TheCounty of Aragon (Aragonese:Condato d'Aragón) orCounty of Jaca (Aragonese:Condato de Chaca) was a smallFrankishmarcher county in the centralPyrenean valley of theAragon river, comprisingAnsó,Echo, andCanfranc and centered on the small town ofJaca (Iacca inLatin andChaca inAragonese), an area now part ofSpain. It was created by theCarolingians late in the 8th or early in the 9th century, but soon fell into the orbit of theKingdom of Navarre, into which it was absorbed in 922. It would later form the core of the 11th centuryKingdom of Aragon.
Originally intended to protect the central Pyrenean passes from theMoors in the same way that theDuchy of Vasconia and theMarca Hispanica were to protect the west and east, Aragon remained largely out of the reach of its nominalCarolingian lords, though it was an expressly Frankish creation and not an ethnically distinct region. The earliest attested local ruler wasOriol (807), probably Frankish, Visigothic or Hispano-Roman. That Aragon was a combined creation of Frankish efforts atReconquest and the activity of the local Hispano-Visigothic elite to unite the rural populace against the Moors of theEbro valley seems assured.
In the first half of the 9th century, under the strong Carolingians, such asCharlemagne, the county of Aragon was culturally oriented northwards, across the important passes at Echo and Canfranc. The monastery ofSan Pedro de Siresa, founded about that time, was aBenedictine house nourished by the reforms ofBenedict of Aniane. The cultural endowment of the monastery was extensive; by 848 its collection of manuscripts includedVergil,Horace,Juvenal,Porphyry,Aldhelm, andAugustine of Hippo'sDe Civitate Dei.
In the later 9th century, the Carolingians ceased to be powerful sovereigns in the outlying regions of their empire and the Moors of the Ebro valley simultaneously ceased being a threat to the Christian population to their north. As Carolingian influence waned, the counts of Aragón sought new allies. In 820 Charlemagne's vassal, CountAznar I, was ejected from the county by his son-in-lawGarcía 'the Bad', who rode to power on the back of troops supplied byÍñigo Arista, ruler of the fledglingKingdom of Pamplona. He then repudiated his wife in order to marry Íñigo's daughter. In 844, Aznar's sonGalindo was forced to make himself a vassal of Íñigo in order to secure his return and succession to the county. CountAznar II looked south, marrying his daughter to thewali ofHuesca,Muhammad al-Tawil.
The Navarrese also expanded their kingdom to the region south of the Aragón, a zone devastated militarily by the Arabs in the preceding centuries of conflict. The Navarrese fortification of this area severely curtailed the possibility of Aragonese expansion via reconquest by cutting off the obvious route of such conquest. The death ofGalindo Aznárez II without surviving legitimate sons resulted in a division of his lands, withSobrarbe passing with a daughter to thecounts of Ribagorza, while Aragon itself fell under the direct control of the Pamplona crown, kingGarcía Sánchez I marryingAndregota Galíndez, another daughter of the defunct count.
During the century of direct Navarrese lordship, the diminutive county of Aragon retained a separate administration and its charters referred to it as the "land of the Aragonese lords", and counts were appointed by the kings, starting with the illegitimate son of the last autonomous count. In the 10th century the religious centre of the county moved south toSan Juan de la Peña. San Juan, contrary to San Pedro, had been founded by Christian refugees from MoorishZaragoza and the monastery had a militant Visigothic character; the war with the Muslims was espoused and theVisigothic rite was the standard of worship.
In 922, the Aragonese had finally secured their own bishopric. The old itinerant "bishops of Aragon" (sometimes calledbishops of Huesca or Jaca) were established in the valley ofBorau. The bishops regularly took up residence in one of the major monasteries, like San Juan, San Pedro, orSan Adrián de Sasave. The location of the see also serves as evidence that the upper valleys in the south of the country were becoming increasingly more populated as the region south of the river Aragón became more fortified and the Moorish threat diminished further. This frontier zone, too, was seeing repopulation in light of militarisation.
Sancho the Great, who had united most of Christian Iberia under his control, gave lands in Aragon to his illegitimate son,Ramiro as early as 1015. With the deaths of his father in 1035 and brother,Gonzalo of Sobrarbe and Ribagorza, whose lands he also acquired, in 1043, Ramiro held the nucleus of what would become theKingdom of Aragon.
From the death of Galindo Aznárez II, the county of Aragon was incorporated within the crown ofNavarre(for kings of Navarre during this period see:List of Navarrese monarchs). The rulers of Navarre appointed a series of nobles as their (non-sovereign) counts in Aragon. These are poorly documented, but include: