The codex was bought in Vienna in 1739 by Johann Christian Gotze, director of the royal library at Dresden, from a private owner, and given to the library. How it had come to Vienna is not documented. The usual assumption is that it went to Europe among the early consignments sent back from the Spanish colonies and reached the Habsburg court, but no record ties it to a particular shipment, and its history before 1739 is guesswork.
It is one of only four Maya books generally accepted as authentic. The others are the codices in Madrid and Paris, both damaged and both later, and the Maya Codex of Mexico, long called the Grolier Codex, which surfaced in the 1960s without archaeological context and was suspected of being a forgery for decades. Radiocarbon dating and materials analysis reported between 2016 and 2018 established it as genuine and in fact the oldest of the four, and it is now accepted by most specialists, though it is a fragment of a Venus almanac rather than a full book.
In February 1945 the bombing of Dresden destroyed the building in which the codex was housed. The manuscript survived, but water, from the hoses and from the flooded cellar in which it lay, soaked the pages, running pigment and staining the lime ground. The damage is permanent and plainly visible. It is the reason the photographic facsimiles made in the nineteenth century, before the war, now count as primary evidence in their own right rather than as reproductions. The codex is held by the Saxon State and University Library and has been digitised at high resolution.