ABSTRACT
The anonymous Cypriot chronicle known as ‘Amadi’, named after its last Venetian owner, the sixteenth-century nobleman Francesco Amadi, is the only chronicle from Cyprus that recounts the events of the Fifth Crusade in some detail. On the basis of internal evidence, it was probably written in the early sixteenth century and its anonymous writer essentially compiled his account from earlier French sources of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 To a large extent, he simply translated those sources, stringing them together, and so his account has been criticized from a literary point of view as being stylistically disjointed and unpolished. From an historical point of view, however, this disjointedness is helpful in enabling historians to trace the original sources used by the person translating them to form his compilation.2 In addition, one observes that the anonymous chronicler, despite following his sources closely, on occasion omits something, summarizes certain parts of the original or even garbles the meaning completely. This in turn raises other questions as to whether he was doing so on his own initiative, following a variant but now lost version of the original source, or even using a source now completely lost.
