Villa di Chiesa

Villa di Chiesa, later Iglesias, sits at 190 metres in the hills of southwestern Sardinia, founded as Villa Ecclesiae by Count Ugolino della Gherardesca after 1258 to exploit the region's silver. His family built the Castle of Salvaterra, defence walls, a hospital and an aqueduct, and under Pisa the town became one of the largest on the island: at the start of the fourteenth century its mines were thought to produce a tenth of the silver circulating in Europe, and it had its own mint. Sardinians and Pisans lived beside Tuscans, Corsicans and Germans, under a law code, the Breve di Villa di Chiesa, preserved in a version of 1327.

The Aragonese took the town on 7 February 1324 after a siege of more than seven months, and in June 1327 it became the first royal city of the new Kingdom of Sardinia, later known as Iglesias. The plague of 1348 killed many of its 6,000–7,000 inhabitants. In 1353 it revolted for Marianus IV of Arborea and was handed back to Aragon after the peace of Sanluri in 1355, taken again by Arborea in 1365, and restored to Aragon in 1388; it rose once more in 1391, receiving the army of Brancaleone Doria, and fell to the Aragonese in 1409. Alfonso V gave it in fief to Eleonora Carroz for 5,000 florins in 1436, but the town paid a ransom and won back royal status in 1450. In 1720 it passed to the House of Savoy with the rest of Sardinia.