Mark and
march refer to a border region similar to a
frontier, such as the
Welsh Marches, the borderland between England and Wales.
In contrast to a
buffer zone, a march could be dominated by a single given country, and rather than being
demilitarized, it could be strongly fortified for defence against the neighbouring country. Although a march generally circumscribed the same or similar land area as a
county, it held its distinction from a normal
county due to its more important position at the border of the
state. A march was ruled over by a
Marquess (English pronunciation) or a
Marquis (French or Scottish pronunciation), or nobles with corresponding titles in the other European states. (The equivalent feminine titles of
marchioness and
marquise respectively may be used by the wife of a titleholder or by a woman holding the rank in her own right.) In comparison, regular counties were ruled over by
counts.
The name Denmark preserves the Old Norse cognates
merki ("boundary")
mörk ("wood", "forest") up to the present.
A sense of the dangerous "otherness" of the marches, where the king's writ did not run, as seen from the secure cultural homeground in
feasting hall or
palace, is suggested in
Beowulf by the lakeside marsh of the monstrous
Grendel: "the fell and fen his fastness was, the march his haunt".
See also:
List of marchesEtymology
The Frankish word
marka and the Old English word
mearc both come from
Proto-Germanic *marko, which itself comes from the
Proto-Indo-European root *
mereg-, meaning "edge, boundary". The root *
mereg- gave
Armenian marz ("border, land"),
Latin margo ("margin"),
Ukrainian межа ("border", "margin"),
Old Irish mruig ("borderland"),
Persian marz ("border, land") and
Norse merki ("boundary, sign") and
mörk ("borderland, forest"). It seems in
Old English "mark" meant "boundary", or "sign of a boundary", and the meaning later evolved into "sign in general", "impression or trace forming a sign". The word "march" in the sense of borderland was borrowed from French
marche, which had borrowed it from Frankish. The word "mark" in the sense of borderland is a modern borrowing from German
Mark, though in some cases it is simply short for
Markgrafschaft.
By region
The specific
subdivisions of Armenia are each called
Marz, possibly a loanword from Persian into Armenian or an Armenian loanword into Persian.
See
Krajina and
Military Frontier.
Spain
Beyond the province of
Septimania, after some early setbacks,
Charlemagne's son
Louis took Barcelona from the
Moorish emir in 801. Thus he established a foothold in the borderland between the Franks and the Moors. The Carolingian "Hispanic Marches" (
Marca Hispánica) became a buffer zone ruled by the
Count of Barcelona, with its own outlying small separate territories, each ruled by a lesser
miles with armed retainers, who theoretically owed allegiance through the Count to the Emperor, or with less fealty to his Carolingian and Ottonian successors. Each was the
catlá ("castellan" or lord of the castle) in an area largely defined by a day's ride, the region dotted with strongholds becoming known by them, like Castile at a later date, as "Catalunya." Counties in the
Pyrenees that appeared in the 9th century as
appanages of the counts 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. 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.
But communications were arduous, and the power center 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.
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.
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. There the
Denmark
France
The
province of France called
Marche (), sometimes
Marche Limousine, was originally a small border district partly of
Limousin and partly of
Poitou.
Its area was increased during the
13th century and remained the same until the
French Revolution. Marche was bounded on the north by
Berry, on the east by
Bourbonnais and
Auvergne; on the south by Limousin itself and on the west by Poitou. It embraced the greater part of the modern
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 1900 m².; its capital was
Charroux and later
Guéret, and among its other principal towns were
Dorat,
Bellac and
Confolens.
Marche first appeared as a separate fief about the middle of the
10th century when
William III, duke of Aquitaine, gave it to one of his vassals named
Boso, who took the title of
count. In the
12th century it passed to the family of
Lusignan, sometime also counts of Angouleme
counts of Limousin, until the death of the childless
Count Hugh in
1303, when it was seized by King
Philip IV. In
1316 it was made an
appanage for his youngest son the Prince, afterwards King
Charles IV and a few years later (
1327) it passed into the hands of the
family of Bourbon. 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.
See
County of Marche.
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."
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
- March of Austria (marcha Orientalis, the "Eastern March" or "Bavarian Eastern March" () in modern lower Austria);
Other
- *Altmark ("Old March"), the western region of the former margraviate,
- *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.
- Mark, a medieval territory that is recalled in the Märkischer Kreis district (formed in 1975) of today's North Rhine-Westphalia. The northern portion (north of the Lippe River) is still called Hohe Mark ("Higher Mark"). The former "Lower Mark" (between Ruhr and Lippe rivers) is the present Ruhr area and is no longer called "Mark". The title, in the form "Count of the Mark", survived the territory as a subsidiary title of the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
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.
The portions of the
gyepű was usually guarded by tribes who joined the Hungarian nation and were granted special rights for their services at the borders, such as the
Szeklers,
Pechenegs and
Cumans. These ethnic groups merged into the Hungarian
ethnicity and identity also taking up the
Hungarian language at different times ranging from as before the tenth century (the
Szeklers) to as late as the seventeenth century (some
Cumans).
The Hungarian
gyepű originates from the
Turkish yapi meaning
palisade.
Italy
For the modern Italian region, see Marche. 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
Emperor Henry IV invested
Werner with the whole territory of the three marches, under the name of the
March of Ancona. It was afterwards once more recovered by the Church and governed by papal legates as part of the
Papal States. The Marche became part of the
kingdom of Italy in 1860.
Marche were repeated on a miniature level, fringing many of the small territorial states of pre-
Risorgimento Italy with a ring of smaller dependencies on their borders, which represent territorial
marche on a small scale. A map of the
Duchy of Mantua in 1702 (Braudel 1984, fig 26) reveals the independent, though socially and economically dependent arc of small territories from the 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.
Japan
The European concept of
marches applies just as well to the fief of
Matsumae on the southern tip of Hokkaidō which was at Japan's northern border with the
Ainu people of
Hokkaidō, known as
Ezo at the time. In
1590, this land was granted to the Kakizaki clan, who took the name Matsumae from then on. The Lords of Matsumae, as they are sometimes called, were exempt from owing rice to the
shogun in tribute, and from the
sankin kotai system established by
Tokugawa Ieyasu, under which most lords (
daimyo) had to spend half the year at court (in the capital of
Edo).
By guarding the border, rather than conquering/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 Hokkaidō/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.
China
See Great Wall of China and Willow Palisade In Norse, "mark" meant "borderlands" and "forest", while it in present-day Norwegian has adapted the meaning "wilderness" or "forest".
The Norwegian county
Finnmark, "the borderlands (or, the
forests) of the
Sami" (known to the
Norse as
Finns). Also,
Hedmark ("the borderlands of
heath") and
Telemark ("the borderlands of the Þela tribe" ).
The forests surrounding Norwegian cities are called "
Marka" - the marches, e.g. the forests surrounding
Oslo are called Nordmarka,
Østmarka and Vestmarka - i.e. the northern, eastern and western marches.
Markland was the
Norse name of an area in North America discovered by Norwegian
Vikings.
See also مرزبان
Marzban.
Roman Empire
See Limes RomanusRussia
See Wild Fields and CossacksUnited Kingdom
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 Saxon 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
Welsh Marches (
marchia Wallia), while the native Welsh lands to the west were considered Wales Proper (
pura Wallia). The
Norman lords in the Welsh Marches were to become the new
Marcher Lords.
The title
Earl of March is at least two distinct
feudal titles: one, created 1328, held by the powerful border families of
Mortimer (in the
Peerage of England), in the west
Welsh Marches and one,
Dunbar, in the northern marches (in the
Peerage of Scotland).
The
Scottish Marches is a term for the border regions on both sides of the border between England and Scotland. From the
Norman conquest of England until the reign of
King James VI of Scotland, who also became
King James I of England, border clashes were common and the monarchs of both countries relied on
Marcher Lords to defend the frontier areas known as the Marches. They were hand-picked for their suitability for the challenges the responsibilities presented.
Patrick Dunbar, 8th Earl of Dunbar, a descendant of the
Earls of Northumbria was recognized in the end of 13th century to use the name March as his earldom in Scotland, otherwise known as Dunbar, Lothian, and Northumbrian border.
Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March,
Regent of England during the minority of
Edward III and usurper who had supplanted Edward II, was created an earl 1328. He was married to Joan of Joinville, whose mother was one of the heiresses of French Counts of La Marche and Lusignan. 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 March in France.
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."
See also
