This volume originated in a 2016 University of Cagliari conference on commerce, finance, and war in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Sardinia. Its goal, well achieved in the collected essays, was to produce new studies from archival sources in Italy, Spain, and France. The work was published in 2017 together with Maria Elisa Soldani's companion monograph, I mercanti catalani e la Corona d'Aragona in Sardegna. (In a wealth of material, Brill's A Companion to Sardinian History, 500–1500, also was issued in 2017.) The volume reflects the further movement of medieval Sardinian economics and commerce into mainstream Mediterranean historiography. In recent decades, scholars including Olivetta Schena and Sergio Tognetti, among others, have produced numerous works revealing extensive and sophisticated commercial and financial operations in and with medieval Sardinia. Their studies highlight the island's role within the larger Mediterranean network, building on the foundational work of Alberto Boscolo, Marco Tangheroni, and others a generation earlier. The current volume advances this effort through an examination of specialized issues, including coinage, individual trader activities and networks, war financing, and commercial maritime regulation. The contributors document the scope of existing historiography on their respective subjects but also provide a fresh perspective and new information gained from notarial records, merchant notebooks, and other unedited materials. The result is a masterfully detailed look at aspects of economic and commercial life concerning late medieval Sardinia.
The volume contains an introduction and seven essays on topics dating from the twelfth century, with Pisan and Genoese hegemony, through Aragon's conquest in the fourteenth century, and into events of the fifteenth century. The chapters are set against the political backdrop of an island that, despite being largely controlled and influenced by outside agents and governments, managed to assert its own localized voice and character. Schena and Tognetti introduce the essays and place them within the Mediterranean historical and historiographical nexus with Sardinia. Enrico Basso analyzes scholarship since the nineteenth century, particularly Sardinia's relationship with Genoa and the scientific approach of Alberto Boscolo and Geo Pistarino, as well as their successors, from the mid-twentieth century forward. Monica Baldassarri details Sardinia's monetization before and after Aragon's conquest, using archaeology and numismatics. Baldassarri includes discussion of pre-conquest silver denari and grossi of Lucca, Genoa, Pisa, and Barcelona, emphasizing island-mined Pisan Gherardesca coins, followed by an examination of domestic mining and production under Aragon. Mario Lafuente Gómez documents Aragon's financing of its Sardinian conquest from 1323 to 1410, initially via royally imposed territorial subsidies, then by Parliament-negotiated funds that ultimately restrained royal power, and finally by private capital.
Maria Elisa Soldani examines the Cagliari-based operations of the Barcelonan merchant Joan Benet under early Aragonese governance. Through account books, Soldani demonstrates Benet's impressive energy, detailing his widespread Sardinian and foreign mercantile network and commodity trading. Laure-Hélène Gouffran discusses coral (“red gold”) commerce between Marseilles and coral-producing Sardinian Alghero, with Levant-bound exports, during the second half of the fourteenth century. Gouffran's analysis includes activities of the investor-trader Julien de Casaulx, whose coral shipments to the Levant from 1380 to 1382 alone totaled 10,402 florins. Giuseppe Seche examines records from a Cagliari diocesan archive revealing the commercial relationship between a Sardinian-Catalan family, the Dessi, and the Navarro brothers of Valencia during the second half of the fifteenth century. Seche highlights mercantile knowledge of markets, contacts, products, financing, and operations in this context. Elena Maccioni analyzes the Barcelonan Sea Consulate's evolution in controlling Sardinian strongholds during an era of piracy. Archival sources reveal that elite Catalan merchants assumed public functions in financing and protecting contested waters and territories, including via armed galleys.
The amount of information and data contained within relatively brief chapters is striking, but it at no point obscures the authors’ cohesive narratives and arguments. The charts, tables, and maps provide valuable displays of textual or additional information. Noteworthy are Baldassarri's graphs and mapping of monetization, coin distributions, and mines for Sardinia and Ligurian-Tuscan Italy; Soldani's extensive tables of commodity trading, by date, product, commissioning agent, and even ship type; Seche's appendix of transcribed documents; and Gómez's numerical tables of Aragon's war financing, arranged by campaign, individual leader, and royal territory. Overall, this volume provides an important contribution to the scholarship on late medieval Sardinian commerce and finance from a grassroots perspective. One can only look forward to additional studies from the editors and contributors.
