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The 'Kingdom of Sardinia' was a state centred on the island of Sardinia for more than five centuries. It was often combined with extensive territories elsewhere, such as Corsica or Savoy, but Sardinia was always its namesake. Prior to the firm establishment of a Sardinian monarchy, the island was divided between four ''giudicati'' ruled by ''iudices'' (judges who sometimes styled themselves ''reges'' (kings).
The first kingdom was created by Frederick Barbarossa in 1164. It was part of the Holy Roman Empire, though imperial suzerainty over Sardinia was disputed by the Papacy. In 1297, Pope Boniface VIII created a new kingdom, long after the old one, which had never been very real, had ceased to be claimed, for the Crown of Aragon.
In 1720 the kingdom was acquired by the House of Savoy and from this point (with the exception of the Napoleonic ‘parenthesis’) the capital was located on the mainland at Turin. The state at this period is sometimes referred to as 'Piedmont-Sardinia'. Its geographical bounds included Savoy, Piedmont, the County of Nice and, later, Liguria.
In 1860 Nice and Savoy were ceded to France as a price paid for French support in the campaign to unify Italy. In 1861, it became a founding state of the new Kingdom of Italy. It ceased to exist after that date.

Contents

First Kings of Sardinia

Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica

Spanish government

War of the Spanish succession and Treaty of Utrecht

After Congress of Vienna

''Risorgimento''

Garibaldi and the ''Mille''

Towards Kingdom of Italy

Sources

External links

First Kings of Sardinia

The title "King" first appears as an informal praise of Constantine I of Logudoro, though his successor Gonario II employed it in official documents. The first crowned "King of Sardinia" or ''rex Sardiniae'' was the judge Barisone II of Arborea.
Frederick Barbarossa, who invested him as such in 1164, was forced to reverse this decision and regrant Sardinia to the Archdiocese of Pisa the next year. Barisone's successors, Hugh I and Peter I, continued to claim the title, but it never had any meaning. Briefly after succeeding to the Giudicato of Gallura, Enzo, son of the Emperor Frederick II, was installed as king, but was captured and never succeeded in making the kingship hereditary.

Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica

The Kingdom came into being on 4 April 1297, when Pope Boniface VIII, intervening between the Houses of Anjou and Aragon, established on paper a ''regnum Sardiniae et Corsicae'' that would be a fief of the Papacy. Then the Pope offered his newly-invented fief to the Valencian James II the Just, king of the Crown of Aragon (a confederation made up of the kingdoms of Aragon and Valencia, and the Counties of Barcelona, Pallars Sobirà and Urgell), promising him papal support should he wish to conquer Pisan Sardinia in exchange for Sicily.
In 1323 James II formed an alliance with Hugh II of Arborea and, following a military campaign which lasted a year or so, occupied the Pisan territories of Cagliari and Gallura along with the city of Sassari, claiming the territory as the "Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica". In 1353 Aragon made war on Arborea, then fought with its leader Marianus IV of Arborea, but did not reduce the last of the autochthonous ''giudicati'' until 1410.
The Kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica retained its separate character as part of the Crown of Aragon and was not merely incorporated into the Kingdom of Aragon. At the time of his struggles with Arborea, Peter IV of Aragon granted an autonomous legislature to the Kingdom, which had one of Europe's most advanced legal traditions. The Kingdom was governed in the king's name by a viceroy.
When in 1409, Martí the younger, king of Sicily and heir to Aragon, defeated the last Sardinian ''giudicato'' but then died in Cagliari of malaria, without issue, Sardinia passed with the Crown of Aragon to a united Spain. Corsica, which had never been conquered, was dropped from the formal title.

Spanish government

The loss of the autochthonous' independence, the firm Aragonese (later Spanish) rule, with the introduction of a sterile feudalism, as well as the discovery of the Americas, provoked an unstoppable decline of Kingdom of Sardinia.
A short period of resurgence occurred under the local noble Leonardo de Alagon, marquess of Oristano, who managed to defeat the viceroyal army in the 1470s but was later crushed at the Battle of Macomer (1478), ending any further hope of independence for the island.
The unceasing attacks from North African pirates and a series of plagues (from 1582, 1652 and 1655) further worsened the situation.
In 1637 a French fleet sacked Oristano.

War of the Spanish succession and Treaty of Utrecht

Main articles: War of the Spanish succession, Treaty of Utrecht

After the war of the Spanish succession and under the Peace of Utrecht, Philip was recognized as King Philip V of Spain.
He retained the Spanish overseas empire, but ceded the Spanish Netherlands, Naples, Milan, and Kingdom of Sardinia to Austria; Sicily and parts of the Milanese to House of Savoy; and Gibraltar and Minorca to Great Britain.
In 1720 the Kingdom of Sicily was exchanged for that of Sardinia, and the House of Savoy was enabled to call itself royal, as Kings of Sardinia.
Officially, the nation's name became "Kingdom of Sardinia, Cyprus, and Jerusalem, Duchy of Savoy and Montferrat, Principality of Piedmont." During most of the 18th- and 19th-century under the House of Savoy, the political and economical capital was Turin.

After Congress of Vienna

When Napoleon occupied the kingdom in 1796 along with the rest of Northern Italy, the king, Charles Emmanuel IV fled to Sardinia. In 1814 the kingdom was restored and enlarged with the addition of the former Republic of Genoa, now a duchy, and it served as a buffer state against France. This was confirmed by the Congress of Vienna.
In the reaction after Napoleon, the country was ruled by conservative monarchs: Victor Emmanuel I and Charles Albert, who fought at the head of a contingent of his own troops at the Battle of Trocadero, which set the reactionary Ferdinand VII on the Spanish throne.
The Kingdom of Sardinia industrialized from 1830 onward. A constitution, the ''Statuto Albertino'' was enacted in the year of revolutions, 1848, under liberal pressure, and under the same pressure war was declared on Austria. After initial success the war took a turn for the worse and the Kingdom of Sardinia lost.

''Risorgimento''

Main articles: Italian unification

Like all of Italy, the Kingdom of Sardinia was troubled with political instability, under alternating governments. After a very short and disastrous second war with Austria, Charles Albert abdicated on March 23, 1849, in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II.
In 1850 a liberal ministry under Count Camillo Benso di Cavour was installed, and the Kingdom of Sardinia became the engine driving the Italian Unification. The Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont) took part in the Crimean War, allied with Ottoman Empire, Britain and France, and fighting against Russia.
In 1859 France sided with the Kingdom of Sardinia in a war against Austria, the Austro-Sardinian War. Napoleon III didn't keep his promises to Cavour to fight until all of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia had been conquered. Following the bloody battles of Magenta and Solferino, both Sardinian/French victories, Napoleon thought the war too costly to continue and made a separate peace behind Cavour's back in which only Lombardy would be ceded. Due to the Austrian government's refusal to cede any lands to the Kingdom of Sardinia, they agreed to cede Lombardy to Napoleon who in turn then ceded the territory to the Kingdom of Sardinia to avoid 'embarrassing' the defeated Austrians.

Garibaldi and the ''Mille''

On March 5 1860 Parma, Tuscany, Modena and Romagna voted in referendums to join the Kingdom of Sardinia. This alarmed Napoleon who feared a strong Savoyard state on his southeastern border and he insisted that if the Kingdom of Sardinia were to keep the new acquisitions they would have to cede Savoy and Nice to France. This was done after dubious referendums showed around 90% majorities in both areas in favour of joining France.
In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi started his campaign to conquer southern Italy in the name of the Kingdom of Sardinia. He quickly toppled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and marched to Gaeta. Cavour was actually the most satisfied with the unification while Garibaldi wanted to conquer Rome. Garibaldi was too revolutionary for the king and his prime minister.

Towards Kingdom of Italy

On March 17, 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed thus ending the Kingdom of Sardinia as a separate kingdom. Piedmont would become the most dominant and wealthiest region in Italy and the capital of Piedmont, Turin, would remain the Italian capital until 1865 when the capital was moved to Florence. The House of Savoy would rule Italy until 1946 when a republic was proclaimed.

Sources

External links

★ Map of the Kingdom of Sardinia