Kingdom of Navarre

The Kingdom of Navarre, originally the Kingdom of Pamplona, was a Basque medieval kingdom straddling the western Pyrenees between present-day Spain and France. It took form around Pamplona during the Reconquista, in the buffer zone between the Carolingian Empire and Umayyad Córdoba, when Íñigo Arista was declared ruler in 824 in opposition to Frankish expansion. Under Sancho the Great it became a leading Christian power, though partitions and dynastic unions later shrank it under the kings of Aragon and France. In the fifteenth century its dynasty split into warring factions, and Ferdinand of Aragon conquered the southern half in 1512, annexing it to Castile in 1515 as a separate kingdom with its own courts until 1841. The northern remnant joined France by personal union when Henry III of Navarre became Henry IV of France in 1589 and merged into France in 1620, while the south traded self-government for the Compromise Act of 1841.