Il sale e le saline sarde nel tardo medioevo

In late medieval the salt mines of Sardinia lost their function of the leading export centre in the Mediterranean. Wars, epidemics, and political instability contributed to keep away from the Cagliari salt market the traders that in the two previous centuries had guaranteed their presence with a volume of trades of considerable importance. In the crucial period of restructuring of the late medieval routes, the geography of trade draws the new hierarchy of ports. At the opening of the fifteenth century, the salt marshes of the Balearic had taken the place of those in Cagliari. In this context, the objective of this work is to evaluate the policies to revitalize the salt trade and, particularly, the interventions developed in this field by the Catalan kings of Aragon in the fifteenth century. With the pacification of Sardinia and the conquest of the kingdom of Naples, the strategies revealed ambitious plans for Iberian market integration of the various kingdoms of the Crown. Although with limited results, it emerges the ability to plan the unified management of strategic productive resources, of which the salt is an example. These initiatives, by the involvement of the Tuscan and Iberian capitals, especially in the second half of the century, reveal economic choices of extraordinary lucidity which make new contributions to the historiographical debate on the actual incisiveness of economic policies in the planning and integration of local markets, interregional and international.