The Legend of Charlemagne

A portrait of Charlemagne based on a painting by Albrecht Dürer, set against a stylised mountain landscape with a river. The issuing state 'ANDORRA' is placed above; the year '2022' to the right.

Charlemagne is regarded as one of the most formative figures in European history. As King of the Franks and, from 800, Emperor of the West, he united large parts of Western Europe under a single rule, promoted education and church reform, and thereby laid foundations for the medieval political order of the continent. His influence on Andorra is not purely legendary: the tradition according to which Charlemagne granted the mountain people of Andorra special freedoms after they supported him in the fight against the Moors is part of the country's founding myth. Whether this charter is historically verified or belongs to legend cannot be established with certainty — but the story itself has shaped Andorra's self-image for centuries and remains part of the small state's collective identity in the eastern Pyrenees.

Charlemagne's image is known to posterity above all through a painting by Albrecht Dürer, created around 1511/1512 and now held in Nuremberg — one of the most influential depictions of the emperor ever made. Dürer thereby created a portrayal of the ruler that endured far beyond its own time and decisively shaped the iconographic image of Charlemagne. For Andorra, this legend connects the small Pyrenean state to a continental history and lends the reference to its Carolingian origins a representative function. Andorra's 2023 2-euro commemorative coin, titled "The Legend of Charlemagne", takes up this founding myth.