Establishing Power And Law 239
ruled as sovereign. In exchange, Hugo II had to lend the predetermined “oma-
gium et fidelitatis sacramentum” to the Aragonese dominus, and hand over to
him an annual poll tax of three thousand florins. In this manner, the proud
lord of Arborea came to find himself in the same state of vassalage as he had
been to the Crowns of Donoratico of Pisa, the Doria and Malaspina of Genoa
(who too retained vast holdings on the island), and the numerous men who
succeeded Alfonso and had been compensated by feudal concessions.
On 19 June 1324, the very day of Pisa’s capitulation, Alfonso, in a letter to his
father, boasted of having conquered and enfeoffed the entire island. Replying
to this letter in a plea to Cardinal Napoleone Orsini the following year, Hugo II
lamented the fate of the Sardinians, who had hoped to find peace under a sin-
gle king, but now instead had “tot reges quot sunt ville in Kallaro.”24 Both were
exaggerating, either out of pride or fear, because in reality the feudalization of
Sardinia was a more arduous and complex process, against which the masses
tenaciously resisted, which made many of the seignories assumed by the sov-
ereigns of Aragon precarious (and at times only virtual).25
The number of jurisdictions grew continuously after the mid-fourteenth
century: from around 50 in 1333, to 60 in 1340, and then to 80 in 1358, when a
large part of the territory still escaped feudal enclosure.26 Concessions were
normally granted with the formula mos Italiae, which carried with it the right
to use one or more armed horses and the duty to return the fief to the sovereign
in the absence of direct male heirs. In actuality, however, the concessionaries
often eluded both armed service—rendered obsolete by the nearly complete
recourse to mercenary soldiers—and residence on the island, to which they
were often recalled by the king.
The impossibility of an absent sovereign imposing a single model of vassal-
ic fidelitas led to multiple variations and modulations in Sardinian feudalism
from the outset, depending on the different weight that the feudatories carried
in court, the royal apparatus, and in the local balance of power. Throughout
the fifteenth century and beyond, when the island was nearly subdued and
24 The text of Hugo II’s feudal investiture can be found in Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina,
ed., Diplomatario aragonés de Ugone II de Arborea (Sassari, 2005), pp. 87–89.
25 Marco Tangheroni, Sardegna mediterranea (Rome, 1983), pp. 120, 153–154. In more recent
historical scholarship, the view of the Catalan-Aragonese feudalization of Sardinia is
generally negative. The most incisive observations on this subject are Marco Tangheroni,
“Il feudalismo in Sardegna in età aragonese,” in Sardegna mediterranea, pp. 23–54; and
Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, “La Sardegna aragonese,” in Storia dei Sardi e della
Sardegna, ed. Massimo Guidetti (Milan, 1988–1990), vol. 2, pp. 251–278.
26 Ibid.