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CHAPTER 10
Spanish Sardinia: Conflicts and Alliances
Giovanni MurgiaAfter the marriage of Isabel and Ferdinand in 1479, the dynastic union of the
two Crowns of Castile and Aragon established the base for the effective union
of Spain, not only on the juridical-institutional level, but also on a religious one
rooted in Roman Catholicism. The previous year, the Viceroy Nicolò Carrós’s
defeat of the marquis of Oristano Leonardo Alagon at the Battle of Macomer
concluded the Aragonese conquest of the kingdom of Sardinia.1 Alagon’s ini-
tiative did not spring from a political desire to restore Sardinia’s ancient au-
tonomy and independence and free her of Aragon’s yoke, as a certain type of
history steeped in the ideological conditioning of a sardista matrix would have
it. Rather, it was set amid battles among powerful noble families of Iberian
origin, who wished to affirm their hegemony within their own feudal strata,
and above all their ties to the Crown. After a very long period during which sol-
diers and armed bands covered the length and breadth of Sardinia’s territory,
a peaceful era began that lasted until the early eighteenth century, when, with
the extinction of the Hapsburg dynasty and various turns of political-military
and diplomatic fortune, the island passed first to Austria then definitively to
the House of Savoy.
The consolidation of Spanish rule was to be realized within the context of a
monarchy planning to extend its political, military, and mercantile supremacy,
not only across the Mediterranean, but, after the discovery of the Americas,
even across the ocean. This reinforcement placed the island in a web of far
broader interests and exchanges, on the one hand, while granting it a second-
class political and economic role that reduced it to an insignificant periphery,
on the other. With the expansionist agenda of the Spanish Crown, Sardinia lost
the importance it had once enjoyed in the kingdom of Aragon, by which it had
been regarded as a strategic point for preserving the kingdom’s command over
the Mediterranean throughout most of the fifteenth century. Moreover, with
the suppression of internal opposition, the process of Sardinia’s feudalization
gradually unfolded over the course of the sixteenth century, by which point
the island had acquired a much clearer physiognomic definition. The process
of territorial stabilization as well as the definition of the legal prerogatives
1 Mirella Scarpa Senes, La guerra e la disfatta del marchese di Oristano (Cagliari, 1997).