Ethnic identity in medieval Sardinia: rethinking and reflecting on 14th and 15th century examples

The few examples of identity-making discourses examined in this work show the potential of reading traditional documentary sources, especially of those already published, in order to increase the range of interpretations proposed so far by historiography and to specify, at least in part, the model applied to the relationships between Sardinians and Catalan-Aragoneses. This is arelationship analysed mainly through institutional and economical categories, leaving in the background the numerous examination possibilities offered by a social sciences' typical reading. And here, indeed, it takes shape in this work and in previous ones an even greater wealth of details available to the scholar for reconstructing motives, purposes and action methods of the late Middle Ages Sardinian history's protagonists, caught in the folds of individual documents, with a detailed analysis of the single terms that may be found in the sources. Here, again, the identity images are enriched with nuances: the images of not only the Judges of Arborea, engaged in a complex work of integration into a new social and cultural context - the Catalan-Aragonese society - which led them to try the development of a new dynastic and personal identity, proposing to replace the title of judges and requesting and obtaining the appointment as milites and the granting of nobility titles. Here, more images also appear such as those of Judical Sardinians and Regnum's subjects engaged in an ethnic as well as military conflict. Next to them, we find a third type of Sardinians: the Barbaricini - now opponents of the Aragoneses and the Arboreas, now allies of the latter - whose expansion area once again raises historiographical problems not completely resolved on the true extent of the Judical domain and of the royal one in the internal areas of the island. All these examples, as well as many others that here cannot be treated in full, reaffirm the need for a deep re-reading of Sardinian history during the Middle Ages' last two centuries; a reassessment that should be more attentive to documents' content, and less inclined to build a priori interpretation models often used in modern political and nationalistic purposes. A re-reading that delivers to scholars and readers a Judicate of Arborea's history without its laudatory tones, but that still puts greater emphasis on its nature of a unicum institutional framework in medieval Western Europe