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Between the IV and V centuries AD, the crumbling of the Roman Empire left without defence Sardinia and its coastal towns, which were repeatedly raided by pirates from North Africa. In 406 the Vandals crossed the Rhine, which with the Danube had been the historic north-eastern border of the Roman Empire. They took possession of part of Europe and North Africa, where they conquered Carthage and Hippon (during the siege of which, in 430, Saint Augustine met his death [n]) and established the Vandal kingdom of Africa.
In AD 456 the Vandals under Geiseric occupied Carales and other coastal towns in Sardinia, marking the end of seven centuries of Roman domination of the Island. Vandal rule was short-lived, lasting until 533, and did not influence the social organisation which had developed under Rome but it did lead indirectly to the arrival in Sardinia, around 508, of the first Christian Bishops [i].
The Byzantine rule marked the separation of Sardinia’s history from that of Italy and Europe: the Island became a province of the well-tested Byzantine state organisation [i], which for more than a thousand years would be the depositary of the Roman legal concept of the State and of public/private property. Indeed the Byzantines simply called themselves ‘Romaioi’ (in Greek, Romans).
And it was in the Byzantine era, around AD 550, in the reign of Justinian I [i], that Christianity completed its penetration of
Sardinia [n]. The ‘Barbaricini’ converted under the Pontificate of Gregorius Magnus; indeed in 594 the Pope wrote to their chief Ospitone, calling him Gregorius Hospitoni duci Barbaricinorum.
For the Byzantines, Sardinia was a Province in the outer reaches of the Empire but important for its geographical position, and production of cereal crops and metals. Sardinia was governed by the Judex Provinciae and by a dux with his seat at Forum Traiani (present day Fordongianus), bordering on the hostile territory of the "‘Barbaricini".
Between AD 669 and 673 the Arabs besieged Byzantium [n]; in 698 they conquered Carthage, bringing north-eastern Africa under the sway of Islam. The Byzantines were engaged on several military fronts and Sardinia, left to its own devices, was the victim in 711 A.D. of a major Arab raid.
Byzantine rule over Sardinia continued until about AD 650. In that period the Island had to rely on its own resources to combat the Arab raids and it began to develop a singular form of political autonomy which was subsequently to give rise to the Sardinia of the Judges.
Around AD 650 the powers of the two Byzantine governors of Sardinia, the Judex and the dux, were combined into a single authority; between 851 and 863, under the pressure of the Arab raids, the legates of Byzantine authority in the four districts of the Island conferred upon themselves the title of Judex and each one placed himself at the head of a sovereign and autonomous “Giudicato”: Calaris (Cagliari), Arborea, Torres (Logudoro) and Gallura.
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