During the later middle ages, the Crown of Aragon included a number of polities, among which the two major islands of the Mediterranean: Sardinia and Sicily. Despite being components of the same union, those two realms were at the antipodes, with the latter being endowed with huge autonomy and the former treated as a colony. Through adopting a comparative approach, this talk examines to what extent the Aragonese rulership changed in Sardinia and Sicily and why it adjusted to their various political and social contexts, finally discussing how that different governmental approach reflected in the development of their bureaucratic apparatuses.

Peer reviewed