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| Kingdom of Sardinia-House of Hohenstaufen 1238-1272 |
The Grandma and her friends are enjoying Sardinian history. Today, they are reading about the most splendorous age of this land, when Sardinia was an independent Kingdom. Sardinia is one of the ancient European nations with a long and interesting History to discover and enjoy.
Before reading about the influence of the House of Barcelona firstly, the Aragonese Crown later and the years of independence, The Grandma has been also studying a new lesson of her Elementary Language Practice manual (Grammar 3).
More information: Present Simple Negative & Questions
The Kingdom of Sardinia was a state in Southern Europe which existed from the early 14th until the mid-19th century. It was the predecessor state of the Kingdom of Italy.
The kingdom initially
consisted of the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, sovereignty over both
of which was claimed by the Papacy, which granted them as a fief, the
regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae to King James II of Aragon in 1297.
In 1297, Pope Boniface
VIII, intervening between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon, established on
paper a Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae that would be a fief of the
Papacy. Then, ignoring the indigenous states which already existed, the
Pope offered his newly invented fief to James II of Aragon, promising
him papal support should he wish to conquer Pisan Sardinia in exchange
for Sicily.
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| House of Barcelona 1297-1410 |
In 1323 James II formed an alliance with Hugh II of Arborea and, following a military campaign which lasted a year or so, occupied the Pisan territories of Cagliari and Gallura along with the city of Sassari, claiming the territory as the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica.
Beginning in 1324, James and his successors conquered the island of Sardinia and established de facto their de jure authority.
Although the Kingdom of
Sardinia and Corsica could be said to have started as a questionable
and extraordinary de jure state in 1297, its de facto existence began in
1324 when, called by their allies of the Giudicato di Arborea in the
course of war with the Republic of Pisa, James II seized the Pisan
territories in the former states of Cagliari and Gallura and asserted
his papally approved title.
More information: Britannica
In 1347 CE Aragon made war on landlords of the Doria House and the Malaspina House, who were citizens of the Republic of Genoa, which controlled most of the lands of the former Logudoro state in north-western Sardinia, including the city of Alghero and the semiautonomous Republic of Sassari, and added them to its direct domains.
The Giudicato of
Arborea, the only Sardinian state that remained independent of foreign
domination, proved far more difficult to subdue. Threatened by the
Aragonese claims of suzerainty and consolidation of the rest of the
island, in 1353 Arborea, under the leadership of Marianus IV, started
the conquest of the remaining Sardinian territories, which formed the
Kingdom of Sardinia.
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| Kingdom of Sardinia under the Crown of Aragon |
In 1368 an Arborean offensive succeeded in nearly driving the Aragonese from the island, reducing the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica to just the port cities of Cagliari and Alghero and incorporating everything else into their own kingdom.
A peace treaty returned the Aragonese their previous possessions in 1388, but tensions continued and 1382 CE the Arborean army led by Brancaleone Doria again swept the most of the island into Arborean rule. This situation lasted until 1409 when the army of the giudicato of Arborea suffered a heavy defeat by the Aragonese army in the Battle of Sanluri.
After the sale of the remaining territories for 100,000 gold florins to the giudicato of Arborea in 1420, the Kingdom of Sardinia extended throughout the island, except for the city of Castelsardo, at that time called Casteldoria or Castelgenovese, which had been stolen from the Doria in 1448. The subduing of Sardinia having taken a century, Corsica, which had never been wrestled from the Genoese, was dropped from the formal title of the Kingdom.
More information: WikiVisually
In 1420, after the Sardinian-Catalan War, the last competing claim to the island was bought out. After the union of the crowns of Aragon and Castile, Sardinia became a part of the burgeoning Spanish Empire.
In 1353 Arborea waged
war on Aragon. The Crown of Aragon did not reduce the last of the
giudicati, indigenous kingdoms of Sardinia, until 1420. The Kingdom of Sardinia
and Corsica retained its separate character as part of the Crown of
Aragon and was not merely incorporated into the Kingdom of Aragon.
At
the time of his struggles with Arborea, Peter IV of Aragon granted an
autonomous legislature to the Kingdom and its legal traditions. The
Kingdom was governed in the king's name by a Viceroy.
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| House of Trastámara, 1412-1555 |
In 1420, Alfonso V of Aragon, king of Sicily and heir to Aragon, bought the remaining territories for 100,000 gold florins of the Giudicato of Arborea in the 1420 from the last giudice William III of Narbonne and the Kingdom of Sardinia extended throughout the island, except for the city of Castelsardo, at that time called Casteldoria or Castelgenovese that was stolen from the Doria in 1448, and renamed Castillo Aragonés (Aragonese Castle).
Corsica, which had never been conquered, was dropped from the formal title and Sardinia passed with the Crown of Aragon. The defeat of the local kingdoms, communes and signorie, the firm Aragonese rule, the introduction of a sterile feudalism, as well as the discovery of the Americas, provoked an unstoppable decline of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
A short period of uprisings occurred under the local noble Leonardo Alagon, marquess of Oristano, who defended his territories against the Viceroy Nicolò Carroz and managed to defeat the viceroy's army in the 1470s, but was later crushed at the Battle of Macomer in 1478, ending any further revolts in the island. The unceasing attacks from north African pirates and a series of plagues (in 1582, 1652 and 1655) further worsened the situation.
More information: History of Royal Woman
In 1720 it was ceded by the Habsburg and Bourbon claimants to the Spanish throne to Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy. The Kingdom of Sardinia came to be progressively identified with the states ruled by the main branch of the House of Savoy, which included, besides Savoy and Aosta, dynastic possessions since the 11th century, the Principality of Piedmont, a possession built up in the 13th century, and the County of Nice, a possession since 1388. While in theory the traditional capital of the island of Sardinia and seat of its viceroys was Cagliari, the Piedmontese city of Turin was the capital of Savoy.
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| Habsburg, Bourbon, Savoy and Carignano, 1516-1861 |
When the mainland domains of the House of Savoy were occupied and eventually annexed by Napoleonic France, the king of Sardinia made his permanent residence on the island for the first time in its history. The Congress of Vienna (1814–15), which restructured Europe after Napoleon's defeat, returned to Savoy its mainland possessions and augmented them with Liguria, taken from the Republic of Genoa. In 1847–48, in a perfect fusion, the various Savoyard states were unified under one legal system, with the capital in Turin, and granted a constitution, the Statuto Albertino.
There followed the annexation of Lombardy (1859), the central Italian states and the Two Sicilies (1860), Venetia (1866), and the Papal States (1870). On 17 March 1861, to more accurately reflect its new geographic extent, the Kingdom of Sardinia changed its name to the Kingdom of Italy, and its capital was eventually moved first to Florence and then to Rome.
More information: Department of State of the USA-Office of Historian
People inevitably think of themselves as Sardinian first
and Italian second (or sometimes even third, after European).
A book written once about Sardinia was entitled
The Unconquered Island, and it's true.
Invaded and exploited it has been, yes, but not conquered.
Dana Facaros
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