March (territory)
In medieval Europe, a march or mark was, in broad terms, any kind of borderland,[1] as opposed to a national "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 titles such as marquess (masculine) or marchioness (feminine) in England; marqués (masculine) and marquesa (feminine) in Spanish-speaking countries and the Catalan and Galician regions; marquês (masculine) and marquesa (feminine) in Portuguese-speaking countries; markesa (both masculine and feminine) in Basque; marquis (masculine) or marquise (feminine) in France and Scotland, margrave (German: Markgraf, lit. 'march count'; masculine) or margravine (German: Markgräfin, lit. 'march countess', feminine) in Germany, and corresponding titles in other European states.
Etymology
The word "march" derives ultimately from a
It seems that 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
During the Frankish Carolingian dynasty, usage of the word spread throughout Europe.
The name Denmark preserves the Old Norse cognates merki ("boundary") mǫrk ("wood", "forest") 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
After some early setbacks,
In the early ninth century, Charlemagne issued his new kind of land grant, the
But communications were arduous, and the power centre was far away. Primitive
Certain of the Counts aspired to the characteristically Frankish (Germanic) title "Margrave of the Hispanic March", a "margrave" being a graf ("count") of the march.[citation needed]
The early History of Andorra provides a fairly typical career of another such buffer state, the only modern survivor in the Pyrenees of the Hispanic Marches.[citation needed]
Marches set up by Charlemagne
- The Danes;
- the ;
- the sorabicus;
- the March of Meissen, March of Merseburg and March of Zeitz;
- the Franconian march in modern Upper Franconia, against the Czechs;
- the Eastern Marchthat became the Margraviate of Austria);
- the Pannonian march east of Vienna (divided into Upper and Lower);
- the Carantanian march;
- Carinthia), erected as a border territory against the Avarsand Slavs;
- the March of Friuli;
- the Marca Hispanica against the Muslims of Al-Andalus (Spain)
France
The
Its area was increased during the 13th century and remained the same until the
Marche first appeared as a separate fief about the middle of the 10th century when
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 (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 the parlement of Paris.[5]
Several communes of France are named similarly:
- Marches, Drôme in the Drôme département
- La Marche in the Nièvre département
Germany and Austria
The Germanic tribes that Romans called Marcomanni, 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 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
- Lothar II.
- the Schleswig;
- Meißen March in modern Free state of Saxony; the March of Zeitz; the Merseburg March; the Milzener March around Bautzen);
- March of Austria (marcha Orientalis, the "Eastern March" or "Bavarian Eastern March" (German: Ostmark) in modern lower Austria);
- the Hungarian March
- the Carantania march or March of Styria (Steiermark);
- the Pettau);
- the Sann March (Cilli);
- the Krain or Windic march and White Carniola (White March), in modern Slovenia.
- three marches were created in the Low Countries: Antwerp, Valenciennes, Ename.
Other
- The Margraviate of Brandenburg, its ruler designated Markgraf (margrave, literally "march-count"). It was further divided into regions also designated "Mark":
- Altmark ("Old March"), the western region of the former margraviate, between Hamburg and Magdeburg.
- Mittelmark ("Central March"), the area surrounding Berlin. Today, this region makes up for the bulk of the German federal state of Brandenburg, and thus in modern usage is referred to as Mark Brandenburg.
- Neumark ("New March") since the 1250s was Brandenburg's eastern extremity between Pomerania and Greater Poland. Since 1945, the area is a part of Poland.
- Uckermark, the Brandenburg–Pomeranian borderland. The name is still in use for the region as well as for a Brandenburgian district.
- Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
- Ostmarkenverein, the territories Prussia gained in the partitions of Poland.
Habsburg Empire
Italy
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From the Carolingian period onwards the name marca begins to appear in Italy, first the
In 1105, the
Marche were repeated on a miniature level, fringing many of the small territorial states of pre-
Hungary
In medieval Hungary the system of gyepű and gyepűelve, 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, the gyepű was not controlled by a Marquess.
The Gyepű was a strip of land that was specially fortified or made impassable, while gyepűelve was the mostly uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land beyond it. The gyepűelve is much more comparable to modern buffer zones than traditional European marches.
Portions of the gyepű were usually guarded by tribes who had joined the Hungarian nation and were granted special rights for their services at the borders, such as the Székelys, Pechenegs and Cumans. A ban on settlement north of Niš by the Byzantine Empire in the twelfth century helped to establish uninhabited marchland between the empire's territory and Hungary.[6]
The Hungarian gyepű originates from the Turkish yapi meaning palisade. 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]
Iberia
In addition to the Carolingian Marca Hispanica, Iberia was home to several marches set up by the native states. The future kingdoms of Portugal and Castile were founded as marcher counties intended to protect the Kingdom of León from the Cordoban Emirate, to the south and east respectively.
Likewise, Córdoba set up its own marches as a buffer to the Christian states to the north. The Upper March (al-Tagr al-A'la), centered on Zaragoza, faced the eastern Marca Hispanica and the western Pyrenees, and included the Distant or Farthest March (al-Tagr al-Aqsa). The Middle March (al-Tagr al-Awsat), centred on Toledo and later Medinaceli, faced the western Pyrenees and Asturias. The Lower March (al-Tagr al-Adna), centred on Mérida and later Badajoz, facing León and Portugal. These too would give rise to Kingdoms, the Taifas of Zaragoza, Toledo, and Badajoz.
In
The forests surrounding Norwegian cities are called "Marka" – the marches. For example, the forests surrounding Oslo are called Nordmarka, Østmarka and Vestmarka – i.e. the northern, eastern and western marches.
In Norway, there are – or have been – the counties:
- Finnmark, "the borderlands of the Sámi" (known to the Norse as Finns)
- heath"
- Telemark, "the borderlands of the Þela tribe"[8]
In Finland, mark occurs in the following placenames in Satakunta:
- Noormarkku (Swedish: Norrmark), a former municipality of Finland
- Pomarkku (Swedish: Påmark), a municipality of Finland
- Söörmarkku (Swedish: Södermark), a village in Noormarkku, Finland
In
British Isles
This section needs additional citations for verification. (November 2010) |
The name of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the midlands of England was Mercia. The name "Mercia" comes from the Old English for "boundary folk", and the traditional interpretation was that the kingdom originated along the frontier between the Welsh 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 the River Trent valley.
Latinizing the Anglo-Saxon term mearc, the border areas between England and Wales were collectively known as the
The title Earl of March is at least two distinct feudal titles: one in the northern marches, as an alternative title for the Earl of Dunbar (c. 1290 in the Peerage of Scotland); and one, that was held by the family of Mortimer (1328 in the Peerage of England), in the west Welsh Marches.
The
His family, Mortimer Lords of Wigmore, had been border lords and leaders of defenders of Welsh marches for centuries. He selected March 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.
In Ireland, 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 between The 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]
Titles
Related concepts
This section may contain material not related to the topic of the article.(November 2010) ) |
Abbasid Caliphate
Armenia
The specific
The Balkans
See Krajina and Military Frontier.
Byzantine Empire
China
The Chinese concept of March is called Fan (藩), referring to feudatory domains and petty kingdoms on the borderlands of the empire.
In their initial development during the
Japan
The European concept of marches applies just as well to the fief of
By guarding the border, rather than conquering or colonizing Ezo, the Matsumae, in essence, made the majority of the island an Ainu reservation. This also meant that Ezo, and the
Persia (Sassanid Empire)
Roman Empire
Ukraine
Ukraine, from the Moscow-centric Russian viewpoint, functioned as a "borderland" or "march" and gained its current name, which is derived from a Slavic term of the same meaning (see above for similar in Slovenia, etc.), ultimately from this function. This, though, was merely a continuation of a semi-formal arrangement with the Poles, before escalating feuds, political infighting in Poland, and religious differences (mainly Eastern Orthodox vs. Roman Catholic) saw a loose coalition of Ukrainian lords and independent landowners collectively known as the Cossacks shift to ally with the Russian Empire.
The
See also
- American Frontier
- Buffer state
- List of marches
- Marz (territorial entity)
- No man's land
Notes
- ^ "In distant Westminster, where it was impossible to imagine the stress of life in the Irish marches, march law (like Irish law, which Edward I had once described as 'detestable to God and contrary to all laws') was outrightly condemned," notes James F. Lydon [9]
- ^ The styling marquis or marquess is a peculiarity of each title.
- ^ Chisholm 1911, p. 689.
- ^ a b "Online Etymology Dictionary". www.etymonline.com.
- ^ Lewis 1965.
- ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 689–690.
- ^ a b c Chisholm 1911, p. 690.
- ISBN 0-521-77017-3.
- ^ Carleton, D., & Phillipps, T. (1841). Sir Dudley Carleton's State Letters, during his Embassy at the Hague, AD 1627. first edited by Thomas Phillipps. Typis Medio-Montanis, impressit C. Gilmour.
- ^ Alexander Bugge (1918). "Navnet Telemark og Grenland" [The name Telemark and Grenland].
- ^ Lydon 1998, p. 81.
- ^ Neville, p. [page needed].
- ^ Lydon 1998, p. [page needed].
- ^ Gwyn, p. [page needed].
- ^ Moore, p. [page needed].
- ^ Otway-Ruthven, p. [page needed].
References
- Gwyn, Stephen. The History of Ireland. [full citation needed]
- Lewis, Archibald R. (1965). "Chapter 5:Southern French and Catalan Society (778-828)". The Development of Southern French and Catalan Society, 718-1050 (Prin ed.). University of Texas Press.
- Lydon, James F. (1998). The Making of Ireland: from ancient times to the present. p. 81.
- Moore, Thomas. The History of Ireland from the Earliest Kings. [full citation needed]
- Neville, Cynthia J. Violence, custom and law: the Anglo-Scottish border lands in the later Middle Ages. [full citation needed]
- Otway-Ruthven, J.A. A History of Medieval Ireland.[full citation needed]
Attribution:
- public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Marche". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 689–690. Endnote:
- A. Thomas, Les États provinciaux de la France centrale (1879).
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the