Peter of Eboli

Who is Peter of Eboli?

Peter of Eboli or Petrus de Ebulo was a didactic versifier and chronicler who wrote in Latin.

A monk from Eboli, 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, 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 book celebrates in glowing terms the victory of Henry over his opponent, the illegitimate usurper Tancred, who, though a doughty fighter, was of such short stature that Peter ridicules him as Tancredulus. 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.