Historian: 1278 pariatge created Andorra’s enduring co‑lordship

This evening at the Consell General historian Albert Villaró argued that the 1278 pariatge — technically an arbitral sentence rather than a treaty — was the decisive contingency that prevented Andorra from becoming just another Pyrenean valley. Delivered as an extrajudicial ruling of obligatory effect between Bishop Pere d’Urtx and Count Roger Bernat of Foix (and their successors), the document ended nearly a century of conflict between the Castellbò‑Foix family and the Bishopric of Urgell and established the co‑lordship that would define Andorra for centuries.

The pariatge’s text, signed on 8 September 1278 in Lleida before notary Arnau de la Vall‑llebrera, contains twelve clauses, three of which are specifically about Andorra. They provided for joint administration of justice — the bishop’s and count’s bailiffs exercising high, middle and low jurisdiction together — rules for tax collection (notably the quèstia, arranged so the bishop could collect up to a fixed sum in his year and the count could collect in the following year without a fixed quota), and the right of each lord to receive host and cavalcade from Andorran men (the capacity to recruit soldiers), explicitly forbidding their use by one lord against the other. Although modest in form, Villaró noted, the sentence proved peculiarly durable and remained operative until Andorra’s 1993 Constitution.

Villaró placed the pariatge in its medieval context: arbitration between a secular and an ecclesiastical lord was a common mechanism for resolving territorial sovereignty disputes, but such arrangements generally disappeared with the Ancien Régime. He attributes Andorra’s exceptional survival to a relative symmetry between the two co‑lords — a bishop backed by the papacy and an increasingly powerful count of Foix — arguing that, had one side been overwhelmingly dominant, the smaller polity would likely have been absorbed.

His presentation, held in the vestibule of the Consell General and organised with the Tribunal d’Arbitratge del Principat d’Andorra, also traced the negotiations and actors behind the sentence. Villaró identified six mediators who shaped the agreement: Bonanat de Lavània, a canon of Narbonne acting for the Pope; Ramon d’Urtx, the bishop’s brother; Isern de Fanjau and Guillem Ramon de Josa, agents of the count; and two royal judges, Jaspert, bishop of Valencia, and Ramon de Besalú, whom Villaró locates as archdeacon of Tarantona (a dignity tied to the Lleida chapter) rather than Tarragona. He noted the pariatge followed peace agreements the previous August between Pere the Great and Roger Bernat.

Villaró also examined the document’s transmission: numerous medieval copies altered its title and employed authentication techniques such as the carta partida — splitting letters between two parchments to certify matching halves when reunited. He dismissed suggestions that the signing location conferred special legal status on Lleida, calling it a contingent choice because that is where the parties happened to be in September 1278.

Presented as part of a talk titled “From pariatge to arbitration: the nature of the most consequential document in Andorran history,” the lecture highlighted how a seemingly humble arbitral sentence evolved into the institutional foundation of Andorra’s cosovereignty and, in Villaró’s words, made possible the principality’s continued distinctness.