The Sardinian Church 207
Another glimpse of religious practices in Sardinia during the Aragonese era
comes from Cagliari. During Lent in 1355, while the plague raged in Cagliari,
certain excommunicated Catalan merchants asked for absolution, “because
it was Lent, when every faithful Christian had to confess and receive the
sacrament.”83 Thus, the most important prescription of the Fourth Lateran
Council was known and practiced by merchants as well. The same source states
that a month or so earlier, the archbishop of Sassari imposed an ecclesiastical
interdict on the city to prevent the churches from making public the decree of
excommunication imposed upon him by the papal collector after he refused to
hand over the funds owed to the Apostolic Camera. Municipal administrators
protested against the archbishop, bolstered by the people’s discontent with
“the unjust wrong inflicted on them by being deprived of religious services.”84
What is less well known is how effective the matrimonial discipline im-
posed by the Fourth Lateran Council was in the late Middle Ages. This set of
prescriptions concerned the obligation to publish the banns in order to make
certain the will and freedom of the parties involved. For this period, there is
no documentation of the way weddings were celebrated, apart from the patri-
monial rules of marriage, if a sa sardisca or a sa pisanisca (the preference for
Sardinian or Pisan customs) regarding the ownership of the assets produced
durante matrimonio. Later documentation suggests that rules about such prac-
tices had been in place for some time: the culmination of the process of mar-
riage occurred when the families of the bride and groom demonstrated their
approval; from then on they were considered husband and wife.
The role of the church in these proceedings is unclear, but the issue
seems to have emerged by 1307 when a certain Roger Tagliaferro begged King
James II of Aragon to seek from the pope a provision that would “legitimate all
of the men of the island,” because they were all “bastards.”85 Rather than sug-
gest that Sardinia was overrun with libertine tendencies, Tagliaferro’s surprising
remark can be understood as an expression of the devaluation of the traditional
Sardinian form of marriage from the point of view of canon law, because it was
83 Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Collectoriae, Reg. 211, 94v–95r.
84 Raimondo Turtas, “L’attività del collettore pontificio a Sassari nel 1354–1355,” in Gli
Statuti Sassaresi: economia, società, istituzioni a Sassari nel Medioevo e nell’Età moderna;
atti del convegno di studi, Sassari, 12–14 maggio 1983, eds Antonello Mattone and Marco
Tangheroni (Sassari, 1986), pp. 253–263; La casa dell’Università. La politica edilizia della
Compagnia di Gesù nei decenni della formazione dell’Ateneo sassarese, 1562– 1632 (Sassari,
1986), p. 259.
85 Salavert y Roca, Cerdeña y la expansión mediterránea, p. 246; Raimondo Turtas, La storia
della Chiesa in Sardegna, pp. 294–295, 321, 401.