Mujāhid immediately sets about building cities to…

May 1016 CE

Mujāhid immediately sets about building cities to solidify his conquest, using the local Sards for slave labor (he may have had some buried alive in the walls of his new city).

The area he controls, the plain between the central mountains and the sea, corresponds roughly to the Judicature of Cagliari (regnum Calaritanum in the Liber, III, 45), whose judge he had defeated and killed.

The site of one Islamic fortification can be approximated, for a Greek charter of 1081 makes reference to a "castro de Mugete" (castle of Mujāhid) near Cagliari, the chief city and port of the judicature.

Archaeological research in the 1970s uncovered what may be Roman baths modified to fit Islamic tastes near Quartucciu.

It is also possible that an Arab population had been present on the island for some time if it had indeed served as the staging area for the assault on Rome in 841.

Medieval cartographers called the southeastern Sardinian coast from Arbatax south Sarabus, a corruption of the Sard for "the Arabs", and the very name "Arbatax" may derive from ārba‘a, meaning "four", a possible reference to the four Byzantine forts which lined that section of the coast.

The liberus de paniliu, a designation for the "semi-free Christian children of Muslim slaves", appear in several eleventh-century donation charters from the region.

Religious diversity, owing to a large endemic Arab population, may also explain the slowness with which monasticism of either the Western or Eastern variety encroach upon the area.

The presence of Ilario Cao, a Cardinal from Sardinia, in the curia of the warlike Pope Benedict VIII, is probably instrumental in obtaining papal approval and even active support of a military venture to Sardinia.

Benedict even grants privileges to those who take part in the campaign and grants it a "vermilion banner".

One fourteenth-century source records that a papal legate was sent to preach it as a crusade, but this is probably anachronistic.

Thietmar, a much closer source, describes the attack on Luni by the "enemies of Christ" and how Benedict responded by calling "all leaders (rectores) and protectors (defensores) of the Church" to kill them and chase them away.

Thietmar goes on to say that Mujāhid sent a sack of chestnuts to the pope to illustrate the number of Muslim soldiers he would unleash on Christendom.

Benedict sent back a sack of millet representing the number of Christian soldiers that would meet them.

The entire story has been called into question, but that the papacy took a direct interest in Mujāhid's attacks on Christians lands cannot be doubted.

Thietmar says that the pope sent a fleet, but this probably only means that he encouraged the maritime republics to send fleets on behalf of all Christendom.

The combined forces of Pisa and Genoa, arriving in May vastly outnumbered those of Mujāhid.

The emir's troops are already restless because of a lack of sufficient booty, and so he tries to flee.

His fleet is badly battered by a storm as it passes through a rocky cove, according to the Arabic sources, and the Pisans and Genoese pick off the remaining ships, capturing Mujāhid's mother and his heir.

His mother seems to have been originally a European captured and sold into slavery, as she chooses to remain with "her people" after her capture on Sardinia His son and heir, ‘Alī, will remain a hostage for a number of years.

Those Muslims who survive the wreck of their ships are slaughtered onshore by the local populace.