alternatehistory.com

Matthijs van de Velde
Mediterranean Correspondent

Sardinia Celebrates King’s 56th Birthday

In Sardinia, men have long lived and died on the cast of a die. This curious isle's relationship with unpredictability dates to the last days of Rome, in which it seemed secure in the hands of Constantinople’s emperors until the machinations of the Latin Church pried it from their grasp. A confused period followed in which four native princes known as giudici, or judges, tried and failed to resist attempts at control by Pisa, Genoa, and even the Pope’s secular state. The conquest of Sardinia by the Aragonese crown in the 1300s created a measure of good government which the united Spanish state inherited in the following century and maintained for the next four. The arrival of the Great European War changed things once again: the French conquered the island and its Spanish naval bases in 1912. The island’s fate remained in question until the Paris Peace Accords of 1916, in which the French gave up their goals of establishing a friendly republic and acquiesced to the demands of the pro-Catholic, royalist, and very popular resistance movement. A scion of a cadet branch of the Spanish royal dynasty, whose progenitor had been exiled from Spain after running afoul of the military junta, was eventually chosen as the French candidate for kingship of Sardinia. He ran without opposition and was confirmed as King Carlu I on December 2, 1916.

However, little of war and politics is particularly visible in the revelry that has animated the thoroughfares of Cagliari (known locally as Casteddu) over the past week. For the last thirty years, this island kingdom has shed its feudal past and assumed fame and wealth incommensurate with its size. Central to this development has been Sardinia’s somewhat shorter but no less impactful tradition of reckless fun.

The Sardinian gaming industry was born in the shadow of rural resorts. The military junta of Spain, desperate for a source of revenue, first attempted to turn Sardinia into a land of rustic getaways in the early 1800s. It was socially acceptable then for the well-to-do of France, Germania, and northern Spain to visit a resort and drink from a curative mineral spring, or bathe in the sea. Sardinia, with its pristine beaches and rugged interior, was near-perfect for such ventures. Encouraged by the Sardinian resorts’ initial successes, the government-general of Sardinia created concessionary companies with the exclusive right to provide several services to the resorts— and one of these services simply happened to be the provision of “games of chance.” Madrid may well have preferred to build casinos openly, but feared that such a brazen rejection of contemporary moral conventions would isolate Spain from the rest of Europe. Following the lead of Visegrad, France, Lithuania and the German states had banned public gambling as part of a wider program to reintroduce proper morality into public life, and combat the forces unleashed by the German Revolution. Spain couldn't afford to openly stray from this powerful crowd, and so the concessions offered a means of quietly conferring the right to build gambling-houses to enterprising opportunists native and foreign (many of the latter were once owners of gambling-houses further north). The primacy of resort over casino allowed those who visited the latter to claim that they came to enjoy the former, and merely gambled away their earnings and inheritances as a side venture. Visitors during this time were a diverse lot— Lithuanian boyars were as likely to lose their money in a game of roulette as Portuguese businessmen. Upon returning home, they spread news to friends and enemies of the dangerous fun they’d had.


The French military government (still colloquially referred to as sa ditadura de sas arraneddas, or the Dictatorship of the Frogs) tolerated the existence of gambling, but the new King redefined it. King Carlu, an old darling of the media, has long declared his intention to be a modern monarch who works within constitutional bounds for the prosperity and stability of the nation. With the strength of the island’s Spanish-built civil service behind him, the King began the third year of his reign by overseeing the establishment of a licensing regime for the island’s resort-casinos. All owners would henceforth be required to gain accreditation by allowing state inspectors to measure their games and employees (especially the dealers) by the standards of fairness and professionalism common on the European mainland, and then pay a hefty fee for the whole process. However, this fee was lowered by 25% for owners who moved their establishments into the urban area of Cagliari, by another 50% for owners who promised to renovate their facilities to fit modern tastes, and waived entirely for owners who then advertised their services in mainland Europe’s cities.

Through newspaper ads, Sengupta announcements, and the new medium of glossy color posters, increasing numbers of Europeans came to learn of a land that had once been the exclusive playground of nobles and their parvenu associates. As the postwar recession ended and the Era of Good Feelings began producing much of its namesake emotion, delegates from the continent’s nouveau riche arrived in a Cagliari that the Mediterranean travelogues of the 1800s may not have easily recognized. For starters, the casinos’ games had all changed. The marketing and gaming experts that the more ambitious casino owners hired assured their clients that the impending wave of middle-class gamblers were not the wealthy, adrenaline-addicted fanatics of the past century— these new men and women wanted games of low stakes, in which they could make and keep money. They then suggested that the casino owners relegate games in which customers competed with each other to secondary status and focus on games like roulette, in which customers play against the house itself. If they lost, the house profited— and profits could, after the Sardinian state received its share through taxes and licensing fees, be plowed right back into the enterprise to make it more productive.


In a massive investment of resources, the casinos did everything they could to show that Sardinia had continent-sized ambitions and opportunities. Stately orchestras and wild parties could each unfold on opposite sides of the same street. Swimmers and sunbathers enjoyed the beach, while never straying more than five minutes’ distance from the seaside restaurants of world-famous chefs. Gardeners and landscapers beautified the city center, and waystations on the urban periphery offered horses and guns for hunting trips into the rural hinterland beyond. Though the chance of ignominious failure was quite real, the massive burst of spending paid off. Cagliari had been painted onto the mental map of the average European as the finishing line of the rat race. As the city’s fame began to spread beyond Europe, the effects of money spent and money earned percolated through the island itself.

Of course, it’s foolish to pretend that there were— or are— no losers in Sardinia. The casinos, and by extension the state that shares in their incomes, fund themselves with the money provided daily by thousands of losers. Still, a curiously strong conception of fairness still prevails here. One may remember the case of Filibertu Lussu, who ran a major counterfeiting operation in the late 1920s with the aim of mass-producing the easily-copied currency of Visegrad’s Balkan client states. The Sardinian state, which had adopted the progressive but effective penal code of the Republican government in Spain, proved its willingness to enforce those laws by extraditing Lussu to Buda.

The state’s commitment to maintaining public safety, even-handedness, and order have been an important contributor to Sardinia’s success during the Era of Good Feelings, which has endured the Era’s chaotic transition into the Deluge. Seeking to avoid the onerous and capricious taxes of their home countries, many Mediterranean banks and corporations have already moved their headquarters to Cagliari. Even if the great reservoir of gamblers were to run dry tomorrow, Sardinia is well-prepared to become a major hub of European finance. Crown Prince Felix, meanwhile, appears to be interested in development in a different field. He is expected by many seasoned observers— including myself— to be favorable to political liberalization and allow the country’s legislative Cortes to assume greater power. Seasonal migrants to Cagliari, encouraged by the effectiveness of the urban police, have set down more permanent roots. Walking through the streets, one meets laborers and footmen from Corsica and the Italian peninsula, chefs from France and Spain, musicians and financiers from Argelia and Tripolitania, and sailors from all the world’s corners. A few days ago, I met an old man at the corner of Pudda and Margiane who claimed to be a monk of Lan Xang. Shaking a bronze staff, he asked me for alms, in the tradition of his profession. I obliged him, and would eagerly do the same now. Cagliari is not Paris— it is not the center of an empire which has yoked the world together. Forgive my idealism, but I feel justified in believing that Cagliari’s worldliness is the product of genuine aspirations, held by people who genuinely want to be right here, right now, with the sun above and the chaotic but ultimately constructive bustle of humanity all around.

Let us now return to the subject of the king’s birthday.

The well-staffed orchestras in the city’s amphitheaters and the trumpets and horns which screech from street corners have been, directly or indirectly, paid for by the casinos, who have much reason to love King Carlu. Other things they have paid for include the city’s harbor renovations, the string of hotels along the southern and western coasts, and— according to their critics— the government itself. There has been much talk of moving the national government to the western city of Aristanis [1]— conservative members of the Cortes think it unseemly for a sovereign government to exist amid gaming and and associated immoralities, while fear of the gambling lobby’s disproportionate influence on the representatives of the Sardinian people crosses party lines. The King is not deaf to these concerns— he announced an investigation into Aristanis’s suitability as a capital last year. Still, Cagliari is unlikely to lose its primacy in Sardinia’s economy, culture, and international image. For proof of this, one may refer to the disqualification of Sassari [2], a city which reliably elects reactionary politicians who decry modernity on the Cortes floor, from consideration as a new seat of government.

The changes of the 20th century have not left a single corner of the island untouched. The island had a literacy rate of 16% in 1916, but a thorough expansion and reform of the educational system has quadrupled that number. The new labor force of educated and skilled workers moves to places where their abilites are in demand. While not all of these internal migrants can afford to live in Cagliari itself, their settlement in the neighboring cities and towns of Sardinia’s southern coast has doubled the area’s population since 1916. The northwestern city of L'Alguer [3] has adopted parts of Cagliari’s model, but departed from others— it is also a magnet for thousands of visitors, but it attracts people with its pristine beaches, its Iberian heritage (the locals speak a dialect of Catalan) and a film festival that is less prone to the well-meaning but ham-fisted censorship which haunts Paris’s Festival international. In all the cities and villages of Sardinia, bleary-eyed provincialism has been usurped by a keenness to understand the rapidly-rewritten rules of country, continent, and planet— and bend them to one’s own advantage.

One cannot even credibly claim that “gambling” had paid for all this. Traditional light manufacturing and agriculture continue to enrich the country as they always have. The spokesmen for the tourism industry, which now contributes more to the economy than any other sector, are more likely to promote the island’s stunning vistas, its world-renowned automobile races, its tasteful and useful mix of historical and modernist architecture, and its robust and innovative community of artists and musicians. The island’s name has become a brand, a byword for something more noble and captivating than playing risky games with one’s spare change. Sardinia has reinvented itself in a way that we Dutch, ruled by an Amsterdam that cares more about recovering Friesland than developing the provinces still under its care, may never emulate. In the process, it has become a model for more eager students. Some eager but inexperienced journalists have taken to calling Ayutthaya the “Sardinia of the East,” but that land may well become worthy of the title if current trends of rising Asian prosperity and study of Sardinian methods continue.

One departs it all with the sense that Sardinia’s historical penchant for chaos and high stakes has merely shifted to a form more in tune with the modern world’s madness. ■


[1] OTL: Oristano.

[2] My idea is that every city in Sardinia except for Cagliari is referred to by the name that locals use for it. Oristano is “Aristanis” in the Campidanese dialect of Sardinian. Sassari is known by no other name in the Sassarese dialect, which is closer to Corsican and mainland Italian than to the Sardinian language spoken further south. Cagliari gets to be Cagliari because it has, as a major city, been named (and misnamed) often in the documents of the wider continent, and so the Italian version of the name has stuck as an exonym (kind of like how Peking was used for Beijing, Rangoon for Yangon, and Bangkok for Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahintharayutthaya Mahadilokphop Noppharatratchathaniburirom Udomratchaniwetmahasathan Amonphimanawatansathit Sakkathattiyawitsanukamprasit.)

[3] OTL: Alghero.

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If Italy is going to be a mega-Switzerland in this TL, why not make Sardinia a mega-Monaco? Reading about OTL Monte Carlo and Macau was one of the more fun things I’ve done for my guest posts.