The Cocharelli Codex as a Source for the History of the Latin East: The Fall of Tripoli and Acre

The Cocharelli Codex is a sumptuously illuminated manuscript produced in Genoa in the early fourteenth century, of which only 27 folios survive today. The codex contains a treatise on the Virtues and Vices written by an unidentified member of the Genoese merchant family of the Cocharelli for the moral instruction of his children. The text is of particular interest because it includes a series of exempla that narrate historical events dealing with Genoa and the Latin East at the end of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Many of these narratives are explicitly said to derive from the personal recollections of the author’s grandfather, Pellegrino Cocharelli, whose presence and whose commercial activities are witnessed by documentary evidence in Acre, Cyprus and Genoa between 1269 and 1307. The article discusses the texts and the miniatures concerning the downfall of Tripoli (1289) and of Acre (1291) and tries to examine the position and the reliability of these narratives in the light of the other known sources, as well as of the recent interpretations of the last period of the Frankish rule in the Outremer.