Sardinia As A Crossroads In The Mediterranean 43
courts in 1492. At the time, the Spanish Inquisition was corrupted from its goal
of religious purification and became more concerned with pursuing economic
interests. They, along with a class of bureaucrats and functionaries, took ad-
ministrative control of Sardinia with the expectation that commerce would
again flourish. A variety of factors worked against these prospects, including
Sardinia’s obligation to defend the Crown by providing it with money and sol-
diers. Sardinia’s participation in the Thirty Years’ War, on the Spanish side, cost
it five percent of its population, and combined with devastatingly bad weather
and plague, undermined Spanish attempts to free up markets. Sardinia’s long-
term commercial development was frequently sacrificed to the Crown’s “glob-
al” needs. The end of the Thirty Years’ War brought momentary stability and
ended most of Spain’s claim over its empire. In the vacuum left by the Crown,
civil strife between Spanish settlers and native Sardinians corroded high soci-
ety and nearly led to war on the island.
From history, we revert to the latest archaeological work in the field. Marco
Milanese has two chapters in this volume. The first summarizes the major
themes that have occupied archaeologists working in Sardinia for the last
three decades, many of which address traditional narratives that, until now,
have largely been based on documents. Milanese uses the GIS, drawn from
field surveys, excavations, and documents collected since the 1970s, to analyze
and reinterpret sites and regions studied previously. Employing this data has
yielded great rewards and permitted new conclusions to be drawn from an
ever-widening pool of information on a regional scale. For example, the study
of deserted villages, mentioned above, is one such well-founded archaeologi-
cal topic of interest, which has been fundamental since John Day published
his study on deserted villages in the early 1970s.116 In his chapter on “The Role
of Archaeology in Rethinking Sardinia,” Milanese not only takes up the aban-
donment of villages, but explores the site with a longue dureé approach, from
formation to desertion. This chapter also treats the rise of monasteries from
an archaeological perspective, and begs the question: which settlements came
first, monasteries or villages? By identifying and distinguishing different types
of settlements in the rural landscape of the island (domos, curtes, and don-
nicàlias), Milanese concludes that the villages and the landscapes around
them largely predate the monasteries that later settled in their vicinity, revers-
ing the traditional belief.
Milanese then turns to castles, the first generation of which appear with the
arrival of Pisan and Genoese interests in the eleventh century, and continued
116 Day, Villaggi abbandonati in Sardegna dal Trecento al Settecento. Inventario (Paris, 1973);
Milanese, Vita e morte dei Villaggi rurali.