ABSTRACT
The work that goes under the name of the Chronique d’Amadi is an anonymous history of Cyprus in Venetian Italian which dates from the sixteenth century.1 The man whose name is associated with this work, Francesco Amadi, was a Venetian erudit who died in 1566; he was the owner of the unique surviving manuscript, not the author. Amadi, as I shall refer to this work from now on, recounts the history of the crusades from the time of the First Crusade and the Lusignan regime in Cyprus to the year 1442. As a piece of literature it is singularly unimpressive – the style lacks polish, and the work is no more than a compilation in an Italian translation of earlier works which vary considerably in detail and interest. Anyone looking for a more sophisticated piece of Italian Renaissance historiography should turn instead to the Historia overo Commentarii de Cipro by Florio Bustrone, even though the content of that work would appear to be in large measure derived from Amadi.2 It is, however, the rather artless approach to his materials characteristic of the Amadi compiler that appeals to historians of Lusignan Cyprus. Put simply, the fact that he lacked literary pretension would seem to indicate that he stayed close to his texts, and so, although in the form we have it, it is a ‘late’ source, the information it conveys inspires far greater confidence than, say, the writings of Francesco Amadi’s contemporary, Etienne de Lusignan. What I should like to suggest is that Amadi best encapsulates the phrase used in my title, the tradition of history writing in Cyprus.
