Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

The library the Holy See keeps is older than its founding document. Nicholas V, pope from 1447 to 1455, decided that the Latin, Greek and Hebrew manuscripts gathered in Rome should be made available for scholars to read and to study, and the collection grew from about 350 manuscripts to roughly 1,200 in his lifetime. What Sixtus IV added in 1475 was the institution rather than the books: a papal bull, Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae, dated 15 June, a named librarian in Bartolomeo Platina, and the money to pay for the work. The library opened as four rooms, the Latin, the Greek, the Secret and the Pontifical, and by 1481 it held close to 3,500 manuscripts.

The rooms it occupies now were built for it under Sixtus V late in the sixteenth century, and it has kept an unbroken line of librarians and prefects since. Its holdings today run to more than 180,000 manuscripts and archival units, about 1.6 million printed books, some 9,000 incunabula, over 300,000 coins and medals and more than 150,000 prints.

The atlas holds the library as a custodian of texts and not as a religious body in itself. That distinction matters here more than it does at a museum, because the institution and the church that owns it are not separable, and a reader should be able to see which of the two any given fact belongs to. What the library does with the manuscripts, catalogue them, conserve them, and publish them progressively in digital facsimile, is the part recorded here.

The library holds two manuscripts this atlas tracks, and each is missing the same thing: a record of where it was before it arrived.

The Codex Vaticanus, shelfmark Vat.gr.1209, is a mid-fourth-century Greek Bible and one of the two oldest substantially complete ones. It appears in the first surviving catalogue of the library, drawn up in 1475, and nothing certain is known of it before that. How it reached Rome, and from where, is a question the manuscript does not answer. Its modern history is better documented and less comfortable. Napoleon had it taken to Paris in 1809 and it came back in 1815. Through most of the nineteenth century the library allowed scholars only brief and supervised access, which produced a long public quarrel about whether the text was being withheld, and Constantin von Tischendorf was expelled in 1866 for copying more than he had been permitted. A photographic facsimile appeared in 1889 and 1890, and the manuscript has been fully published and digitised since.

The Codex Borgia, shelfmark Borg.mess.1, is a pre-conquest Central Mexican divinatory manuscript, and its silence is longer. It surfaces in the eighteenth century in the collection of Cardinal Stefano Borgia, whose name it now carries, and passed on his death in 1804 to the Propaganda Fide and from there to this library in 1807. How it left Mexico, when, and in whose hands, is not recorded anywhere. Even its place of origin is inferred from its style. The library can say what has been done with the book since 1807 and nothing at all about the three centuries before.