Sardenya, una història pròxima. El regne sard a l'època moderna

2012. Pròleg de Francesco Manconi, 400 pp.

Sardinia has been a part of the Crown of Aragon. It is precisely the legal, political, social, linguistic, etc. ‘conformity’ of the island with the Catalan-Aragonese Motherland the distinctive seal of the Sardinian History for about four centuries. That is why for a today-historian studying Valencia and Sardinia are revealed so many homogeneities which asks a deep analysis from multiple aspects from the problems of a neighbouring political situation to the measures to fight the common Turk danger enemy, without forgetting the institutional similarities of the royal and town field. This is what Lluís Guia does in the initial chapters of the book. The main topic is the historic phase Spanish-Sardinian which opens with he death of Carlos II in 1700. This is a chapter almost unknown extended almost to the diplomatic cession of the kingdom of Sardinia to the Duke of Savoy in 1720. In this context, Guia’s works represent an absolute novelty which reports to us many capital questions of this crucial period of the Sardinian history; from the definitive crisis of the parliament institution to the highest acceptation of the elites of the sudden drastic dynastic changes; from the client logic which divided the Sardinian nobles, to the tensed adequation of kingdom’s magistrates. Like Francesco Manconi says in the prologue, ‘the work of Lluís Guia has to be received with great interest by the international scientific community and with a bit of complacency by the Sardinian historiography because of the interest the Iberic historians are finally showing for the history of Sardinia’.