The Latins in Greece: A Brief Introduction 15
its immediate aftermath, they all end their narratives in the first decade of the
13th century. More information can be gleaned from some of the major Latin
chronicles of non-local origins, such as the continuators of William of Tyre32
and the chronicles of Matthew Paris,33 Ralph of Coggeshall34 and Alberic of
Trois-Fontaines;35 again, however, their information is mostly focused on the
conquest, on Constantinopolitan affairs and on the first decades of Latin rule.
The single most important narrative source of local origin regarding
Frankish Greece is the Chronicle of the Morea (which is dealt with in detail in
Gill Page’s chapter); in its various surviving forms it covers the period up to
- The fact that it is primarily concerned, as is evident from its title, with the
history of Frankish Peloponnese and the fact that similar sources are lacking
for many of the other territories, has meant that much of the historiography
of medieval Greece revolves around the Principality of Achaea. The only other
major narrative source of local origin is the Chronicle of the Tocco, written in
Greek, but possibly emanating from the circles of the counts of Cephalonia.36
The chronicle covers the last quarter of the 14th century and the first quarter of
the 15th and is an important source for the history of the Ionian Islands, Epirus
and the Peloponnese. To these sources one should add the various Venetian
chronicles of the 14th and 15th centuries, such as the works of Marino Sanudo
Torsello37 and Andrea Dandolo’s and Laurentius de Monacis’s chronicles on
32 Louis De Mas Latrie, ed., Chronique d’Ernoul et de Bernard le Trésorier (Paris, 1871).
33 Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. Henry Luard, 7 vols., Rolls Series, 57 (London,
1872–1883).
34 Ralph of Coggeshall, Chronicum Anglicanum, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Rolls Series, 66
(London, 1875); the sections relevant to the Fourth Crusade can be found in translation
in Alfred J. Andrea, ed., Contemporary Sources for the Fourth Crusade (Leiden, 2000),
pp. 277–90.
35 Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, “Chronica,” ed. P. Scheffer-Boichorst, in Monumenta Germaniae
Historica, Scriptores 23 (Hannover, 1874), pp. 631–950; the sections concerning the Fourth
Crusade can be found in translation in Andrea, ed., Contemporary Sources, pp. 291–309.
36 Giuseppe Schirò, ed., Cronaca dei Tocco di Cefalonia: prolegomena, testo critico e traduzi-
one, Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae, 10 (Rome, 1975).
37 Marino Sanudo Torsello, Liber Secretorum Fidelium Crucis, in Gesta Dei per Francos,
ed. Jacques Brongars, 2 vols. (Hannover, 1611; repr. Jerusalem, 1972), 2:1–288; for an English
translation, see The Book of the Secrets of the Faithful of the Cross, trans. Peter Lock
(Farnham, 2011). For Sanudo’s Istoria del regno di Romania, see Hopf, Chroniques Greco-
Romanes, pp. 99–170; no English translation of this work exists, but it has been translated
into modern Greek, under the title Ιστορία της Ρωμανίας: Istoria di Romania, ed. and trans.
Eutychia Papadopoulou (Athens, 2000). See also, “The Correspondence of Marino Sanudo
Torsello,” ed. Sherman Rody (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Pennsylvania,
1971).