82 Bouloux
Mediterranean island, at the heart of the world of antiquity, a space that me-
dieval scholars felt to have been sufficiently described by the ancient authors.
These same elements were conserved and transmitted by the cartographers
who elaborated the large medieval world maps during the thirteenth century.
In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the cartographic contour of the
island became more precise, without coming to rest in a uniform image. Like
other islands, Sardinia would be a space of cartographic experimentation,
based on the synthesis of charts, Ptolemaic maps, and a mixture of modern
terms and terms from antiquity, producing a superimposition of ancient and
modern spaces. Yet it would also remain tied to the common tradition, the
excerpts chosen by Henricus Martellus were the same as those to be found in
the encyclopedists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: Pliny, Solinus, and
Isidore of Seville.
During the same period, new details incorporated into the descriptive texts
would formulate an identity for Sardinia based on its wealth of natural resourc-
es and the opposition between the space of the interior, mountainous and in-
habited by “barbarians,” in contrast to the more urbanized coastline, an identity
schema that the scholars of the sixteenth century would be sure to develop.33
Translated by Christian Hubert
33 Antonello Mattone, “Segni insulari. Idea e percezione della Sardegna nell’età moderna,” in
Quel mar che la terra inghirlanda. In ricordo di Marco Tangheroni, eds Franco Cardini and
Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, II (Rome, 2007), pp. 479–498.