130 Zedda
exercised an important role. Another important indicator of the emperor’s in-
volvement is the fact that Christian forces captured Mughaid’s son, Hasan, and
he was taken hostage by the imperial court. It would be totally incomprehen-
sible for the heir of the defeated prince to be sent as far away as Germany if the
emperor had not played a role in the undertaking.
Only in the second half of the eleventh century, after the expulsion of
Mughaid from Sardinia, is there evidence of a change in the political and ter-
ritorial order of Sardinia. At that point, there were not yet four giudicati, but
two kingdoms: those of Cagliari and Ore (Locum de Ore refers to Logudoro, i.e.
Torres). The long period of Torres’s separation from Cagliari is corroborated by
the title under which its sovereign appears in the Cronaca di Montecassino.33
When referring to Barisone of Torres, the text grants him the title rex, faithfully
recording the manner in which Barisone titled himself on the seal of the dona-
tion charter of the church of Montesanto and in the abbey of Bubalis (1065).
In the latter case, Barisone had himself called rex and placed his effigy—the
face of the king—on the seal. Barisone seems to have possessed the political
and military authority to award himself this designation, which is proof of his
power over Orzocco Torchitorio, the “king” of Cagliari. When describing the ac-
tions of Orzocco, the Cronaca di Montecassino refers to him as “the other king”
of Sardinia, confirming that in the 1060s there were—at least officially—still
two kingdoms, and not four giudicati.
The “cold war” between the two kingdoms of Cagliari and Ore resulted in an
unstable status quo, due to the need to maintain and expand territorial bound-
aries. This ambiguous division of Sardinia continued for 40 years, a period for
which there are no documents. The duration of the situation seems to have
reinforced the island’s division, perhaps preventing the restoration of its unity,
and thus enabling future fragmentation of the original kingdom. For this to
happen, an external opportunity as disruptive as that of the Mughaid invasion
needed to occur, so that the church reform of the second decade of the elev-
enth century could find an inroad into the island.
The Italic world of the eleventh to early twelfth centuries differed even more
from the political panorama that would be established in the third to fourth
decades of the twelfth century, after the crucial transition marked by the coro-
nation of Roger as the king of Sicily in 1130, as well as the resolution of the
schism within the church between Anacletus II and Innocent II (1130–1138).34
33 Hartmut Hoffmann, ed., Chronica monasterii Casinensis: Die Chronik von Montecassino
(Hanover, 1980), pp. 388–389.
34 See the forthcoming proceedings of the conference, “Framing Anacletus II (Anti) Pope,
1130–1138,” which convened in Rome, 10–12 April 2013.