528 Cadinu
Sardinia (probably Bosa and Porto Torres). The 1202 letter attests to the inter-
ruption of previously friendly relations, and to the Tunisian prince’s threat to
send his warships against the coasts of the judge of Torres.60
To conclude, the judges, with clear differences within the island, are active
city builders and control their ports. Oristano, Sassari, Bosa, and Posada, to-
gether with many other smaller centers, preserve the traces of a Mediterranean
urbanism; together with the linear “borghi,” such as Tissi, Santa Giusta o
Villamassargia (and perhaps Santa Igia), they all provide the connective tissue
between the judges’ commissions and European urban trends.61
4 The New Cagliari and Cities in the Thirteenth Century
The most important urban development in thirteenth-century Sardinia was
the Pisans’ construction of the Castello district in Cagliari (Castellum Castri
de Kallari, Castro Novo Montis de Castro) in 1215–1216. This gesture sought to
60 The presence of merchants from Sardinia in North African ports has been signaled in the
past, but never truly considered. An Egyptian source mentions the payment of a decima
by Sardinians to Alexandria in 1170s, a fact that requires commercial and trading agree-
ments between merchants sent by a Sardinian judge and the merchants of Alexandria.
More specifically, it is worth mentioning that the decima is also testified in the same years
as a tax imposed upon Pisans by Tunis, as written in the 1186 treaty mentioned above: “[...]
Pisans are held to pay the decima weighing upon them according to the common agree-
ments and the well-known pacts [...] with the exception of barter goods between them
or ships that are sold to one another, because in these two cases they are not obliged by
the decima, nor one can require it from them,” mentioned in Amari, I diploma arabi, p.
- The traditional narrative does not take a position towards the Egyptian source, con-
sidered a difficult case to interpret, and when interpreted, is generally assumed to refer
to non-Sardinian merchants (!). In Soddu, Homines de Bonifacio, p. 4, n. 14 the conflict
among the two scholars, Tangheroni and Cahen, is well summarized: “[...] the two inter-
pretative hypotheses are that it’s either Muslim merchants settled in Southern Sardinia
(Cahen) or Pisan merchants present in Sardinia, already settled and therefore identified
as Sardinians (second hypothesis by Cahen and accepted by Tangheroni), since «there
is no other mention of a Muslim, nor a Christian relative to the participation of the
long range Mediterranean trades of Sardinian merchants» (Marco Tangheroni, Fonti e
problemi della storia del commercio mediterraneo nei secoli XI–XIV, in Ceramiche, città e
commerci nell’Italia tardo-medievale, Ravello 3–4 maggio 1993, edited by S. Gelichi, Sap,
Mantova 1998, pp. 11–22, p. 16; cfr. Claude Cahen, Douanes et commerce dans les ports
Méditerranéens de l’Egypte médiévale d’après le Minhadj d’Almakhzumi, in «Journal of the
economic and social History of the Orient», 7 (1964), pp. 217–314).”
61 Cadinu, Originalità e derivazioni, pp. 118–122.