Establishing Power And Law 243
of the right to autonomous convocation. They wished to play the role of a coun-
terweight and to exercise a regulatory function vis à vis the defective mecha-
nisms of the royal government, on their own and without the hindrance of the
parliament or the Crown.
2.3 The New Freedoms
Constitutional developments of the Regnum Sardiniae included the freedom
of the social classes to represent and denounce the unauthorized activities and
offences of their functionaries to the king. But they had a deeper impact on the
set of binary and reciprocal relations that wove through European society after
the demise of serfdom. In its radical asymmetry, the rapport between serf and
lord had barred any rapport that entailed reciprocity among men or groups, as
well as representation of any kind.34
The rejection of the condition of the servi had been causing internal tension
throughout Western Europe ever since the tenth century, but in Sardinia it was
long suppressed by the persistence of despotic forms of the “economy of the
home,” and the social institution of serfdom met with a crisis only in the thir-
teenth century. Throughout the fourteenth century, the emancipation of servi
accelerated markedly and reached its final stage mid-century, when the short-
age of men became drastic, due to extermination by the Black Death and the
massacres caused by the wars between Aragon and Arborea. Even within the
feudal system, an effort to cancel every residual distinction between freedmen
and servi was present in the countryside: all men were officially recognized as
homines subject to the same jurisdiction. On Arborea’s front as well, the peo-
ple’s call to fight the foreign invader entailed a different consideration of their
rights. Furthermore, the confrontation between the two contenders also mani-
fested itself in the competition to attract the surviving populace within their
respective borders. It is not clear which side anticipated the other in conceding
freedom to the last serfs, an accusation that both sides reciprocally hurled at
the other, each claiming that they were doing it to undermine the other.35
However, this series of measures progressively unraveled on both sides. In
1355, the fifth constitution of parliament recognized the right of all Sardinians
to transfer their own possessions and goods, insofar as they adhered to certain
conditions, such as the demonstration of sufficient guarantees and a sworn
pledge that they not transfer their property in the territories of the Arborea,
Doria, or Malaspina families.36 An article in the Peace of 1388 deregulated the
34 Otto Hintze, Stato e società (Bologna 1980), pp. 111–137.
35 Anatra, Dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia, p. 241.
36 Meloni, Il Parlamento, pp. 166–167.