250 Ortu
areas.51 However, medieval sovereigns were generally more conditioned by
the view that their essential prerogative did not lie in lawmaking, but in rul-
ing on the law. It was precisely this power that Eleonora of Arborea attributed
to herself.
Eleonora likewise made shrewd use of her royal prerogatives when stipulat-
ing the peace of 1388. For the king of Aragon, the peace was obviously subject
to Eleonora and Brancaleone’s recognition of their condition of vassalage. In
his instructions to his delegate, Ximen Perez de Arenòs, Giovanni I suggested
that he “recipere et habere a dicta nobili judicissa et ab eius filio recognitionem
feudi quod in Sardiniae insula tenet pro nobis.” Moreover, in the preamble to
the draft of the treatise of 1386, Eleonora was forced into this role, declaring
herself as having “venir a obediencia e deguda subiecció” to the king of Aragon.52
Might not this devotion have been genuine, since, in the same draft from 1386,
Eleonora specified that she had come to a deal through the necessity “de liurar
Micer Branca e los Sarts presoners”? That it was not appears even more clear
in light of the truce’s chapters 14 and 15. The former specifies that the mutual
obligations of the two parties must be understood as equal, “així però com se
pot entendre de dret e de rahó entre señor a vassal e de vassal a señor.” That is,
the penalty for the possible violation of the peace was not the same for both
parties: the king of Aragon would certainly not lose his throne, while Eleonora
would not only lose her fief and rule, but would also become a “perjura bara
traïdora a costum de Cathalunya e fur de Aragó.” 53
However, the giudicessa of Arborea, who claimed that she would not be-
come involved in the political and legal realm of her interlocutor, did not share
the same reverence for the traditions of Catalonia and the statutes of Aragon.
Thus, having signed a fictive truce and regained Brancaleone, she once again
assumed the justice of arms.
Eleonora died in 1404 and Brancaleone was cast out of power in 1408,
when the elders of the giudicato offered the throne to a French relative of the
Arborea, Guglielmo of Narbona. In 1409, Martin Jr., king of Sicily, effectively
ended Arborea’s epic resistance with the defeat of Sanluri. In 1410, the last
giudice, Leonardo Cubello, almost immediately renounced the throne—by
now too uncomfortable—in order to retain the most fertile lands of the giudi-
cato as the marquis of Oristano.
51 Ennio Cortese, “Il tramonto del mito dell’Impero universale,” in Panta rei. Studi dedicati a
Manlio Bellomo, ed. Orazio Condorelli (Rome, 2004), pp. 23–67.
52 Tola, Codex Diplomaticus Sardiniae, vol. 1, 2, CL, pp. 817, 822.
53 Tola, 818, 827–828.