56 Schena
history, that of the communal cities of central and northern Italy,14 and were
thus weighed down, indeed rendered opaque by a whole series of negative
judgments or prejudices. Now, however, these sources are being reexam-
ined with renewed interest on the political, social, and juridical level. This
discourse also reexamines Sardinian legal sources related to the major cit-
ies of Sardinia (Cagliari, to which we shall return, but also Iglesias, Sassari,
Alghero, Castelsardo, Bosa) that arose in the course of the thirteenth century
as “pazionati”15 municipalities under the aegis of the cities of Genoa and Pisa
and that subsequently (fourteenth–fifteenth centuries) became “royal cities”
by virtue of the appropriation of the island, which was legally configured as
the regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae within the state bloc of the Crown of Aragon.16
Though broadly delineated in some studies, the geography of the South does
not account for the unifying role played in the late medieval Mediterranean
by the Crown of Aragon—be it on the political level or on that of written
memory—in the elaboration of texts and the widespread dissemination of
the royal document produced in the sovereign Catalan-Aragonese chancery
(thirteenth–sixteenth centuries). The attention paid to the strategies of pro-
ducing and preserving written memory by the cities of southern Italy, in which
the organization within royal structures conditioned the typology of sources,
has recently generated some studies that offer an account of this legacy of
documents,17 though it is odd and significant that none of these volumes take
into consideration the singular case of late medieval Sardinia.
A huge number of documents—public and especially private—have cer-
tainly been lost, but the gaps in medieval documentation are not isolated to
14 See the essays on the subject in the volume, Signori, regimi signorili e statuti nel tardo
medioevo, eds Rolando Dondarini, Gian Maria Varanini, and Maria Venticelli (Bologna,
2003).
15 This is a medieval term for which there is no English equivalent, meaning “subject to the
limitations of a pact, conceded solely for three generations rather than in perpetuity.”
16 See Laura Galoppini and Marco Tangheroni, “Le città della Sardegna tra Due e Trecento,”
in La libertà di decidere, pp. 207–222; Carla Ferrante and Antonello Mattone, “Le comu-
nità rurali nella Sardegna medievale (secoli XI–XV),” Studi Storici I (2004), pp. 169–243;
Olivetta Schena and Sebastiana Nocco, “Città e tradizioni normative nella Sardegna me-
dievale: alcune linee di ricercar,” in Bibliografia Statutaria Italiana, vol. II (Rome, 2009),
pp. 189–219.
17 See the essays by Francesco Senatore, Anna Maria Airò, and Beatrice Pasciuta in Scritture
e potere. Pratiche documentarie e forme di governo nell’Italia tardomedievale (XIV–XV sec-
olo), ed. Isabella Lazzarini, Reti Medievali 9/1 (2008), http://www.retimedievali.it; or the
contributions on the southern region in Archivi e comunità tra medioevo ed età moderna,
eds Attilio Bartoli Langeli, Andrea Giorni, and Stefano Moscadelli (Trent, 2009).