Kingdom of Sardinia
gigatos | June 6, 2022
Summary
The Kingdom of Sardinia was a southern European state entity that existed between 1297 and 1861, when it was legally replaced by the Kingdom of Italy.
The Kingdom of Sardinia was created in compliance with the Treaty of Anagni by Pope Boniface VIII under the name Regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae, becoming a constituent nation of the Crown of Aragon on April 5, 1297. At its creation, Corsica was in a situation of substantial anarchy, while Sardinia was divided between the Giudicato of Arborea, the overseas territories of the Republic of Pisa, the free commune of Sassari and three seigniorial states belonging to the della Gherardesca, Malaspina and Doria families. Beginning in 1323 the Aragonese began the conquest of Sardinia, incorporating it completely into the Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica only in 1420 at the end of the Sardinian-Catalan War. Renamed simply “Kingdom of Sardinia” in 1479, the kingdom remained part of the Crown of Aragon until 1516, when following dynastic union with the Crown of Castile it passed to the Crown of Spain.
In 1700, with the outbreak of the War of the Spanish Succession, the Kingdom of Sardinia was disputed between the Habsburgs and the Bourbons until 1720, when following the Treaty of the Hague it was handed over to the House of Savoy. With the acquisition of the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Savoy formed a federation consisting of the principality of Piedmont, the Duchy of Savoy, the county of Nice and the Kingdom of Sardinia, which, due to the importance of its title, gave the entire federation its name. The federation ended on December 3, 1847 when, as a result of perfect fusion, the federated states were united under one kingdom.
During the Risorgimento, the conquest of the Italian peninsula by the Savoyard Kingdom of Sardinia caused the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy on March 17, 1861, thus ending the history of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
The long duration of its institutional history and the various historical phases it went through mean that commonly historiography distinguishes three different periods according to the dominant political entity: an Aragonese period (1324-1479), a Spanish-imperial period (1479-1720) and a Savoy period (1720-1861).
Regnum Sardiniae was created to resolve the political and diplomatic crisis that arose between the Crown of Aragon and the Capetian dynasty of Anjou following the War of Vespers for control of Sicily. The deed of enfeoffment, dated April 5, 1297, stated that the kingdom belonged to the Church and was given in perpetuity to the kings of the Crown of Aragon in exchange for an oath of vassalage and the payment of an annual census.
After its creation, the kingdom was territorially conquered starting in 1324 with the war waged by the Aragonese rulers against the Pisans, in alliance with the Judicial Kingdom of Arborea.
Mariano IV, son of Ugone II, ruler of Arborea, had almost succeeded in the historic goal of unifying the island under his own banner and driving out the Aragonese. He died suddenly while still missing the conquest of the cities of Alghero and Cagliari. With the peace of 1388, Eleanor, sister of Ugone III, and John I Cacciatore king of Aragon restored the giudicato of Arborea to its former boundaries.
The conquest was long opposed by the resistance on the island of the Giudicato of Arborea itself and could only be considered partially concluded in 1420, with the purchase of the remaining territories from the last Giudice for 100 000 gold florins, in 1448 with the conquest of the town of Castelsardo (then Castel Doria). It was part of the Crown of Aragon until 1713, even after the marriage of Ferdinand II to Isabella of Castile, when Aragon became dynastically (but not politically-administratively) linked first to Castile, then – in the already Habsburg era (starting in 1516) – also to the other state entities ruled by that House (County of Flanders, Duchy of Milan, etc.).
In 1713 immediately after the War of the Spanish Succession, Sardinia became part of the domains of the Habsburgs of Austria, who ceded it, after a failed attempt by Spain to recapture it, to Victor Amadeus II (formerly Duke of Savoy), receiving the Kingdom of Sicily in exchange (1720). In 1767-69 Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy took the Maddalena archipelago from Genoese control. In 1847 all the other states of the Savoy Royal House merged into the Kingdom with the so-called perfect fusion.
With the reorganization of the Sardinian state and the consequent disappearance of the old institutions, the island became a region of a larger state, no longer limited to the island alone as it had been since its founding, but unitary, with one customs territory, one people, one parliament and one constitutional law (the Statuto Albertino), encompassing Sardinia, Savoy, Nice, Liguria and Piedmont (which housed the capital Turin), retaining the name Kingdom of Sardinia for a few more years, until, once the Unification of Italy was achieved, with the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy, it changed its name to the Kingdom of Italy.
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The Aragonese conquest of the Sardinian territories of the Republic of Pisa
The first part of the history of the Kingdom of Sardinia is characterized by the Aragonese conquest of the portion of the island already in the hands of Pisa (corresponding to the territories of the former giudicati of Calari and Gallura) and the long conflict that opposed this first territorial nucleus of the new state to the giudicale kingdom of Arborea. It was not until 1323 that King James II of Aragon decided to undertake the territorial conquest of Sardinia by sending to the island an army led by his son, the Infante Alfonso, which defeated the Pisans in both the siege of Villa di Chiesa (July 1323-February 1324) and the battle of Lucocisterna (February 1324).
Pushing in this direction were Catalan commercial interests and, in part, the need to give Catalan and Aragonese nobility the opportunity to conquer lands and fiefdoms. Catalan policy at that time was in fact aimed at commercial hegemony in the Mediterranean, through the strategic ruta de las islas, (the islands route), which from the Balearic Islands was to touch precisely Sardinia, then Sicily, Malta and Cyprus. Controlling such a sea route should have allowed the Barcelona merchant class to gain a dominant position over Pisa, Genoa, and Venice itself. Indeed, this is what happened: several influential Catalan families such as the Canelles developed important trade between Sardinia and Aragon, setting up new economic relations in the Western Mediterranean Sea area.
Life in the new kingdom was somewhat precarious, however. From the outset, the imposition of feudal rule on populations that had never experienced it, combined with the drastic shift of economic and political interests outward from the island, caused discontent and strong resistance both in the villages with an agricultural vocation and in the artisan and commercial classes of the cities. Ugone II of Arborea had sworn vassallatic submission to the King of Aragon, calculating to become a sort of lieutenant of him in the territories taken from the Pisans while at the same time retaining his own sovereign titles in the Arborean possessions: in practice a sort of lordship, held in various capacities and legally uneven, over the entire island. However, for the Crown of Aragon, now also de facto holder of sovereignty over the Kingdom of Sardinia, Arborea was no more than a portion of the kingdom itself, entrusted simply to a vassal of the crown. Such a misunderstanding would give rise to fatal misunderstandings and even jurisdictional proceedings against the House of Arborea.
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Anti-Aragonese revolt of the Dorias and wars between the Giudicato of Arborea and the Kingdom of Sardinia
In 1347, as the terrible epidemic of the Black Death, depicted by Boccaccio in his Decameron, began to spread throughout Europe, events in Sardinia precipitated. The Dorias, fearful of the Aragonese hegemony that threatened their possessions, decided to take action by unleashing war and massacring the army of the regnoli at the Battle of Aidu de Turdu.
Because of the terrible pestilence, the war actions stopped, momentarily saving the royalists from complete defeat in the north of the island, but six years later, in 1353, by resolution of the Corona de Logu, the new ruler of Arborea, Mariano IV, took the field on the side of the Dorias. This decision, on the part of one who was considered nothing more than a vassal of the Aragonese crown, was considered treason. The fortunes for the young Kingdom of Sardinia quickly took a turn for the worse, not least because of the widespread rebellion of the subjugated populations. In 1353, the King of Aragon and Sardinia himself, Peter IV the Ceremonious, had to mount a major expedition to the island, placing himself at its command. Having obtained a truce from the Dorias and Mariano IV (who emerged politically strengthened from the affair), Peter IV took possession of Alghero, driving out its Sardinian population and the Genoese traders who resided there and repopulating it with Catalan and Valencian families, then entered into a peace treaty with the disputants (at Sanluri) and, upon arriving at Castel di Calari, convened for the first time the cortes of the kingdom, the parliament in which representatives of the nobility, clergy and towns of the Kingdom of Sardinia sat (1355). But it was inevitable, given the situation on the island, that hostilities would resume. Not ten years had passed that, despite the raging plague, Arborea again went to war against the Kingdom of Sardinia (1364). The clash soon took on a nationalist connotation, pitting Sardinians and Catalans against each other, in a conflict that in duration, harshness and cruelty had nothing to envy the contemporary Hundred Years” War between the Kingdom of France and the Kingdom of England. For long years (apart from an interlude between 1388 and 1390) the Kingdom of Sardinia was reduced to the two cities of Alghero and Cagliari and a few besieged strongholds.
Under King Martin the Elder, the Catalans won a decisive victory on June 30, 1409, at the Battle of Sanluri, and shortly thereafter they conquered Oristano, thus reducing the Giudicale territory to Sassari and its environs; finally, in 1420 they obtained from the last Arborense ruler, William III of Narbonne, the cession of what remained of the ancient Giudicale kingdom, at the price of 100,000 gold florins. The following year the parliament of the Cortes, which from then on would be called the Stamenti, could meet again in Cagliari. This institutional representative body continued to function de facto until the end of the 18th century, being abolished de jure in 1847, along with the kingdom”s other institutions. Although the Kingdom of Sardinia continued to be part of the Aragonese Crown, during the 15th century the Iberian institutional set-up underwent a decisive evolution, in which the Sardinian kingdom was also involved.
In 1409, at the decisive defeat of the Kingdom of Arborea at the Battle of Sanluri, the Kingdom of Aragon lost its heir to the throne as well as King of Sicily Martin the Younger. The following year his father, Martin the Elder, died without other heirs: thus the lineage of the Count-Kings of Barcelona, long holders of the Aragonese Crown, became extinct. Succession to the throne was problematic. Eventually, after two years of conflict, the Castilian lineage of Trastámara imposed itself. From that moment on, the Catalan component of the Aragonese Crown increasingly took a back seat, with considerable economic, political and cultural consequences. This situation would trigger periodic grievances from the Catalans and even outright rebellions. After the final exit of the kingdom of Arborea in 1420, a few centers of anti-Aragonese resistance remained in Sardinia.
In 1448 the last remaining Doria stronghold on the island, Castelgenovese (present-day Castelsardo), whose name was therefore changed to Castelaragonese, was conquered. In the same years, the last Sardinian resistance was suppressed in the mountains of Gennargentu. The island was divided into fiefs, assigned to those who had contributed to the victorious conquest.
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The Kingdom of Sardinia under the Catholic Monarchs and the Habsburgs of Spain
The failed revolt and failed aristocratic succession of Leonardo de Alagon, last marquis of Oristano, was also followed by the demise of an autonomous policy of the Aragonese Crown following the dynastic union with the Kingdom of Castile. When John II of Aragon died in 1479, he was succeeded by his son Ferdinand II, who had married Isabella, Queen of Castile, ten years earlier. The dynastic union of the two states did not give a formal start to the territorial unification of Spain, however, the Crown of Aragon, and with it the Kingdom of Sardinia, which continued to be part of it, was from then on involved in the power politics first of the “Catholic Kings,” then of the Habsburgs of Spain.
The Crown of Aragon and the states that formed it, including the Kingdom of Sardinia, were massively Hispanized at all levels; in language (Castilian), in culture, in fashions, in that sense of belonging to a political organization, the Spanish empire, perhaps the most powerful that had appeared in the world up to that time, to which belonged numerous peoples, different from each other, and located in every corner of the world, from Mediterranean to Central Europe, from the Americas to the Philippines, from the Portuguese colonies in Brazil, Africa and India to the Mariana Islands. It was a feeling of belonging to which the Sardinian ruling class also fully adhered, even holding political positions of high prestige, as with Vicente Bacallar y Sanna, and cultural positions of good standing for a small province of a great empire. Sardinians fully shared, for better or for worse, the political choices and economic interests of the Kingdom “of Spain,” as it was then called, a stronghold of Habsburg power in Europe, following its historical parabola from its period of maximum splendor and European and world hegemony (16th century) to its final decline (second half of the 17th century).
During the 16th century, the raids of the Barbary pirates and Turks were joined for the island by the threat of Spain”s rival European powers (first France, then England). The almost continuous state of belligerence required some expenditure of resources and men. Under Charles V of Habsburg and especially under his son Philip II, the Sardinian littorals were provided with a dense network of coastal towers as a first measure of defense. However, these measures were never sufficient to ensure a decisive defense against enemy incursions.
Culturally, the progressive and profound process of Hispanization of all administrative and social structures on the island continued. The tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition (based in Sassari) persecuted as much the expressions of heterodox thought of the ruling classes (famous was the trial and condemnation at the stake of the jurist from Cagliari, Sigismondo Arquer, in 1561) as the manifestations of popular religiosity and traditions (a very large portion of which was a legacy of very ancient cults and mystical-medical knowledge). This repressive work was counterbalanced by the new evangelization carried out in the countryside and in inland areas by the Jesuits, who, attentive to local customs and languages, redesigned – safeguarding them – celebrations, festivals and liturgical practices of a clearly pre-Christian matrix that had survived until then (and from then to the present day). The Jesuit fathers were also responsible for the erection of colleges in the main cities of the island; from those in Sassari and Cagliari the two Sardinian universities of Sassari and Cagliari would develop in the first decades of the 17th century. In 1566 the first printing press in the kingdom was also founded in Cagliari by Nicolò Canelles, fostering cultural progress throughout the island.
The feudal system, especially during the 17th century, was partly tempered by the pactual regime that many communities were able to impose on the lord”s on-site representatives with regard to taxation and administration of justice, which were otherwise exposed to the arbitrariness of the baron and annuity contractors. However, feudal taxation remained burdensome and often unsustainable, especially because of the extreme variability of harvests. Periodically, recrudescences of the plague afflicted Sardinia (as did the rest of Europe during the Old Regime): sadly memorable was that of 1652. The second half of the 17th century was a period of economic, cultural and political crisis. The Sardinian aristocracy, of Catalan descent, split into factions: a more conservative pro-government one, a second led by Agostino di Castelvì, marquis of Laconi and first spokesman of the Stamento militare, desirous of greater political autonomy. In 1668 these disagreements led to Parliament”s denial of the donative tax, an unprecedented and potentially subversive event. A few weeks later, the Marquis of Laconi, the acknowledged leader of the anti-government faction that had put forward the demand for the allocation of offices exclusively to natives of the Island, was treacherously murdered.
A month later, suffering the same fate on the streets of Cagliari Castle was none other than the viceroy himself, Manuel de los Cobos y Luna, Marquis of Camarassa. This succession of events aroused great scandal in Madrid and suspicion that a generalized revolt was being prepared in Sardinia, just as had happened in Catalonia less than thirty years earlier. Repression was extremely severe; however, the population remained essentially uninvolved in these events. In 1698 the last deliberative session of the Sardinian parliament ended. For the Stamenti to gather again, self-convening, it would be necessary to wait until 1793, under exceptional circumstances. Upon the death of the last heir of the Habsburgs of Spain, the difficult succession to the Iberian throne opened up, disputed by the Bourbons of Louis XIV of France and the Habsburgs of Austria, with the other European states siding with one or the other pretender. The bloody conflict known as the War of the Spanish Succession ensued.
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The Kingdom of Sardinia to the Habsburgs of Austria
The War of the Spanish Succession had the dimensions of a full-fledged world war, involving all European powers and their respective colonial empires; in August 1708, during the conflict, an Anglo-Dutch fleet sent by Charles of Austria besieged Cagliari, thus ending Iberian rule after nearly four centuries. After an initial conclusion, regulated by the Peace of Utrecht and the Treaty of Rastatt, the Kingdom of Sardinia came into the possession of the Habsburgs of Austria, who held the island for four years.
In 1717, however, a Spanish expeditionary force, sent by Cardinal Alberoni, a powerful Iberian minister, occupied the island again, driving out Hapsburg officials. It was only a brief interlude, which served only to refresh the two pro-Austrian and pro-Spanish parties into which the Sardinian ruling class was divided.
Following the Peace of Utrecht, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, had become King of Sicily in 1713. Between 1718 and 1720, through diplomatic negotiations in London and The Hague, he had to cede the Kingdom of Sicily to the Empire and accept the Kingdom of Sardinia in its place. The Savoy sovereign thus became the 17th king of Sardinia.
The Kingdom of Sardinia was thus added to the domains of the House of Savoy, a dynasty sovereign since the 10th century, which to the initial nucleus of the County of Savoy-which became a duchy in 1416-had added the Principality of Piedmont in 1418, the county of Asti in 1531, the Marquisate of Saluzzo in 1601, Monferrato, part in 1630 and part in 1713, and large parts of western Lombardy also in 1713.
For the Savoy, who at least since the duchy of Charles II (1505-1553) had progressively shifted their center of gravity to the Italian dominions, the annexation of Sardinia was the result of both a military and diplomatic defeat, which had revealed the weakness of Savoy foreign policy after the death of Queen Anne of England and the consequent loosening of English support. The exchange between Sicily and Sardinia was uneven both economically and politically. The prestige of the Kingdom of Sicily, one of the oldest in Europe, was not comparable to that of a peripheral Iberian state such as Sardinia; the Kingdom of Sicily, for example, was one of only four kingdoms in Europe for which a coronation ceremony was provided within which was also an anointing with consecrated oil. Victor Amadeus II had therefore decided to travel to Palermo for such a ceremony, and he and his court stayed in Palermo for about a year.
On the contrary, in 1720 in Turin there was much thought as to whether the king should travel to Cagliari and proceed with a new coronation. However, the lack of a tradition in this regard would have forced the ruler to invent a new one. For a dynasty that had its north star in antiquity and tradition this was an option not to be considered. The ruler, therefore, gave up that option and did not go to Sardinia, sending a Viceroy there from then on in the function of governor.
Although the Kingdom of Sardinia was less valuable than that of Sicily, the Savoy thought, contrary to what happened in Sicily where they encountered strong opposition from the rich and powerful local nobility, that they could take advantage of the poor and weak Sardinian nobility by including them more easily than the Sicilian nobility in their own honor system. Charles Emmanuel III in 1732 wanted to include among his “gentlemen of the chamber” some Sardinian nobles, such as Don Dalmazzo Sanjust, Marquis of Laconi, and Don Felice Nin, Count of Castillo. The co-option of the Sardinian ruling class into the Savoy power system was a constant, destined to grow more and more until the Risorgimento. In this sense, it is important to note how at least since the 1940s, then, several families of the Sardinian nobility began to send their sons to study at the Royal Academy of Turin, thus laying the foundations for their careers at court. This is the case, for example, of the Pes di Villamarina, one of the Sardinian noble families most closely linked to the House of Savoy. It should also be noted that several Sardinian officials were also called to national magistracies, such as the Cagliari lawyer Vincenzo Mellonda (d. 1747), whom Victor Amadeus II wanted first to teach at the University of Turin and then in 1730 appointed second president of the Senate of Piedmont. When the Savoy family, forced by Napoleonic impetuosity, moved to Cagliari at the end of the eighteenth century, they could thus count on a relationship with the island”s aristocracies that was decidedly changed from a seventy-year period earlier.
Moreover, Sardinia was more easily manageable and defensible than the more distant Sicily. Which also helps to understand the fortification works put in place by the Savoy in major cities, starting with Cagliari from the time of its first viceroy Pallavicino.
It should not be overlooked, however, that for a long time relations between Sardinians and Piedmontese were marked by a strong distrust. Great were the differences between the cultures of the two peoples and their respective ruling classes. This is a sensitive issue that has long marked historiography. However, it should not be forgotten that in general the Savoy government and aristocracies, after the long French preponderance, were now far removed from Spanish culture. Similar problems to those experienced with the Sardinian subjects occurred, in fact, with those cities in Lombardy that came under Savoy control, such as Alexandria and Novara. The ruling classes of such cities had been accustomed for centuries to dealing with a distant power that gave them a substantial free hand over local government in exchange for tribute and military services. Nothing could be further from the Savoy policy, which was building a modern French-style state in which the local ruling classes were left with very little power and, in any case, always under the control of the central government. The misunderstanding between Sardinians and Piedmontese was first and foremost a problem of political culture. In this light, harsh phrases such as, for example, those written by Viceroy Pallavicino in 1723 to Minister Mellaréde are also more understandable: “as a certain rule it is necessary never to trust the Sardinians, who promise wonders and never keep their word.”
Although from 1720 it came into common usage to define the Regi States as the Kingdom of Sardinia, this was only a kind of metonymy. From a formal point of view, in fact, all the states were on the same level, and if a hierarchy among them existed, it was determined primarily by seniority of ownership by the dynasty and, then, by the title of the state (a marquisate, for example, preceded a committee).
From 1720, the title of king of Sardinia certainly became the most important one held by the Savoy sovereigns, but this did not mean that the island to which it was ”leaned” became the main part of the Royal States. Indeed, if Victor Amadeus II did not want to travel to Sardinia to be crowned king there, until 1798 no Savoy sovereign considered visiting the territory of the Kingdom. It was only the loss of the Regi Stati di Terraferma following the defeat in the war against revolutionary France that led to Charles Emmanuel IV”s arrival in Sardinia. Similarly, the seat of the court remained permanently Turin (and the network of residences surrounding it, in which the court also spent seven
Determining, then, a certain distrust in the commitment of Victor Amadeus II and Charles Emmanuel III to Sardinia was the fear that new conflicts in which the Savoy states had engaged would result in the loss of the island or its exchange for other territories. After investing so much money in Sicily and losing it so unexpectedly, the fear of repeating the experience, was strong. It was only after 1748 and the end of the Wars of Succession that, with the beginning of a fifty-year period of peace, the government in Turin decided to provide for a serious reform process in the Kingdom.
This is not to say, however, that in the preceding years the Savoy viceroys had not developed – in agreement with the Turin Secretariats of State – a reforming policy, as shown, for example, by recent research on viceroy Ercole Roero di Cortanze (viceroy from 1727 to 1731), whose work was central in curbing the abuses of the clergy, thanks in part to the support of the archbishop of Cagliari, Raulo Costanzo Falletti di Barolo (archbishop from 1727 to 1748): both from the ranks of the Asti nobility. In the same years, the Jesuit Antonio Falletti di Barolo developed a policy to make Italian the only official language of the island, although until the end of the eighteenth century this remained mostly Castilian along with Sardinian; Italian was, however, introduced in Sardinia in 1760 by royal will, to the detriment of the Iberian and local languages.
The same policy of control of law and order and repression of brigandage implemented by Marquis Carlo San Martino of Rivarolo (viceroy from 1735 to 1739) can be read today with a less critical interpretation than that offered by a part of nineteenth-century historiography.
The reformist instances, grafted into the Piedmontese regalist-jurisdictionalist tradition of Gallican descent, which were proper to the reign of Victor Amadeus II, did not lose effectiveness even during the reign of his successor Charles Emmanuel III. Between 1759 and 1773, Giovanni Battista Lorenzo Bogino, the true first minister of the Regi States, was created minister for the Affairs of Sardinia, and he implemented a vast policy of reforms on the island (the establishment of the Granary Mountains, the reform of the Universities of Cagliari and Sassari, and extensive legislation on jurisdictionalism), which were of undoubted importance in the development of the island.
Certainly, the nascent bourgeoisie and the productive world remained bound by the rigid centralizing provisions of the tax and customs. The rural people and the humblest workers in the cities-that is, the majority of the population-suffered both feudal taxation and government control. The harshness of the Savoy judicial and prison system constituted a strong element of discontent, remaining in the public imagination for a long time.
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Attempted French invasion of Sardinia and Sardinian revolutionary uprisings
When revolutionary France, whose democratic and emancipatory ideas had now seeped onto the island, attempted to militarily occupy Sardinia in the inertia of the Piedmontese viceroy, it was the Parliament that rallied, raised funds and men, and opposed a Sardinian militia to the French landing attempt. Circumstances favored an unpredictable victory for the Sardinians, and the event increased disappointment with the government.
On April 28, 1794, the viceroy and all Piedmontese and foreign officials were expelled from the island. The parliament and the Royal Hearing took control of the situation and ruled the island for a few months until a new viceroy was appointed. In spite of this, unresolved problems were now emerging overwhelmingly. The cities were uncontrollable, the countryside in revolt. The government envoy to Sassari Giovanni Maria Angioy, placed at the head of the rebellion, marched to Cagliari with the intention of seizing power, abolishing the feudal regime and proclaiming the Sardinian republic. Aristocracy and clergy, along with a sizeable part of the bourgeoisie, abandoned all reforming vague wishes and in 1796, with Piedmontese military aid (again conspicuous after the armistice of Cherasco), blocked the revolutionary attempt. Angioy had to repair to France, dying there an exile and in misery a few years later. Other revolutionary attempts in the following years (1802 and 1812) were stifled in blood.
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French occupation of Piedmont and transfer of the Savoy family to Cagliari
In 1799, after Napoleon”s armies took possession of northern Italy, Charles Emmanuel IV and a large part of his court had to repair to Cagliari. Here they remained for a few months, moving back to the peninsula after Charles Felix was appointed viceroy of the island. Victor Emmanuel I returned there in 1806. The royal family”s stay in Sardinia lasted until 1814 for Victor Emmanuel I, until 1815 for his wife Maria Theresa of Habsburg Este and their daughters, and until 1816 for Charles Felix and his wife Maria Christina of Bourbon Naples.
The royals in Cagliari settled in the royal palace, a 14th-century building located in the Castello district, formerly the residence of the viceroys of Sardinia from 1337 until 1847
The expenses of maintaining the court and state officials certainly burdened the coffers of the kingdom, but at the same time, the transformation of the vice-royal palace into a royal palace and the establishment of a court had important consequences for the development of the island. For the first time there was the emergence of Sardinian court artists, whom the Crown sent to train on the continent (particularly in Rome). In addition, the Sardinian nobility and bourgeoisie were able to establish very close relations with the various members of the House of Savoy, and at the Restoration they obtained assignments in Turin that would have been unthinkable during the previous decades.
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The Restoration and Reforms
With the end of the Napoleonic era and the Congress of Vienna, the Savoy family, having returned to Turin, obtained the Republic of Genoa, without a plebiscite sanctioning such annexation. The interests of the ruling house were increasingly directed toward Lombardy and northern Italy, but still without connection to the nascent demands for liberation and Italian national unity. Although averse to any radical innovation of institutions, the ruling house promoted some legislative renewal during the Restoration period. In 1820 an edict was issued in Sardinia by King Victor Emmanuel I that allowed anyone to become the owner of a piece of land that they had managed to girdle: it was the so-called Edict of the Chiudende. In 1827 King Charles Felix extended the new civil code to Sardinia, thus repealing the ancient Carta de Logu, a general law of reference for the entire island since the time of Eleanor of Arborea, kept in force by Catalans and Spaniards. Between 1836 and 1838, King Charles Albert finally abolished the feudal system.
The monetary redemption of territories taken from the aristocracy and high clergy was levied, in the form of tribute, on the people. With the proceeds, many aristocratic families were even able to buy back in full ownership a large part of the feudal lands. This series of legislative measures, ostensibly aimed at fostering the economic progress of agriculture and thus of the entire Sardinian economy, turned out to be largely counterproductive, because the new land holdings, no longer intended for communal uses, were earmarked for rent for grazing, which was cheaper and more remunerative than cultivation, favoring passive income over productive activities. While on the Savoy possessions on the mainland the decisive process of modernization was underway, in Sardinia social and economic imbalances grew and the island”s resources (mines, timber, salt pans, dairy production) were contracted out and given in concession mostly to foreigners, in a colonial-style economic cycle. The Sardinian situation thus remained stagnant, with periodic popular rebellions and nourishment of atavistic banditry.
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The Italian Risorgimento and the formal end of the Kingdom of Sardinia
From the earliest years after the Restoration, liberal bourgeoisies and much of the intellectual class in the various Italic states in the Italian peninsula began to cultivate political projects of national unification, fueled by the growing hold of Romantic ideas.
Around the middle of the century, starting in 1848, a year of revolutions throughout Europe, the process of territorial unification of the Peninsula began concretely with the First War of Independence.
At the head of the political process thus initiated was precisely the Kingdom of Sardinia led by the Savoy. In the same 1848 Charles Albert granted the Statute, the kingdom”s first constitution, which remained formally in force until 1948, when the current Constitution of the Italian republican was promulgated.
Between 1859 (Second War of Independence) and 1861 (after Garibaldi”s expedition of the Thousand, 1860), Italy achieved unity under the banner of the Savoy kingdom, resulting in the disappearance of the other states.
On March 17, 1861, the XXIV King of Sardinia, Victor Emmanuel II, proclaimed the birth of the Kingdom of Italy.
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Legislation
The Savoy codes, with the exception of the civil code, were provisionally extended to all of Italy after the unification of Italy. The Civil Code of 1865 and the Commercial Code of 1882 (which succeeded the 1865 code) were replaced by a single code, the Civil Code of 1942. The Criminal Code of 1889 was replaced by the Criminal Code of 1930.
Sources
