Mea Culpa: The oldest borders in Europe (and in the World)

Dear most excellent reader, I write to you today as an act of contrition. I have sinned against Rigour and against you. I have proved undeserving of your trust. I have no excuse, so I don the proverbial hairshirt and shall do my utmost to mortify my pride as a collector of facts about Portugal through the righting of this great wrong. (Except I do have a bit of an excuse: it was an honest mistake; I was misled at an early age; and one can sort of argue my claim wasn’t actually wrong under a not completely unreasonable set of criteria. But I did share a supposed fact without checking its veracity. And to be honest I’m not amazingly comfortable with the criteria one needs to assume to make me right.) Anyway, I can only hope you’ll see I’m truly repentant and committed to righting the errors of my ways, and kindly find it in your heart to place your trust in me again.

When I was a young impressionable fifth (?) grade student, I used to particularly pride myself on my ability to effortlessly memorise relatively long excerpts of my teachers’ lessons (particularly History ones) verbatim¹. In those lessons, I was sometimes told that Portugal’s borders as established under the Treaty of Alcanizes, in 1297, were the oldest in Europe. Having no reason to question this claim, coming as it did from the authority of a History teacher (probably more than one, actually), I simply assimilated this alleged fact and moved on. And nearly two decades later, when I got round to writing my latest post on (very short summaries of) the reigns of every Portuguese king (in the First Dynasty, for now), I unloaded this claim on you, the innocent reader, without so much as a quick Google check. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!

The problem – a friend has helpfully pointed out, to my infinite embarrassment – is the continued existence of Andorra, who claim to have the oldest borders not only in Europe but in the World. Their borders seem to have remained essentially unchanged since their establishment in a treaty from 1278, almost exactly seventeen years before D. Dinis secured the treaty of Alcanizes.

My first reaction was naturally denial. After all, Andorra is barely an independent country, what with their heads of state being the French President and the Bishop of Urgell. (In fact, this is precisely the arrangement they started in 1278, only then with the Count of Foix instead of the French President².) I could try to argue they only became effectively independent in 1993, when their new Constitution gave Andorrans more power at the expense of the co-princes, and when they joined the United Nations…

And none of that is exactly wrong, but they are (valid) reasons to disqualify Andorra whose only real motivation is that they make my original claim “true”. It seems we have one of those situations where someone has the oldest something depending on exactly how you define either “oldest” or “something”. And the only way to play at this game is to look at the set of criteria that make you win and to argue fervently that those are the criteria anyone would naturally pick even if they didn’t know whom that would benefit.

And now I must be honest and transparent and point out that, even if Andorra is disqualified, Portugal’s claim’s strength is still not independent of such more or less arbitrary choices of criteria.

For starters, any disqualification of Andorra due to lack of independence must also apply to Portugal during at least the period between 1580 and 1640, when Portugal and the Spanish kingdoms were ruled in a personal union. I don’t know if any European country has been continually independent with stable borders since before then…

Secondly, there have been small adjustments to the borders of 1297. The most recent one was the de facto annexation of Olivença by the Spanish in 1801, in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Portugal never really accepted this, and even got Spain to agree to the restitution of Olivença in the Congress of Vienna, where the European powers agreed on a post-Napoleon balance of power. However, the Spanish were very busy and never actually remembered to return it³. So depending on how you view the legal intricacies of these matters you could argue our current borders are actually much more recent than we claim – although it seems a little silly to lose so many centuries over a disputed town or two, and I’m personally inclined to squint and just look at the border on a larger scale. Again, I’m sorry but I don’t know whose borders are the oldest if you disqualify Andorra and date Portugal’s to 1801.

Finally, if you consider the entirety of Portugal’s borders these were last altered as recently as 1975, when our empire was dissolved by the circumstances that followed the Carnations Revolution. Granted, I did explicitly refer only to our “continental” borders, but this does suffer from its fair bit of arbitrarity – and was done specifically to avoid these sorts of problems, so it’s not an innocent choice either.

And that’s about it. This is the information I have. Take it and draw your own conclusions. Personally, I’ll probably go on making claims about Portugal’s borders’ seniority, but I’ll be more careful to properly qualify them – and maybe I’ll even start mentioning Andorra everytime I do this! (Also, I’ve added a link to this post to the sentence where I made this claim in the post that triggered all of this.)

Footnotes

1. Somewhat sadly (I did kind of like having been called “the recorder” for a while), I eventually stopped being able to do this effortlessly (i.e., without consciously deciding to attempt it), presumably when I started making a more consistent effort to make the new information my own by framing it in the context of other things I knew.

2. The French presidents “inherited” his co-prince status from the French kings, who in turn inherited them from the kings of Navarre, who I’m guessing inherited it from the Counts of Foix.

3. Okay, it is a bit more complicated, with the Spanish arguing they didn’t have to after the Portuguese unlawfully took Spanish land in modern Uruguay. If I’m looking at this correctly, it might be even more complicated than this because the treaties defining who was entitled to what in that region only clearly defined jurisdictions for existing colonies and were at best ambiguous on the status of future new settlements, and the disputed land in this case seems to fall into this “grey” category. So basically it’s a messy legal situation where there’s probably no objectively right side, as a result both Portugal and Spain claim sovereignty over Olivença (after all, none of us can have Uruguay now), but Spain is the one actually administering the place. This could be an interesting future topic.