A Revision Of Sardinian History 117
The problem of verifying sources is therefore crucial to the development of
research on medieval Sardinia; indeed, the island’s history suffers from having
been read as the sum of its events. Although this approach often is relegated
to popular accounts, in eulogistic texts that celebrate the island’s glory in a
remarkably acritical and nationalistic manner, a fiercely Sardo-centric atti-
tude also prevails in scholarly writings, which has sometimes led to simplistic
interpretations based on manipulated or even non-existent data. All this has
hampered the progress of scholarship and resulted in a feeble attempt to deal
with the puzzle of the origins of the Sardinian giudicati, without taking into
account the island’s countless international, political, economic, and cultural
ties. Instead, scholarship has adhered to the localized approach, which hinders
a full understanding of events and the reasons behind the island’s political di-
vision into four separate territorial entities.
This paper rereads some key pages from the history of medieval Sardinia,
paying particular attention to the transition from the cultural world of
Byzantium to that which would slowly develop into the age of the giudicati,
when the island witnessed its division into four territorial entities, between the
eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Perhaps we should not take for granted the
premise that a full understanding of this peculiar institution’s history must al-
ways take into account the island’s close involvement in the complex patterns
of international politics (particularly its rapport with the Apostolic See and
Holy Roman Empire), even at moments when it was allegedly most isolated.
In the traditional historiography of Sardinia, the island’s past has been con-
tinuously rewritten, beginning with the works of Giovanni Francesco Fara and
Giovanni Proto Arca in the late sixteenth century. It is a history sometimes
poorly forged, with its saddest point being Arborea’s forgeries, which, through
the fabrication of a crude apparatus of non-existent sovereigns, a local litera-
ture far too sophisticated for the period, and myths and legends that are still
believed to some extent even today, presents the distorted image of medieval
Sardinia that has been disseminated.
Certainly, the work of Enrico Besta, Arrigo Solmi, and Francesco Cesare
Casula helped bring Sardinian historiography back on a scholarly track on par
with works of the period. But practically nothing has shaken the mighty pil-
lars of nineteenth-century historiography in Sardinia. In fact, today’s studies
appear to have been crystallized on the model of Besta and Solmi. The debate
Bloch, “Un romanzo agiografico del XII secolo: gli scritti su Atina di Pietro Diacono di
Montecassino,” in VIII Conferenza dell’Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia,
Storia e Storia dell’Arte in Roma (31 October 1990) (Rome, 1991); Herbert Bloch, Monte Cassino
in the Middle Ages, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1986), p. 76.