CAFFARO. - Genoese chronicler, b. around 1080, d. in 1166. Of noble lineage (he was the son of Rustico, lord of Castrofino) and related to the leading families of Genoa, C. set out at the age of twenty for the Holy Land in the Genoese expedition of the autumn of 1100: from that time he took part in many enterprises that extended the possessions and the renown of the Republic. With the maturity he had attained in navigation, in commerce, and in his long sojourn in Syria, C.'s political activity begins. And, always in the service of his homeland, he spends the rest of his life in embassies, in offices, in new expeditions.
In 1121, lavishing Genoese gold as well, he pleads, before the Curia of Callixtus II, and in 1123 before the Council, the claims of the Genoese episcopate, and in reality of the Genoese government, against the archbishop and the people of Pisa, for jurisdiction over Corsica, and he does so with great success, opening the way to Genoa's political assertion over the island. He then alternates the office of consul in his city with that, on nearby and distant seas, of admiral; highly skilled in diplomatic maneuvering as in naval and military conduct, he appears as the most complete representative of that aristocracy of birth and above all of deeds that made the greatness of Genoa and of Venice.
He had led his men to the capture of Minorca and to the siege of Almeria, against the Saracens, in 1147-48, and had upheld with a firm hand the Republic wedded to victorious war, when he began to occupy his incipient old age with the work that more than any other secured his fame: the Annales Iannenses, already begun in his youth and carried forward amid wars and missions of government. In them the story of his homeland is followed with such immediacy and such warmth from 1100 to 1163 as only a personal, many-sided experience, identifying itself with the very glories of Genoa, could grant. In 1152 the liber was delivered to the consuls and received into the public archive; thus inaugurating an annalistic tradition, perpetuated down to nearly the fourteenth century, which restored to history the cult that had once been proper to Rome. Further, C. composed, drawing them from his recollections, two other minor works: the De liberatione civitatum Orientis and the Historia capitonis Almarie et Tortae. He died, after having recovered in the defense of his homeland from the designs of Frederick Barbarossa at Roncaglia and, near Genoa, at Bosco, all his energy, revealed almost to the very last in the artless and powerful prose of the Annales, in particular in the account of the deeds of Barbarossa.
Bibliography7 works
Pier Fausto Palumbo