County of Roussillon
former country
The County of Roussillon (Catalan: Comtat de Rosselló, IPA: [kumˈtad də rusəˈʎo], Latin: Comitatus Ruscinonensis) was one of the Catalan counties in the Marca Hispanica during the Middle Ages. The rulers of the county were the counts of Roussillon, whose interests lay both north and south of the Pyrenees.
The historic county's lands today lie within the borders of France.
Visigothic county
There was a Visigothic county around the city of Ruscino in the 6th and 7th centuries with a jurisdiction corresponding to the Diocese of Elna. This early county comprising the historic comarques of Plana del Roselló, Conflent, and Vallespir was created by Visigothic king Liuva I in 571. The Visigothic legacy in Roussillon survived in its courts, where Visigothic law was applied exclusively as late as the 11th century.
Roussillon was occupied by the Moors in 721. It was probably conquered for the Frankish Empire by Pepin the Short and his Visigothic allies in 760, immediately following his conquest of Narbonne, though all that is certain is that it was in Frankish hands during the reign of Charlemagne. By that point, Roussillon had been nearly completely depopulated, was not widely cultivated, and land use was very inefficient, which has often been explained by Moorish razzias and Frankish reprisals over a span of forty years.
Pepin reestablished the old Gothic county with its seat at Ruscino.
“County of Roussillon” enters the record as former country. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what County, Roussillon and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “County of Roussillon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.