Flags With Coats of Arms (34)

Where these 34 flags are in the world

Counting by continent is the quickest way to see whether a design tradition is regional or global. Europe accounts for the largest share of this collection with 12 of the 34.

Why heraldry ends up on flags

A coat of arms on a flag is nearly always older than the flag. Arms were granted to rulers, cities and colonies long before nation-states standardised their banners, so when a country needed a flag the existing arms were the obvious thing to put on it. That is why so many of these flags share a structure: a plain or striped field inherited from a regional colour tradition, with a locally specific shield placed in the middle to distinguish it from its neighbours.

It also explains a practical quirk. Several of these flags exist in two official versions — one with the arms and one without — because the plain version is easier to manufacture. Spain and a number of Central and South American states have both in use.

The design argument against them

The common vexillological advice is that a flag should be simple enough for a child to draw from memory, use no more than three colours, avoid lettering, and be recognisable at a distance. A full coat of arms fails all four tests at once. Turkmenistan's carpet guls, Belize's two woodcutters and fifty leaves, and the various flags carrying scrolls of national motto are the standard examples given.

The counterargument is worth stating, because the design rules are aesthetic conventions rather than laws. A flag's job is not only to be legible at four hundred metres; it is also to carry meaning, and a shield can encode a founding story, an industry and a geography in one image. Belize's flag tells you the country's economy was built on mahogany. A clean tricolour tells you nothing at all.