Dictionary Definition
Marches n : a region in central Italy [syn:
Marche]
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Pronunciation
Verb
marches- third-person singular of march
French
Noun
marches f- plural of marche
Verb form
marches- second-person singular indicative present of marcher
- second-person singular subjunctive present of marcher
Spanish
Verb form
marches- second-perswon singular subjunctive present of marchar
Extensive Definition
- For other uses, see March (disambiguation).
Mark from the Old English
mearc and march (or various plural forms of these words) derived
from the Frankish
word marka ("boundary"), refer to a border region, e.g. the
borderland between England and Wales, similar to a frontier. During the Frankish
Carolingian
Dynasty, the word spread throughout Europe. In contrast to a
buffer
zone, a march could be dominated by a country, and rather than
being demilitarized,
it could be fortified for defense 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 of Denmark preserves
the memory of 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
marches
Etymology
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"), Old Irish mruig ("borderland"), Persian marz ("border, land") and Norse 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
Armenia
The specific subdivisions of Armenia are each called Marz, possibly a loanword from Persian into Armenian or an Armenian loanword into Persian.The national anthem of Azerbaijan is "The March
of Azerbaijan." The land belonging to today's nation was in the
19th century Russia's march
bordering Iran, the nation which
remains the ruler of two-thirds of the Azeri population.
The Balkans
See Krajina and
Military
Frontier.
- See Marca Hispanica also known as the "Hispanic Marches"
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 9th 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
- The march of the Danes.
The province
of France called Marche
(Occitan:
la Marcha), 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:
- 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:
- 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
- "Ostmark" a modern rendition of the term marchia orientalis used in Carolingian documents referring to the area of Lower Austria that was later a markgraftum (margraviate or "county of the mark"): see the main article Ostmark.
- Altmark, between Hamburg and Magdeburg
- Nordmark, the "Northern March", the Ottonian empire's territorial organisation on the conquered areas of the Wends. In 1134, in the wake of a German crusade against the Wends, the German magnate Albert the Bear was granted the Northern March by the Holy Roman Emperor Lothar II.
- Mark Brandenburg, an area north of Berlin. Today it is used to refer to the state of Brandenburg
- Neumark, a region created by Brandenburg on the border between Pomerania and Great Poland.
- Steiermark (Styria), the margraviate ("border county") of Styria was established under Charlemagne from a part of Carantania (Carinthia), erected as a border territory against the Avars and Slavs.
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 thew seventeenth century (some Cumans).
Italy
- For the modern Italian region, see Marche.
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.
Norway
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
often called "marka" - the marches, e.g. the forests surrounding
Oslo are
called Nordmarka, Østmarka and Vestmarka - i.e. the northern,
eastern and western marches.
Persia (Sassanid Empire)
See also مرزبان Marzban.
Roman Empire
See Limes
Romanus
Russia
See Wild Fields
and Cossacks
United Kingdom
- See Welsh Marches and Scottish Marches.
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."
Notes
marches in German: Grenzmark
marches in French: Marche (juridiction)
marches in Italian: Marca (circoscrizione)
marches in Dutch: Mark (gebied)
marches in Polish: Marchia
marches in Portuguese: Marca de fronteira
marches in Romanian: Marcă
marches in Russian: Марка
(административно-территориальная единица)
marches in Serbian: Марка (погранична
област)