Sardinian medieval kingdoms
[3] This defence was so effective that in a letter in 851 Pope Leo IV asked the Iudex Provinciae ('judge of the province') of Sardinia, based in Caralis, for aid in the defense of Rome.
With the fall of the Exarchate of Africa, based in Carthage, at the end of the seventh century, and especially with the emergence of the Arab presence in Sicily (827), Sardinia remained disconnected from the core lands of the Byzantine Empire and had, out of necessity, become economically and militarily independent.
He appointed, in the most strategic area for the defense of the coast, the lociservator (lieutenant), belonging to his family, the Lacon-Gunale, who became substantially autonomous from Caralis over time; this was probably the action that precipitated the birth of the kingdoms, or judgedoms.
[6] The administrative organization of the judgedoms differed significantly from the feudal forms existing in the rest of medieval Europe as their institutions were closer to those of the territories of the Byzantine Empire, although with local peculiarities that some scholars consider of Nuragic derivation.
The king did not have possession of the land nor was he the repository of sovereignty since this was formally held by the Corona de Logu, a council of elders (representatives of the administrative districts - Curadorias) and high priests.
The territory of various kingdoms was divided into curadorias, administrative districts of varying sizes formed by urban and rural villages, dependent on a capital which housed the curadore.
The curadore appointed for each village was part of the curadorias a majore de Bidda (the modern equivalent of a mayor) with administrative and judicial powers, and direct responsibility for the successful actions of land management.
The chart survived, albeit with some difficulty, the judicial period and remained in force in the Spanish and Savoyard era until the enactment of the Code of Carlo Felice in April 1827.
Term of Byzantine origin (kontakion - stick on which cards sewn together were rolled up) which defines the register on which the parchments of the deeds of donation to monasteries or other ecclesiastical bodies were transcribed.
In them the sums of money, the servants, the maids, the cultivated lands, the vineyards, the wooded areas (the salts), the pastures and the livestock donated by the local nobility were reported in great detail.
Besides the use of spears and shields, another common weapon was the leppa, a sword with a bone handle and curved blade, between 50 and 70 cm long which was still in use, in a more contained dimension, until the end of nineteenth century.
[8] In the eleventh century, after the schism of 1054, the judikes, according to Pope Alexander II, began a policy for the development of Western monasticism on the island, with the aim of a wider dissemination of culture but also of new techniques for cultivating the land.
For several centuries afterwards representatives of many religious orders including the monks of the Abbey of Montecassino, the Camaldolese, the Vallombrosians, the Vittorini of Marseille, the Cistercians of Bernard of Clairvaux arrived and settled in Sardinia.
Pisa and Genoa began to infiltrate the Judicial politics and economy in the eleventh century intervening to support the giudicati, against the Taifa of Dénia, an Iberian Muslim kingdom, which was trying to conquer the island.
From the second half of the thirteenth century the autonomous existence of the kingdoms of Logudoro, Gallura and Calari ended due to the diplomatic maneuvers of Genoa and Pisa on the territory, on trade, on the episcopal curiae, and the judicial chancelleries.
