58 Schena
contact from the twelfth century to the time of Barisone I of Arborea (1146–
1185) by virtue of the marriage of the giudice with the Catalan Agalbursa de
Bas, and more intensely from 1323–1324, through the anti-Pisan alliance with
Hugh II (1321–1335), with whom they had violent confrontations between 1354
and 1420, with brief and transitory interludes of peace.
This reading of the losses suffered by the Sardinian archives in the giudici
period is, too simplistic and, clashes with the “archival policy” of the kings of
the Crown of Aragon23—jealous custodians of their archives and the “found-
ers” of an archive within ten years of the conquest of the regnum Sardiniae
et Corsicae; Alfonso IV the Kind established the first general archive of
Aragonese Sardinia—the territorial jurisdiction of which corresponded to that
of the entire regnum—in the Castle of Cagliari, the capital of the kingdom, on
21 December 1332. The functions of the nascent arxiu real were listed in the
preservation of all the book-keeping documents, capibrevia, libri, caterni et
alie scripture compotorum, prepared on the island by royal officials and private
contractors involved in the collection of royal rights; all documents, registra,
and anything else produced by the general governing body of the regnum; all
documents, instrumenta, and anything else implemented in the interest of the
court on the island. The archive, likewise assigned custody of political papers
(of the governing body), was entrusted to Bernard Dez Coll, deputy auditor
general of the Crown of Aragon, who was sent to the island to carry out an in-
spection of the accounting records of the administrators, and in particular the
accounting books of the customs house and salt mines of Cagliari.24
The documentation deposited from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries
in the arxiu real of the kingdom of Sardinia—today preserved in the miscella-
neous collection entitled Antico Archivio Regio in Cagliari’s State Archive—has
also suffered substantial losses. In order to fill the many gaps in local documen-
tation, numerous investigations have been conducted since the second half of
the twentieth century in Barcelona, where the deposits of the Archive of the
Crown of Aragon have been systematically probed, as well as in Madrid and
23 See Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, “Los archivos reales o la memoria del poder,” in El
poder real en la Corona de Aragón (Siglos XIV–XVI), XV Congreso de Historia de la Corona
de Aragón ( Jaca, 20–25 September, 1993), Actas, I/2 (Zaragoza, 1996), pp. 123–139; Rafael
Conde y Delgado de Molina, Reyes y archivos de la Corona de Aragón. Siete siglos de regla-
mentación y praxis archivísticas (siglos XII–XIX) (Zaragoza, 2008).
24 Gabriella Olla Repetto, “La politica archivistica di Alfonso IV d’Aragona,” in Studi sulle
istituzioni amministrative e giudiziarie della Sardegna nei secoli XIV e XV (Cagliari, 2005),
pp. 71–98, esp. pp. 85–86.