The Chronicle of Amadi

Description

The anonymous text known as the Chronique d’Amadi survives in a single, mid sixteenth-century manuscript in the Marciana Library in Venice. Francesco Amadi, who died in 1566 and with whose name this work is now indelibly linked, was the owner of this manuscript and not the author. In 1891 it was published by René de Mas Latrie in the series ‘Documents inédits sur l’histoire de France’ as volume one of his two-volume Chroniques d’Amadi et de Strambaldi.

Amadi is an Italian-language compilation of narrative sources for the history of Cyprus. It is a long text, running to somewhere in excess of 200,000 words. Like William of Tyre’s well-known chronicle, it begins with the emperor Heraclius recovering the True Cross from the Persians in the seventh century, and it continues with an account of the crusades and events in the kingdom of Jerusalem from the end of the eleventh century onwards. With the conquest of Cyprus by King Richard I of England in 1191, the focus moves increasingly to Cyprus. Although certain periods are covered in considerable detail and others hardly at all, it follows the fortunes of the island and its western rulers down to the beginning of 1441 which is where it ends.

This is the first time the chronicle has been translated into any modern language. It has been prepared jointly by Nicholas Coureas, who undertook the initial translation of the Italian text, and Peter Edbury, who was largely responsible for the introduction, annotations and index. The translation is accompanied by four annexes, the second and fourth of which were drafted by Peter Edbury and the other two by Nicholas Coureas. Together they have worked on checking and correcting the text and making improvements to the introduction, the apparatus and the annexes.

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