Drawing on a range of evidence related to royal authority, political events and literate culture, this study traces how kings and emperors involved themselves in the affairs of the Spanish March, and examines how actively people in Catalonia participated in politics centred on the royal court. Rather than setting the political development of the region in terms of Catalonia's future independence as a medieval principality, Cullen J. Chandler addresses it as part of the Carolingian 'experiment'. In doing so, he incorporates an analysis of political events alongside an examination of such cultural issues as the spread of the Rule of Benedict, the Adoptionist controversy, and the educational programme of the Carolingian reforms. This new history of the region offers a robust and absorbing analysis of the nature of the Carolingian legacy in the March, while also revising traditional interpretations of ethnic motivations for political acts and earlier attempts to pinpoint the constitutional birth of Catalonia. 'To the Franks, Catalonia was the province that got away, while to the Crown of Aragon the area brought cultural and commercial contacts from beyond the Pyrenees and into the Mediterranean. Chandler studies the central influence of the Carolingian rulers on Catalonia, not to illustrate the creation of sovereign nationhood on the advent of the Capetians, but to illuminate the area as a component element of Charlemagne’s empire. Recommended.' L. C. Attreed, Choice Traces the political development of the Carolingian Spanish March and revises traditional interpretations of Catalonia's political and constitutional history. Cullen J. Chandler is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Lycoming College, Pennsylvania. He has, with Steven Stofferahn, co-edited a Festschrift in honour of John J. Contreni, and his first article, 'Between Court and Counts', won the Early Medieval Europe-Blackwell Essay Prize.