History of the Vatican Library

The Vatican Library trace its linage to the earliest days of Christianity and the church’s persecution by the Romans, through the Middles Ages and the Renaissance to the present day. Throughout the turbulent first several centuries of existence, the archives’ most important items were moved from one hiding place to another in hopes of safeguarding them from attack or theft. For a time, the popes even stored their most precious records inside Castel Sant’Angelo, the historic Roman fortress.
The archives as we know them today were created when Pope Innocent III undertook the first systematic collection of official church papers in the late 12th Century. With the intervention of the printing press around 1450, the Vatican’s collection multiplied until it was destroyed during the sack of Rome by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V in 1527. In the early 1600 Pope Paul V assembled church records and other materials from around the Christendom and separated the collection into the Vatican Library and the Secret Vatican Archives.[1]
In the 15th century the library had been the best stocked in Italy, but by the end of the century its role had been strictly delineated. Its function was no longer the pursuit of scholarship, but only the organization of documents and books for the business of the papacy. Gregory XIV decreed in 1591 that no scholar was to consult the documents without his express permission.[2] The secret Archives were off limits to all but the most vetted visitors until the end of the 19th Century. Individuals found leaking documents-or even setting foot inside the building- were harshly punished, excommunicated , or both.

Around 1810, shortly after annexing the Papal States and arresting the pope, Napoleon Bonaparte hauled off the archives to Paris. When Napoleon abdicated a few years later, the pope wanted his papers returned, but many of the documents never made it back to Rome. Quite a few were burned as refuse along the way or, in one case, sold to Parisian merchants for wrapping paper.
[1] ‘It isn’t so secret after all’ by Michael Herra. Taken from Secrets of Angels and Demons: the unauthorized guide to the bestselling novel/ Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer.
[2] Fallen order: intrigue, heresy and scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio/Karen Liebreich

Image courtesy of Library for the information age (Book and technology mobile) which has an interesting timeline for the history of libraries in general.

This particular post I found most interesting to write as I love history, and finding out about the Vatican Library, which I knew nothing about was really facinating. The one thing I found really hard to do was to condense all the information I had found.
I found the History of the Vatican Library interesting in some respects especially reading about the Parisan merchants who had been sold some of the documents in the Secret Archives for wrapping paper - travesity!!