Davies’s survey of Europe’s vanished states — and a disputed claim about Andorra

When historian Norman Davies digs up vanished polities in Reinos desaparecidos: la historia olvidada de Europa, he aims to show on a continental scale Heraclitus’s old truth: everything passes. The book collects a string of once-prominent entities that ended up as historical dust. In a luminous preface Davies argues that “we must constantly remember the fleetingness of power; transitoriness is a fundamental feature of both the human condition and political order, and sooner or later all things end. States and nations, however large, bloom for a season and are then replaced.” The volume is thus a catalogue of more or less glorious failures: Alt Clut, Burgundy, Savoy, Galicia, Etruria, Rosenau, Chernagor, Prussia, Éire, the USSR — and, somewhat unexpectedly, Aragon.

A personal anecdote introduces the piece: as a child the author owned a 1935 Salvat encyclopedia whose foldout maps showed a pre‑World War II Europe — a single large Germany stretching to Prussia, a shrunken, eastward‑stretched Poland, and the Baltic states as distinct entities. Those maps, once relics, regained relevance after 1989. That sense of historical ebb and flow is what brought the author to Davies’s book, purchased from FNAC to ease a bad mood and found impossible to resist.

Davies devotes roughly a hundred pages to Aragon, and it is there that he briefly touches on Andorra. He writes that “to the east lies the Principality of Andorra, one of the oldest states in Europe.” He summarizes Andorra’s unusual governance: for seven centuries, since 1278, its government was overseen by the Count of Foix (later by the préfet of Ariège) and by the Bishop of la Seu d’Urgell; since 1993, Davies notes, Andorra has functioned, like Monaco, Liechtenstein and San Marino, as a sovereign microstate.

Where Davies’s account becomes contestable is his claim about language and song. He states that “Andorrans, like the inhabitants of La Franja of Aragon, speak Catalan, but their national anthem is bilingual,” and he reproduces the Gran Carlemany in both Catalan and French. Davies then concludes that “the Andorrans still sing to Charlemagne, for the country was born under his dominion and never became part of the great powers that succeeded his empire.”

The author of the article questions these assertions. He suspects Davies did not consult more specialised local studies — for example, Carlemany i Andorra: història de la Carta Pobla — in which the foundations of the Charlemagne‑origin narrative are critically reassessed. The article argues that presenting the anthem as officially bilingual and invoking an unbroken origin in Charlemagne is a misleading simplification and an unnecessary lapse in an otherwise engaging work.

Despite that criticism, the author concedes that Reinos desaparecidos remains an absorbing read: a compelling reminder of the impermanence of political forms and a provocative catalogue of historical actors that once seemed destined for permanence but ultimately faded. The only real disappointment, he suggests, is when such an ambitious survey treats local myths and complexities too casually.