Su patriottu sardu a sos feudatarios ("The Sardinian Patriot to the Lords"), widely known also by its incipit as Procurade 'e moderare ("Endeavor to moderate"), is a protest and antifeudal folk song in the culture of Sardinia. It is considered by local nationalists to be the national anthem of the island.
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The anthem was written in Sardinian by the lawyer Francesco Ignazio Mannu (Frantziscu Ignàtziu Mannu in his native language) on the occasion of the failed Sardinian revolution, a series of mass revolts (1793-1796) against the Piedmontese medieval feudal system (which would survive until the second half of the 19th century), long since abandoned by Western European powers, that culminated with the execution or expulsion from the island of the officials of the ruling House of Savoy on 28 April 1794 (officially commemorated today as Sa Die de sa Sardigna, "Sardinian people's day"). Because of its temporal coincidence with the French revolution, the song was also nicknamed by J. W. Tyndale and other scholars like Auguste Boullier as "the Sardinian Marseillaise".
In 2012, a bill was presented before the Sardinian Council that would recognize the song as the official anthem of Sardinia.
Editions, translations and literary critique
The anthem was illegally published in Sassari in 1796 and not in the nearby island of Corsica, as it was believed until recently. After all, Sassari was already taken by the rebels and, in 1796, ruled by the alternos Giovanni Maria Angioy.
The song was first translated into another language from Sardinian by John Warre Tyndale in 1849 (Endeavor to moderate...), while Auguste Boullier would publish a French translation in his own book (Essai sur le dialecte et les chants populaires de la Sardaigne) in June 1864 with the incipit being Songez à modérer....
The anthem, aside from any copy that had been illegally circulating on the island, was published for the first time in Sardinia in 1865 by Giovanni Spano and later by Enrico Costa, who also made an Italian translation. Sebastiano Satta would provide another Italian translation on the centenary of Giovanni Maria Angioy's triumphant entrance in the city. In 1979, B. Granzer and B. Schütze would translate the song into German, with the title Die Tyrannei.
Raffa Grazia compared the song to Giuseppe Parini's "Il giorno". The scholar also drew attention to another two poems having a similar subject: one by the Ploaghese poet Maria Baule about the attempted French invasion of the island in 1793, with the title Ancòra semus in gherra ("we are still in war"), that was published by Giovanni Spano; the other one, always addressing the events of 1793, by the Gavoese poet Michele Carboni (1764–1814) titled Animu, patriottas, a sa gherra! ("Come on, patriots, to war!").