Septimania

Septimania is a historical region in modern-day Southern France. It referred to the western part of the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis that passed to the control of the Visigoths in 462 CE, when Septimania was ceded to their king, Theodoric II. During the Early Middle Ages, the region was variously known as Gallia Narbonensis, Gallia, or Narbonensis. In modern-day France, the medieval territory of Septimania roughly corresponds to the former administrative region of Languedoc-Roussillon, along with the departments of Aude, Gard, Hérault, Lozère, and Pyrénées-Orientales. Languedoc-Roussillon and the Midi-Pyrénées were merged into the current administrative region of Occitania by the Government of the French Republic in 2016. In the Visigothic Kingdom, a Romano-Germanic independent state that emerged after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, which became centred on Toledo by the end of the reign of Leovigild, Septimania was both an administrative province of the central royal government and an ecclesiastical province whose metropolitan was the Archbishop of Narbonne. Originally, the Goths may have maintained their hold on the Albigeois, but if so it was conquered by the time of Chilperic I. There is archaeological evidence that some enclaves of Visigothic population remained in Frankish Gaul, near the Septimanian border, after 507. The region of Septimania was invaded by the Andalusian Muslims in 719, renamed as Arbūnah and turned into a military base for future operations by the Andalusian military commanders. It passed briefly to the Emirate of Córdoba, which had been expanding from the south during the same century, before its subsequent conquest by the Christian Franks in 759, who by the end of the 9th century renamed it as Gothia or the Gothic March (Marca Gothica). Eventually, the Christian Franks chased the Muslim Arabs and Berbers away from Septimania and conquered Narbonne...