With the exception of Jacques de Vitry's Historia orientalis and such pièces d’occasion as the De constructione castri Saphet, it was the French langue d’oïl that emerged clearly as the language of choice for history-writing in the Latin East in the thirteenth century. Jacques, who composed his history while bishop of Acre in the early 1220s, evidently had a copy of the Latin text of William of Tyre's celebrated Chronicon to hand while writing, and he may also have had the latter's lost Gesta orientalium principum. However, after Jacques’ departure for the Latin West in 1225, there is no clear evidence for anyone in Acre making use of William's Latin works or, indeed, of Jacques’ Historia orientalis. Later in the century the latter was translated into French, but it would seem that the translation was made in northern France and that it had limited circulation; there is no evidence for it finding its way to Latin Syria, although in the sixteenth century it does seem to have been used by the compiler of the history known as the Chronique d’Amadi, who was working in Cyprus.

The list of works on historical or pseudo-historical topics that can be shown to have circulated in Acre in the thirteenth century is not long. Apparently writing in Cyprus in the 1240s, Philip of Novara indicated that as early as the 1220s there was a taste for Arthurian romance in the Latin East, and he himself was evidently familiar with the Guillaume d’Orange cycle. Much later, the festivities to mark the coronation of King Henry II of Cyprus as king of Jerusalem in 1286 included a re-enactment of scenes from the prose Roman de Tristan, and it has been suggested that what appears to be the earliest extant manuscript of that text may have been copied in Acre. Philip has the distinction of being the only thirteenth-century writer of vernacular history in the Latin East to be known by name, but his narrative of the conflict between the Ibelins and the Hohenstaufen in Syria and Cyprus in the second quarter of the thirteenth century seems not to have been widely read; it is not echoed in any subsequent history before the sixteenth century, and it only survives in a single fourteenth-century manuscript in what is self-evidently an edited form.