Archives And Documents 67
Conclusions
The sources for which we have here provided a synthetic but, we hope, exhaus-
tive overview, enable the reconstruction of the course of politics, institutions,
the economy, and culture within the kingdom of Sardinia over two centuries—
from its establishment, on 19 June 1324, until the death of Ferdinand II, the
Catholic in 1516—and the gradual process of assimilation between the nació
cathalana and nació sardesca that can be gleaned above all from urban life,
and to a far lesser extent from the agricultural and pastoral world of the island’s
interior, for which documentation is particularly scarce or utterly absent.
If the fourteenth century was characterized by a state of unrest—albeit in-
termittent—between the Catalans and the Sardinians, and consequently the
Crown of Aragon had to assert itself through the force of arms, which did not
facilitate the integration of the two nacions, then in the course of the fifteenth
century, with the end of the conflict and the transition from a war to a peace
economy, which was accompanied by the administrative reorganization of the
kingdom launched by the Catholic King, one may speak of a “Catalanization”
process that involved nearly the entire island and led to the integration and
peaceful coexistence of the two nacions. It could be said that this process—re-
lentless and with extremely important institutional, economic, and cultural re-
percussions—came to an end only in the sixteenth century, with the rise of the
Hapsburg emperor, Charles V to the throne and with the consequent extraor-
dinary expansion of the Spanish Crown’s horizons. The Catalan-Aragonese
subjects felt the need to reaffirm their historical-political unity to defend their
legal-institutional liberties and possibly their economic autonomy, and the
kingdom of Sardinia was not uninvolved in this process, which bound it to
the fate of the Iberian east. This demonstrates, as Marconi writes, “that the
political, economic, and even ideological bond with the Crown of Aragon was
by that point a firm reality, destined to perpetuate itself even regardless of the
historical ties established by the kings of Aragon.”58
Translated by Irina Oryshkevich
58 Francesco Manconi, “L’identità catalana della Sardegna,” Isole nella storia, Cooperazione
Mediterranea. Cultura, economia, società 1–2 ( January–August 2003), pp. 105–112, esp. 106.