A Revision Of Sardinian History 133
related to the previous 52 years of the island’s history,41 and the 1074 charter of
Orzocco Torchitorio, giudice of Cagliari (found in his Liberos de paniliu).42
The synod carried out the Gregorian plan, which hinged on the unification
of the four giudicati in the two ecclesiastical provinces of Torres and Cagliari,
in order to pursue two objectives: one religious and the other political. In the
time of Gregory VII, the rules of church reform were not yet fully accepted,
and could certainly transpire only in a context of political and institutional
stability. Thus, the religious objective was to introduce, once and for all, the
necessary infrastructure to Sardinia. The political objective was to take over
the single archontate (seated in Cagliari), which had never recovered from the
invasion of Mughaid, and thus to resolve once and for all the conflict that had
prevailed over the island in previous decades.43
In light of these two objectives, the pope conceded the coexistence of two
ecclesiastical provinces with a growing number of suffragan dioceses in an
area that was sparsely populated and not extensive. Clearly he did so to satisfy
the ambitions of the island’s four lords, among whom were many who held
contentious and ambivalent feelings towards the Holy See. The model for the
repartition of this limited area into various archdioceses seems identical to
that carried out a century earlier at the time of the Emperor Otto I in southern
Lombard Italy, when Capua, Benevento, and Salerno were elevated to archdio-
ceses in quick succession.44
These were cities whose territory overlapped with the extensions of the
three Lombard principalities (Capua in 966, Benevento in 969, and Salerno
in 983) and the duchies of Campania (Naples in 969, Amalfi in 987, and fi-
nally Sorrento in 1005),45 whose lords were as litigious as those in Sardinia.
It was precisely these three provinces that were to define the ecclesiastical
41 On this issue, see Raffaello Volpini, “Documenti nel Sancta Sanctorum del Laterano. I resti
dell’‘Archivio’ di Gelasio II,” Lateranum n.s. 52:1 (1986), pp. 215–264.
42 For a reconstruction of the entire context, see Zedda and Pinna, La Carta del giudice.
43 In the papers of the giudice Orzocco Torchitorio, there are references in 1074 to punnas
that interest the giudicato of Cagliari in particular, and which led to a reduction of the
archbishopric’s properties: “et ka fudi minimadu s’archiepiscopadu de punnas ki benint in
sa terra (and because the archbishop was damaged by wars which devasted the land).”
See Zedda and Pinna, La Carta del giudice, p. 59.
44 Stefano Palmieri, “Duchi, principi e vescovi nella Longobardia meridionale,” in
Longobardia e Longobardi nell’Italia meridionale. Le istituzioni ecclesiastiche, eds Giancarlo
Andenna and Giorgio Picasso (Milan, 1996), pp. 95–96.
45 Jean-Marie Martin, “L’ambiente longobardo, greco, islamico e normanno,” in Storia
dell’Italia religiosa, I. l’antichità e il medioevo, eds Gabriele De Rosa, Tullio Gregory, and
André Vauchez (Rome, 1993), pp. 193–242.