Bellicose things: the inner lives of Byzantine warfare implements

Abstract The Poliorcetica (Vat. gr. 1605) is a Byzantine treatise on siege warfare, composed by the so-called Heron of Byzantium, which was illuminated with drawings and schematics for the construction and use of military tools and structures in the eleventh century. Using an object-oriented lens, this article looks closely at the word-image relations used by the Poliorcetica’s author to engage the manuscript’s illuminations. The article considers how the manuscript diagrams the relationships between objects and their military operations by relying on the viewer’s faculty of imagination (phantasia) to fill in the gaps offered between the text and its images.