Archives And Documents 57
Sardinia. In an interesting analysis of the Middle Ages in southern Italy, Mario
Del Treppo observed that the state of the sources in that area was a problem
and he contended that “the historian of the medieval South is working with
extremely precarious documentary bases that allow him more than anything
else to collect and produce evidence for or against already established theses,
but nearly never to formulate new ones in a rigorously and originally docu-
mented manner.”18 As for the South, what at first glance is striking as well as
disconcerting is the precarious state of preservation, dispersion, and the ir-
reparable loss of documents. An elucidating example of the problem is again
offered by Del Treppo; while preparing the ninth volume of the Italia Pontificia
series—on the dioceses of Sannio, Apulia, and Lucania—Holtzamann was
compelled more than once to end his investigation with a disconsolate “de
archivis nihil.”19 By comparison, the volume dedicated to Sardinia and edited
by Kehr20 in that same series is relatively more complete, or at least does not
reveal as many gaps.
One of the principal causes of the dispersion of Sardinian sources are the
conflicts—especially those of the period of the giudicati—whose history from
the late twelfth century was marked by extended periods of war;21 meanwhile,
the fourteenth century was characterized by the confrontation first between the
Catalan-Aragonese and the Pisans, and later between the Catalan-Aragonese
and the Sardo-Arboreans;22 consequently one may speak of a conflict situa-
tion that lasted for nearly two centuries. One of the most symbolically pow-
erful means of striking the enemy in the Middle Ages—though also in other
periods—was through the destruction of documents and archives; was this
the fate of the repositories of documents of giudici and post-giudici Sardinia?
The Catalan-Aragonese may have deliberately destroyed the public and private
records of the civilization of the giudice of Arborea with whom they were in
18 Del Treppo, La libertà della memoria, pp. 121–122.
19 “From the archives, nothing,” ibid., p. 122.
20 Repertorio dei privilegi e delle lettere pontificie prima del 1198, in Italia Pontificia, X. Calabria-
Insulae, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum, compiled by Paulus Fridolinus Kehr and Dieter
Girgensohn (ed.) (Zurich, 1975).
21 See Alberto Boscolo, La Sardegna bizantina e alto-giudicale (Sassari, 1978); Alberto
Boscolo, La Sardegna dei Giudicati (Cagliari, 1979); Francesco Artizzu, La Sardegna pisana
e genovese (Sassari, 1985); John Day, La Sardegna sotto la dominazione pisano-genovese.
Dal secolo XI al secolo XIV (Turin, 1987); Gian Giacomo Ortu, La Sardegna dei giudici
(Nuoro, 2005).
22 On the conflicts that characterize the history of fourteenth-century Sardinia, see
Francesco Cesare Casula, Profilo storico della Sardegna catalano-aragonese (Sassari, 1982);
Francesco Cesare Casula, La Sardegna aragonese, 2 vols (Sassari, 1990).