Spanish March

The Spanish March or Hispanic March^[1] was a military buffer zone established c.795 by Charlemagne in the eastern Pyrenees and nearby areas, to protect the new territories of the Christian Carolingian Empire - the Duchy of Gascony, the Duchy of Aquitaine, and Septimania - from the Muslim Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba in al-Andalus.

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. As time passed, these lordships merged or gained independence from Frankish imperial rule.^[2]