March (territory)

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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

derived from merki "boundary, sign",[2]
denoting a borderland between two centres of power.

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

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 ("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,

Marca Hispánica) 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 ("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 the Pyrenees that appeared in the 9th century, in addition to the County of Barcelona, included Cerdanya, Girona and Urgell
.

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.[3] 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 (the first ones were in Septimania) emanated directly from the Carolingian king, and they reinforced central loyalties, to counterbalance the local power exercised by powerful marcher counts.[citation needed
]

But 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 Catalonia 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 County declares itself 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. This is feudalism in the larger landscape.[citation needed
]

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

France

The

Marche (Occitan: la Marcha), 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.[4]

Its area was increased during the 13th century and remained the same until the

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 1,900 square miles (4,900 km2) its capital was Charroux and later Guéret, and among its other principal towns were Dorat, Bellac and Confolens.[5]

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:

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".

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

Other

Habsburg Empire

Map of the Military Frontier against incursions from the Ottoman Empire in the middle of the 19th century (marked with a red outline)

Italy

From the Carolingian period onwards the name marca begins to appear in Italy, first the

Marca Fermana for the mountainous part of Picenum, the Marca Camerinese for the district farther north, including a part of Umbria, and the Marca Anconitana for the former Pentapolis (Ancona). In 1080, the marca Anconitana was given in investiture to Robert Guiscard by Pope Gregory VII, to whom the Countess Matilda ceded the marches of Camerino and Fermo
.

In 1105, the

Italian unification in the 1860s, Austria-Hungary still controlled territory Italian nationalists still claimed as part of Italy. One of these territories was Austrian Littoral, which Italian nationalists began to call the Julian 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-

principality of Castiglione in the northwest across the south to the duchy of Mirandola southeast of Mantua: the lords of Bozolo, Sabioneta, Dosolo, Guastalla, the count of Novellare
.

Hungary

Local autonomies (including Cumania, Székely Land and Transylvanian Saxons) in the late 13th century

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.

Scandinavia

Danes
".

In Norse, "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".

Vikings
.

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, note also:

In Finland:

  • Noormarkku (Swedish: Norrmark), a former municipality of Finland
  • Pomarkku (Swedish: Påmark), a municipality of Finland
  • Söörmarkku (Swedish: Södermark), a village in Noormarkku, Finland
  • Markku, an island in the archipelago of Finland.

In

Nordmark Hundred was the frontier area near the border to Norway. Almost all of it is now a part of Årjäng Municipality. In the Middle Ages the area was called Nordmarkerna and was a part of Dalsland
and not of Värmland.

British Isles

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

Marcher Lords
.

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

Marcher Lords
to defend the frontier areas known as the Marches. They were hand-picked for their suitability for the challenges the responsibilities presented.

Earls 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.

Angouleme
.

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

Marquis, marchese and margrave (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 by Richard II, but not naturalized until the mid-15th century, and now more often spelled "marquess".[b]

Related concepts

Abbasid Caliphate

Armenia

The specific

subdivisions of Armenia are each called marz, մարզ (pl. "marzer, մարզեր"), a loanword from Persian
.

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

major states, however, their military strength and strategic importance were typically much greater than the counties'. Over time, however, the commanderies were eventually developed into regular provinces and then discontinued entirely during the Tang dynasty
reforms.

Japan

The European concept of marches applies just as well to the fief of

daimyōs) had to spend half the year at court (in the capital of Edo
).

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

Kurile Islands beyond, were left essentially open to Russian colonization. However, the Russians never did colonize Ezo, and the marches were officially eliminated during the Meiji Restoration
in the late 19th century, when the Ainu came under Japanese control, and Ezo was renamed Hokkaidō, and annexed to Japan.

Persia (Sassanid Empire)

Roman Empire

Ukraine

Map of the Wild Fields in the 17th century

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

Tatar slave raids in East Slavic lands brought considerable devastation and depopulation to this area prior to the rise of the Zaporozhian Cossacks. As settlement advanced and the borders moved, the Tsars transferred or formed Cossack units to perform similar functions on other borderlands/marches further south and east in (for example) the Kuban and in Siberia, forming (for example) the Black Sea Cossack Host, the Kuban Cossack Host and the Amur Cossack Host
.

See also

Notes

  1. ^ "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]
  2. ^ The styling marquis or marquess is a peculiarity of each title.
  1. ^ Chisholm 1911, p. 689.
  2. ^ a b "Online Etymology Dictionary". www.etymonline.com.
  3. ^ Lewis 1965.
  4. ^ Chisholm 1911, pp. 689–690.
  5. ^ a b c Chisholm 1911, p. 690.
  6. .
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Alexander Bugge (1918). "Navnet Telemark og Grenland" [The name Telemark and Grenland].
  9. ^ Lydon 1998, p. 81.
  10. ^ Neville, p. [page needed].
  11. ^ Lydon 1998, p. [page needed].
  12. ^ Gwyn, p. [page needed].
  13. ^ Moore, p. [page needed].
  14. ^ Otway-Ruthven, p. [page needed].

References

Attribution: