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government. There were 1,500 hearths in Cagliari around 1330; 1,750 in 1370;
and barely 848 in 1485. Sassari was emptied of its inhabitants in 1328 and would
only regain its population of 2,500 hearths towards the fifteenth century. The
history of Corsica is marked by the same sagging demographics—approxi-
mately 25,000 hearths and slightly over 100,000 inhabitants in 1461—meager
urbanization and a lack of “urban civilization”—there were less than 10,000
urbanized Corsicans in 1461.15
As previously mentioned, Sardinia and Corsica were lands of immigration,
but unlike Sicily, whose wealth attracted artisans and farmers to spontaneous-
ly immigrate, the population of Sardinia and Corsica was voluntary. Migration
took a different form in Sardinia and Corsica, where it was concentrated and
urban, giving rise to non-native cities: the Pisan cities of Sassari, Villa di Chiese
(Iglesias), and Bosa; Pisan, and subsequently Catalan, Cagliari; Catalan Alghero;
and the Genoese cities of Bonifacio, Calvi, and Ajaccio (Castel Lombardo) in
Corsica.16 Genoese immigration to the three islands also led to the formation
of small agricultural holdings, especially in Corsica.
In Sicily, there was a slow and constant influx of a diverse group of immi-
grants—in the twelfth century, Lombards, Calabrians, Apulians, and some
French; Pisans, Lucchesi, and Florentines in the thirteenth; and Catalans,
Greeks, and Albanians in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—which cre-
ated a very open melting pot. There was even a sprinkling of Sardinian im-
migrants in Sicily: six in Palermo, whose arrival appears to have followed the
wars of conquest (1412–1424) and their destruction. There were also seven
Corsicans, but their arrivals were spread out over a longer timeframe, from
1331 to 1417.17 All of the Sardinian and Corsican migrants were manual laborers
who were engaged in rough work: digging vineyards, cultivating cereals, cut-
ting sugarcane, or tanning hides. This emigration of workers in the Tyrrhenian
15 Jean-A. Cancellieri, “Directions de recherché sur la démographie de la Corse médiévale
(XIIIe–XVe siècles),” in Strutture familiari, epidemie, migrazioni nell’Italia medievale, eds
Rinaldo Comba, Gabriella Piccini, and Giuliano Pinto (Naples, 1984), pp. 401–433. The
quote comes from Yéramiel Kolodny, La Géographie urbaine de la Corse (Paris, 1962).
16 For example, on Castel Lombardo, see Roberto S. Lopez, “Da mercanti a agricoltori: as-
petti della colonizzazione genovese in Corsica,” in Su e giù per la storia di Genova (Genoa,
1975), pp. 211–215.
17 In the medieval Brownian movement, even the islands with low population and reduced
activity provided migrants: as an example, in Trapani, the last wills of Giovanni Corso,
born in Vitulbe and inhabitant of Biccicon d’Ornano (Archivio di Stato, Trapani, notaio
Scannatello 199, 10 November 1456). Both the small villages of Vitulbe and Biccicon disap-
peared without traces, swallowed up by the movement.