It is 92 centimetres long, 50 centimetres wide and 22 centimetres thick, and it weighs 74.8 kilograms — about as much as an adult man. Two people are needed to lift it. It is the largest surviving medieval manuscript in the world, and it contains, among many other things, the complete Latin Bible and a full-page portrait of the Devil. Its Latin name, Codex Gigas, means simply “giant book.” Its nickname, the Devil’s Bible, comes from that portrait and from the legend of how the book was made.
A book too big to be ordinary
The Codex Gigas is made up of 310 leaves of vellum — 620 pages — said to have been prepared from the skins of about 160 animals, donkeys or calves. The handwriting is remarkably uniform from the first page to the last. Scholars believe the manuscript was produced in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, between about 1204 and 1230, and that it took many years to complete, with estimates ranging from five to more than twenty years.
The book was created in, or at least for, the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice, near Chrast in Bohemia. The records written into the codex itself end in the year 1222. The monastery was destroyed in the fifteenth century during the Hussite Revolution, and the book had already left its keeping long before that.
What is inside
The Codex Gigas is far more than a Bible. Its first half contains the complete Latin Bible in the Vulgate version, the Old and New Testaments together in one enormous volume. The second half gathers a library of other works: the histories of the Jewish writer Flavius Josephus, the encyclopaedia of Isidore of Seville, medical writings, a chronicle of Bohemia, a calendar, a list of the monastery’s dead, and a collection of ritual and medical formulas that modern readers often describe as magical or protective charms.
Compared with other grand Bibles of the period, the book is not heavily illustrated with small pictures. Its power lies in its scale and in two facing full-page images near the end: on one page, the Kingdom of Heaven, and directly opposite, the Devil. The portrait of the Devil, on folio 290 recto, is about 50 centimetres tall. It shows a crouching figure with a dark green face, small horns, red-tipped ears, staring eyes with red pupils, and clawed hands and feet raised in a threatening pose. A few pages before these images, several leaves are blackened with yellow writing, adding to the book’s strange atmosphere.
The legend of the monk and the Devil
The legend attached to the book has been told in various forms since the Middle Ages. In the best-known version, a monk of Podlažice named Herman the Recluse broke his monastic vows and was sentenced to be walled up alive — immured in a small cell — as punishment. To earn his freedom, he promised to write a book containing all human knowledge in a single night. As midnight approached and the task proved impossible, he is said to have made a bargain with the Devil, who finished the book for him in exchange for his soul. The portrait of the Devil, the story goes, was the monk’s thanks, or the Devil’s signature.
It is a fine story, and it explains the book’s nickname. It is not, however, history. No contemporary record supports it, and the name “Herman the Recluse” appears in the manuscript itself only in a later addition. What modern scholarship can say is that the handwriting throughout the book is strikingly consistent. Research by the palaeographer Michael Gullick concluded that a single scribe wrote the entire manuscript, which makes the achievement extraordinary but does not require supernatural help. How one person sustained such uniform work over so many years, and for whom, remains genuinely unknown: the true author and the exact circumstances of the book’s creation are still not established.
From Bohemia to Sweden
The book’s later history is documented well enough to follow, and it is almost as dramatic as the legend. A note on the first page records that in 1295 the monks of Podlažice pawned the codex to the Cistercian monastery of Sedlec, and that the Benedictine monastery of Břevnov bought it back the same year.
In 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops took Prague Castle and carried off Rudolf’s library as spoils of war. The Codex Gigas went to Stockholm, where it has remained ever since. In 1697 a fire broke out in the royal castle in Stockholm, and the book was reportedly thrown from a window to save it from the flames. It survived, though its binding was damaged and some pages are said to have been lost.
The manuscript passed to the Swedish Royal Library in the nineteenth century and is now held by the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm, where it is conserved and shown to the public. In September 2007 it returned to Prague on loan for the first time in 359 years, drawing large crowds, before going back to Sweden in early 2008.
What Is Documented, and What Is Not
Documented: The Codex Gigas measures 92 cm by 50 cm by 22 cm, weighs 74.8 kg, and contains 310 vellum leaves. It was produced in Bohemia in the early thirteenth century, probably between 1204 and 1230, and contains the complete Latin Vulgate Bible plus historical, medical and other texts. It was pawned to Sedlec in 1295, later held by Rudolf II in Prague, taken to Sweden as war booty in 1648, survived the 1697 Stockholm Castle fire, and is now held by the National Library of Sweden. The full-page Devil portrait appears on folio 290 recto, opposite an image of Heaven. Palaeographer Michael Gullick’s research indicates a single scribe wrote the whole book.
Unverified: The legend that a monk named Herman the Recluse wrote the book in one night with the Devil’s help is a medieval story, not a documented fact. The identity of the scribe, the exact number of years the work took, and the precise number of animals whose skins supplied the vellum (about 160, donkey or calf) are estimates, not certainties. The claim that pages were lost in the 1697 fire is reported rather than firmly established.