The first purpose of this project is to provide modern editions for all the Annales de Terre Sainte texts, which are anonymous, thirteenth-century compilations from Acre written in Old French. The main focus, though, would be to explore the dynamics between the Annales, their sources, and the texts that have used them as such. In their French version, the Annales survive in four manuscripts: the oldest is Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteo LXI.10, while two others are from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 6447 and fr. 24941, and finally the Varia 433 is from the Biblioteca Reale in Turin and contains the Gestes des Chiprois, whose first section is a re-elaboration of the Annales. Apart from the Gestes’ version, which started at the Creation (but, since the first quire went missing, it now starts with 1132) and ended in 1224, all the French texts start in 1095, but while Pluteo’s version ends in 1277, the others end with the fall of Acre in 1291. There is also a Castilian translation, surviving only in Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional 10046, that goes from 1095 to 1260. Furthermore, materials from the Annales are incorporated in the Estoire de Eracles, in the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis by Marino Sanudo and in the Chronique d’Amadi. They are also the source of significant information in the second part of the Gestes des Chiprois, Philip of Novara’s chronicle. It is also possible that a Catalan translation was made, since in Barcelona, Biblioteca de Catalunya 152, plenty of annalistic material concerning the Holy Land can be found concerning the years from 1095 to 1275, and it does resemble the text of the Annales. Subject of study is also one of the main sources of the Annales de Terre Sainte, the Annales breves Terrae Sanctae, short annals in Latin that are found on f. 32r of Barletta’s breviary, a manuscript, written in the XIII century, that belonged to the Holy Sepulchre; these Annales begin with 1097 and end with 1202, and everything appears, translated, also into the French versions.
The final edition of the text will be digitised, so that the relationships between all the texts, their sources and the other material concerning the history of the Holy Land can be shown in an interactive way in a hypertextual environment.