The first 'days' of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa were initially published apart from the rest of the novel in 1805, while the stories comprising the Gypsy chief's tale were added later. Because of its rich and varied interlocking structure, the novel has been favorably compared to many celebrated literary antecedents such as the ancient BCE Jatakas and Panchatantra as well as the medieval Arabian Nights and Decameron. The novel's stories-within-stories sometimes reach several levels of depth, and characters and themes - a few prominent themes being honor, disguise, metamorphosis and conspiracy - recur and change shape throughout.

The stories cover a wide range of genres and subjects, including the gothic, the picaresque, the erotic, the historical, the moral and the philosophic and as a whole, the novel reflects Potocki's far-ranging interests, especially his deep fascination with secret societies, the supernatural and ' Oriental' cultures. Eventually the narrative focus moves again toward van Worden's frame story and a conspiracy involving an underground Muslim society, revealing the connections and correspondences between the hundred or so stories told over the novel's sixty-six days. The bulk of the stories revolve around the Gypsy chief Avadoro, whose story becomes a frame story itself. Recounted to the narrator over the course of sixty-six days, the novel's stories quickly overshadow van Worden's frame story. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa collects intertwining stories, all of them set in whole or in part in Spain, with a large and colorful cast of Romani, thieves, inquisitors, a cabbalist, a geometer, the cabbalist's beautiful sister, two Moorish princesses (Emina and Zubeida) and others that the brave, perhaps foolhardy, Walloon Guard Alphonse van Worden meets, imagines or reads about in the Sierra Morena mountains of 18th-century Spain while en route to Madrid. The novel was adapted into a 1965 Polish-language film, The Saragossa Manuscript ( Polish: Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie), by director Wojciech Has, with Zbigniew Cybulski as Alfonse van Worden. It is narrated from the time of the Napoleonic Wars, and depicts events several decades earlier, during the reign of King Philip V (r. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa ( French: Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse also known in English as The Saragossa Manuscript) is a frame-tale novel written in French at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries by the Polish author Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815).

Saragossa manuscript