Saint George and the Dragon

The episode Saint George and the Dragon appended to the hagiography of Saint George was Eastern in origin, brought back with the Crusaders and retold with the courtly appurtenances belonging to the genre of Romance. The earliest known depictions of the motif are from 10th- or 11th-century Cappadocia and 11th-century Georgia; While the veneration of Saint George as a soldier saint goes back to the 7th century at least, the earliest known surviving narrative of the dragon episode is an 11th-century Georgian text.

In Western tradition, the dragon was combined with the already standardised Passio Georgii in the second half of the 13th century, first in Vincent of Beauvais' encyclopedic Speculum Historiale and Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend (1260s), rising to great popularity as a literary and pictorial subject in the Late Middle Ages. The legend gradually became part of the Christian traditions relating to Saint George and was used in many festivals thereafter.

According to the Golden Legend, the narrative episode of Saint George and the Dragon took place somewhere he called "Silene", in Libya; the Golden Legend is the first to place this story in Libya as a sufficiently exotic locale, where a dragon might be found. In the tenth-century Georgian narrative, the place is the fictional city of Lasia, and the idolatrous emperor who rules the city is called Selinus.

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