The Chickpea Test: How Sardinians Expelled Their Rulers in 1794

The word that saved your life in Cagliari on April 28, 1794, was cixiri. Pronounced correctly — with the sharp, affricate ci and the rolled r — it meant chickpea in the Sardinian tongue. Stumble over it, hesitate, or betray the flat vowels of the Italian mainland, and you were seized, marched to the harbor, and loaded onto a ship bound for Piedmont. By nightfall, 514 officials of the Savoyard administration had been expelled from the island they had ruled for seventy years.

The Spark: A Victory That Counted for Nothing

The explosion had been building for months. In early 1793, a French revolutionary fleet under Admiral Laurent Truguet appeared in the Gulf of Cagliari, intending to seize the island. The Piedmontese viceroy dithered, but the Sardinian people did not. Summoned by their parish priests, who framed the invasion as a holy war against godless revolutionaries, shepherds, farmers, and townsmen mobilized. They manned the coastal batteries and repelled the landing, driving the French back to their ships in a humiliating rout.

It was the first time Sardinians had defended the kingdom for the House of Savoy with almost no help from the royal army. The victory fostered a new confidence. If they could save the crown, surely the crown owed them a hearing. The Sardinian parliament, the Stamenti, drafted a loyal petition of five demands: regular sessions of their assembly, confirmation of the island's ancient laws, reservation of public offices for natives, and a ministry for Sardinian affairs in Turin. A delegation carried it to the capital.

They waited months for an audience. When King Victor Amadeus III finally received them, he dismissed every request without discussion. The message was unmistakable: Sardinian blood was cheap, but Sardinian aspirations were irrelevant.

The Uprising

News of the rebuff reached Cagliari in late April. On the morning of the 28th, the city erupted. The cry "Get the foreigners out!" rang through the narrow streets of the Castello district. Mobs formed spontaneously, hunting down Piedmontese bureaucrats, tax collectors, and garrison officers. There were no uniforms to distinguish the occupiers — they dressed like the locals, spoke Italian among themselves, and had lived in the city for years.

The solution was brutally simple. A Sardinian would approach a suspect and demand a single word: cixiri. The phonology of the island's language, a direct descendant of Latin preserve sounds that Italian had long since softened. The affricate ci and the trilled r were shibboleths no mainlander could counterfeit. Those who failed were identified, arrested, and herded toward the port.

The viceroy himself, Balbiano, was permitted to depart with honors. But 514 others — judges, treasury clerks, military engineers, customs agents — were bundled onto waiting vessels. The deportation was orderly, almost courteous. No one was killed. The message was political, not murderous: the island would no longer be governed by strangers.

The Aftermath and the Abyss

For a few heady weeks, Sardinia governed itself. The Stamenti assumed authority in Cagliari, and a magistrate named Giovanni Maria Angioy was sent north to restore order in Sassari. Instead, Angioy — an Enlightenment idealist — placed himself at the head of a peasant revolt against feudal dues, marching south at the head of a popular army to proclaim a Sardinian Republic.

The revolution fractured. Southern nobles, terrified of losing their privileges, rallied to the royalist cause. The new viceroy offered amnesty and reform, peeling away moderates. In June 1796, near Oristano, royalist forces crushed Angioy's army. The magistrate fled into exile, dying in poverty in Paris. The old order returned, bloodied but intact.

The Cacciata — the Expulsion — became a founding myth. It is still commemorated as Sa die de sa Sardigna, Sardinia's Day. But the chickpea test also revealed the limits of a revolt that had no program beyond rejection. The island had expelled its administrators but could not replace the state. The Savoyard monarchy, once resented as foreign, would survive to lead the unification of Italy, dragging Sardinia into a nation it had never chosen.

The Word That Remains

Cixiri is still the word for chickpea in Sardinian. It appears on menus in Cagliari, in the dialects of the Campidano, in the songs of the canto a tenore. Every time it is spoken, it carries the echo of a spring morning in 1794 when a legume became a password, and a people proved they could still decide who belonged on their soil — if only for a season.

This is one episode in a much longer story. For the full account of the history of Sardinia, read “A History of Sardinia” by Franco Aquilina on MixCache.com.