Alex Metcalfe, Hervin Fernández-Aceves, and Marco Muresu, eds. The Making of Medieval Sardinia. The Medieval Mediterranean, volume 128. Brill 2021.

From Brill

This landmark volume combines classic and revisionist essays to explore the historiography of Sardinia’s exceptional transition from an island of the Byzantine empire to the rise of its own autonomous rulers, the iudikes, by the 1000s.

In addition to Sardinia’s contacts with the Byzantines, Muslim North Africa and Spain, Lombard Italy, Genoa, Pisa, and the papacy, recent and older evidence is analysed through Latin, Greek and Arabic sources, vernacular charters and cartularies, the testimony of coinage, seals, onomastics and epigraphy as well as the Sardinia’s early medieval churches, arts, architecture and archaeology. The result is an important new critique of state formation at the margins of Byzantium, Islam, and the Latin West with the creation of lasting cultural, political and linguistic frontiers in the western Mediterranean.