Pierre de Marca (24 January 1594 – 29 June 1662) was a French bishop and historian, born at Gan in Béarn of a family distinguished in the magistracy.

[1] His family was known among judicial circles in the 16th century, and maintained the Roman Catholic faith after the official introduction of the Reformed religion into Navarre.

He published his first writing, Discours d'un Béarnais, très fidèle sujet du roi, sur l'Édit du retablissement de la religion catholique dans tout le Béarn (1618), which supported Catholicism as the established state religion.

During the siege of La Rochelle, he performed a mission which brought him in touch with Richelieu, who shortly afterwards nominated him as intendant de justice in Béarn (1631).

It was only after Marca had formally denied those propositions contained in De concordia which were displeasing to Rome that he was proclaimed in the consistory (13 January 1648).

Michel Le Tellier having ordered him to refute a thesis of the college of Clermont on the infallibility of the pope, Marca wrote a treatise which was most Gallican in its ideas, but refused to publish it for fear of drawing down the indignation of Rome.

In 1617, at the age of twenty-three, he had set to work looking through archives, copying charters, and corresponding with the principal men of learning of his time, the brothers Dupuy, André Duchesne and Jean Besly, whom he visited in Poitou.

During his long stay in Catalonia, Marca conducted research to support a geographical and historical study of this province, which was bound to France by so many political and literary associations.

Etienne Baluze, who became his secretary in 1656, helped him with the work and finished it, adding appendices and publishing the whole in 1688 under the title Marca hispanica.