Sardinia As A Crossroads In The Mediterranean 41
regarded positions in those cities. On occasion, Jews won certain significant
“relative” freedoms, compared to continental Italy, such as exemption from
extra taxation, proselytization, and the need to wear Jewish identification tags
on their garments. However, by the 1480s, restrictions on Jewish movement
came into effect throughout Spain and its colonies, limiting movement on and
off the island, and leading to emigration from Sardinia, as Sardinian Jews fled
to southern Italy. Those who remained were forced to convert to Catholicism
and became known as conversos. At this point we turn from Jewish to Christian
history.
Raimondo Turtas’ book is the definitive history of the Sardinian church
through the twenty-first century.113 His chapter in this volume begins with
the church’s contact with the island’s “pagan” populations, and the Christians
who came to Sardinia from North Africa, fleeing Vandal and Arian invaders.
Turtas synthesizes the narrative of the church by using all available docu-
ments and papal correspondence from local repositories and other Christian
centers in the Mediterranean. He builds on over a century of earlier histories
of the church, updating them by melding them with current interpretations of
Sardinian history.114 For example, Gregory the Great inaugurated contact with
Sardinia and began a dialogue that was carried out in epistolary form and later
collected as the Registrum Gregoriano. After introducing the Monothelitic cri-
sis in the Eastern church and the early theological debates between Byzantine
and Western Christendom in the council’s “lively” relationship with Rome,
Turtas chronicles the slow and peaceful transition into the early Middle Ages,
when Sardinia was granted autonomy within the Byzantine Empire.
In the next chapter, Henrike Haug uses visible, public inscriptions and doc-
uments to zoom in on the dispute between the two maritime republics. The
feud dates to events of the early eleventh century, where former allies, Pisa and
Genoa, defeated the Saracens on the continent, at sea, and in Sicily, only to
turn on one another over Sardinia. By the mid-twelfth century, the feud had be-
come an international controversy in which the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa
was petitioned to mediate. The claims of each side were made to the emperor,
as well as being presented as evidence and testimony in public view: they were
dramatically carved in stone and placed on the facade of Pisa’s cathedral.
Gian Giacomo Ortu’s chapter explores the political, social, and economic
character of Sardinia, from the late eleventh to the early fifteenth centuries.
Here, the author dissects the who’s-who of Sardinian power and how the
113 Turtas, Storia della Chiesa in Sardegna.
114 Turtas draws upon foundational studies, such as Pietro Martini, Storia Ecclesiastica di
Sardegna (1839–1841); Damiano Filia, La Sardegna Cristiana, 2 vols (Sassari, 1909).