52 Schena
Actually, however, many reasons lie behind the lacuna in the documents pre-
served in the island’s archives: the effect of wars, termites, and natural and
random disasters should not be underestimated, while distinctions based on
place and period need to be made.
According to Gabriella Olla Repetto, human negligence seems to have
played a decisive role in the dispersion of documentary material related to
Catalan-Aragonese, and later, Spanish domination.2 As early as the fifteenth
century, the scarcity of documents required for administrative purposes with-
in the royal offices of the island led to a continual demand for copies from the
Archives of the Crown of Aragón in Barcelona or other Iberian archives.3
The situation grew even worse at the point of the kingdom of Sardinia’s
transition into the Savoy dynasty. Addressing his sovereign, the first viceroy
of Savoy, Filippo Guglielmo Pallavicino, the baron of Saint-Remy (1720–1723),
deplored the absence in the island’s archives of documents needed by him to
carry out governmental activities and openly stated that he held the Spaniards
responsible for this state of affairs, insomuch as in recent times “they had car-
ried off more than a few written documents, above all the correspondence of
sovereign representatives, in the hope that the island would revert to them.”4
In 1875, recalling the proposal made by Felice Giuseppe Giaime, the intendant-
general of Sardinia in 1777, Giovanni Pillito “pointed to Spain’s reclamation of
Sardinian documents on the basis of the Treaty of Utrecht,”5 but by this point it
was a matter of requests motivated above all by scholarly demands and in any
case was equally destined to remain unheeded.
The organized transfer of Sardinian documents from the archives of the
Iberian Peninsula dates back to the Catalan-Aragonese period. The original
records drafted in the offices that managed the royal patrimony on the island,
for example, must have been sent to Barcelona to be submitted to the auditor
general (Maestro Razionale), and were then carefully guarded in his archive,
whereas Sardinian magistrates often remained permanently deprived of their
own documents. It is true that clear-cut royal regulations authorized the
2 Gabriella Olla Repetto, Saggio di fonti dell’Archivio della Corona d’Aragona di Barcellona, rela-
tive alla Sardegna aragonese (1323–1479), vol. I, Gli anni 1323–1396 (Rome, 1975), p. 9.
3 Giuseppina Catani, “Alcune note sulle carte catalano-atagonesi conservate nell’Archivio
di Stato di Cagliari,” in Milites, eds Alberto Monteverde and Graziano Fois (Cagliari, 1997),
pp. 305–315.
4 Francesco Loddo Canepa, “Gli archivi di Spagna e la storia Sarda,” Studi Sardi, 9/1–3 (1950),
pp. 142–214: 147; 142–143 nota 1; 144–46.
5 Ibid., 142.