Andorra's history: two lords and the arbitration that outlived them

Who held the valleys before the bishops and counts

People used the valleys long before anyone wrote them down. La Balma de la Margineda, a rock shelter at Sant Julià de Lòria, was settled around 9500 BCE as a seasonal camp for hunter-gatherers crossing between the two sides of the Pyrenees, and a Neolithic group made a permanent camp in the Madriu valley around 6640 BCE, growing cereals and keeping livestock. Burials at Segudet in Ordino and at Feixa del Moro in Sant Julià de Lòria are dated to 4900 to 4300 BCE.

The Greek historian Polybius names a people called the Andosini among those Hannibal subdued between the Ebro and the Pyrenees in 218 BCE, and the name has long been attached to Andorra because the two words look alike. The link is disputed. More recent work has pointed to phonetic difficulties and noted that Hannibal's likely route did not pass through the valleys, and the linguist Joan Coromines concluded that the surviving evidence does not allow a definitive etymology for the name at all.

Roman presence is recorded from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, at Camp Vermell in Sant Julià de Lòria, at Encamp and at the Roc d'Enclar, with trade in wine and cereals running down to Urgellet, the Roman town that became La Seu d'Urgell. The Visigoths followed for about two hundred years, and when al-Andalus took most of the peninsula the valleys fell under Frankish jurisdiction, inside the Marca Hispanica.

Where the Charlemagne legend meets the documents

The state's own story begins with Charlemagne. Tradition holds that he granted the valleys a charter in return for their help against the Moors; the Government of Andorra's heritage page dates the founding to 805, Britannica has Charlemagne recovering the region in 803 and his son Louis the Pious granting the charter of liberties. The national anthem is still called El gran Carlemany.

The documents start later and say something plainer. The deed of consecration of the cathedral of La Seu d'Urgell, dated 839, lists the six old parishes of the valleys. In 843 Charles the Bald gave the territory to Sunifred, count of Urgell and Cerdanya, and a surviving copy of that lost document is the earliest known occurrence of the name. In 988 Count Borrell II of Urgell handed the valleys to the diocese of Urgell in exchange for land in Cerdanya, and by 1133, according to the Government of Andorra, they had become an ecclesiastical lordship. From that point the bishop was the lord, and everything that follows is a quarrel over who else had a share.

How the bishop and the count settled their feud

The bishop needed protection. In 1095, knowing that the counts of Urgell wanted the valleys back, he signed a sworn declaration of co-sovereignty with the lord of Caboet, a local nobleman. The Caboet rights then travelled by marriage. Arnalda de Caboet married the viscount of Castellbò, and their daughter Ermessenda married the count of Foix; Wikipedia's history of Andorra dates that marriage to 1208. A family whose main lands lay north of the Pyrenees now held half of a lordship whose overlord sat at La Seu d'Urgell.

The two lords fought over it for most of the thirteenth century, with the Cathar Crusade in the background. The first pariatge describes the result in its own Latin: men killed, castles pulled down, limbs mutilated, "and many other enormous and almost unspeakable misdeeds". The legal position had also become odd. In 1275 the men of the valleys gave the count of Foix every right of justice that could exist there, civil and criminal, so that by the last quarter of the century the bishop was the feudal superior and his own vassal held the higher jurisdiction.

What the first pariatge imposed

The settlement was an arbitral sentence, issued on 8 September 1278 between Bishop Pere d'Urtx and Count Roger Bernat III of Foix, with the king of Aragon, Peter III, as mediator. Pope Martin IV confirmed it at the bishop's request on 7 October 1282. Under its terms a levy called the quèstia was imposed on the Andorrans and taken by the two lords in alternate years, the count without limit and the bishop capped at 4,000 sous melgoresos. Justice was to be done by the two lords' bailiffs acting comuniter et simul, in common and at once. The count owed the bishop homage "of mouth and hands" under the Usatges of Barcelona for everything he held in the valleys, and held the castles as an honorary fief.

Why a castle prompted the second pariatge

Ten years later the count began building a castle at the Roc d'Enclar, and a second sentence was issued on 6 December 1288 by the same two men. It ruled that no rock or hill could be fortified without the consent of both lords, settled a dispute over an old church tithe, and required the two to appoint the valleys' notaries jointly. Taken together the two texts gave Andorra its territory and its political form. According to Wikipedia's history of Andorra, the borders have not moved since 1278.

The pariatges were a treaty between two lords about their shares of a third party, and the Andorrans appear in them as the people who pay the quèstia.

How the Andorrans built a council inside the bargain

The first concession came quickly. In 1289 the same bishop and count granted the Andorrans the privilege of assembling in a council that could approve ordinances on the few matters left to them. The General Council's own history of the institution is careful about what this meant: the new body gave some continuity to an older tradition of open assemblies, and at the same time placed it wholly under the authority of the two lords. Its first recorded tasks were dividing the quèstia among households and regulating access to common land. Common land has lasted as long as the council: when UNESCO inscribed the Madriu-Perafita-Claror Valley in 2004, it cited a communal system of land management that has survived over 700 years.

The date most often given as the council's founding is 1419. The General Council's history treats that as a later misreading. The privilege granted that year by Bishop Francesc de Tovia, and approved months afterwards by Joan de Grailly, count of Foix, set up the annual election of two or three representatives from each parish with power to handle the main business. In practice it handed the council to the heads of the wealthiest houses, the prohoms, who no longer needed to call a general assembly to decide anything important. From at least the early sixteenth century the heads of household were split into anfocs and casalers, and the casalers, from the more modest houses, never appear on the lists of elected officers.

The council met wherever it could at first: in cemeteries, in church porches, on threshing floors large enough for everyone. From the late fifteenth century it had a Casa del Consell in Andorra la Vella, and in 1702 it bought a larger house from the Busquets family, built in 1580, which became the Casa de la Vall. Sessions were held there until 2011. Inside it the Closet of the Six Keys kept the country's documents, one key for each parish. The syndics, at first ad hoc negotiators with the lords, gained standing in the council through the eighteenth century, and one of them settled into its presidency around 1800 under the title of síndic general.

How the count's half passed to a French president

The bishop's share stayed where it was. The count's share followed the house of Foix wherever inheritance took it, and in the fifteenth century that was the throne of Navarre. In 1589 Henry IV, king of Navarre, count of Foix and lord of Andorra, became king of France, and the Foix rights went into the French crown with him. Wikipedia dates the formal step to an edict of 1607 naming the king of France and the bishop of Urgell as co-lords. From the last quarter of the seventeenth century the two began to be called co-princes.

The Spanish side of the arrangement changed shape at the same time. In the Reapers' War and the War of the Spanish Succession the Andorrans backed the rest of the Catalans while professing neutrality. When the Nueva Planta decrees abolished Catalonia's own legal system in 1716, Bishop Simeó de Guinda persuaded the new Bourbon authorities that the valleys had always been neutral and separate from the Principality of Catalonia, and the decrees were never applied to them. That argument produced the definitive political separation of Andorra from Catalonia. It also produced a burst of local writing on the valleys' privileges, including the Manual Digest of Antoni Fiter i Rossell in 1748 and the Polità andorrà of Antoni Puig in 1763.

The French Revolution nearly ended the bargain. In 1793, according to the Government of Andorra, the republicans refused to keep up relations whose origin was feudal. Napoleon restored the co-lordship, in 1806 by the Government's account and in 1809 by Wikipedia's. During the Peninsular War the empire annexed Catalonia in 1812 and 1813, and Andorra was placed in the district of Puigcerdà in the new department of Sègre; a decree of 1814 restored its independence. Every French head of state since, king, emperor or president, has held the count's share.

Why the heads of household got the vote

The medieval institutions and the rural economy of the valleys changed little through the first half of the nineteenth century. The break came in 1866 with the New Reform, the Nova Reforma, led by the syndic Guillem d'Areny-Plandolit and ratified by both co-princes. It gave the vote to every head of household and enlarged the powers of the General Council, which now had 24 members, and it displaced the oligarchy of prohom families that had run the council since the fifteenth century.

The reformed council soon collided with the co-princes over money. Their authorities banned casinos and betting houses, and on 8 December 1880 revolutionaries attacked the syndic's house and set up a Provisional Revolutionary Council under Joan Pla i Calvo and Pere Baró i Mas, which allowed foreign companies to build casinos and spas. Loyalists from Canillo and Encamp retook Ordino and La Massana between 7 and 9 June 1881, and after a day of fighting the Treaty of the Bridge of Escalls was signed on 10 June. The council was replaced and new elections held. Arguments between pro-bishop, pro-French and nationalist factions, known together as the Andorran Question, went on through troubles at Canillo in 1882 and 1885.

The same decades brought the Catalan cultural revival into the valleys. Between 1882 and 1887 the first schools were set up, and the poet Jacint Verdaguer lived in Ordino in the 1880s.

What the neighbours' wars brought to the valleys

Much of Andorra's twentieth century arrived from conflicts next door. The first episode is a story that later sources have kept repeating. North American newspapers claimed in 1958 that Andorra had declared war on Germany in 1914 and never signed a peace. In 2014 the broadcaster Ràdio i Televisió d'Andorra looked for the declaration and found no documentation of one. Three Andorran volunteers, Valentí Naudi, Josep Estany and René Huguet, did fight in that war.

Why France sent gendarmes into the valleys

In 1933 France occupied the valleys after unrest before elections. The trigger was a labour dispute during construction of the FHASA hydroelectric station at Encamp, and on 5 April 1933 the union group Joves Andorrans seized the parliament, demanding universal suffrage among other reforms. Colonel René-Jules Baulard arrived with 50 gendarmes.

The next year an adventurer and nobleman, Boris Skossyreff, won some support in the General Council with promises of modernisation and a tax haven, proclaimed himself Boris I at Urgell and declared war on the bishop. The sources differ on the date of the proclamation, 8 July 1934 in one Wikipedia article and 12 July in another, and agree that Spanish authorities arrested him on 20 July and expelled him. From 1936 to 1940 a French detachment under Baulard was garrisoned in the valleys against spillover from the Spanish Civil War, and refugees from both sides of that war crossed the border and many stayed.

How the war turned Andorra into a smuggling route

Andorra stayed neutral through the Second World War and became a smuggling route between Vichy France and Francoist Spain. The Hostal Palanques network, in contact with British intelligence, helped almost 400 fugitives, Allied airmen among them, between 1941 and 1944. The General Council was criticised at the time for blocking both the entry and the expulsion of refugees and for sympathy with Francoism; its members answered that their conduct was necessary for Andorra's survival. The Government of Andorra's own summary of the period is that the border, under these new conditions, gave rise to a trade in goods and currency, and that the tourist and financial economy grew out of it. Banking began with Banc Agrícol in 1930 and Crèdit Andorrà in 1949, and ski resorts and hotels followed.

In 1943, in the middle of all this, Andorra carried out its first execution since the nineteenth century, when Pere Areny was shot in a public square of Canillo for killing his brother.

How a feudal lordship became a constitutional state

By the 1970s the arrangement had fallen out of step with both of its lords. The General Council's history puts it bluntly: the co-princes were, in fact, the absolute lords of the country, holding a veto over the council they had used many times, at a moment when France and Spain had both changed their own politics since the late 1960s. Immigration drawn by the new economy had swollen Andorra la Vella and Escaldes, while every parish still elected the same number of councillors. Women gained the vote during the 1970s.

The first reforms came from the top. In 1978 the council sent the co-princes a memorandum asking for modern institutions, and the same year the co-princes created the parish of Escaldes-Engordany, split off from Andorra la Vella to rebalance representation. They authorised an executive council under a head of government in 1981, and it took office in 1982 with Òscar Ribas Reig as the first head of government. Andorrans called the package the reformeta, the little reform, because the new executive had no power over matters such as foreign representation.

Pressure through the late 1980s, including recommendations from international bodies, opened a constituent process. A Tripartite Commission with delegates of each co-prince and of the General Council drafted a text, which was adopted on 2 February 1993 and put to a referendum on 14 March 1993. It passed with 74.2% of the vote on a 76% turnout, was signed by the co-princes of the day, President François Mitterrand and Bishop Joan Martí Alanis, and entered into force on publication on 28 April 1993. The General Council describes the process as a transition agreed peacefully between governors and governed.

What the constitution kept from the pariatges

The preamble cites the need to regulate "the institutions dating back to the Pareatges", and Article 43 names the co-princes as "an institution which dates from the Pareatges and their historical evolution", held "in their personal and exclusive right" by the bishop of Urgell and the president of the French Republic, with equal powers. Sovereignty moved to the Andorran people, the General Council became a parliament elected by universal suffrage, and political parties and trade unions were legalised. The old tribute ended in 1993: before the constitution Andorra paid about $460 to the French ruler in odd-numbered years and about $12 to the bishop in even-numbered years, together with six hams, six cheeses and six live chickens.

Andorra joined the United Nations on 28 July 1993 and the Council of Europe in 1994. Because the office is personal, a co-prince can threaten to give it up. In 2009 the French president Nicolas Sarkozy threatened to abdicate as co-prince unless Andorra changed its banking laws, and between 2013 and 2016 the principality introduced a personal income tax and a general indirect tax and ended banking secrecy.