On April 28, 1794, a major revolt broke out in Cagliari against the Savoy government of the city and the island, unleashing the Sardinian Vespers. Every year in Sardinia, this event is commemorated with the holiday called Sa die de sa Sardigna (literally "The Day of Sardinia"). This holiday is touted as a moment in history when the entire island stood united against foreign power, but reality tells us that this was a revolution left unfinished and crushed by the Sardinians themselves.

Giovanni Maria Angioy was a jurist and a large Sardinian landowner, descendant of a noble family from the village of Bono, in the historical region of Goceano. Its history is intertwined with that of the Sardinian Vespers, from the moment the Savoy Viceroy Balbiano was expelled from Cagliari after an armed popular uprising sparked by discontent over the failure to grant the Sardinian Estates' demands following their victory against the French revolutionary invasion of the capital. Angioy was a member of the Royal Audience tribunal when he took over the reins of government in the absence of a viceroy.

During the three years of the Sardinian Vespers, two main currents of thought emerged within the Sardinian revolutionary movement: the moderate current, which supported only the Savoy sovereign's request for confirmation of the Estates' demands, led by Efisio Luigi Pintor; and the radical current, which advocated the complete dissolution of the feudal system through peaceful means, led by Giovanni Maria Angioy himself. This conflict was always marked by substantial mistrust between the parties and was exacerbated by the massacre in Cagliari of Sassari judges loyal to the king, and by revolts in the fiefdoms of Sassari nobles in Logudoro, which led to the siege of Sassari by its vassals.

Sassari, in fact, had become the stronghold of the Savoy's iron fist in Sardinian affairs and had effectively distanced itself entirely from the Cagliari government, which was supported by the complicity of the new Viceroy Vivalda. The united Sardinian Estates thus decided to send Giovanni Maria Angioy at the head of an army to Sassari to take matters into their own hands, but by the time he arrived in the city on February 28, 1796, Pintor's moderate faction was already eliminating its rival's loyalists. Angioy's ideas were labelled Jacobin, and his expedition was declared illegal, forcing him into forced exile in France until his death.