A Revision Of Sardinian History 131
Until the Balearic and other campaigns, Pisa did not seem to have enjoyed a
monopoly over Tyrrhenian routes.35 Moreover, documents pertaining to rela-
tions between Pisa, Sardinia, and Genoa—despite testimony of habitual and
significant contact between the two Tyrrhenian shores—do not yet indicate
the monopoly that the two port cities held in Sardinia. It is true that the Pisans
obtained an exemption from the customs tax in the giudicato of Torres, thanks
to the so-called Privilegio Logudorese, but this was, in fact, an independent con-
cession granted by the giudicato of Torres, who compensated his Pisan friends
with prestigious recognition for the help that they had offered him.36 In fact,
similar privileges were likewise issued in other Mediterranean ports, without
entailing loss of jurisdiction on the part of the one conceding to the benefit
of the concessionary, nor divesting them of their rights regarding the port or
customs. More realistically, the Pisans, and on a secondary level the Genoese,
became the principal commercial partners of the giudici of Sardinia, to whom
they offered their self-interested protection in exchange for commercial privi-
leges. Thus, Pisa carried out its strategy in Sardinia securely, more forcefully,
and with greater foresight than did others. Yet, it must be taken into consid-
eration that the balance and relations of power in the central Mediterranean
were substantially and significantly modified only after the events of the first
half of the twelfth century, which included incidents between Pisa, on the one
hand, and Amalfi, Naples, and Gaeta on the other, in the early years of Roger
of Sicily’s reign.
35 Patricia Skinner, Family Power in Southern Italy: The Duchy of Gaeta, 850–1139, 2nd ed.
(Cambridge, 2003); Graham A. Loud, Church and Society in the Norman Principality of
Capua, 1058–1197 (Oxford, 1985); Ulrich Schwarz and Giovanni Vitolo, Amalfi nell’alto
Medioevo (Salerno, 1980); Valeria Beolchini and Paolo Delogu, “La nobiltà romana altome-
dievale in città e fuori. Il caso di Tusculum,” Collection de l’Ecole française de Rome 359
(2006), pp. 137–169; Valeria Beolchini, Tuscolo, una roccaforte dinastica a controllo della
Valle Latina; fonti storiche e dati archeologici (Rome, 2006); Leonardo Carriero, La città
medievale. Insediamento, economia e società nei documenti napoletani del X secolo (Aonia,
2012).
36 The Privilegio Logudorese is a key document for Sardinian and Pisan history, besides being
one of the first samples of Italian language (vulgare). The date and the interpretation
have been debated for a long time: Armando Petrucci and Antonino Mastruzzo, “Alle
origini della ‘scripta’ sarda: il privilegio logudorese,” Michigan Romance Studies 16 (1996),
pp. 201–214; Eduardo Blasco Ferrer, “Consuntivo delle riflessioni sul cosiddetto privilegio
logudorese,” Bollettino Storico Pisano 70 (2001), pp. 9–41, suggests about 40 years later, as
well as assigning it to the political and cultural area of the Arborea; see the response by
Armando Petrucci and Antonino Mastruzzo, “Ancora a proposito del privilegio logudo-
rese,” Bollettino Storico Pisano 71 (2002), p. 217; they both agree that the document was
created in the Logudorese area, between 1080–1085.