Establishing Power And Law 249
with the cry, “Arborea! Arborea!” from the time of the revolt of Alghero.49 Such
respect did not decrease and was transferred to his successors, until their final
defeat on the battlefield in Sanluri in 1409.
Mariano’s son, Hugo III, was no less determined in battle than his father,
until he fell victim to a plot in Oristano, which took his life on 6 March 1383. In
the absence of other direct male heirs, the succession fell on Federico, a minor
and the son of Eleonora, Hugo’s sister, who assumed the regency together with
her husband Brancaleone Doria. Eleonora violated the feudal pact of 1323 by
forcing the elders of the giudicato to recognize Federico’s succession, without
caring about the absence of the king of Aragon. She demonstrated the temper
of a true sovereign and never desisted from threatening royal territories, even
when Brancaleone was held hostage in Cagliari after going to Barcelona to pro-
pitiate royal favor.
In 1386, there were some peace negotiations, which were interrupted by the
death of Peter the Ceremonious, and concluded by his successor, John I, in
- Once Brancaleone was freed, the peace turned out to be fictive and the
war resumed its course, even though both sides were nearing the end of their
resources in a Sardinia that was exhausted by the endless drain of men and vil-
lages. The end of hostilities would, in fact, represent the renunciation of one of
the two factions’ claim to sovereignty over the island’s territory—a renuncia-
tion impossible for either.
In 1384, the year after her brother Hugo’s assassination, Eleonora con-
ceded possession of Padru Maiore-Forquillo’s saltus to the homines of Santa
Lussurgiu, a large village of Montiferru. On this occasion, she declared her-
self to be acting in the role of “iudicissa Arboree Dei gracia,” and not by the
concession of any worldly authority. In order to confute the claim to author-
ity by Arborea’s giudici, Eleonora used a passage in the preamble to the Carta
de Logu, according to which she attributed to herself the power to “servarj
sa iusticia (administer justice),” but not to pass laws.50 The note she cited is
anachronistic and it is very rare for a medieval sovereign to attribute to her-
or himself a prerogative—the ius condendi—which at the time belonged by
right only to God and to his earthly reflection, the emperor. Ennio Cortese has
observed that, in the first half of the fourteenth century, treatises attacking
imperial ideology and laying claim to the full autonomy of kings, even with
respect to facere leges (making laws), began to appear in French and Iberian
49 Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, “La Sardegna aragonese,” in Guidetti 1988–1990, vol. 2,
p. 268.
50 Jesús Lalinde Abadía, “La ‘Carta de Logu’ nella civiltà giuridica della Sardegna medievale,”
in Birocchi and Mattone, La Carta de Logu, pp. 13–49.