136 Zedda
new sovereignty based on a territorial relationship with the Christian populace
through the exercise of jurisdiction and a particular physicality. According to
this picture, the ancient terms were not necessarily or arbitrarily imposed on
the territorial situations of the Middle Ages, but were rather granted an essen-
tially new meaning and administrative function that nevertheless alluded to
an earlier context (Fig. 4.1).
A thorough reexamination of available documentation from the period be-
tween 1065 and 1075 makes it clear how far they were from preparing an epoch-
making synod dealing with Sardinian territorial reorganization.
After such a hypothetical synod, Sardinia was to contain not one but three
ecclesiastical provinces, an operation that for technical reasons could not have
occurred during the pontificate of Alexander II (and indeed surviving docu-
ments contain no evidence of his intention in this regard), and would have
been highly unusual for the period. One must recall that in all of peninsular
Italy—the islands included—only 17 archdioceses existed during the time
of Gregory VII (or until the final years of the pontificate of Alexander II), of
which four were in the north (the patriarchates of Aquileia, Grado, Milan, and
Ravenna) and seven were in the south (excluding Rome, they were Naples,
Amalfi, Bari, Taranto, as well as Capua, Salerno, and Benevento, which were
established later).53 For all these reasons, the operation that came to be imple-
mented in Sardinia was truly exceptional. The original plan for three divisions
would have been even more so, and probably never would have occurred to
Gregory VII, let alone Alexander II.
Consequently, it seems that the constitution of the ecclesiastical province
of Arborea cannot be ascribed to the pontificate of Alexander II. In the first
place, there are no letters from Alexander II, nor any bishop in Sardinia, or any
guidice in Arborea. Further, there is no other evidence regarding guidici be-
yond Cagliari or Torres in the 1060s. Lastly, there are no letters from Gregory VII
that attest to the nomination of the two archbishops of Cagliari and Torres for
what was still supposed to be designated as the provincia Sardiniae, a united
province not subdivided into archdioceses. In fact, the constitution is datable
53 For an analysis of the ecclesiastical organization of the Italian peninsula up to 1073, and
its subsequent rearrangement, see Corrado Zedda, “Creazione e gestione dello spazio tir-
renico pontificio (fine XI–inizio XII secolo),” Corse d’hier & de demain (2013). One aspect
that needs to be further researched is that of the episcopal elections of Torres, which could
have been historically in the hands of the papacy, rather than the metropolitan of Cagliari,
if we think that in the seventh century this pontifical right was carried out by the Turritan
ecclesiastics (Italia Pontificia, X, Calabria—Insulae, in Regesta Pontificum Romanorum,
congessit Paul Fridolin Kehr, a cura di Dieter Gierghenson (Zurich, 1975), p. 405, nn. 35–36).