128 Zedda
In order to realize his plan, Mughaid set about hundred ships to sea—an
extraordinary number. Even if the quantity is exaggerated, it seems that he felt
that it was necessary to have a huge fleet and a great army to conquer Sardinia.
It is unlikely that Mughaid intended to disembark in Sardinia blindly, or with
his head lowered. It is possible that he knew of the nerve centers of the is-
land’s defense system from Muslim pirates, who for some time had frequented
the coast. Consequently, he would have had to plan the undertaking in detail;
the possibility that Muslims who had their bases on the island played a role
cannot be excluded. A twelfth-century work, the Liber Maiolichinus, confirms
that the Mughaid army landed at Cagliari: “Post illum vero Mugetus annum, per-
duxit Mauros in regnum Calaritanum, et numero primos excedunt posteriores.” 30
While some of this tale can be confirmed by documentation, this source needs
to be treated with caution, as it is a poetic text written over a century after the
event.
However, Arab sources may be better equipped to provide evidence as to the
institutional organization of the island at the moment of the Mughaid inva-
sion. Such sources refer to a Malut or Malik, who was killed by Mughaid in the
battle, but the misrecognition of this person’s identity has led to imprecise and
misleading conclusions. According to Boscolo,
[i]n the course of the battle [...] Malut lost his life and, if the phonetic
transcription is incorrect and the name of the fallen man is Salut, pre-
sumably this was the Archon Salusio, already an autonomous judge in the
Cagliari “party,” called by events to command the phalanx.31Among Arabs, the term Mulut/Malik is not a proper name, but the word for
“king” or “lord.” It is synonymous with a term used in a tenth-century chronicle
from Cordoba, concerning a Sardo-Amalfi mission that reached Cordoba in
- It is therefore erroneous to associate the term Malut/Malik with the rather
improbable Salut. This misreading resulted in the ambiguity of a Sardinian
giudice called Salut, who fell in battle while defending his giudicato.
Actually, the identity of this Malut is still rather uncertain and gives rise
to further problems of interpretation. The text is drawn from the conjecture
of Amari, who based it on a variant of the Codex of Abenalatir, one of the
30 Carlo Calisse, ed., Liber Maiolichinus de gestis Pisanorum illustribus: poema della guerra
balearica secondo il cod. pisano Roncioni aggiuntevi alcune notizie lasciate da M. Amari
(Rome, 1904), vv. 944–946, p. 42.
31 Alberto Boscolo, Studi sulla Sardegna bizantina e giudicale (Cagliari, 1985), p. 31.