124 Zedda
In addition, Piero Fois was able to propose plausible dates for some of the
seals discovered in the area of Tharros. One of them offered provocative infor-
mation, mentioning the property—a sort of war booty—of an unknown per-
son in a place possibly called Assemini (a locality close to Cagliari). Other seals
seem to attest to a tight rapport between Tharros and the Iberian Peninsula
in around the tenth century. All this information enables us to surmise that
Tharros and its territory was in fact the base of an Islamic community of un-
specified magnitude, yet one capable of controlling the area of Sinis and, more
generally, the coasts of west-central Sardinia, thus posing a danger to the is-
land’s Christian community. The moment and the circumstances in which the
territory of Tharros could have been liberated from Islam are thus more easily
understood.
Once again, we must reexamine the documents, as well as parallels with sim-
ilar situations. Indeed, the expulsion of Muslims from the ribat in Garigliano in
915 may have been linked to an analogous event documented in Sardinia, the
source for which seems to lie in the Passio S. Ephysii.23 As we have established
together with Raimondo Pinna, historical elements can be found in the sec-
tion of the Passio dealing with Ephesus’s military endeavors in Sardinia after
events in Italy had led the soldier to convert to Christianity and be baptized
in Gaeta. In fact, it was in Sardinia that Ephesus’s army and the “barbarians”,
confronted each other in another battle, which concluded in a great victory
for the saint. The two principal sources for the tale of Ephesus’s bellum sar-
dum—a medieval parchment codex in the Vatican Library and another more
frequently consulted sixteenth-century manuscript on paper preserved in the
Archivio della Curia Arcivescovile di Cagliari—reveal considerable discrepan-
cies in the text. Inasmuch as it is legitimate to claim that the latter is a copy
of an older parchment codex, no critical weight can be placed on it, because
it would be fallacious to regard the early modern copy as more credible than
the older, twelfth-century one, or even to attempt to collate the two variants—
profoundly different from each other—in order to come up with a unified and
coherent reading of the text.
Obviously this is only a hypothesis, but local data may help confirm it. The
difference in the topographical information provided by the two versions of
the story surfaces in the precision of the topographical details noted in the
Cagliari, as opposed to the Vatican codex. These, in turn, lead one to conclude
23 Spanu, Martyria Sardiniae, pp. 69–81, 163–173: “The victory over the Saracens recorded
in Passio S. Ephysii, which took place at Caieta, may allude to the great victory of the
Garigliano of 915, obtained thanks to the intervention of one of the great saints of the
Byzantine troops, Procopio—Ephesus,” p. 69.