A description of the jousts of Manuel I Komnenos

Abstract

The thirteenth-century manuscript Greek 1409 in the Vatican Library contains an anonymous Greek ekphrasis of the jousts of an unnamed Byzantine emperor. The text, which has interest for both historians and art historians, has been cited on several occasions in the scholarly literature, but never analyzed in detail. In the following pages we provide a translation of the text, together with a commentary upon the context of the piece. We will argue that the ekphrasis not only describes a specific work of art, depicting a specific event, but also gives valuable information about the visual language through which Byzantine emperors of the twelfth century expressed their power.