Kingdom of Sardinia

The Kingdom of Sardinia is best known as the state of the House of Savoy between 1720 and 1861, which joined the island of Sardinia to Piedmont, Savoy, Nice and, later, Liguria, and was governed in practice from Turin. Often called Piedmont–Sardinia, it was the most dynamic of the Italian states in the nineteenth century and led the movement for Italian unification. In 1861 it renamed itself the Kingdom of Italy.

The title is much older than the Savoyard state. In 1297 Pope Boniface VIII created, on paper, a kingdom of Sardinia and Corsica and granted it to James II of Aragon. Aragonese forces began conquering the island in 1324, against the Pisans and later the native judicate of Arborea, which resisted for nearly a century; the last Arborean lands were bought in 1420. Corsica, held by Genoa, was never taken. Under Aragon and then Spain, Sardinia kept its own parliament and was ruled by a viceroy from Cagliari, but suffered from Barbary pirate raids.

After the War of the Spanish Succession, the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 gave Sicily to Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, while Sardinia went to the Austrian Habsburgs. A few years later Victor Amadeus was made to give up Sicily, receiving Sardinia in its place under the Treaty of The Hague of 17 February 1720. Because Sardinia was an established kingdom, the exchange let the dukes of Savoy keep a royal crown. The island remained a secondary possession: the court, government and ruling class stayed on the mainland, and from the 1760s Italian was promoted in place of Spanish on the island.

The kingdom joined the coalition against revolutionary France in 1792 and was defeated by Napoleon in 1796. In December 1798 French troops occupied Turin and forced King Charles Emmanuel IV to withdraw to Sardinia. For most of the next sixteen years the mainland was under French control, and the island was ruled directly by its kings for the first time.

The Congress of Vienna restored the Savoyard mainland and added the former Republic of Genoa, making the kingdom a buffer against France. The restored kings, Victor Emmanuel I, Charles Felix and Charles Albert, were at first strongly conservative, and Victor Emmanuel I scrapped the Napoleonic legal code. In 1847 the Perfect Fusion ended Sardinia's separate institutions and centralised the whole state on Turin. During the Revolutions of 1848 Charles Albert granted a constitution, the Statuto Albertino, and declared war on Austria, but he was defeated and abdicated in March 1849 in favour of his son, Victor Emmanuel II.

From 1852 the liberal prime minister Camillo Cavour modernised the state and sent troops to the Crimean War on the side of Britain and France. In 1859 a French alliance brought war with Austria and the annexation of Lombardy. In 1860 the central Italian duchies and Romagna voted to join the kingdom, while Savoy and Nice were ceded to France. That same year Giuseppe Garibaldi and his volunteers overthrew the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the kingdom's name.

On 17 March 1861 the Sardinian parliament proclaimed the Kingdom of Italy, ratifying the annexations of the previous two years. Its laws and institutions were extended across the peninsula, and Turin served as the capital until 1865. The Savoyard state was thus the legal predecessor of the Kingdom of Italy, which the House of Savoy ruled until Italians voted for a republic in 1946.

Our 1783, 1800 and 1815 maps show the Kingdom of Sardinia; by the time of the 1815 map the restored kingdom had gained Liguria, the former Genoese republic, at the Congress of Vienna.