Spanish Sardinia: Conflicts And Alliances 253
granted to the feudal class on an institutional level, was accelerated by the
shift to allodial titles, that is, emphyteutic leases of vast territories, to the great
houses of the Aragonese, Catalan, and Valencian nobility, such as the Castelví,
the Carroz, and the Centelles.
Naturally, the consolidation of the feudal system was to have heavy reper-
cussions, especially on life in rural areas, with pressure on the community’s
politico-institutional autonomy and particularly on the economy and social
dynamics. In reality, political, institutional, and juridical control, as well as
the economic-productive process were significantly conditioned by the feu-
dal matrix. Indeed, the feudatory administered justice, imposed and collected
tributes, and above all controlled the economy. All of this led to the crystal-
lization of a three-year land rotation model, characterized by a cycle of grain
and legume production that alternated with pasturage and was practical for
a manorial economy of pure subsistence and the collective use of territorial
resources. Heavy loads tend to fall on an economy dominated by grain crops
(the strategic resource par excellence), including feudal tributes, ecclesiastical
tithes, food rationing privileges of cities, royal revenues, and rigid commer-
cial regulations that stifle the free marketing of surplus production.2 The free
market was opened only after the cities and kingdom’s demand for provisions
had been met. Exports, however, were subject to rigorous constraints and con-
trols, especially in the case of grain. These exports could only be carried out
of a few qualified ports, known as caricatori. Justified initially by the needs of
military engagements, this relentless mechanism for dealing with provisions
later tended to join generically urban interests voiced by an immense and het-
erogeneous “royal” class composed of the military, functionaries, merchants,
and artisans.
After the discovery of the Americas, which shifted traffic to Atlantic routes,
Sardinia became a vast overseas emporium producing primary materials,
such as metals, salt, coral, tuna, grain, leather, cheese, cheap woolen goods,
and other agricultural products at low cost. In the new geography of com-
mercial exchange, Sardinia was relegated to a secondary zone—a ruta de
las islas—which handled the commerce between the larger islands and the
western Mediterranean. This gradually extinguished those commercial activi-
ties practiced by local merchants, which had succeeded in carving out a space
of some scope within an environment in which foreign trade was otherwise
monopolized.3
2 Giovanni Murgia, Comunità e baroni. La Sardegna spagnola: secoli XV–XVII (Rome, 2000).
3 Bruno Anatra, La Sardegna dall’unificazione aragonese ai Savoia (Turin, 1987), pp. 175–326;
see also Ortu and Bresc infra in this volume.