374 Milanese
of Alghero. The city walls of the late Middle Ages were later absorbed into the
more recent structure of the Torre della Maddalena (perhaps the second quar-
ter of the sixteenth century), which in turn replaced the preceding tower of the
same name in the medieval circuit, and was probably set in the same position.
4 The Jewish Quarter in Catalan Alghero
The study of the Jewish presence in Alghero—Sardinia’s second Jewish com-
munity after Cagliari—through the magnifying lens of archaeology, is essen-
tially a work in progress, bound to excavations that are still in the process of
recovering the nerve centers of the city’s medieval Jewish quarter.33 If the first
Jewish families settled in Alghero in 1322,34 then the true crux of the history of
the Jewish presence in Sardinia lies in the Aragonese conquest of the island,
which took place in 1323–1324, and which was made possible by loans made
by Catalan Jews to the king. Following the definitive occupation of Alghero by
Peter III, a heterogeneous nucleus of 30–40 Jewish families from Catalonia,
Aragon, Majorca, Castile, and Sicily settled there directly after the recoloni-
zation of the city by Catalan-Aragonese pobladors.35 Between 1370 and the
early fifteenth century, other wealthy Jewish merchant families from the south
of France—Provence and Languedoc—settled in Alghero and assumed an
important role in the coral trade.36
The link between Alghero and Languedoc is highly visible in archaeology
and historical documents.37 In October 1355, Giovanni Borraco, a merchant
from Montpellier, obtained a license to sell his goods without paying dues to
XIII–XVI secolo): problemi e prospettive,” in Atti del XXXVII Convegno Internazionale
della Ceramica (Albisola, 2004) (Florence, 2006), pp. 219–250.
33 Marco Milanese, “Fouilles récentes dans la juharía médiévale d’Alghero en Sardigne,” in
L’archéologie du judaïsme en France et en Europe, eds Paul Salmona and Laurence Sigal
(Paris, 2011), pp. 153–160.
34 Giancarlo Sorgia, “Una famiglia di Ebrei in Sardegna: i Carcassona,” Studi Sardi 17 (1961),
pp. 287–308.
35 Rafael Conde y Delgado de Molina, “Il ripopolamento catalano di Alghero,” in Mattone
and Sanna, Alghero, la Catalogna, il Mediterraneo, p. 92.
36 Cecilia Tasca, “La comunità ebraica di Alghero fra ‘300 e ‘400,” Revista de l’Alguer 1 (1990),
pp. 140–166.
37 On the archaeological evidence, see Milanese and Carlini, “Ceramiche invetriate nella
Sardegna nord-occidentale.”