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Sierra de Guadarrama. The true frontier was of another sort; between the two states Alfonso I created a desert, a military march of the most absolute sort, without even colonization. In spite of this, the Mussulmans were able to assume the offensive and to maintain themselves upon the left bank of the Douro until the eleventh century. There was, moreover, in Spain at the beginning of the tenth century, the kingdom of Navarre, which formed a true independent march, and also the Prankish march of Spain. Enlarging itself, it became in 1162 the kingdom of Aragon, independent of France. Both Navarre and Spain ought naturally, in a military organization of society, to become impor- tant centers for political states.
As to the Prankish empire, it continued, like its landed estates, to oscillate between unification and dismemberment, according to the rules of law governing inheritances. In the year 839 the division enacted at the Diet of Worms reserved Bavaria for the second son of Charlemagne, and the remainder fell, in almost equal portions, to the lot of the eldest and the youngest. The latter had almost all the territory comprising present France, together with the greater part of Belgium at the north, and the Spanish march in the south. This kingdom thus included all the populations of ancient Gaul, whether Romanized or not, as well as Germanic populations. The portion given to Lothair included all of the Germanic populations, except those of Flanders and of Bavaria, but also the Romance populations of Switzerland and of Italy.
A new partition of territory was signed in 843 at Verdun. "They took less account," we are told in the historical atlas of Schrader, "of the richness and equality in point of area of the portions, than of their proximity and convenience of location." But are not these elements taken into consideration in all the par- titions? There was already, however, a tendency toward a change; the bond between those who shared in the division was no longer so close as formerly ; the treaty proclaimed the absolute independence of each of the three corecipients. Lothair the Ger- man received also in his portion a large strip of Gallic territory extending from the mouths of the Rhine to those of the Rhone,
