Learning is light, but the ignorant is darkness. Information is illumination.
A. Svirin. Expedition to the ancestors. M.: Malysh, 1970
Vatican Apostolic Library. And it happened that at all times there were people who understood the value of the written word and collected for their descendants and for themselves contemporary manuscripts and books. It is enough to recall the library of the king of Assyria Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, consisting of 25,000 clay tablets with original cuneiform texts, to understand how important such repositories of ancient texts are for all mankind. However, something else is also known. Indeed, apart from clay tablets, which only harden from fire, the texts on papyrus and parchment burned down during the fire of this library. It is not without reason that it is believed that only 10% of its contents have come down to us. But the library in Alexandria also burned down in the fire, and many more libraries died in the same way from the fire. How much we have lost in this way, one can only guess. And how many chronicles and documents were burned during the fires in the Russian wooden towers? You can't even imagine. That is why the world's largest Apostolic Library in the Vatican, founded in the 15th century by Pope Sixtus IV, is so valuable to us. Since then, it has been continuously replenished, so that today it contains more than 150,000 manuscripts, about 1,600,000 printed books, 8,300 ancient incunabula, more than 100,000 different engravings, geographical maps, as well as a collection of 300,000 coins and medals. The library has a Vatican school of librarians, as well as a well-equipped laboratory, which is engaged in the restoration of ancient books and the reproduction of the most important manuscripts by facsimile printing.
Library history
However, it would be more correct to say that the Vatican Library was created in the 4th century. Because it was then that in the Lateran Palace, even during the reign of Pope Damasius I, they first collected an archive of manuscripts, the first mention of which dates back to 384. In the 6th century, the supervision of him was entrusted to the secretary of state of the Vatican, and in the 8th century this responsible business was transferred to a special librarian. Many popes were engaged in collecting manuscripts. For example, in 1310, Pope Clement V gave the order to transfer 643 valuable manuscripts to Assisi, but many of them died nine years later, after the Ghibellines attacked this city.
The collection of the third Vatican library began during the "Avignon Captivity of the Popes", and a special palace tower was allocated for it. The last Avignon Pope Gregory XI moved part of the collection to the Vatican, but much still remained in Avignon, but fortunately did not perish, but ended up in the National Library of France.
The modern or fourth Vatican Library was the brainchild of Pope Nicholas V, elected in March 1447, although on the basis of the bull of Sixtus IV of June 15, 1475, although it is generally believed that it was this pope who founded it. At first it contained only 800 manuscripts in Latin and 353 in Greek. Sixtus IV diligently acquired manuscripts from the countries of Europe and the East, including unique manuscripts that were literally preserved by a miracle from the imperial library in Constantinople. So under him the collection of the library grew to 2527 documents. In 1481, there were already 3,500 manuscripts in it, and a special room was built for her.
A great lover of librarianship was Pope Leo X, who collected ancient manuscripts throughout Europe. In 1527, the library, which at that time contained more than 4 thousand manuscripts, was seriously damaged during the hostilities. Therefore, in 1588, Pope Sixtus V decided that a new building should be built for the library, in which the manuscripts were to be stored in special wooden cabinets. At the same time, Pope Sixtus V liked to compare himself with the founders of the great libraries of the past, such as the Library of Alexandria, Roman, Roman and Athens.
Pope Paul V distinguished himself by allocating a separate building for documents, and ordered to keep the books separately. It was the repository of documents that became the basis of the Secret Archive, about which all sorts of lovers of secrets and mysteries talk so much, starting with the allegedly missing Inca gold and right up to the visit of the Earth by aliens from the stars. It is much more important that in the 17th century a good tradition was born, according to which private collections and collections of the royal houses of Europe began to be transferred to the Vatican library. For example, the Bavarian Elector Maximilian I in 1623 presented Pope Gregory XV with a significant part of the books from the Heidelberg Library (the so-called Palatine Library) as gratitude for his assistance in the Thirty Years War. True, then 38 manuscripts in Latin and Greek, as well as several manuscripts on the history of the city, were returned to Heidelberg. In 1657, the Vatican Library was donated to the Urbino Library, which contained 1,767 texts in Latin, 165 in Greek, 128 in Hebrew and Arabic, which had been collected for a long time by the Duke of Urbino Federigo da Montefeltro.
Later, the popes even organized special expeditions to Syria and Egypt, collecting ancient manuscripts in the local monasteries. So manuscripts from the East were added to the European ones, among which many very interesting documents were discovered.
This is how the library was gradually replenished and replenished, and eventually turned into an accessible secular institution. With her, a reading room was opened, where it was possible to read printed books, a restoration laboratory was created. In 1891, another pope bought for her the collections of the Counts of Borghese, which contained 300 scrolls from the old papal library of Avignon, and in 1902, for a huge sum of 525 thousand francs at that time, the archives of Cardinal Francesco Barberini were bought, which contained 10,041 Latin, 595 Greek and 160 oriental manuscripts, and then a number of other valuable collections. Thus, for example, in 1953, the library received documents from the archives of the princely Rospillosi family. As you can see, all these examples say only one thing - a truly huge number of old manuscripts, incunabula and various printed books collected within the walls of the Vatican Library since the time of Johannes Gutenberg.
Library today
The library is huge and consists of several rooms with their own names, for the most part beautifully designed, many of which are essentially nothing more than museum exhibition complexes. There are older halls and newer ones. Thus, the "Aldobrandini Wedding Hall" was built in 1611 under Pope Pius V and is decorated with beautiful frescoes. The Hall of Papyri from 1774 is also decorated with frescoes, and two more showcases display amazing gold goblets depicting various religious and secular scenes.
The Alexander Hall was built in 1690 and later painted with frescoes depicting the story of Pope Pius VI in captivity by Napoleon, including his exile and his death in exile in 1799.
Then there is the “Paul's Hall” with scenes of the pontificate of Pope Paul V, “The Sistine Halls”, “Urban VII Gallery”, then the Museum of Sacred Art, where clay lamps of the first Christians and goblets for communion, metal and glass products are displayed, and also much another that was used in worship. Ancient Roman and Etruscan artifacts are exhibited here in the Museum of Secular Art, and reliquaries decorated with gold and precious stones, including the golden cross of Paschalia I in the Pius V chapel, painted with frescoes based on sketches of Giorgio Vasari himself in 1566-1572. There is the Clement Gallery, also decorated with frescoes and divided into five rooms, that is how great it was. Not only the Renaissance has left its traces on the walls of the library in the form of frescoes by its masters.
The Sistine Salon, for example, which was designed and built specifically to store manuscripts and rare books, 70 meters long and 15 meters wide, was painted with Mannerist frescoes, with all the characters and the scenes themselves having their captions explaining them. Today this hall is used for exhibitions.
“The Hall of Praise to Pope Pius IX” bears this name for a reason: earlier it housed praise addressed to him. Currently, unique fabrics are exhibited in this room, for example, a linen tunic from the 3rd century.
There is also a "Hall of Praise" in the library without the instructions of a specific person. Roman and early Christian goblets and ivory items are exhibited here, including the famous "diptych from Rambona" depicting the Virgin enthroned in 900, as well as many other valuable rarities adorned with gold, pearls and enamel.
The volumes of manuscripts collected in the library are simply amazing. Here is a list of their collections, indicating the number of documents in each of them:
Latin Collection - 11150
Greek congregation - 2 330
Arab Assembly - 935
Meeting in Hebrew - 599
Syrian congregation - 472
Coptic collection - 93
Persian Assembly - 83
Meeting in Turkish - 80
Meeting in Ethiopian - 77
Indian congregation - 39
Slavic collection - 23
Meeting in Chinese - 20
Meeting in Armenian - 14
Samaritan Assembly - 3
Georgian Assembly - 2
Romanian Assembly - 1
Accordingly, the library has the following departments:
Latin library of texts in Latin.
Greek library with Greek manuscripts.
The secret library containing the most valuable documents. This is not to say that it is impossible to get into it, by no means, but the access of visitors to it is limited, and a researcher who wants to get into it must prove that he cannot do without its materials to work!
There is also the "Library of the New Pontiff", which contains some archival materials, such as, for example, papal acts: about 4000 volumes (!) From the so-called "Chigi collection".
In total, the library contains no less than 50,000 manuscripts, which are stored in 36 sections of its closed part and 16 sections of the open one.
Works of great value
The value of the manuscripts stored in the library is evidenced by at least a short list of their most interesting copies. For example, this is one of the first copies of the Bible in Greek dating from the middle of the 4th century, the Carolingian incunabula, the decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, a treatise on veneration of icons, compiled by order of Charlemagne. The Bodmer Papyrus contains the oldest text of the Gospels of Luke and John. And here are two copies of Gutenberg's "Bible" - the very first printed book of mankind. There are also letters, originals, Thomas Aquinas, Raphael, Martin Luther and even Henry VIII.
As for printed books, there are also a lot of them in the Vatican Library. There are more than 10 thousand of them in its catalog. Moreover, these are only modern printed editions, and the first printed books appeared in it as early as 1620-1630. There is an office of copper engravings, where about 32 thousand sheets of engravings have been collected, all of them sorted by school, and 10 thousand also by genre.
In addition to valuable works of art and archaeological artifacts, the library houses an extensive collection of coins, medals and orders. Moreover, at present, electronic catalogs are being compiled for all manuscripts, orders, medals and coins.
The only library run by the cardinal
The library is run by a cardinal librarian, a prefect (who deals with technical and scientific issues), a deputy prefect, several managers of departments and even individual collections (in particular, a collection of coins and medals), as well as a secretary and treasurer. There is also a council that advises the cardinal librarian and the prefect on the most important issues related to the work of the library. There is also a very responsible position of a restorer, who has at his disposal a separate, and quite numerous, staff of highly qualified employees. Each phase of all restoration work is accompanied by the compilation of accurate descriptions of the taken and digital photographs of the object before and after restoration. To control books (which, say, may be misplaced), the library uses automatic object identification technology - RFID, which uses radio frequency identification technology. There is even an installation that allows you to read inscriptions on parchments or old documents using ultraviolet rays, which are invisible to the naked eye.
Do you want to work here? The doors are open
As for the possibility of visiting the Vatican Apostolic Library and working in it, there are several so-called Lateran agreements in this regard, by which it is guaranteed. On average, 150 scientists, university professors and university professors, and even students working on doctoral dissertations can visit and work in one day.
You can privately go to the library's photo lab and there, for a fee, of course, they will make photocopies of printed books from 1601-1990. publications, as well as photographs, microfilms and CDs. The documents are being digitized, so that many of them can be found on the library's Internet portal.
Now let's talk about the essentials, so to speak. Can our Russian researcher work in this library. There may be a student writing a PhD thesis, we have … neither associate professors, nor professors (well, maybe who is from Moscow, I don’t know) at the regional level. Firstly, it is not affordable. Secondly, they are hindered by their purely Soviet illiteracy. Well, who of them knows Latin and Greek so as to read ancient manuscripts? Old Slavonic, few people know, but here at least someone understands something. And medieval and ancient Roman Latin … Well, how many specialists do we have on it? That is, to work there must come together: a person's knowledge, his money (or money from the state) and his personal interest. It is clear that there are very few chances for such a happy coincidence.
However, in this case, the interest of the state itself is possible. Probably, you can order the Vatican to copy all the sayings about the Slavs and Russia that are found in the documents they have. We have PSRL, so why not publish PSIV in addition to it - "The Complete Collection of Vatican Sources", and first the original text, and then - its translation into Russian, indicating the source, and a brief retelling of it, and the date of writing. Then we would have an accurate idea of everything that "they" wrote "there" about us and could compare their texts with ours, which would make it possible to clarify many of the controversial provisions of Russian history today. Of course, such work would require the involvement of many specialists, and considerable financial costs. But … it would all pay off. And above all, by rapprochement due to the rapprochement of Russian and foreign historical science, which today is largely isolated from the latter. There is simply no other way, since no grants from Fulbright and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research will simply be enough for such work, it is so large-scale. Let those billions be allocated for this business, which, at least, were confiscated from the bribe-taker colonels of the FSB. However, in today's Russia, such a "crank" is unlikely to be possible …
* All illustrations are taken from manuscripts and books from the collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library.
