CAFFARO. - Genoese chronicler, born c. 1080, died in 1166. Of noble stock (he was the son of Rustico, lord of Castrofino) and connected by marriage to the leading families of Genoa, Caffaro set out at the age of twenty for the Holy Land in the Genoese expedition of autumn 1100; from that time he took part in many enterprises that expanded the possessions and renown of the Republic. His maturity in navigation, commerce, and long residence in Syria inaugurated his political activity. And, ever in the service of his country, he spent the rest of his life in embassies, offices, and further expeditions.
In 1121, even expending Genoese gold, he championed before the Curia of Callistus II, and in 1123 before the Council, the claims of the Genoese *expositus*—in reality the government—against the archbishop and people of Pisa for jurisdiction over Corsica, and he did so with great success, paving the way for Genoa’s political affirmation on the island. He alternated, therefore, the office of consul in his own city with that, on nearby and distant seas, of admiral; as skilled in diplomatic maneuvering as in seamanship and warfare, he appears the most complete representative of that aristocracy of birth and, above all, of deeds that made the greatness of Genoa and Venice.
He had led his fellow citizens to the capture of Minorca and to the siege of Almería against the Saracens in 1147–48, and he had steadfastly supported the Republic, exhausted by its victorious war, when he began to occupy his incipient old age with the work that above all others secured his fame: the *Annales Iannenses*, begun in his youth and continued amid wars and governmental missions. In these annals the fortunes of his homeland are followed with such immediacy and warmth from 1100 to 1163 as only a personal, multifaceted experience, identified with Genoa’s own glories, could have permitted. In 1132 the *liber* was entrusted to the consuls and deposited in the public archives, thus inaugurating an annalistic tradition perpetuated until nearly the fourteenth century, which restored to history the cult once proper to Rome. Moreover, Caffaro composed, drawing on his recollections, two other minor works: the *De liberatione civitatum Orientis* and the *Historia captionis Almarie et Tortose*. He died after devoting his energies once more to defending the patria from the designs of Frederick Barbarossa at Roncaglia and, near Genoa, at Bosco, revealing in his final years the same vigor in the naïve yet forceful prose of the *Annales*, particularly in the account of the events involving Barbarossa.