Peter of Eboli

A monk from Eboli (Campania, then part of the Kingdom of Naples), Peter became a court poet to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily.

His flattering verse Liber ad honorem Augusti, sive de rebus Siculis (Book to honor the Emperor, or The Affairs of Sicily), probably written in Palermo, was his first work; it was dedicated to Henry VI, King of Sicily by right of his wife Constance, the Norman heiress and mother of the heir who would be "in every way blessed" according to Peter—Frederick II, stupor mundi— whose birth is described in terms reshaped from Virgil's fourth Eclogue, which Christians read as foretelling the coming of Christ.

The copy from Palermo is illuminated with palace scenes, processions, and battles in tableaux that vie with the text itself and form a precious record of twelfth-century life, as those of the Bayeux tapestry do for the eleventh.

Suscipe, sol mundī, tibi quem praesentŏ libellum: dē tribus ad dominum tertius iste venit.

The first contains our national victories in civil war; The second contains the remarkable deeds of Frederick; This third sets in order the waters of the Euboean colony, Their locations, their powers and their almost buried names.