Sardinia

• 1. Introduction

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  Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and it sits at a crossroads that has drawn Phoenician traders, Roman legions, Vandal warlords, Aragonese kings, and Napoleonic fleets to its shores across thousands of years. Only 16.45 km south of Corsica and just 200 km north of Tunisia, this single landmass holds more than 7,000 ancient stone towers, a legal code that gave women the right to refuse marriage in the 14th century, and a living language so distinct from Italian that it is officially recognized as one of Italy's twelve linguistic minorities. Why did every great Mediterranean power feel compelled to possess it? How did a people isolated on a rocky, mountainous island manage to build one of the most sophisticated Bronze Age civilizations in the western Mediterranean? And how, after centuries of conquest, did Sardinia retain a culture so unlike anywhere else in Europe that travelers have called it a micro-continent? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Nuragic World

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  From about 1500 BC onwards, villages across Sardinia were organized around a kind of round tower-fortress called a nuraghe. Today some 7,000 of these structures dot the Sardinian landscape, ranging from simple lookout towers on strategic hilltops to the vast, complex monuments of Nuraghe Santu Antine, Su Nuraxi, and Nuraghe Arrubiu. Building them on that scale required the coordination of large numbers of people across different roles, which tells us something remarkable: this was no simple tribal society. The Nuragic people were at the center of several commercial routes, trading copper and lead with partners from as far away as Cyprus, Crete, mainland Greece, Spain, and the Italian peninsula. Votive bronze statuettes and the giant limestone statues of Mont'e Prama testify to a civilization with the surplus wealth and artistic ambition to make lasting works of art. Sacred wells and Giants' graves served religious purposes, and pilgrimage sites like Su Romanzesu near Bitti suggest organized mass ritual. Some scholars identify the Nuragic people with the Sherden, a tribe listed among the Sea Peoples, which would connect Sardinia to the turbulent late Bronze Age world that brought down palace civilizations across the eastern Mediterranean. The Nuragic civilization was also linked to the Talaiotic culture of the Balearic Islands and the Torrean civilization of southern Corsica, pointing to a network of shared megalithic traditions across the western Mediterranean. Nuragic society endured in the mountainous interior known as Barbagia until as late as the 6th century AD, long after Roman rule had officially ended the civilization elsewhere on the island.

• 3. Conquest and the Long Roman Century

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  Phoenician merchants had been stopping at Sardinian ports since around the 9th century BC, seeking safe anchorage along their trade routes between modern-day Lebanon and the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe. The most common ports of call were Caralis, Nora, Bithia, Sulci, and Tharros. The 4th-century Latin poet Claudian wrote that Caralis was founded by people from Tyre, probably around the same time Carthage itself was established. Carthaginian ambitions on the island grew after the conquest of western Sicily. A first invasion led by Malchus was repelled by Nuragic resistance, but from 510 BC the southern and west-central parts of the island came under Carthaginian rule. Then, in 238 BC, Rome exploited Carthage's distraction with the Mercenary War that followed the First Punic War to seize both Corsica and Sardinia. The two islands became a single province, though they did not receive a proper provincial governor until 227 BC. Roman rule lasted 694 years, during which the island became an important grain supplier for the capital. Latin became the dominant spoken language, yet Roman culture took hold more slowly, and uprisings from the mountainous interior were a persistent feature of the occupation. The Romans called that interior Barbaria, meaning Barbarian land, and it was precisely there that the last embers of Nuragic life burned longest. Roman colonists populated new settlements like Turris Lybissonis and Feronia, while older coastal cities were enlarged and embellished. This long Roman presence would shape the island's Latin-derived language and its institutional memory in ways that outlasted every subsequent occupation.

• 4. The Four Kingdoms

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  In AD 456, the East Germanic tribe of the Vandals conquered Sardinia, a rule that lasted 78 years. The last Vandal governor, Godas, a Visigoth noble, made a remarkable gambit. When a coup in Carthage replaced King Hilderic with the Arian Christian Gelimer, Godas declared the island's independence and opened negotiations with Emperor Justinian I. Gelimer responded by sending the bulk of his navy and army to subdue Godas: 120 vessels and 5,000 men. This proved catastrophic for the Vandals, because while that fleet was en route to Sardinia, Justinian's general Belisarius arrived at Carthage and overwhelmed the depleted Vandal Kingdom. Sardinia then returned to Byzantine rule. Over the following centuries, as Arab raids intensified following the fall of Carthage to the Arabs in 697, communications with Constantinople became nearly impossible. A letter by Pope Nicholas I in 864 mentions the Sardinian judges without any reference to the empire, and by the time the Byzantine text De Administrando Imperio was completed in 952, the imperial authorities no longer even listed Sardinia as a province. What emerged instead were four indigenous kingdoms known as Judicates: Cagliari, Arborea, Gallura, and Torres. The Judicate was not regarded as the personal property of the monarch in the way later European feudalism would demand. National assemblies called the Crown of the Realm gave these states a semi-democratic character rooted in a millennium-old Roman imperial tradition. Each Judicate maintained its own laws and administered its own foreign affairs. The contest to control them then drew in the Italian maritime republics of Pisa and Genoa, who struggled for influence across the island for the next two centuries, until the ambitions of the Crown of Aragon changed everything.

• 5. Eleanor's Charter

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  In 1297, Pope Boniface VIII created a hypothetical Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica to settle the War of the Sicilian Vespers, offering it to James II of Aragon in exchange for Sicily. The actual conquest came in 1324, when Crown Prince Alfonso led an Aragonese army that occupied the Pisan territories of Cagliari and Gallura. The legal legacy of what followed is extraordinary. The Judicate of Arborea produced the Carta de Logu, a legal code originally compiled by Marianus IV of Arborea and then amended and updated by his daughter, the Female Judge Eleanor of Arborea. Written in Sardinian, the Carta de Logu established a whole range of citizens' rights, including the right of women to refuse marriage and to own property. In terms of civil liberties, that 14th-century code made Sardinia one of the most developed societies in all of Europe. Eleanor's Arborea resisted Aragonese domination fiercely. From 1353 to 1409, the Arborean rulers Marianus IV, Hugh III, and Brancaleone Doria, husband of Eleanor, occupied almost all of Sardinia, leaving the Aragonese only the heavily fortified towns of Cagliari and Alghero. The end came at the Battle of Sanluri in 1409, where Martin I of Sicily defeated a Sardinian, Genoese, and French force of about 20,000 knights, a force that outnumbered the Aragonese yet was beaten. The Judicate of Arborea disappeared in 1420, when its rights were sold by the last king for 100,000 gold florins. Sardinia then became probably the only European territory where feudalism was formally introduced at a point when most of Europe was already abandoning it. Eleonora's falcon, the Eleonora's falcon found on the island today, carries her name as a tribute to a woman who nearly unified her island into an independent republic against an empire.

• 6. Under Spain and Savoy

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  In 1469, Ferdinand II of Aragon married Isabel of Castile, and Sardinia's future passed to their Habsburg grandson Charles I of Spain. The island remained under Aragonese-Spanish rule for roughly 400 years, from 1323 to 1708, long enough to absorb Spanish customs and expressions that are still vividly evident in the folklore parades of Saint Efisio in Cagliari on the 1st of May and the Redeemer in Nuoro on the 28th of August. Catalan is still spoken in the northwestern city of Alghero to this day. The human cost of this period was severe. According to the Jesuits of Cagliari, years of such hunger struck in the late 16th century that the majority of the population could sustain life only with wild ferns and weeds. During the famine of 1680, some 80,000 people, out of a total population of 250,000, are said to have died. In 1708, the Spanish War of Succession handed the island to the Austrians, and then the Treaty of London in 1718 gave it to the House of Savoy, who began actually governing from 1720 onwards. The Savoyards introduced Italian on the island in 1760, beginning a process of Italianization. A more dramatic confrontation came in 1793 during the French Revolutionary Wars, when Domenico Millelire, commanding the Sardinian fleet, defeated French forces near the Maddalena archipelago. The French expedition had been led in part by a then-lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte. Millelire became the first recipient of the Gold Medal of Military Valor of the Italian Armed Forces. Popular discontent with Savoyard rule led to the uprising of the 28th of April 1794, when two Savoyard officials were killed in Cagliari and Piedmontese officers were expelled in what became known as the Sardinian Vespers. The date is still commemorated today as sa die de sa Sardigna. When the Savoyards imposed the Enclosures Act in 1820, turning communal land into private property, they dismantled a system of collective ownership that had persisted since Nuragic times, giving rise to repeated local rebellions, including the Nuorese Su Connottu riot in 1868.

• 7. Modern Sardinia

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  The Brigata Sassari, the first and only regional military unit in Italian history, distinguished itself during the First World War. Sardinia lost more young people than any other Italian region on the front: 138 casualties per 1,000 soldiers, compared to the Italian average of 100. The brigade earned four Gold Medals of Military Valor. In 1926, the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda won the Nobel Prize for Literature. During the Second World War, Sardinia served as a key air and naval base and was heavily bombed by the Allies, particularly the city of Cagliari. German troops left the island on the 8th of September 1943, a few days after the Armistice of Cassibile, following a bilateral agreement between General Antonio Basso, Commander of the Armed Forces of Sardinia, and the German Karl Hans Lungerhausen of the 90th Panzergrenadier Division. By 1951, malaria had been eliminated through the work of the ERLAAS, Anti-malaric Regional Authority, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, opening the door to the tourism boom that followed. Political tensions rose again in the 1970s, when Sardinian nationalist movements grew stronger and, in the span of just two years between 1987 and 1988, 224 bombing attacks were reported from militant groups. Today, around 60% of all Italian and NATO military installations in Italy are located on Sardinia, even though the island makes up less than one-tenth of Italian territory and holds just over 2.5% of the population. The island's institutional memory of sovereignty runs deep: a 1983 election placed a prominent activist of the Sardinian Action Party in the presidency of the regional parliament, and the island's languages were not formally recognized alongside Italian until 1999. The CRS4, based on the island, developed the second European website and the first in Italy in 1991, and then pioneered webmail in 1995, a digital frontier that fits an island accustomed to finding its own way.