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Guglielmo de Tocco, Captain of Corfu: 1330-1331

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2016

Anthony Luttrell
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Extract

Those portions of the Angevin archives at Naples which had survived earlier disasters were destroyed in 1943, Yet documents issued during the fourteenth century by the various Neapolitan branches of the Angevin dynasty can still be discovered in private archives and elsewhere. Such texts are particularly important when they concern Latin Greece for which the sources are strictly limited. The hitherto unknown act published here shows Angevin administrations at work both on Corfu, where the Latins had established Neapolitan institutions, and at Naples, where the Angevin Princes of Achaea and Taranto kept their archives. This document throws light both on the early genealogy of the Tocco and on the way in which the family initiated the acquisition of its extensive possessions in Greece and the Ionian islands; it contributes to the reconstruction of the history of the Tocco family during the decades before the period described in their family chronicle, the first folios of which are missing so that it now effectively begins around 1375. In the case of Corfu in the early fourteenth century, the existing accounts are based in part on exceptionally unsatisfactory materials in the shape of confirmations of privileges granted to the Jewish community. These confirmations, which were issued around 1370 and which contained copies of earlier documents, were preserved in the archives of the Corfu synagogue. They were available to the nineteenth-century Corfiote scholar Andreas Moustoxydes in certified copies translated into what J. A. C. Buchon, to whom Moustoxydes ‘communicated’ his papers, described as ‘detestable Italian’. Moustoxydes used these documents in a careless way, with misprints and contradictions, while Buchon’s versions of what they contained vary from those of Moustoxydes; any control of their content is now impossible since the archives at Corfu, including those of the Jewish community, were destroyed in 1943. Reliable information such as that provided by the document of 1345 preserved in the Tocco family archives and published below is, therefore, especially valuable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies , Volume 3 , 1977 , pp. 45 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © The Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham 1997

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References

1. Professor Antonio Allocati, who will shortly publish an inventory of the Archivio Tocco di Montemiletto now in the Archivio di Stato at Naples, most kindly facilitated the study of the document here published in many ways. See, meanwhile, Allocati, A., ‘Archivi privati conservati nell’Archivio di Stato di Napoli’, in Sovrintendenza Archivistica per la Campania, Atti del Convegno per i primi trent’anni di Attività della Sovrintendenza (Rome, 1973), 78–85 Google Scholar. The present author intends to use other materials in this private archive to illustrate the Italian background to the Greek operations of the Tocco family.

2. See Longnon-P, J.. Topping, Documents sur le régime des terres dans la principauté de Morée au XlVe siècle (Paris—The Hague, 1969).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. For an introduction to Angevin administrative practice and the relevant bibliography, see Allocati, A., Lineamenti delle istituzioni pubbliche nell’Italia meridionale, I: dall’età prenormanna al viceregno spagnolo (Rome, 1968)Google Scholar. On the Angevin administration of Corfu down to 1300, see Perrat-J, C.Longnon., Actes relatifs à la principauté de Morée: 1289-1300 (Paris, 1967).Google Scholar

4. The erroneous genealogy in Hopf, C., Chroniques gréco-romanes inédites ou peu connues (Berlin, 1873), p. 530,Google Scholar is repeated in Bon, A., La Morée franque: recherches historiques, topographiques et archéologiques sur la principauté d’Achate (1205-1430), I (Paris, 1969), p. 707.Google Scholar

5. Cf. Luttrell, A., ‘Vonitza in Epirus and its Lords: 1306-1377’, Rivista di studi bizantini e neoellenici, XI (= n.s.I) (1965), 131—41.Google Scholar

6. Cronaca dei Tocco di Cefaionia di Anonimo: Prolegomeni Testo Critico e Traduzione, ed. Schirò, G. (Rome, 1975). Schirò, pp. 10–11 Google Scholar, States, erroneously, that Guglielmo was governor of Corfu from 1328 to 1335, and that he married Margherita Orsini, ‘signora’ of half of Zante. There is no good evidence for this information which is derived from the undocumented tables in Hopf, op. cit., p. 530.

7. Buchon, J., Nouvelles recherches historiques sur la principauté française de Morée, 2 vols. (Paris, 1843), I, pp. 407–11 Google Scholar; Mustoxidi, A., Delle Cose Corciresi, I (Corfu, 1848), pp. 445–7.Google Scholar

8. Soldatos, C., ‘La Bibliothèque Publique de Corfou’, L’Hellénisme contemporain, II ser., I (1947), 373 and n. 3.Google Scholar

9. According to his epitaph, published in Strazzullo, F., Saggi storici sul duomo di Napoli (Naples, 1959), p. 207.Google Scholar

10. Text in Buchon, op. cit., II, pp. 407-9 = Perrat-Longnon, pp. 114-15; cf. Nicol, D. M., ‘The Relations of Charles of Anjou with Nikephoros of Epiros’, Byzantinische Forschungen, IV (1972), 193—4.Google Scholar

11. Longnon, J., L’empire latin de Constantinople et la principauté de Morée (Paris, 1949), pp. 313, 320–1.Google Scholar

12. Buchon, op. cit., I, pp. 409-10.

13. As already pointed out by Mustoxidi, op. cit., I, pp. 692–3.

14. Mustoxidi, I, p. 445 and note (e), but the dates and details are incredibly garbled and confused; it is not clear how many of Philip’s acts concerning Corfu he really saw.

15. Buchon, op. cit., I, p. 408.

16. Cited in Caggese, R., Roberto d’Angiò e i suoi tempi, II (Florence, 1930), p. 318 Google Scholar n. 1. Corfu was under attack in 1328: … castra ávitatis Nepanti et terre Corfoy … per hostes regios … obsessa (text of 19 June 1328 cited ibid., II, p. 319 n. 2).

17. See Luttrell, op. cit., 133-4, and Settori, K., ‘The Catalans in Greece: 1311–1380’, A History of the Crusades, III, ed. Hazard, H. (Madison, Wisconsin, 1975), pp. 189–90 Google Scholar; both accounts utilize material in the often inaccurate work of Hopf which was based on the Angevin archives destroyed in 1943.

18. Buchon, op. cit., I, p. 307 and n. 1, pp. 410-11.

19. Mustoxidi, op. cit., I, pp. 446-8, citing the ‘copie presso noi esistenti dei due privilegj del 1331’. The same author stated, contradictorily and erroneously, that Philip died in 1330. Mustoxidi, I, p. 447, also mentioned a letter of ‘11 February 1336’ by which Robert instructed his officials at Corfu to assist Theodore son of Johannes Cavasilla to recover certain lands; Buchon, I, p. 411, shows that the date was actually 11 February 1356 (or maybe 1357).

20. Longnon, op. cit., pp. 322-3.

21. Texts in Buchon, op. cit., II, pp. 32-114; the document of 17 July is given as being dated to the VIII Indiction, which would place it in 1340.

22. sic: read Prestito.

23. One word illegible; possibly compromissionem.

24. One word almost illegible; possibly predictum.

25. One word almost completely illegible.

26. sic, perhaps from doaria (dowry); cf. text of 1387: Et quia ipsi Corphyenses in facto dohariorum et alionan possent habere suas consuetudines, … (Diplomatarium Veneto-Levantinum, ed. Thomas, G., II (Venice, 1889), p. 207)Google Scholar. Alternatively perhaps from the Greek hetaireia meaning ‘company’, ‘association’, or even ‘order’ (as kindly suggested by Professor Peter Topping).

27. sic: read emississe.

28. Partially illegible, but must be Johannes Cauasule, on whom supra, p. 49.

29. sic: read precedentium.

30. sic: read impostea.

31. Two words illegible; possibly prout su(. .).

32. One word illegible; possibly r(ation)e.

33. sic: read interpretatione.

34. Written in a different hand.

35. MS: Rgta:-