Contribution Of Archaeology To Medieval And Modern Sardinia 283
villa of Geridu. At least until the thirteenth century, the productive base of
secular and ecclesiastical seigniorial estates consisted of landed corporations,
spread throughout the countryside and inhabited by servants and employees.
Regarding this matter, a vast area of northwest Sardinia, which coincides more
or less with the current province of Sassari, enjoys a more privileged place in
the written sources than does the rest of the island, due to the survival of pat-
rimonial registers (condaghes). Drawn up in monastic scriptoria, these refer
to estates owned by certain monasteries, but also to private properties from
the second half of the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries.43 Detailed records
of landed property, as well as changes in ownership, which exist thanks to
donations, bartering, or acquisitions, allow for the analytical reconstruction
of cross-sections of the history of agrarian landscapes44—of an only slightly
mercantile economy, based on the exploitation of land. They also enable read-
ings of the relations between monastic seigniorial estates and serfs, whose
property too was subject to transactions and was sold along with farms, which
were sold whole, along with their inherited territory, livestock, and slave labor.
Furthermore, the condaghes monitored sparse rural settlements and indicated
the estates to which they were subordinate. Aside from the domos, the coun-
tryside was organized within the territory according to a hierarchy of vari-
ous settlement types and economic structures, the features of which remain
open to scholarly interpretation. This is the case with other forms of sparse
settlement,45 such as the tiny domestias that were dependent on the domos:
seeing that domestia appears in the sources as an elaboration of the domo,
and thus part of the larger farm [...] the inventories of the serfs of the mo-
nastic farms frequently offer us an image of a seigneurial domo that was
still related, in many respects, to the genuine slave barrack known as the
Roman villa.4643 Literature on the subject is vast; see Associazione Condaghe S. Pietro in Silki, La civiltà gi-
udicale in Sardegna nei secoli XI–XIII: fonti e documenti scritti: atti del convegno nazionale,
Sassari, Aula Magna dell’Università, 16–17 marzo 2001; Usini, chiesa di Santa Croce, 18 marzo
2001 (Sassari, 2002), particularly the article by Giampaolo Mele, “I Condaghi: specchio
storico di devozione e delle tradizioni liturgiche nella Sardegna medievale,” pp. 143–174.
44 Fois, “Sardegna”; Fois, “L’insediamento Umano.”
45 John Day, “La Sardegna e i suoi dominatori dal secolo XI al secolo XIV,” in La Sardegna
medioevale e moderna, eds John Day, Bruno Anatra, and Lucetta Scaraffia (Turin, 1984),
p. 25.
46 Gian Giacomo Ortu, ed., La Sardegna dei Giudici (Nuoro, 2005), vol. 3, p. 99. On this issue
see also infra Ortu and Zedda.