Un compendio inedito di storia siciliana conservato a Besançon

Manuscript 675 in Besancon (mid-fifteenth century) contains an abridged version of the first thirty chapters of the Cronica Sicilie, one of the most important historiographic texts concerning fourteenth-century Sicily. The article provides an edition of that abridgement, presented in parallel with the text of the Cronica Sicilie, as well as a study of the variants showing that the abridgement derives from a particular branch of the Cronica’s textual tradition, that of manuscript B. As to the method and intention of the redaction of the abridgement, it seems that, although the stratified text is the result of successive interventions, the aim was to preserve only the entries of genealogical or dynastic interest, attesting the continuity of the Sicilian monarchy, from the Normans of the eleventh century to the Aragonese house of the fourteenth century. The text was not meant to be read independently, but in the context of the manuscript that transmits it, which contains an organised collection of texts, mostly historiographic and in Latin, brought together in order to recount the whole history of the regnum Sicilie, from its mythical origins to the middle of the fifteenth century.