Vatican Library

• 1. Introduction

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  The Vatican Library holds 42 kilometers of shelving. That is not a metaphor. Laid end to end, the shelves of the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana would stretch from one side of a major city to the other, lined with 75,000 codices, more than a million printed books, and manuscripts that reach back to the first century. Somewhere in those stacks sits the oldest nearly complete Bible in existence. Somewhere else, the sole surviving copy of an Arabic love story. And tucked away for centuries before anyone outside the Vatican knew it existed, a text called the Secret History, written by Procopius, which would reshape how historians understood the Byzantine Empire once it finally came to light in 1623. How does a collection this vast come to exist? What does it mean to be a library that answers to no nation, survives the fall of empires, and quietly absorbs the looted books of wars it never fought? And who decides who gets to walk through the door?

• 2. Five Eras, One Thread

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  Scholars have divided the library's long history into five periods: Pre-Lateran, Lateran, Avignon, Pre-Vatican, and Vatican. Each name marks a physical move or a political rupture, and together they trace a story of survival against considerable odds. During the Lateran era, the collection grew into one of Europe's most distinguished hoards of illuminated manuscripts. Pope Boniface VIII, who died in 1303, had assembled something remarkable. That same year, Philip IV of France burnt the Lateran Palace and plundered the collection. The library did not die; it migrated. Seven successive popes then ruled from Avignon, in southern France, and the years between Boniface's death and the papacy's return to Rome in the 1370s saw sustained growth in both book collection and record-keeping. The Pre-Vatican period, roughly 1370 to 1447, was a time of fragmentation. Parts of the collection sat in Rome, parts in Avignon, and parts elsewhere. Pope Eugenius IV, who died with 340 books to his name, represents the modest scale of that dispersed era. What would happen next would dwarf everything that came before.

• 3. Nicholas and the Dream of Rome

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  Pope Nicholas V arrived at the Vatican in 1447 with a vision larger than any single collection. He wanted Rome to become a destination for scholarship once again, a place where the world's knowledge gathered rather than scattered. Nicholas inherited some 350 Greek, Latin, and Hebrew codices from his predecessors. He combined them with his own books and then went further, acquiring manuscripts from the imperial Library of Constantinople and commissioning Italian and Byzantine scholars to translate the Greek classics into Latin. He also embraced the pagan classics at a time when that was not an obvious choice for a pope. By 1455, the collection had grown to 1,200 books, of which 400 were in Greek. Nicholas died that year before he could formalize the institution he had imagined. His successor, Pope Sixtus IV, completed the project. On the 15th of June 1475, Sixtus issued the papal bull Ad decorem militantis ecclesiae, formally establishing the Vatican Library. By 1481, when librarians Bartolomeo Platina and Pietro Demetrio Guazzelli produced a signed listing of the holdings, the number stood at 2,527 manuscripts. At that moment, it was the largest collection of books in the Western world.

• 4. Looted Libraries, Absorbed

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  Some of the Vatican Library's greatest treasures arrived not through purchase or scholarship but through the spoils of war. In 1623, Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria, gave the Holy See the hereditary Palatine Library of Heidelberg, containing around 3,500 manuscripts. Maximilian had just seized it as loot during the Thirty Years' War, and the gift was a political gesture of gratitude toward Pope Gregory XV. That collection, now absorbed into the Vatican holdings, remains there largely intact. A token 39 manuscripts were sent to Paris in 1797 and returned to Heidelberg at the Peace of Paris in 1815; Pope Pius VII donated 852 others to the University of Heidelberg in 1816. The rest stayed. Queen Christina of Sweden's library arrived by a different path. Her generals had looted it from Habsburg Prague and German cities during the same Thirty Years' War, and when she died in 1689, Pope Alexander VIII purchased the collection. It represented, for all practical purposes, the entire royal library of Sweden at that time. Had it remained in Stockholm, it would almost certainly have been destroyed when fire consumed the royal palace in 1697. In 1657, the manuscripts of the Dukes of Urbino were acquired. In 1661, the Greek scholar Leo Allatius was appointed librarian, a figure whose expertise matched the breadth of what the shelves now held.

• 5. Napoleon, Theft, and Repatriation

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  In 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte had Pope Pius VII arrested and ordered the contents of the library seized and transported to Paris. The operation took years to execute. The books and manuscripts returned in 1817, three years after Napoleon's defeat and abdication. Smaller violations followed in the modern era. In 1995, Anthony Melnikas, an art history teacher at Ohio State University, was caught having stolen three leaves from a medieval manuscript that had once belonged to Francesco Petrarch. One of the stolen leaves carried an exquisite miniature of a farmer threshing grain. A fourth leaf, from an unknown source, was found in his possession by U.S. Customs agents. Melnikas had been trying to sell the pages to an art dealer, who then alerted the library director. During the restoration between 2007 and 2010, the library responded to the persistent threat of theft by tagging all 70,000 volumes then in the library with electronic chips.

• 6. The American Rescue

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  By the early 20th century, the Vatican Library held one of the world's most important collections and one of its most disorganized. Foreign researchers, particularly Americans, were vocal about how inadequate the facilities were. The library's junior librarians were undertrained, and the existing catalogue system was not suited to a collection of such scale. Pope Pius XI, himself a scholar and former librarian, launched a major revitalization project between the two World Wars. Several American organizations stepped forward to help, including the American Library Association and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Librarians from the Vatican traveled to the United States to study how modern libraries functioned, visiting the Library of Congress and institutions in Princeton, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Champaign, Toronto, and Ann Arbor. Back in Rome, a reorganization followed. Father Franz Ehrle oversaw the introduction of the Library of Congress card catalogue system between 1927 and 1939, and also established the library's first program to photograph important or rare works. The catalogue was computerized in the early 1990s under Rev. Leonard E. Boyle. By 1992, the library had almost two million catalogued items. That joint transatlantic effort had a lasting institutional consequence: it led directly to the founding of the International Federation of Library Associations in 1929, a body still active today.

• 7. What the Shelves Hold

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  Among the manuscripts in the Vatican Library, the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1209 stands out as the oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible. The library also holds the Lorsch Gospels, an illuminated gospel book written and illustrated between 778 and 820, though it is now split between the Vatican and other museums, with the carved ivory rear cover and the Gospels of Luke and John kept here. De arte venandi cum avibus, a Latin treatise on falconry written in the 1240s, sits in the collection as a two-column parchment codex of 111 folios. The Codex Borgia, made of animal skins, records Mesoamerican mythology and foundational rituals in hieroglyphic texts. A small manuscript called Codex Vat. Arabo 368 is the sole surviving copy of the Hadith Bayad wa Riyad, an Arabic love story. The library also holds more than 100 Quran manuscripts, catalogued by the Italian Jewish linguist Giorgio Levi Della Vida. The largest of these, Vat. Ar. 1484, measures 540 by 420 millimeters. The smallest, Vat. Ar. 924, is a circle just 45 millimeters in diameter, preserved in an octagonal case. And there are 330,000 Greek, Roman, and papal coins and medals, along with a large collection of texts related to Hinduism, with the oldest editions dating to 1819.

• 8. Opening the Doors

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  Access to the Vatican Library has never been a simple matter. During the Renaissance, most books were not shelved but chained to wooden benches, each bench dedicated to a specific topic. If a reader borrowed a book, the chain came with it. Until the early 17th century, academics could also borrow books outright; for particularly significant volumes, the pope himself would issue a reminder slip. Privileges could be revoked for infractions. Pico della Mirandola famously lost his right to use the library after publishing a theological book the Papal curia disapproved of. During the Counter-Reformation, Protestant scholars found access especially restricted. Pope Leo XIII formally reopened the library to scholars in 1883, and changed the title of its effective director from Custodian to Prefect. Today, the library is open to anyone who can document their qualifications and research needs. Up to 200 scholars may use it at one time, and between 4,000 and 5,000 visit each year, most doing post-graduate research. On the 20th of March 2014, NTT Data Corporation announced an agreement with the Holy See to digitize approximately 3,000 manuscripts within four years, with the equipment and technicians estimated to be worth 18 million euros. The digital library service, called DigiVatLib, provides free access to the resulting high-definition images, opening the collection to researchers who will never set foot in the Belvedere Courtyard.