Establishing Power And Law 231
as their standard. Despite accepting and imposing the dynastic principle of the
transmission of royal power, no family line could, in fact, make it exclusively
its own, except at the price of constant uncertainty vis à vis succession to the
throne. In this manner, none of the major lines were definitively excluded from
the magic circle of kingship. A singular example of the horizontal bonds in the
lineage of the majorales crops up in a record of the condaghe of San Michele di
Salvenor, which lists the brothers of Barbara de Gunale by name: Costantino
de Athen, Costantino di Thori, Mariano de Serra, and Ithoccor de Carvia.10 The
siblings were therefore able to assume the surname of either the father or
mother, or of any one of their grandparents.
Confirmation of prestige and lineages did not bypass the religious sphere.
Aside from more extraordinary expressions of devotion, such as voyages to the
Holy Land, for example, concern for the sacred was especially apparent in the
foundation of churches and monasteries. The symbolic value of ecclesiasti-
cal patronage was exalted in Sardinia during the time of the giudicati by an
emphasis on the duality between the religious and lay condition—between
men of the church (the divites) and everyone else (the pauperes)—which
dates back to the Byzantine era. A reflection of this Manichean ideology can
be seen in the habit of certain monastic communities to qualify the very ma-
jorales as pauperes. Yet, not even the pious and propitiatory act of endowing
and “affiliating” a religious domus was completely free of financial worry, since
it decreased significant portions of the family patrimony and heightened the
ever-impending risk of hereditary fragmentation.11
1.4 The Power of the giudici
Some scholars doubt that the giudici were actually kings, both because they
fell under the naval and commercial guardianship of Pisa and Genoa, and be-
cause they recognized the higher authority of either the emperor or the pope.
But this recognition was more a theoretical distinction than a real limit on
the potestas (powers) of medieval kings, save those of France and England, to
whom an authority much like that of an emperor had been attributed from the
outset.12
Moreover, it was precisely its dignity and eminence that made the giudici
throne an object of desire for ambitious Italian seigniors, especially the aris-
tocratic families of Pisa, who, from the mid-twelfth century on, infiltrated
10 Maninchedda and Murtas, Il Condaghe di San Michele di Salvenor, tab. 131.
11 Ortu, La Sardegna dei giudici, pp. 88–89.
12 Ennio Cortese, Il problema della sovranità nel pensiero giuridico medioevale (Rome, 1966),
pp. 18–24; Diego Quaglioni, La Sovranità (Rome and Bari, 2004), pp. 25–29.