Poesia all’ombra del Patriarcato di Costantinopoli nel XIV secolo? Il Vat. gr. 1003 e i versi di Efrem di Ainos (Historia chronica, Catalogus patriarcharum)

This contribution examines the principal witness to the poetic works of Ephraem of Ainos (Historia chronica and Catalogus patriarcharum Constantinopolitanorum), a manuscript copied around the transition from the 1340s to the 1350s and now preserved in the Vatican Apostolic Library as Vat. gr. 1003. In addition to providing a detailed palaeographical, codicological, and textual description of the codex, the study reconstructs the circumstances of its production, leading to the hypothesis—on both palaeographical and material grounds—of a direct Constantinopolitan origin, only a few years after the composition of the two texts and, in all likelihood, within the very milieu in which they were produced, namely the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The article concludes with an overview of the manuscript’s history following its arrival in Rome. The hitherto missing link for a comprehensive reconstruction, on the basis of the evidence currently available, of the circulation of the manuscript in seventeenth-century Rome is identified in the sole complete apograph of Vat. gr. 1003, namely Vat. Barb. gr. 146, in which the hand of Lorenzo Porzio, *Scriptor Graecus* of the Vatican Library and close collaborator of Leone Allacci, the institution’s first custodian, can be recognized.