Catalan counties

The Catalan counties (Catalan: Comtats Catalans, IPA: [kumˈtats kətəˈlans]) were the administrative Christian divisions of the eastern Carolingian Hispanic Marches and the southernmost part of the March of Gothia in the Pyrenees created after their rapid conquest by the Franks.

The various counties roughly defined what later came to be known as the Principality of Catalonia.

In 778, Charlemagne led the first military Frankish expedition into Hispania to create the Hispanic Marches, a buffer zone between the Umayyad Moors and Arabs of Al-Andalus and the Frankish Kingdom of Aquitaine. The territory that he subdued was the kernel of Catalonia (not yet known like that since the first written mention of Catalonia and the Catalans as an ethnicity appears almost a century later in 1113 at the Liber maiolichinus) which was already a no man's land since the defeat of the Visigoths and the arrival of the Muslims in 714 who crossed the Pyrenees with an army to be defeated in 732 at the Battle of Tours. In 781, Charlemagne made his 3-year-old son Louis the Pious (778 – 840) king of Aquitaine, who was sent there with regents and a court in order to secure the southern border of his kingdom against the Arabs and the moors and to expand southwards into Muslim territory.

These counties were originally feudal entities ruled by a small military elite. Counts were appointed directly by and owed allegiance to the Carolingian (Frankish) emperor. The appointment to heirs could not be taken for granted. However, with the rise of the importance of the Bellonids and strong figures among them such as, Sunifred (fl. 844–848) and Wilfred the Hairy (c.870-897), and the weakening of Carolingian royal power, the appointment of heirs eventually become a formality. This trend resulted in the counts becoming de facto independent of the Carolingian crown under Borrell II in 987, starting since, to call themselves and to be known as dei gratia comes (counts by the grace of god) and dux catalanensis (Catalan dukes) or even Hispaniae subjogator (attorney of Hispania) and Propugnator et murus christiani populi (wall and defender of the Christian folk).

The many counties (aside from the counties of County of Pallars, County of Urgell and County of Empuries) were to be soon absorbed into the County of Barcelona. A Count of Barcelona, prince Ramon Berenguer IV, married princess Petronilla of Aragon of the Kingdom of Aragon in 1150, uniting as equals the County of Barcelona and the Kingdom of Aragon. Thus, their son, Alfonso II of Aragon, became the first king of the Crown of Aragon, ruling over both the Catalans and the Aragonese.