Peter of Eboli
Encyclopedia
Versifier
* a poetaster* the versificator regis, or "king's poet"...
and chronicler who wrote in Latin.
A monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...
from Eboli
Eboli
Eboli is a town and comune of Campania, southern Italy, in the province of Salerno, on the south edge of the hills overlooking the valley of the Sele....
(Campania
Campania
Campania is a region in southern Italy. The region has a population of around 5.8 million people, making it the second-most-populous region of Italy; its total area of 13,590 km² makes it the most densely populated region in the country...
, then part of the Kingdom of Naples
Kingdom of Naples
The Kingdom of Naples, comprising the southern part of the Italian peninsula, was the remainder of the old Kingdom of Sicily after secession of the island of Sicily as a result of the Sicilian Vespers rebellion of 1282. Known to contemporaries as the Kingdom of Sicily, it is dubbed Kingdom of...
), Peter became a court poet to Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor
Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor
Henry VI was King of Germany from 1190 to 1197, Holy Roman Emperor from 1191 to 1197 and King of Sicily from 1194 to 1197.-Early years:Born in Nijmegen,...
and King of Sicily. His flattering verse Liber ad honorem Augusti
Liber ad honorem Augusti
The Liber ad honorem Augusti sive de rebus Siculis is an illustrated narrative epic in Latin elegiac couplets, written in Palermo in 1196 by Peter of Eboli...
, sive de rebus Siculis (Book to honor the Emperor, or The Affairs of Sicily), probably written in Palermo
Palermo
Palermo is a city in Southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Province of Palermo. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old...
, was his first work; it was dedicated to Henry VI, King of Sicily by right of his wife Constance
Constance of Sicily
Constance of Hauteville was the heiress of the Norman kings of Sicily and the wife of Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor...
, the Norman
Normans
The Normans were the people who gave their name to Normandy, a region in northern France. They were descended from Norse Viking conquerors of the territory and the native population of Frankish and Gallo-Roman stock...
heiress and mother of the heir who would be "in every way blessed" according to Peter—Frederick II, stupor mundi
Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor
Frederick II , was one of the most powerful Holy Roman Emperors of the Middle Ages and head of the House of Hohenstaufen. His political and cultural ambitions, based in Sicily and stretching through Italy to Germany, and even to Jerusalem, were enormous...
— whose birth is described in terms reshaped from Virgil
Virgil
Publius Vergilius Maro, usually called Virgil or Vergil in English , was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He is known for three major works of Latin literature, the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the epic Aeneid...
's fourth Eclogue
Eclogue
An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics.The form of the word in contemporary English is taken from French eclogue, from Old French, from Latin ecloga...
, which Christians read as foretelling the coming of Christ. The book celebrates in glowing terms the victory of Henry over his opponent, the illegitimate usurper Tancred
Tancred of Sicily
Tancred was King of Sicily from 1189 to 1194. He was an illegitimate son of Roger III, Duke of Apulia, the eldest son of King Roger II, and of Emma, daughter of Achard II, Count of Lecce...
, who, though a doughty fighter, was of such short stature that Peter ridicules him as Tancredulus ("Little Tancred"). 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
Bayeux Tapestry
The Bayeux Tapestry is an embroidered cloth—not an actual tapestry—nearly long, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England concerning William, Duke of Normandy and Harold, Earl of Wessex, later King of England, and culminating in the Battle of Hastings...
do for the eleventh.
Peter of Eboli also wrote a didactic poem, De Balneis Puteolanis ("The Baths of Pozzuoli
Pozzuoli
Pozzuoli is a city and comune of the province of Naples, in the Italian region of Campania. It is the main city of the Phlegrean peninsula.-History:Pozzuoli began as the Greek colony of Dicaearchia...
") that is the first widely distributed guidebook to thermal baths, a weapon in the local economic rivalries that arose over healing, medicinal bathing and the medieval tourist industry in southern Italy during the High Middle Ages. A copy is included in the historical miscellany at the Huntington Library, HM 1342.
Peter is known to have written three poems because he lists them all at the end of De Balneis Puteolanis in the following elegiac couplets:
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The second poem of the three listed here, the mira Federici gesta ("remarkable deeds of Frederick") is lost.