244 Ortu
trans-border domiciliation of the people of both Arborea and Aragon, thereby
liberating their rights over their respective goods, a freedom which remained
on the books until 1421, when the island was unified and there were no longer
any boundaries to violate. However, by the fifteenth century, such freedoms
sometimes existed solely in political and jurisdictional parlance, while domi-
ciliary coercion and servile status persisted. Such practices were thoroughly
extinguished by the promulgation of the Arborean Carta de Logu (1392) and,
taking note of the fact that it was the adequate legislative transcription for the
ultimate attainment of freedom for all Sardinians, the Magnanimous extended
it to the entire island in 1421.37 This does not, however, mean that the Carta
de Logu adopted any of the Catalan-Aragonese feudal ordinances, especially
anything that could have redefined the relationship between the community
and the land.
The feudalization of Western Europe entailed the abandonment of Roman
terms for property, articulated by the firm categories of dominium, priva-
tum, and publicum, which were ill-suited to expressing the new and extreme
variations of de facto and de jure ownership (which were often interwoven).
Possessory pluralism received a new conceptual and normative order from the
giuristi, which was based on the so-called “divided rule.” This implied an es-
sential duality between, on the one hand, “profitable” rule, which considered
the effective availability of land, its exploitation, and enjoyment, and “direct”
rule, on the other hand, which pertained to the formal title of possession. In
reality, the modulations of this duality were variable and complex, but, in gen-
eral, within the sphere of a jurisdiction, the “dominium directum (direct own-
ership)” of land rested with its titular (the feudatory) and the dominium utile
(invested ownership) with the rural community.38
In much of Europe, the feudal aristocracy was not limited to the governance
of land and the administrative management of crown property, collecting from
it corresponding tributes or dues. In fact, their “houses” enhanced the patri-
monial base itself, drawing more or less arbitrarily from the great state basin.
Not even the Catalan and Aragonese barons had any scruples about acting in
this way for a while, but in the end they had to put up with the implacable te-
nacity with which communities appealed to the ius naturale (natural law) and
laid claim to their primary right over land. Royal legislation acknowledged the
37 Gian Giacomo Ortu, “Carta de Logu e cartae libertatis: in tema di giurisdizioni nella
Sardegna del Trecento,” in La Carta de Logu d’Arborea nella storia del diritto medievale e
moderno, eds Italo Birocchi and Antonello Mattone (Rome, 2004), pp. 97–106.
38 Paolo Grossi ed., Un altro modo di possedere: l’emersione di forme alternative di proprietà
alla coscienza giuridica post-unitaria (Milan, 1977).