90 Galoppini
enemies—the Lombards—who were mostly Arian. Pope Gregory the Great’s
concern was fully justified, as the Lombards were most likely backed by Pisa’s
powerful fleet.14
Many attempts were made by the Lombards to conquer Sardinia, as wit-
nessed by an epigraph found in Porto Torres, which celebrates the victory
of Constans II (641–668) over “the Lombard tyrants and [...] other barbar-
ians.” It is likely that Lombard dominion was not considered feasible on the
large islands of the Mediterranean (Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica), even though the
Lombards had very important contacts with the Sardinians. Liutprand, king of
the Lombards, paid a hefty sum to have the remains of Saint Augustine moved
when he found out that the Saracens “having devastated Sardinia, infested
even those places where at one time the bones of Saint Augustine, bishop, had
been transported and honorably buried in order to save them from defilement
by the barbarians.” The relics of the saint were brought to the basilica of San
Pietro in Ciel d’Oro (Pavia), where they can still be found today.15
Over the course of Late Antiquity, the class of the great lay landowners of
Sardinia disappeared. Manpower had diminished, making cultivation of the
large estates difficult, and many turned into marshy and uncultivated areas.
The church (the male and female monasteries, as well as the bishops, espe-
cially the metropolitan of Cagliari) assumed ownership of these vast territo-
ries, thereby overcoming the great crisis in rural Sardinia through a process of
designation.
The agricultural heritage of the island was made up of vast stretches of un-
worked land, great open fields for grazing, and small enclosed spaces, where
cereals, grapevines, and fruit trees were cultivated. During the centuries of the
“long Byzantine age,” autochthonous traditions were consolidated in Sardinia,
for instance in land cultivation and animal husbandry, while a new and pecu-
liar culture developed. But the island was still not completely excluded from
maritime traffic and Mediterranean events.16
On the basis of scarce written sources, it is difficult to draw even a conserva-
tive hypothesis as to the stability of the population that inhabited the island.
14 Marco Tangheroni, “Pisa, i Longobardi e la Sardegna,” in Dal mondo antico all’età contem-
poranea. Studi in onore di Manlio Brigaglia offerti dal Dipartimento di Storia dell’Università
di Sassari (Rome, 2001), pp. 171–190; Graziella Berti, Catia Renzi Rizzo, and Marco
Tangheroni, Il mare, la terra, il ferro. Ricerche su Pisa medievale (secoli VII–XIII) (Pisa,
2004), pp. 143–161.
15 Paolo Diacono, Storia dei Longobardi, ed. Lidia Capo (Milan, 1992), p. 348.
16 André Guillou, “La lunga età bizantina: politica ed econonomia,” in Guidetti, Storia dei
Sardi e della Sardegna, vol. 1, pp. 329–371.