Contribution Of Archaeology To Medieval And Modern Sardinia 293
construction of citadels in the giudicato of Torres.77 Several scholars have
questioned Fara’s sources,78 a process concluded by Paolo Maninchedda and
Alessandro Soddu, who revealed that Fara had drawn his information from an
anonymous fifteenth-century chronicle that expanded on older fourteenth-
century sources, through which continental seigniors tried to retain their
rights in Sardinia against the Catalan-Aragonese conquerors by vaunting and
boasting of their centuries-long seigniorial status on the island.79 After the
early studies of Foiso Fois,80 Jean Michel Poisson used scientific methods to
identify two phases of fortification: the first, between the tenth and twelfth
centuries, at the initiative of the giudicati; the second, in the first half of the
thirteenth century, was a continental seigniorial initiative.81 In 1998, a series of
emergency and preventive excavations at the castle of Monteleone, along with
the restoration of the castles of Bosa, Alghero, and Castelgenovese, led to a siz-
able critical mass of data that made it possible to date these citadels to the late
thirteenth century. At Alghero and Castelgenovese, the oldest indicators were
fragments of Spiral Ware of Campanian manufacture.
After the death of Adelasia di Torres in 1259, the last direct heir of the reign-
ing dynasty of the giudicato of Torres, the principal Genoese (the Doria) and
Tuscan (the Malaspina) families—which had been living in the region as
powerful seigniorial estate holders for at least a century (as well as the Pisan
giudicato of Cagliari, which went through something analogous)—as well as
Pisa and the Giudicato of Arborea set out to subdivide and fortify the ancient
territory, which they did fairly quickly. After some encounters in the 1260s, the
new regional aristocracy consolidated in the 1270s. The earliest evidence of the
citadels of Castelgenovese, Monteleone (1272), Monteforte (1275), Casteldoria,
Bosa, Osilo, and Alghero (1281), which sanctioned the transformation of the sei-
gnior from farming into territorial estates, date to this period.82 The emergence
of fortifications seems to have been a demanding investment for the new po-
litical class in the new institutional framework that followed the dissolution of
the giudicato of Torres, particularly for powerful lords, who relied on castles to
represent them. Thus, castles serve as an archaeological index of the expansion
77 Day, Anatra, and Scaraffia, La Sardegna Medievale e Moderna.
78 Among others, see Rosalind Brown (1984) and Francesco Bertino (1985).
79 Maninchedda (2000); Soddu, “Il monastero di San Pietro di Nurki”; Soddu (1996).
80 Foiso Fois, Castelli della Sardegna medioevale, ed. Barbara Fois (Milan, 1992).
81 Jean-Michel Poisson, Habitats et fortifications (Lyons, 1983); Jean-Michel Poisson, Castelli
medievali di Sardegna (Florence, 1989), pp. 191–204; Jean-Michel Poisson, L’érection de
châteaux dans la Sardaigne (Caen, 1990).
82 Milanese, Vita e morte dei villaggi rurali, p. 288.