116 Zedda
as ecclesiastical archives have generally been neglected. Since research in these
archives has not been valued to the same extent, the dynamics of the church
and its interactions with the political sphere have remained somewhat mar-
ginalized in historical hypotheses on the origins of the Giudicati, particularly
in terms of interpretations of relations between Sardinia and the Apostolic See
in the years of the “Gregorian” reform. On the other hand, it is precisely from
this area—as recent studies have shown—that new materials, which have
sometimes undermined deeply ingrained assumptions among scholars, have
emerged.
An example of how imprecise knowledge can lead scholarly work astray
emerges from an examination of Pope Victor III’s letter to the bishops of
Sardinia in 1087, which is regarded as evidence of the serious neglect suffered
by the Sardinian church and, in particular, its buildings. On the other hand, it
is also considered to be the point of departure for the allegedly triumphant
political building campaigns that took place on the island in the eleventh
century. However, we now know with certainty that the letter is a blatant, al-
beit well-concocted, forgery, which fooled scholars such as Raffaello Delogu,
Alberto Boscolo, and Paul Amargier, even though Andrea Carboni’s brilliant
study revealed the nature of and reasons for the forgery.3 Similarly, a reexami-
nation of original sources may reveal that they are sometimes not altogether
authentic or reliable either, as demonstrated by the Carta (1074) written in the
Sardinian vernacular by Orzocco Torchitorio, a judge from Cagliari, which con-
tains a clever fourteenth-century interpolation.4 Conversely, a contextualized
and problematized reading of sources, such as the Condaghes and the Rationes
Decimarum, combined with a focused investigation of the terrain, may furnish
a new and different reading of Sardinian territory, as in the case of the creation
of the archdiocese of Arborea in the eleventh century.5 As Herbert Bloch dis-
covered, even the alleged presence of the Cassinese in southern Sardinia may
have been based on forgeries that they themselves inserted into documents
(not only Sardinian ones) preserved in their archives.6
3 Andrea Carboni, L’epistola di Vittore III ai vescovi di Sardegna. Prova e storia di un falso (Rome,
1960).
4 Corrado Zedda and Raimondo Pinna, La Carta del giudice cagliaritano Orzocco Torchitorio,
prova dell’attuazione del progetto gregoriano di riorganizzazione della giurisdizione ecclesias-
tica della Sardegna (Sassari, 2009).
5 Corrado Zedda and Raimondo Pinna, “La diocesi di Santa Giusta nel Medioevo,” in La
Cattedrale di Santa Giusta. Architettura e arredi dall’XI al XIX secolo, ed. Roberto Coroneo
(Cagliari, 2010), pp. 25–34.
6 Herbert Bloch, The Atina Dossier of Peter the Deacon of Monte Cassino. A Hagiographical
Romance of the Twelfth Century (Vatican City, 1998); and its summary in Italian: Herbert