THE ARCHIVIO

Paul V. must be regarded as the founder of the Archivio of the Vatican, for it was he who turned the suite of apartments which Sixtus V., when he was building the Vatican Library, designed for the residence of the librarian, into the Archivio.

The Popes began the systematic storage of their archives as far back as Pope S. Damasus (366-384), whose Archivio, roughly speaking, occupied the site of the Cancelleria.

M. Paul Fabre, the great authority on the subject, informs us that the Archives were soon moved to the Lateran, because it was more convenient to have the documents necessary for deciding questions in the place where the discussions were held, and the Lateran is between a mile and two miles from the Archivio of Pope S. Damasus. From the beginning of the seventh century, when one speaks of the Library of the Lateran it includes the Archives. M. Fabre tells us that the Library at this time was often called the _Scrinium_, a word which means a convenient locked chest in which one could put important documents--what we should call deed-boxes--though from the allusions of contemporaries the documents never seem to have been kept locked. It is to this Library of the Lateran that the _Liber Pontificalis_ refers. M. Fabre shows from the accounts of the Council held in Rome in 649, that the Library must have been very well arranged and catalogued, for it is recorded that the chief of the notaries was able to produce at once any document or volume which was asked for. The name of this first of the great Pontifical librarians was Theophylactus.

The departure of the Popes to Avignon broke up the Lateran Library and Archives. They were taken at first to Assisi for safety, but in 1339 the masterful Benedict XII. had the Pontifical registers of the thirteenth century and a large quantity of the archives taken to Avignon. The rest of them were left in the Convent of Assisi, where the bulk of them were gradually and irredeemably lost. M. Fabre tells us that Sixtus IV. transferred the most important charters of the Holy See to the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, and that Leo X. transferred others taken from the _Biblioteca Segreta_ of the Vatican there. “But the collection of documents, enclosed at that time in bags of silk of various colours, was small in comparison with those which had been left at Avignon, and all that had been produced by the daily business of the Curia since the end of the Grand Schism, which were dispersed in many places.” Without mentioning the _Biblioteca Segreta_, supposed to include the letters of Luther, there were the Archives of the _Camera Apostolica_, of the _Gardaroba_, of the Cancelleria, of the Apostolical Secretaries, and of the Nuncios.

It was the ambition of Pius IV., and the dream of S. Pius V., to bring them together in a single institution; and Clement VIII., as a preliminary of the execution of this grand design, had a very fine circular hall in the top of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo fitted with handsome presses, elaborately decorated, which Marini saw destroyed in 1799. Here he gathered all the scattered collections and transferred a certain number from the Vatican Archives. Paul V. (1605-1621) ordered the fitting up of the Archivio of the Vatican, mentioned in the beginning of the chapter, and, from that time forward, no fresh archives were sent to Sant’ Angelo. The documents in the _Biblioteca Segreta_ naturally formed the kernel of the new Archivio. Michel Lonigo, who had charge of the transfer to the new Archivio, has left a detailed account of the documents which form the basis of the new Vatican Archivio. Gradually the Archivio of the Vatican became the chief repository of the Papal Archives.

Urban VIII., says M. Fabre, caused the Bulls registered “_par voie sécrète_” from Sixtus IV. (1471-1484) to Pius V. (1565-1572), to be transported there from the Archives of the Secretaries-Apostolical; and also from the Archives of the Secretariat of the Briefs, registers, and minutes of Briefs from Alexander VI. (1492-1503) to 1567; and added a certain number of volumes which came from Avignon, and the correspondence of the Nuncios of the sixteenth century, which had lain till then in the Archives of the _Gardaroba_; and Alexander VII. added the papers of the Secretariat of State. Under Alexander VII. the documents of the Nunciatures were arranged in the upper floor in special presses, and near them was formed another series with the letters of Cardinals, Princes, etc. Clement XI. instituted in the same room a series of _Varia Politicorum_; and in Benedict XIII.’s time the Canon de Pretis made an inventory of all these various collections.

Pius VI. enriched the Archives with five hundred large volumes recovered from Avignon, and finally, in the month of May 1798, the Archivist, Gaetano Marini, when he was ordered by the French to give up the keys of the Castle of Sant’ Angelo, obtained their permission to transfer all the documents preserved there to the Vatican Archives; this, thanks to the aid and energy of the French soldiers, was effected in a single day. Marini gave a further proof of his capacity and intelligence by preserving at the Vatican the exact order in which the documents had been arranged at Sant’ Angelo. But all this was upset by Napoleon’s transfer of the Vatican documents to Paris in 1810, and their restitution, owing to the good offices of the English in 1817. After the death of Marini the Archives, like the Library, were not kept in a way that could be considered satisfactory, until that great Pope Leo XIII., in his comprehensive scheme to set his house in order, turned his attention to them. He made immense additions, including two thousand volumes of Papal Briefs, added in 1883, and all the Archives of the Dataria in 1888.

Leo also extended the accommodation of the Archives by adding five rooms adjoining the old Sala da Studio of the Archives. They face the Vatican Gardens on the ground floor of the street which leads up to the Sculpture Galleries, in a line with the Pope’s coach-house. Two of these look on and communicate with the room devoted to Cardinal Mai’s library in the new _Biblioteca Leonina_.

This is a Bull of Pope Clement VIII., dated “Rome at St. Peter’s in the year of the Incarnation of Our Lord one thousand and five hundred and ninety-two on the Kalends of January in the first year of our Pontificate.”

It is, a widow and her son having complained that some inhuman sons of iniquity were detaining part of the property of their husband and father to the value of fifty ducats, the Pope commands the Bishops of the district to order that within a fixed time the detainers of such property should appear before them; and failing such appearance to give sentence against the unlawful detainers and concealers.

(This Bull is now in the possession of the Author.)]

Father Angelo Mai was appointed Chief-Assistant of the Vatican Library when he was thirty-seven. He held at the time a similar position in the great Ambrosian Library at Milan. “But whatever he had till now performed,” says Cardinal Wiseman, in his _Last Four Popes_, published by Hurst & Blackett, in 1858, “was eclipsed by the most fortunate and brilliant of his discoveries, that of Cicero’s long-coveted treatise _De Republicâ_. Petrarca, Poggio, and Bessarion, with a host of elegant scholars, had desired and sought in vain to see this treatise. It had eluded every research. Under a copy of St. Augustine’s _Commentary on the Psalms_ Mai discovered it, in large, bold characters, with its title legible. I can well remember the commotion which the announcement of this success excited through the literary world in Rome. Of course, it took some time to prepare the work for publication. Indeed, I have heard from the learned discoverer himself, that while new types were being cast, and arrangements made for publishing it through all Europe, he was busily engaged in hunting out all the quotations of Cicero’s work dispersed through the ponderous tomes of subsequent writers--especially Fathers. The very one whose own lucubrations had shielded it from destruction, and covered it with a patina or antiquarian crust such as often saves a valuable medal, yielded no small number of extracts, which either were found in the discovered portions and so verified their genuineness, or were absent from them and so filled up lacunæ.

“How often have I had that precious volume in my hand, with the man whose fame it crowned explaining to friends around him the entire process of discovery, and the manner in which he drew out order from the chaotic confusion of its leaves. Indeed, seldom was it my lot to lead any party to visit the Vatican Library, while Monsignor Mai was librarian, without his leaving his own pursuit to show us its treasures, and not the least valuable of them, himself.”

Gregory XVI., wishing to employ his extraordinary abilities in the service of religion, made him secretary of the Congregation of the Propaganda, but he was allowed to have the MSS. of the Library at his house. “He did not confine his industry to palimpsests, but drew from the shelves of the Vatican, histories, poems, medical and mathematical treatises, acts of Councils, Biblical commentaries--in fine, works of every age and of every class, classical, patristic, mediæval, and even modern, not only in Greek and Latin, but in Arabic, Syro-Chaldaic, and Armenian. He re-established, under the auspices of Gregory, the celebrated Vatican press, which had formerly published the splendid St. Ephrem; he had cast for it new sets of types, for various alphabets, from the best models in old manuscripts; and especially employed it in the printing of the great Codex Vaticanus, which he transcribed.”

Out of the manuscripts which he discovered, he published between 1827 and 1838 “(1) _Scriptorum veterum nova collectio_--a collection, in ten huge quarto volumes, of writers, sacred and profane, of every age.

“(2) _Classici scriptores ex codicibus Vaticanis editi_, in ten volumes of smaller dimensions. These two series closely followed one another. The first began to be published in 1827, and the second was closed in 1838.

“(3) _Spicilegium Romanum_, another series in ten volumes, which he finished in 1844.

“(4) _Nova Patrum Bibliotheca_, of which only six of the twelve volumes had appeared when death brought his labours prematurely to a close.”

He was appointed a Cardinal in 1838, at the same time as Cardinal Mezzofanti, one of the most famous linguists in history. He became Cardinal-Librarian in 1853, a year before his death.

Our Royal Society of Literature, in awarding the gold medal in 1824 to this gentle scholar, the most famous in the great roll of the librarians of the Vatican, hailed him as “the Discoverer and Restorer of Palimpsests.”

Cardinal Wiseman, who was his colleague in the Sacred College for four years, has left us a vivid picture of Mai’s labours.

“To drop figures, the peculiarity of Mai’s wonderful discovery consisted in the reading of manuscripts twice written; or, as they are more scientifically called, palimpsests. A book, for instance, may have been very properly catalogued as containing the commentaries or sermons of some abbot of the eleventh or twelfth century, works of which there may be several other transcripts in the library. Edited or not, it is improbable that the volume has been, or will be, looked into during a generation. But the lens-like eye of a Don Angelo peers into it, and it becomes a treasure-trove. The writer of the Middle Ages had taken down from the shelves a work which he considered of small value--perhaps there were duplicates of it--some letters, for instance, of a heathen Emperor to his tutor, and scrubbed, as he thought, the parchment clean, both of its inky and of its moral denigration, and then had written over it the recent production of some favourite author. It is this underwriting that Mai scanned with a sagacious eye; perhaps it was like the lines of a repainted canvas, which, in course of time, came through the more evanescent tints superadded, a leg or arm cropping out through the mouth of an impassioned head by the second artist; and he could trace clearly the large forms of uncial letters of the fourth or fifth century, sprawling through two lines of a neatly written brevier. Or the scouring had been more thoroughly done; and then a wash of gallic acid revived the pallid reed-strokes of the earlier scribe.

“Ingenuity, patience, learning, and immense perseverance were requisite for the process. Often only the unconnected passages were found, half a sentence in one page, which the next did not continue, but the rest of which might perhaps be found in another manuscript three hundred numbers off; sometimes portions of various works were jumbled together under one later production, upside down, back to back, like shuffled cards, while perhaps not one page contained the ‘Incipit,’ or the ‘Explicit feliciter liber 1, de----’ so as to give a clue to what these fragments contained. Learning was then, indeed, necessary; for conjecture often gave the first intimation of what had been discovered, from the style, or from the sentence having been fortunately embalmed, or petrified, by quotation in some later author.

“In this way did Mai labour on, looking through the tangled mass of confused materials, catching up the ends of different threads, and pursuing them with patient diligence, till he had drawn each, broken or perfect as it happened to exist. After one minor publication of a translation, he began in 1813, and continued till 1819, to pour out an unintermitting stream of volumes, containing works or portions of works, lost, as it had been supposed, irrecoverably. Various orations of Cicero; the lost writings of Julius Fronto; unpublished letters of Marcus Aurelius, Antoninus Pius, Lucius Verus, and Appian; fragments of speeches by Aurelius Symmachus; the History of Dionysius of Halicarnassus from the twelfth to the twentieth books; inedited fragments of Philo; ancient commentaries on Virgil; two books of Eusebius’s Chronicles; the Itineraries of Alexander, and of Constantius Augustus, son of the Emperor Constantine; three books of Julius Valerius on the actions of Alexander the Great; the sixth and fourteenth Sibylline books; finally, the celebrated Gothic version, by Ulphilas, of St. Paul and other parts of Scripture; such were the principal works recovered and published, with notes, prefaces, and translations, by this indefatigable scholar, in the period just mentioned of six years. It was a work in which he could have little or no assistance from others; in fact, it was an art exclusively his own.”

His library he wished to bequeath to the Roman clergy. But as he could not afford to provide a building or endowment he gave orders for it to be valued and sold, stipulating that the Pope was to have first offer at half the valuation. He was anxious that his collection should be kept separate and bear his name. He stipulated that every book should bear his arms. His manuscripts were all bequeathed to the Vatican. Pius IX. at once gave orders for the Library to be purchased, and it was kept in the first of the Borgia Apartments, the Sala dei Pontefici, until it was removed to the chamber which it now occupies in the end of the Leonine Library--the link with the Archivio.