A Revision Of Sardinian History 125
that the sixteenth-century hagiographer engaged in some obvious manipula-
tion of the text in order to spread the scholarly association between the bar-
barica gens and the mountain people of the Iolian-Ilienses mountains, who
represent the long-standing myth of Sardinian resistance, which was already
strong in the sixteenth century.24 The link between the two battles (in the sense
of military campaigns led by both Byzantines and the duchies of Campania)
waged by Ephesus in Italy and Sardinia, becomes clearer and more credible
insofar as the text refers to the enemies in the same manner. The barbaricae
gentis are those who rule Sardinia, while the barbaras gentes are those who
invaded Roman land in Italy. The account of Ephesus’s Sardinian expedition
in the Vatican codex does not contain a single topographical reference to the
“mountain” people—mentioned in the Cagliari version—who devastated the
plain.
What renders the Vatican codex credible from the point of view of historical
evidence is its very precise description of the military operation, which is so
detailed that it has to be a literary composition of a memory highly sensitive to
the territory of what was to become the giudicato of Arborea. The moment of
confrontation begins when Ephesus and his men reach the site known as Tyrus,
where the barbarians were lined up for battle. The account in the sixteenth-
century codex from Cagliari is utterly different. In it, the disembarkation oc-
curs in a fantastical portus tharrensis, which must have been in friendly hands,
while in the Vatican version it is clearly blocked. The fighting occurs all along
the coast, where the seat of the enemy—which could be Tharros—is located.
Such identification is supported by the toponymy—καστρον του Τάρον—used by
the geographer Giorgio Ciprio in the late seventh century.25 If one accepts the
existence of a ribat comparable to the one in Garigliano, one might locate it by
the ruins of the Roman city of Minturno, since architectural remains appear
to furnish material evidence of military fortifications of Muslims, who—all in
all—were not that numerous. Analogously, one might posit that Sardinia’s ribat
was located precisely near the ruins of Tharros, perhaps even within them. It
almost seems as though the author of this part of the Passion of Ephesus was
well aware of how everything had turned out in Garigliano and intentionally
recounted how something analogous had occurred in Sardinia.
24 This is demonstrated by the use of the source by the barbaricino historian Giovanni Proto
Arca at the end of the same century; see Giovanni Arca, Barbaricinorum libelli, ed. Maria
Teresa Laneri (Cagliari, 2005).
25 Georgius Cyprius, Descriptio Orbis Romani, ed. Henricus Gelzer (Leipzig, 1980 [680]),
p. 35.