Spanish March

In its broader meaning, the Spanish March sometimes refers to a group of early Iberian and trans-Pyrenean lordships or counts coming under Frankish rule.

It included Basques in its northwestern valleys, the Jews of Occitania,[3] and a large Occitano-Romance-speaking population governed by the Visigothic Code, all of them under the influence of al-Andalus since their lords had vowed allegiance to the Umayyad Córdoban rulers in 719, until King Pepin the Short of Francia conquered Septimania in 759.

In 719, the Umayyad forces of al-Samh ibn Malik bypassed the Pyrenees by marching along the Mediterranean coast to conquer Septimania and established a fortified base at the city of Narbonne.

Umayyad control of this frontier province was secured by offering the local population generous terms, intermarriage between ruling families, and treaties.

Peace was signed in 730 between the victor at Toulouse, the Duke of Aquitaine, and Munuza, a Berber rebel Muslim lord based in Cerdanya (in current-day Catalonia), a region that could act as a buffer zone against Umayyad expansionism.

The Spanish March was to be the result of the southward expansion of the Frankish realm from its heartland in Neustria and Austrasia starting with Charles Martel in 732 after various decades of fighting between the Franks and Umayyads or "Saracens".

The Dukes of Aquitaine (including Vasconia) pledged formal allegiance to the kings of the Franks several times, Odo the Great in 732 and Hunald I in 736 after being defeated, but remained independent.

In 737, Charles Martel led an expedition to the lower Rhône and Septimania, possibly seeing that the Umayyad thrust was threatening his grip on Burgundy, which had just been subdued in 736, but he failed to keep the region.

After subduing the Basques to the north of the Pyrenees (790), Frankish overlordship expanded to the upper Ebro (794) and Pamplona (798), when Alfonso II of Asturias also came under Charlemagne's influence.

After being defeated by the Moors in the 816 Battle of Pancorbo, Pamplona, now led by the Basque lord Iñigo Arista broke away from the Spanish March, with the County of Aragon following suit shortly thereafter in 820.

The counties to the south, which were used by the Moors to enter and overrun Visigothic Septimania in 719, became, at this point, a natural extension of the March of Gothia ruled by local counts under the Carolingian Empire.

The majority were Hispano-Romans (Goths) and Basques but there were also Muslims, and Jews from Septimania who repopulated the Frankish conquered easternmost territories of present-day northern Spain and a small portion of southern France.

The march included various outlying smaller territories, each ruled by a lesser miles with his armed retainers and who theoretically owed allegiance through the count to the emperor.

Historians have interpreted the aprisio both as an early form of feudalism and in economic and military terms as a mechanism to entice settlers to a depopulated border region.