Les fonds d'archives grecs de l'Italie du Sud et de Sicile. Un miroir pour l'Athos?

André Guillou began publishing the Greek documents of Southern Italy shortly before the appearance of the third volume of the Archives de l’Athos (Actes de Xéropotamou, 1964). The first volume, published in 1963, was followed by six other in the series Corpus des actes grecs d’Italie du Sud et de Sicile (1974–2009). Additional publications have appeared since then. Thanks to this editorial work we may now attempt a comparison of the Italian documentary body with the already well-known Athonite material, which may permit a better understanding of the regional particularities of the documents. More than a thousand documents written in Southern Italy survive from the Byzantine and Angevin periods (10th–14th centuries), covering an area extending from Latium to Sicily. They comprise public and semi-public documents, private documents, inventories and minutes. The private acts, which have been neglected by both historians and scholars of diplomatics, deserve particular attention. Mostly preserved in the original, many are still unpublished or have appeared only in unreliable editions, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries. Taking stock of all the documentation available to date, this paper focuses on the history of the archives and on the policies of document conservation during medieval and modern times.