Urban Planning And New Towns In Medieval Sardinia 513
to the giudicato era in a thoroughly consensual system of taxation and religious
conversion.32 This otherwise undocumented phenomenon paints a picture of
a region that was particularly rich in reciprocal relations with the Maghreb,
and whose material culture seems to have been significant during the early
ninth century, when Islamic policy was consolidated in Sicily; it still does not
seem possible to distinguish the nature of the contacts between Sardinia and
the other Mediterranean regions with Muslim settlements during the eighth
and ninth centuries.33
If it is true that material evidence of Arab culture is also found on Sardinia
in eras marked by European and Italian “communal” culture, this condition of
cultural comingling, common to other areas of the Mediterranean, might have
lasted even longer. In this regard, Sardinia is an interesting case study, given
that Islamic influence over urban models persists even after the “expulsion”
of the Muslim population from the island at the beginning of the eleventh
century.34 With these cultural foundations the judgeship society will naturally
I sigilli bizantini della ΣΑΡΔΗΝΙΑ (Rome, 2004); and Walter Emil Kaegi, “Gightis and Olbia
in the Pseudo-Methodius Apocalypse and their Significance,” Byzantinische Forschungen
26 (2000), pp. 161–167. During the recent conference “Settecento-Millecento. Storia, ar-
cheologia e arte nei ‘secoli bui’ del Mediterraneo,” further Islamic-related contexts were
presented by Piero Fois (Cagliari), Pier Giorgio Spanu and Raimondo Zucca (Tharros
and Nora), Domingo Dettori (on Tergu), Donatella Mureddu and Rossana Martorelli,
Donatella Salvi, Fabio Pinna (on Luogosanto), Rubens D’Oriano and Giovanna Pietra
(on Olbia).
32 Relationships between Christian and Muslim border areas were not only military. In fact,
the stabilization of military outposts (Ribat) sought to promote the opening of local mar-
kets and to collect revenues from the taxation of the unconverted; see Bianca Scarcia
Amoretti, Il mondo musulmano. Quindici secoli di storia (Rome, 1998), pp. 54–58; Eliyahu
Ashtor, A Social History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (London, 1976). On the re-
percussions in Sardinia of the cultivation of conquered lands, see Fois, “Il ruolo della
Sardegna,” p. 18.
33 Cadinu, “Elementi di derivazione islamica,” pp. 387–424.
34 After the ninth century, the word commune refers to the municipality as a center of power.
The return of the Iberian Peninsula to the Christian world and the Catalonian conquest
of Sardinia at the end of the 1420s promoted important Iberian migrations from Sardinia
imbued with Jewish and Islamic traditions; see Cadinu, Urbanistica medievale, p. 21. Prior
examples are Giba de Saraginis (cited in 1206 on the border of the Cagliari Giudicato),
the Kufic sarcophagus in Assemini from 1077–1078, the presence of numerous Arab ser-
vants registered in the condaghi (church registries), like Jorgi Sarakinu, Mical Sarakinu,
Saraquino Kerellu; the persistence of the Arab term serra used to indicate an important
street, and the ceramics and other artifacts found. Cadinu, Urbanistica medievale, pp.
16–28; see Michelle Hobart, “Merchants, Monks, and Medieval Sardinian Architecture,”