66 Schena
Among the projects to publish the sources preserved in the archives of the
principal cities of Sardinia, of particular interest is the study of the documents
in the Municipal Archives of Cagliari, which houses a collection of original
materials, Pergamene e Carte reali, produced in the Chancellery of the Crown
of Aragon, first by the Catalan-Aragonese and later by the Spanish sovereigns;
these documents are devoted, by and large, to the city of Cagliari and thus fun-
damental to the history of the most populous and important city in Sardinia,
regarded by the rulers of the Crown of Aragon as cap i clau del Regne; caput
et fortitudo totius insule Sardinie. The close relationship between the city and
monarch characterizes the entire history of Catalan-Aragonese Cagliari (four-
teenth-fifteenth centuries), and, inasmuch as the “royal papers”—definitely
the most important core collection due to its consistency and the importance
of the letters received by the city councilors in the late Middle Ages—offer
written testimony of the direct, unmediated relationship between the sover-
eign and city councilors, they belong among the most significant and inter-
esting sources for reconstructing the institutional, political, and economic
life of the city, as well as the divisions and the organization of municipal
power and its magistracy from the early fourteenth century to the time of the
Catholic Monarchs. The author—in collaboration with Anna Maria Oliva, se-
nior researcher at the Cagliari CNR Institute of the History of Mediterranean
Europe—has edited the first volume of the “royal letters” to the city of Cagliari
under the aegis of the FIRB project “Euro-Mediterranean Sources and National
Identity,” directed and coordinated by Professor Massimo Miglio, president of
the Italian Historical Institute for the Middle Ages.57
57 Lettere regie alla città di Cagliari, eds. Anna Maria Oliva and Olivetta Schena. The Italian
Historical Institute for the Middle Ages includes in its series the new edition—edited by
Maria Giuseppina Meloni and Maria Grazia Mele, research associates at the Institute of
the History of Mediterranean Europe of the CNR of Cagliari—of the Llibre Vert of the
city of Cagliari, a voluminous collection of privileges conceded to the city by the Catalan-
Aragonese, Spanish, and Savoy kings of the kingdom of Sardinia in the course of the four-
teenth–fifteenth centuries. The first edition of the municipal cartulary owes its existence
to Raffaele Di Tucci, Il libro verde della città di Cagliari (Cagliari, 1925). Alessandra Cioppi
and Sebastiana Nocco, in turn, will prepare the new edition of the patrominial register
entitled Repartimiento de Cerdeña, already published by Prospero de Bofarull i Mascaró
in the series Colección de documentos inéditos del Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, vol. XI
(Barcelona, 1856).