252 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINal-Ru'ayni ('Zatun' to the Franks) had previously offered to accept
Frankish suzerainty in 797 as part of his own political machinations,
but the expedition of 801, which is glorified in epic verse by the
Aquitainian poet Ermoldus Nigellus, made this a reality, and from
then on the city and the territory between it and the Pyrenees re-
mained in Christian hands. 50 Attempts to expand this new march of
the Carolingian Empire yet further proved fruitless; in 808 Tarragona
was captured but then had to be abandoned and in 809 Louis failed
in a bid to take Tortosa, and the frontier created in 801 remained
little changed until the eleventh century.51
A system of administration was established by the new rulers in the
aftermath of their conquest, dividing up the region into counties
ruled by royal officials responsible for their defence, the conduct of
justice, and accounting to the fisc of royal revenues. All deserted
lands were held to be royal property and former Arab holdings were
probably also appropriated. Because of the lack of information on
earlier centuries, it is impossible to know if the counties that came
into existence in the Frankish march in the first quarter of the ninth
century, that is to say Barcelona, Ausona (Vich), Gerona, Cerdanya,
Pallars and Ribagor~a, had any continuity with the administrative
divisions of the previous Visigothic realm, but it is clear enough from
many explicit citations in the multitude of surviving charters that the
law that was employed in the region was that of the Forum Iudicum, the
Visigothic lawbook. 52
The counts themselves were, for much of the ninth century, drawn
from the ranks of the Frankish aristocracy, and many of them also
held similar offices in other parts of the Carolingian Empire. Their
own political interests generally lay closer to the royal court and few
of them seem to have had significant landholdings in the new fron-
tier territories. Not surprisingly they were often absent and in the
tenth century this was recognised by the creation of the office of
count's deputy or Viscount, who carried out most of the comital
duties, though any major military operation usually required the
personal involvement of the counts themselves. Quite frequently one
individual would be entrusted with responsibility for a plurality of
counties in the frontier regions and he might in addition be invested
with the title Marchio (Marquess or March Warden). At the eastern
end of the Pyrenees there were two such marches, divided by the
mountains: to the north that of Gothia, the old Visigothic Septimania,
and to the south that of Hispania, the newly conquered territories.