inistrative title) had emerged as the autonomous rulers of Sardinia. The title of iudice changed with the language and local understanding of the position, becoming the Sardinian giudice, essentially sovereign, while giudicato, literally judgeship, came to mean both "state" and "palace" or "capital".
Medieval history
Having escaped the barbarian conquests and mass settlement that reshaped the rest of Western Europe, Early medieval Sardinian political institutions evolved from the millennium old Roman imperial structures with relatively little Germanic influence. Examples are seen within naming conventions and the form of government. Sardinians called their leaders Giudici, derived from the Byzantine magistrate title of iuidici (judici, literally “judge”, or “magistrate”), though they were the equivalent of the equally new sovereign titles “duke”, and “king”. Although the Giudicati were hereditary lordships, the old Roman/Byzantine imperial notion that separated personal title or honor from the state still obtained, so the Giudicato (“judgeship”, essentially, a kingdom) was not regarded as the personal property of the monarch as was common in later European feudalism. Like the imperial systems, the new order also preserved Republican forms, with national assemblies called corona de logu, although its powers and importance are not well understood by historians. Each Giudicato saw to its own defense, maintained its own laws and administration, and looked after its own foreign and trading affairs.
In the 10th century there were five known Giudicati on Sardinia, but, the annexation of the Giudicato of Agugliastra by the Giudicato of Cagliari sometime in the 10th or 11th century stabilized the number at four, where it would remain until the Aragonese invasion of the 14th century. The history of the four Giudicati would be defined by the contest for influence between the rival rising sea powers of Genoa and Pisa, and later
