286 Milanese
5 Villages and Monasteries
New archaeological data has improved our understanding of the development
of religious establishments in Sardinia, as well as their rapport with nearby
villages. The dynamic conjectured by the first systematic studies of medieval
villages, particularly with respect to the presumed role of monasteries in gen-
erating and attracting new villages, was a favorite subject among scholars in
the 1970s. The case study of Orria Pithinna (Chiaramonti) in Anglona, which is
still ongoing, seems to invert the traditional paradigm that viewed the rise of
villages as the result of developments promoted by religious establishments.
For instance, Angela Terrosu has posited the monastery’s role in generat-
ing the village at the site of Taniga,55 which bordered (after 1272) the territory
of the medieval (as well as that of present-day) commune of Sassari, where
the church of Santa Maria de Tanacle was part of a much larger allocation of
landed property to the monastery of Montecassino by Pope Calixtus II on 16
September 1122.56 It was part of a list of churches that had been donated (with
their possessions) to establish monastic coenobia; from Sant’Elia and Enoch di
Montesanto, early nuclei dating to 1065, and Santa Maria di Bubalis, belonging
to the Cassinese colony in Sardinia during the reign of Mariano I,57 to the im-
portant monastery of Santa Maria di Tergu.58 In the case of Taniga, the absence
of any written evidence of a villa Tanega (Taniga) until the fourteenth century,
when the village surfaces in sources with reference to the Catalan feudaliza-
tion of the territory, prevents us from confirming Terrosu Asole’s opinion.
In analyses of individual cases of the relations between monastery and vil-
lage, such as that of Orria Pithinna, the chronology that can be deduced from
written sources from both poles of the settlements is a central problem until a
voice is granted to archaeological evidence, as in the case of Tergu. Recent digs
have enabled excavators to recognize a seigniorial curtis on the grounds of which
the Cassinese monastic complex later implanted itself.59 At Orria Pithinna, the
55 Angela Terrosu Asole, L’insediamento umano medioevale e i centri abbandonati tra il secolo
XIV ed il secolo XVII supplemento al fascicolo II dell’Atlante della Sardegna (Rome, 1974),
p. 51.
56 Agostino Saba, Montecassino e la Sardegna medioevale. Note storiche e codice diplomatico
sardo-cassinese (Montecassino, 1927), p. 155.
57 On the document, see Paolo Maninchedda, Medioevo latino e volgare in Sardegna
(Cagliari, 2007), p. 114.
58 For a summary of monasticism in Sardinia until the fifteenth century, see Martorelli,
Tharros, San Giovanni, pp. 53–54.
59 Dettori, “Abbazia di Santa Maria di Tergu”; Giovanna Liscia, “Santa Maria di Tergu:
un’abbazia cassinese in Sardegna,” in Committenza, scelte insediative e organizzazione