. In the Middle Ages the area was calledNordmarkerna and was a part ofDalsland and not of Värmland.
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The name of theAnglo-Saxon kingdom in the midlands of England wasMercia. The name "Mercia" comes from theOld English for "boundary folk", and the traditional interpretation was that the kingdom originated along the frontier between theWelsh and the Anglo-Saxon invaders, although P. Hunter Blair has argued an alternative interpretation that they emerged along the frontier between the Kingdom of Northumbria and the inhabitants of theRiver Trent valley.
Latinizing the Anglo-Saxon termmearc, the border areas between England and Wales were collectively known as theWelsh Marches (marchia Wallia), while the native Welsh lands to the west were considered Wales Proper (pura Wallia). TheNorman lords in the Welsh Marches were to become the newMarcher Lords.
The titleEarl of March is at least two distinctfeudal titles: one in the northern marches, as an alternative title for theEarl of Dunbar (c. 1290 in thePeerage of Scotland); and one, that was held by the family ofMortimer (1328 in thePeerage of England), in the westWelsh Marches.
TheScottish Marches is a term for the border regions on both sides of the border between England and Scotland. From theNorman Conquest of England until the reign ofKing James VI of Scotland, who also becameKing James I of England, border clashes were common and the monarchs of both countries relied onMarcher Lords to defend the frontier areas known as the Marches. They were hand-picked for their suitability for the challenges the responsibilities presented.
Patrick Dunbar, 8th Earl of Dunbar, a descendant of theEarls of Northumbria was recognized in the end of the 13th century to use the name March as his earldom in Scotland, otherwise known as Dunbar, Lothian, and Northumbrian border.
Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March,Regent of England together withIsabella of France during the minority of her son,Edward III, was a usurper who had deposed, and allegedly arranged the murder of, King Edward II. He was created an earl in September 1328 at the height of hisde facto rule. His wife wasJoan de Geneville, 2nd Baroness Geneville, whose mother,Jeanne of Lusignan was one of the heiresses of the FrenchCounts of La Marche andAngouleme.
His family,Mortimer Lords ofWigmore, had been border lords and leaders of defenders of Welsh marches for centuries. He selectedMarch as the name of his earldom for several reasons: Welsh marches referred to several counties, whereby the title signified superiority compared to usual single county-based earldoms. Mercia was an ancient kingdom. His wife's ancestors had been Counts of La Marche and Angouleme in France.
InIreland, a hybrid system of marches existed which was condemned as barbaric at the time.[a] The Irish marches constituted the territory between English and Irish-dominated lands, which appeared as soon as the English did and were called by King John to be fortified.[10] By the 14th century, they had become defined as the land betweenThe Pale and the rest of Ireland.[11] Local Anglo-Irish and Gaelic chieftains who acted as powerful spokespeople were recognised by the Crown and given a degree of independence. Uniquely, the keepers of the marches were given the power to terminate indictments. In later years, wardens of the Irish marches took Irish tenants.[12][13][14]
Marquis, marchese andmargrave (Markgraf) all had their origins in feudal lords who held trusted positions in the borderlands. The English title was a foreign importation from France, tested out tentatively in 1385 byRichard II, but not naturalized until the mid-15th century, and now more often spelled "marquess".[b]
Attribution:
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Marche".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 689–690. Endnote: