County of Ribagorza

The County of Ribagorza was the Pyrenean county of the Esera valleys, lasting from 900 to 1598. Born as the independent creation of a local dynasty on the southern slope of the mountains, it held the northeast of Aragon and the northwest of Catalonia, wedged between Sobrarbe and Pallars, living off high pastures, iron and the tolls of mountain passes. Its counts sat at Benabarre and married into every house of the Spanish March. Independence never lasts in the Pyrenees: the county was absorbed first into Navarre, then into the rising Crown of Aragon, keeping its laws, its river-valley customs and its fragmentary fifteenth-century chronicle as the price of survival. While greater counties dissolved into kingdoms, little Ribagorza kept its name on the map for seven centuries, until the early modern counts sold, married and mortgaged it out of separate existence in 1598. Today its valleys are split between Aragon's Ribagorza comarca and Catalonia's Alta Ribagorça, still arguing in two languages.