THE CHRISTIAN REALMS 261end of the Pyrenees, were deserted and had thereby become the
property of the royal fisc. From these, estates were granted to the new
settlers, who also received privileges denied to the indigenous popu-
lation. They were freed from the supervision of the counts and were
taken directly under royal protection. They received their estates free
of any tax obligations and were permitted to sell or otherwise ex-
change them amongst themselves.
The initial recipients of these benefits were clearly men of some
substance, as the setting up of the estate of one Hispanus called John,
which is unusually well recorded in surviving documents, indicates,
for he further subdivided his newly acquired lands amongst his own
followers, whe were also subject to his jurisdiction for all but the most
serious of offences.^61 Names such as Christianus and Tamunnus
amongst John's men are indicative of a Mozarab or possibly even
Christianised Arab origin. The case of this John, who received his
property in the county of Narbonne after signal service fighting for
the Frankish king on the Spanish march, also suggests that some of
the grants were intended as rewards for military activity. In other
instances, from the records of later disputes over ownership, it looks
as if groups of immigrants or displaced persons just occupied de-
serted lands, and by bringing them into cultivation they were able to
acquire a title, which the Frankish crown was prepared to recognise
and on occasion confirm by charter.
It is not certain how long the process of the immigration of the
Hispani continued, but in the last years of the reign of the West
Frankish king Charles 'the Bald' (840-877), control over deserted
lands and the property of the royal fisc was transferred absolutely to
the local counts.^62 This coincides with the effective transformation of
the status of the latter from being appointed royal officials to being
a hereditary nobility, as can be seen in the case of Catalonia in the
careers of Wifred I and his descendants. Thenceforth the process of
the distribution of vacant lands and of their resettlement became the
prerogative of the counts, and the Hispani cease to feature in the
records as a separate class of landowner. New settlers from Muslim-
controlled Spain doubtless continued to arrive in the march, but they
no longer constituted a group requiring special attention or privi-
leges. It is probable that many of the inhabitants of the settlements
created by Wifred I and his heirs came from within the Catalan coun-
ties, and were attracted to the expanding frontier by land-hunger or
the special concessions granted by the counts.