Guglielmo de Tocco, Captain of Corfu: 1330-1331

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.