North Catalonia

Roussillon (Catalan Rosselló, Spanish Rosellón) is one of the historical Catalan counties corresponding roughly to the present-day southern French département of Pyrenées-Orientales (Eastern Pyrenees). It is as well called French Catalonia, though only a minority of its inhabitants now speak Catalan.

One of the counties ruled by the count of Barcelona since 872, Roussillon (along with the rest of Catalonia) came under the king of Aragon from 1137. From 1276 until 1344 Roussillon's principal city Perpignan was the capital of the kingdom of Majorca. Part of the kingdom of Spain from 1479, Roussillon was occupied by France in 1642 and ceded by Spain in the Treaty of the Pyrenees[?] (1659).