202 Turtas
His successors were no more successful in this: Honorius III (1216–1227),
Gregory IX (1227–1242), and Innocent IV (1243–1254) maintained the course
set by Innocent III. More than once the archbishop of Pisa was stripped of his
title, ecclesiastical interdicts were imposed on the city, and the title of papal
legate was conferred on other church officials. But all of this only led to a web
of excommunications and reconciliations. The pope simply did not have the
military means necessary to force Pisa to loosen its ever-tightening grip over
almost the entire island; indeed, only the realm of Arborea remained inde-
pendent. So it was Boniface VIII (1294–1304) who determined that the best
way to consistently impose his dominium eminens on the island, in theory rec-
ognized even by Pisa, was to concede it to a sovereign powerful determined
enough to impose this right in the name of the Holy See. Consequently, in 1297,
he invested King James II of Aragon (1264–1327) with the regnum Sardinie et
Corsice in exchange for the latter giving up Sicily, which had been occupied by
his father, Peter III, during the War of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). In doing so,
the pope was responding to various needs: first, making peace between the
Aragonese king and France, which was impossible unless Sicily was restored to
the Angevins, to whom the pope had previously granted the island; secondly,
only this reconciliation would allow Christendom to resume its effort to retake
the Holy Land.70
5.8 The Conditions of the Sardinian Clergy
The most important source on the Sardinian clergy is the synod of Santa Giusta,
convened by Honorius III in 1226 in order to apply the canons of the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215) to Sardinia. Presiding was the papal legate Gottifredus,
and the Sardinian archbishops, bishops, and a great number or prelates were
present. It is the only such meeting for which a legislative corpus still survives.71
Among the major questions treated was the matter of candidates to the sa-
cred orders: illegitimate offspring were excluded, especially those of presbyters,
unless they had been ordained with the appropriate dispensation; a bishop
could not ordain a subject of another bishop without the latter’s consent; nor
could a slave be ordained unless his owner freed him (if the slave belonged to
a church, then the authorization of his bishop was enough). The selection of
clergy depended in part on the collegia ecclesiarum—e.g. the chapters, with
their own obligatory rules—and in part on bishops that were charged with
assigning the clericus a benefice that allowed him a decent existence, so that
70 Vicente Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea de la Corona de Aragón,
1297–1314, 2 vols (Madrid, 1956).
71 Zichi, “Note sul codice di S. Giusta,” pp. 73–85.