256 EARLY MEDIEVAL SPAINand the French crown, and can also give an anachronistic impression
of the character of Catalonia in these centuries.
The geographical term was not employed at this period, although
it is being used here for convenience, nor were the early limits of the
Frankish county of Barcelona equivalent to the later boundaries of
the medieval state. Mter the initial Frankish conquest of 801, no
further territorial expansion was achieved before the eleventh century;
the old ecclesiastical centre of the region, Tarragona, the seat of a
Visigothic metropolitanate, did not revert permanently to Christian
control until 1089, and most of the southern parts of modern Cata-
lonia remained in Islamic hands until the thirteenth century. At the
same time, as in the Visigothic period, there were strong links be-
tween the Christian lands south of the Pyrenees with the Frankish
counties north of the mountains in the former Septimania. In due
course both of these areas were to be united under the rule of the
kings of Aragon, and 'French' Catalonia was only lost to the Spanish
monarchy in the seventeenth century. In terms of political frontiers
Catalonia is hard to define, precisely because of the many fluctuations
that occurred in them over the centuries, but at the same time the con-
cept is expressive of the cultural and economic cohesion of the coastal
regions to the north and south of the eastern end of the Pyrenees
irrespective of artificial administrative and political divisions.
The narrative history of tenth-century Catalonia is virtually non-
existent. The handful of brief chronicles that constitute the only
historiography in the region before the twelfth century generally start
their accounts with the sack of Barcelona by Al-Man~iir in 985.^56 Thus
all too little is known of the pattern of events between the death of
Wifred I in 897 or 898, only recorded in the Muqtabis of Ibn Hayyan,
and the rule of his descendant Count Ramon Borrel I (992-1017).
However, the region compensates in the survival of its charters: liter-
ally thousands of originals, let alone the wealth of copies in later
diocesan and monastic cartularies, are to be found in the Catalan
archives, many of them still unedited. Whereas, such an important
monastery as Albelda in the Rioja has only left us twenty-nine charters
of pre-eleventh-century date, some of the Catalan monastic houses
such as San Cugat de Valles, or San Benet de Bages, can offer several
hundred. The collections in such cases are complex in their ramifi-
cations, as in many instances earlier documents have been preserved
relating to property that only subsequently came into the possession
of the monastery. Also the charter holdings of small monastic houses