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The term Kingdom of Sardinia denotes the Savoyard state from 1720 to 1861. From 1720 to 1847, only the island of Sardinia proper was part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, while the other mainland possessions (principally the Duchy of Savoy, Principality of Piedmont, County of Nice, Duchy of Genoa, and others) were held by the House of Savoy in their own right, hence forming a composite monarchy and a personal union, which was formally referred to as the "States of His Majesty the King of Sardinia". This situation was changed by the Perfect Fusion act of 1847, which created a unitary kingdom. Regardless, historians often use "Sardinia" as a synecdoche to designate the whole Savoyard state from 1720. Because Piedmont was the seat of power and prominent part of the entity, the state is also referred to as Sardinia–Piedmont or Piedmont–Sardinia, and sometimes erroneously as the Kingdom of Piedmont.
Before becoming a possession of the House of Savoy, the medieval Kingdom of Sardinia had been part of the Crown of Aragon and then of the burgeoning Spanish Empire. With the Treaty of The Hague (1720), the island of Sardinia and its title of kingdom were ceded by the Habsburg and Bourbon claimants to the Spanish throne to the Duke of Savoy, Victor Amadeus II. The Savoyards united it with their historical possessions on the Italian peninsula, and the kingdom came to be progressively identified with the peninsular states, which included, besides Savoy and Aosta, dynastic possessions like the Principality of Piedmont and the County of Nice, over both of which the Savoyards had been exercising their control since the 13th century and 1388, respectively.
Under Savoyard rule, the kingdom's government, ruling class, cultural models, and centre of population were entirely situated in the peninsula. The island of Sardinia had always been of secondary importance to the monarchy. While the capital of the island of Sardinia and the seat of its viceroys had always been Cagliari by law (de jure), it was the Piedmontese city of Turin, the capital of Savoy since the mid 16th century, which was the de facto seat of power. This situation would be conferred official status with the Perfect Fusion of 1847, when all the kingdom's governmental institutions would be centralized in Turin.
When the peninsular domains of the House of Savoy were occupied and eventually annexed by Napoleonic France, the king of Sardinia temporarily resided on the island for the first time in Sardinia's history under Savoyard rule. The Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), which restructured Europe after Napoleon's defeat, returned to Savoy its peninsular possessions and augmented them with Liguria, taken from the Republic of Genoa. Following Geneva's accession to Switzerland, the Treaty of Turin (1816) transferred Carouge and adjacent areas to the newly-created Swiss Canton of Geneva. In 1847–1848, through an act of Union analogous to the one between Great Britain and Ireland, the various Savoyard states were unified under one legal system with their capital in Turin, and granted a constitution, the Statuto Albertino.
By the time of the Crimean War in 1853, the Savoyards had built the kingdom into a strong power. There followed the annexation of Lombardy (1859), the central Italian states and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (1860), Venetia (1866), and the Papal States (1870). On 17 March 1861, to more accurately reflect its new geographic, cultural and political extent, the Kingdom of Sardinia changed its name to the Kingdom of Italy, and its capital was eventually moved first to Florence and then to Rome. The Savoy-led Kingdom of Sardinia was thus the legal predecessor state of the Kingdom of Italy, which in turn is the predecessor of the present-day Italian Republic.
The Kingdom of Sardinia was the title with the highest rank among the territories possessed by the House of Savoy, and hence this title was and still is used often to indicate the whole of their possessions. In reality, the Savoys ruled not a unitary state, but a complex array of different entities and titles with different institutional, cultural, and legal backgrounds. These included for example the Duchy of Savoy, Duchy of Aosta, Principality of Piedmont, and County of Nice, which were distinct and not juridically part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, which included only the island of Sardinia itself. The situation changed with the Perfect Fusion of 1847, an act of King Charles Albert of Sardinia that abolished the administrative differences between the mainland states and the island of Sardinia, creating a unitary kingdom. The Savoys themselves referred to their possessions as a whole as "the States of the King of Sardinia" (Italian: gli Stati del Re di Sardegna). Modern-day historians use the term Savoyard state to indicate this entity, which is an example of composite monarchy where many different and distinct territories are united in a personal union by having the same ruler.
During the 3rd century BC, the Allobroges settled down in the region between the Rhône and the Alps. This region, named Allobrigia and later "Sapaudia" in Latin, was integrated to the Roman Empire. In the 5th century, the region of Savoy was ceded by the Western Roman Empire to the Burgundians and became part of the Kingdom of Burgundy.
Piedmont was inhabited in early historic times by Celto-Ligurian tribes such as the Taurini and the Salassi. They later submitted to the Romans (c. 220 BC), who founded several colonies there including Augusta Taurinorum (Turin) and Eporedia (Ivrea). After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the region was repeatedly invaded by the Burgundians, the Goths (5th century), Byzantines, Lombards (6th century), and the Franks (773). At the time, what is known today as Piedmont, as part of the Kingdom of Italy within the Holy Roman Empire, was subdivided into several marks and counties.
In 1046, Oddo of Savoy added Piedmont to their main segment of Savoy, with a capital at Chambéry (now in France). Other areas remained independent, such as the powerful communes of Asti and Alessandria, and the marquisates of Saluzzo and Montferrat. The County of Savoy was elevated to a duchy in 1416, and Duke Emmanuel Philibert moved the seat to Turin in 1563.
The Spanish domination of Sardinia ended at the beginning of the 18th century, as a result of the War of the Spanish Succession. By the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Spain's European empire was divided: Savoy received Sicily and parts of the Duchy of Milan, while Charles VI (the Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria), received the Spanish Netherlands, the Kingdom of Naples, Sardinia, and the bulk of the Duchy of Milan.
During the War of the Quadruple Alliance, Victor Amadeus II, Duke of Savoy, Prince of Piedmont, and by now also King of Sicily, had to agree to yield Sicily to the Austrian Habsburgs and receive Sardinia in exchange. The exchange was formally ratified in the Treaty of The Hague of 17 February 1720. Because the Kingdom of Sardinia had existed since the 14th century, the exchange allowed Victor Amadeus to retain the title of king in spite of the loss of Sicily. From 1720 to 1798, when Napoleon invaded Italy, the de facto government resided in Turin; Cagliari, which had been the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia since 1324, returned to be the de facto government during the Savoy exile from 1798 to 1814. When Napoleon was first resided, the de facto government returned to Turin but did not officially become the capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia until 1847.
Victor Amadeus initially resisted the exchange of Sardinia for Sicilia in 1720. Until 1723, he continued to style himself King of Sicily rather than King of Sardinia. The state took the official title of Kingdom of Sardinia, Cyprus, and Jerusalem, as the House of Savoy still claimed the thrones of Cyprus and Jerusalem, although both had long been under Ottoman rule. In 1767–1769, Charles Emmanuel III annexed the Maddalena archipelago in the Strait of Bonifacio from the Republic of Genoa and claimed it as part of Sardinia, which became a part of the Sardinian region since then.
Since the Iberian period in Sardinia, common languages included Sardinian, Corsican, Catalan, and Spanish. Other languages included French, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Occitan, and Arpitan. During the Savoyard period as a composite state, Italian, which alongside French had already been made official in the peninsula since the 16th century via the Rivoli Edict, was introduced to Sardinia in 1760. With the Regio Biglietto of 25 July 1760, Italian was made a priority over French in Piedmont. The Kingdom of Sardinia's attempt of promotion of a unitary language was incisive, and also the replacement of Spanish with Italian has been described as a "revolution of ideas". Since French was still in use in some provinces, the Statuto Albertino (1848) authorised the use of French.
In 1792, the Kingdom of Sardinia and the other states of the Savoy crown joined the War of the First Coalition against the French First Republic, but was beaten in 1796 by Napoleon and forced to conclude the disadvantageous Treaty of Paris (1796), giving the French army free passage through Piedmont. On 6 December 1798 General Joubert occupied Turin and forced Charles Emmanuel IV to abdicate and leave for the island of Sardinia. The provisionary government voted to unite Piedmont with France. In 1799, the Austro-Russians briefly occupied the city, but with the Battle of Marengo (1800), the French regained control. The island of Sardinia, having defeated the armies of the French expedition to Sardinia without the royal army's help, stayed out of the reach of the French for the rest of the war.
The refusal by the Savoyards of recognizing the Sardinian's rights and representation in government caused the Sardinian Vespers (also known as the "Three years of revolution") started by sa dii de s'aciappa ("the day of the pursuit and capture"), commemorated today as Sa die de sa Sardigna, when people in Cagliari started chasing any Piedmontese functionaries they could find and expelled them from the island. Thus, Sardinia became the first European country to have engaged in a revolution of its own, the episode not being the result of a foreign military importation like in most of Europe.
In 1814, the Crown of Savoy enlarged its territories with the addition of the former Republic of Genoa, now a duchy, and it served as a buffer state against France. This was confirmed by the Congress of Vienna, which returned the region of Savoy to its borders after it had been annexed by France in 1792. By the Treaty of Stupinigi (1817), the Kingdom of Sardinia extended its protectorate over the Principality of Monaco. In 1821, the Kingdom of Sardinia's reported population amounted to 3,974,500.
In the reaction after Napoleon, the country was ruled by the conservative monarchs Victor Emmanuel I (1802–1821), Charles Felix (1821–1831), and Charles Albert (1831–1849), who fought at the head of a contingent of his own troops at the Battle of Trocadero, which restored the reactionary Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne. Victor Emanuel I disbanded the entire Napoleonic Code and returned the lands and power to the nobility and the Church. This reactionary policy went as far as discouraging the use of roads built by the French. These changes typified Sardinia.
The Kingdom of Sardinia industrialized from 1830 onward. A constitution, the Statuto Albertino, was enacted during the Revolutions of 1848 under liberal pressure. In addition to make Turin its official capital, the Statuto Albertino made Roman Catholicism "the only State religion". Earlier in 1847, the island of Sardinia, a Piedmontese dependency for more than a century, lost its own residual autonomy to the peninsula through the Perfect Fusion issued by Charles Albert. As a result, the kingdom's fundamental institutions were deeply transformed, assuming the shape of a constitutional and centralized monarchy on the French model; under the same pressure, Charles Albert declared war on Austria. After initial success, the war took a turn for the worse and Charles Albert was defeated by Marshal Radetzky at the Battle of Custozza (1848).
Like all the various duchies and city-states on the Apennine Peninsula and associated islands, the Kingdom of Sardinia was troubled with political instability under alternating governments. After a short and disastrous renewal of the war with Austria in 1849, Charles Albert abdicated on 23 March 1849 in favour of his son Victor Emmanuel II. In 1852, a liberal ministry under Count Camillo Benso di Cavour was installed and the Kingdom of Sardinia became the engine driving Italian unification. The Kingdom of Sardinia took part in the Crimean War, allied with the Ottoman Empire, Britain, and France, and fighting against Russia.
In 1859, France sided with the Kingdom of Sardinia in a war against Austria, the Austro-Sardinian War. Napoleon III did not keep his promises to Cavour to fight until all of the Kingdom of Lombardy–Venetia had been conquered. Following the bloody battles of Magenta and Solferino, both French victories, Napoleon thought the war too costly to continue and made a separate peace behind Cavour's back in which only Lombardy would be ceded. Due to the Austrian government's refusal to cede any lands to the Kingdom of Sardinia, they agreed to cede Lombardy to Napoleon, who in turn then ceded the territory to the Kingdom of Sardinia to avoid "embarrassing" the defeated Austrians. Cavour angrily resigned from office when it became clear that Victor Emmanuel would accept this arrangement.
On 5 March 1860, Parma, Piacenza, Tuscany, Modena, and Romagna voted in referendums to join the Kingdom of Sardinia. This alarmed Napoleon, who feared a strong Savoyard state on his south-eastern border and he insisted that if the Kingdom of Sardinia were to keep the new acquisitions they would have to cede Savoy and Nice to France. This was done through the Treaty of Turin, which also called for referendums to confirm the annexation. Subsequently, somewhat controversial referendums showed over 99.5% majorities in both areas in favour of joining France.
In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi started his campaign to conquer southern Italy in the name of the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Thousand quickly toppled the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which was the largest of the states in the region, stretching from Abruzzo and Naples on the peninsula to Messina and Palermo on Sicily. He then marched to Gaeta in the central peninsula. Cavour was satisfied with the unification while Garibaldi, who was too revolutionary for the king and his prime minister, also wanted to conquer Rome.
Garibaldi was disappointed in this development, as well as in the loss of his home province, Nice, to France. He also failed to fulfill the promises that had gained him popular and military support by the Sicilians: that the new nation would be a republic, not a kingdom, and that the Sicilians would see great economic gains after unification. The former did not come to pass until 1946.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Kingdom of Sardinia (1720–1861)”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.