Sardinia As A Crossroads In The Mediterranean 35
the “feudal” relation with the new Crown was completed.100 Regarding the
subdivision of land among the different feudal families during the Spanish
occupation, see the helpful maps of Raimondo Zedda’s Atlante dei Feudi della
Sardegna. 101
From a geographical and cartographical point of view, a key document that
served many generations of seafarers was La géographie de Ptolémée, translat-
ed from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin during the Renaissance period.102
The few Arab maps that document Sardinia have been collected in a volume by
Margherita Pinna,103 but this is yet another area that could benefit from a reex-
amination of the link between Ptolemy’s world and that of the early medieval
Arab cartographers, such as Al-Idrisi. In 1550, the jurist Sigismondo Arquer, or
his father, published the earliest Western map of Cagliari.104 By the nineteenth
century, geographically questionable maps of Sardinia were substituted with
more precise territorial descriptions.105 The first scientific map (scale 1:250,000)
of Sardinia was not created until 1834, when the traveler Alberto La Marmora
collaborated with Major De Candia to produce a map to accompany the first
encyclopedic description of his Voyage en Sardaigne.106 After World War II,
100 A. de la Torre, ed., Documentos sobre relaciones internationals de los Reyes Catolico, I–VI
(Barcelona, 1949–1966); Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, Diplomatario aragonés de
Ugone II de Arborea (Sassari, 2005).
101 Raimondo Pinna, Atlante dei Feudi in Sardegna. Il periodo Spagnolo 1479–1700 (Cagilari,
1999).
102 Patrick Gautier Dalché, La géographie de Ptolémée en Occident (IVe–XVIe siècle) (Turnhout,
2009).
103 Margherita Pinna, Il Mediterraneo e la Sardegna nella cartografia musulmana: (dall’VIII al
XVI secolo) (Nuoro, 1996).
104 Sigismondo Arquer, Sardiniae brevis historia et description, ed. Maria Teresa Laneri, with
an introduction by Raimondo Turtas (Cagliari, 2007). Recently the map has been reattrib-
uted to his father, Giovanni Antonio Arquer, by Marco Cadinu, Cagliari. Forma e Progetto
della città storica (Cagliari, 2009), pp. 102–124.
105 Giovanni Francesco Fara, De chorographia Sardiniae libri dvo. De rebvs sardois libri qvatvor
(Paris, 1835).
106 Alberto della Marmora, Itinéraire de l’Ille de Sardaigne, ou faire suite au voyage en cette
contrée, I–II (1860); translated and edited in Italian by Maria Grazia Longhi, La Marmora,
Alberto Ferrero: conte di Itinerario dell’isola di Sardegna (Nuoro, 1997). For further informa-
tion on the elaboration of the local cartography, see also Laura Zanini, “Confronti catasta-
li,” in I Catasti e la storia dei luoghi. Storia dell’Urbanistica. Annuario Nazionale di Storia
della Città e del Territorio, ed. Marco Cadinu (Rome, 2013), pp. 175–191.