Details

Subject(s)

• Crusades—Fourth, 1202-1204 [Browse]
• Book production—Venice [Browse]
• Scribes [Browse]
• Venice (Italy)—Manuscripts [Browse]
• Byzantine Empire—History [Browse]
• Byzantine Empire—History—Comneni dynasty, 1081-1185 [Browse]
• Byzantine Empire—History—Angeli, 1185-1204 [Browse]

Summary note

Chronicle of the Crusades to the Holy Land), in Greek; decorated manuscript on paper [northern Italy (Venice), dated 3 October 1541.

Notes

• Ms. codex.
• Physical description: single column of 30 lines in Greek cursive book script by the scribe Nicolaos Kokolos; collation: 1-398, 30 long lines per page; rubrics and titles in faded red ink; small faded red initials set in margins; edges gilt and flecked with red; burn hole on fols. 1-18, resulting in the lost of approximately 60 x 30 mm of 6 lines of text from inner edge; burnished, no watermarks; contemporary limp-parchment wrapper (with yapps, incorporating narrow strips from an Italian 12th-century manuscript as sewing guard around the final quire. On the sewing guard between fols. 303v and 304r, one can read the following words from the Venerable Bede's commentary on the Acts of the Apostles: "/libertatis imponat. De quo"; "et captum a bestia"; "scriptum est. Et destruens"). The spine has a partially readable title written in faded iron-gall ink on a paper label with losses, in Greek and Latin ("Nicetae Choniatae Imperii Historia"). Foliated in pencil at Princeton (2018).
• fol. iii verso: Table of Contents in Greek and Latin ("Nicetae Choniatae Chronica narratio de Imperio"). Lists Byzantine emperors of the Komnenid and Angelid dynasties, from Iōannēs II Komnēnos (r. 1118-43) to Alexios V Doukas Mourtzouphlos (r. 1204), with the numbers of books for each reign. This is followed by a note by Choniates on the events that took place after the fall of Constantinople in 1204 ("Eiusdem de iis quae post urbem captam acciderunt"). Possibly added to by Jacques Sirmond (1559-1651), librarian of the Jesuit College of Clermont, Paris, when the present manuscript was in its library. See A. E. McCabe, A Byzantine Encyclopaedia of Horse Medicine: The Sources, Compilation, and Transmission of the Hippiatrica (2007), pp. 30-31.

Provenance

• Guillaume Pellicier (c. 1490-1568), French ecclesiastic of Montpellier and favorite of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the sister of King Francois I. In 1533, the king stopped in Montpellier on his way to marry his son to Catherine de Medici, and Pellicier served in attendance of the court. Having come to the attention of Francois I he became a leading cultural figure of the court and was given offices in Rome and then as ambassador to Venice in 1539-42. He used his time in Venice for bibliophilic purposes, acquiring many Greek manuscripts for the royal library at Fontainebleau, which were sent to France in 1542. The copy of the present text sent to France in that shipment was also produced in 1541. Pellicier had three copies made of this text, sending on only one to Fontainbleau. This is one of the other two, as is another retained by Pellicier (and now Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Gr. 236, also dated 1541, and sharing a provenance with the present copy through points 2, 3 and 4 below). After 1551, his library was seized, inventoried and judged in entries in the inventory as either condemnatus, suspectus or reprobatus (condemned, suspected or reproved; for the inventory see Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Gr. 3068). He was condemned and ordered to pay the entire trial costs of 12,000 francs, but by 1557 he was a free man. Claude Naulot de Val (fl. 1570s) is sometimes thought of as a later owner of Pellicier's library. But he was a registrar of the city of Autun, and his notes in the present manuscripts (here dated 1573 on folio iii recto and in tri-lingual Greek, French, and Latin on the final page of text) were probably added in his capacity as legal secretary as part of the aftermath of the inventory of the collection when seized. See A. Cataldi Palau, Catalogue of Greek Manuscripts from the Meerman Collection in the Bodleian (2011), pp. 6-10.
• Jesuit College of Clermont, in Paris. Acquired before 1651. Their ex libris is at head of frontispiece: "Colleg[ium]. Paris Soc[ieta]tis Jesu," and an inscription noting the decree of July 1763 (vertically down side of frontispiece: "Paraphe au desir de l'arrest du cinq juillet 1763," signed by 'Mesnil') which followed the near-bankruptcy of the French Order on the outbreak of war with England, and opened the way for the enemies of the Order to force their dissolution by royal order in 1764. The Pellicier manuscripts formed one of the founding collections of their library. A paper slip pasted onto fol. 83r, with the following inscription in English, "CCXXXVI in Clermont Catalogue."
• Gerard Meerman (1722-1771), of The Hague, noted bibliophile and Baron of the Holy Roman Empire, whose wealth came from his father's role as director of the Dutch East India Company, who travelled Europe in the 1740s acquiring entire libraries. His manuscript library was founded on the acquisition of that of the Jesuits of Paris, with the present volume published as Bibliotheca Meermanniana sive Catalogus librorum impressorum etc Codicum manuscriptorum, IV, no. 396. The collection was left to his son Johan, and became the basis of the collection of the Haagse Museum Meermanno. The manuscripts were sold at auction in The Hague in 1824. The handwritten shelfmark "396" is found on a small paper label on the spine and on folio ii recto. There is an unidentified early shelfmark (?) on the inside of the front wrapper: "MC 142."
• Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1892), Phillipps no. 6767 (written in his hand initially in pencil beneath his lion rampant inkstamp and then pen on front pastedown and with his distinctive printed paper label on spine), acquired in 1824 alongside much of the Meerman manuscripts (in fact he acquired nearly four fifths of the entire Meerman collection, individually and in person at the auction; but with the present volume apparently passing through the intermediate hands of the Amsterdam bookseller Radinck, whose pencil inscription appears on the first endleaf (folio i recto). Published while in the Phillipps collection by Studemund and Cohn (see below). His library passed by descent through his family until sold to the Robinson brothers. The vast majority of the Greek manuscripts from the Meerman library, some 241 volumes, were sold en bloc to Berlin, Preussiche Staatsbibliotek, in 1887. But this volume (alongside 32 others which were all shelved away from the main block in Phillipps Library at Middle Hill) remained in the Phillipps collection, and was sold by the heirs to the New York bookdealer, H. P. Kraus in the 1970s; H. P. Kraus catalogue 153 (1979), no. 94. Martin Schoyen, The Schoyen Collection, Oslo and London, MS. 562, acquired directly from H. P. Kraus. Ownership stamp on the inside of the front limp-parchment wrapper.
• Purchased by the Princeton University Library at Bloomsbury Auctions, London: Western and Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures, 10 July 2018, lot 79.

Source acquisition

Purchase: Acquired with matching funds provided by the Program in Hellenic Studies with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund. 2018. AM 2019-15.

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