They call it, quite exaggerating, The Devil's Bible . Also, along the same lines, The Code of Satan . But it is commonly known as Codex Gigas (Big Book), a more accurate denomination although, admittedly, not as suggestive as the previous ones. In any case, none of them really fit the content.
It is, yes, a book . A fairly old book highly coveted by collectors and the curious, whose inordinate interest has ended up surrounding it with a halo of mystery that brings to mind those mythical and arcane volumes that tinge many stories with romanticism, some real and others fictional (the Necronomicon of Lovecraft's tales). After all, legend has it that the author was helped bySatan in person that he asked in exchange for his portrait to appear on a page, as it happens (in the 290th, although the poor thing does not come out very favored).
Its main characteristic lies in the size with which it was necessary to endow the volume to record in it so much knowledge. Suffice it to say that it weighs nothing less than 75 kilograms and measures 92 × 50.5 × 22 centimeters. And it is that it contains copies of lots of well-known classic works, from the Bible (Vulgate version ) to the History of the Jews of Flavius Josephus, going through the Etymologies of San Isidoro or the Chronica Bohemorum . But also others without a signature, such as medical treatises, chronicles of history, compendiums of magic, calendars, etc.
Its 624 thick pages are parchment , illustrated in color and gilt and, oddly enough, very well preserved. Some initials occupy an entire page, so they should not be considered miniatures, since we would be talking about letters of almost a meter.
All this seems to have been the fruit of the efforts of a Benedictine monk named Herman the Recluse , who used in it the time that he was imprisoned in Prague as a condition to redeem his sentence; logical, if one takes into account that it was capital punishment and its application was sandwiching. For that and because he had to finish the job in one night, according to the legend , he turned to the Devil. It happened in the thirteenth century and when the monastery in Podlažice that guarded it was in financial trouble, it sold the book to the Cistercian monastery in Sedlec.
Then it was passed from hand to hand :Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg took it out of the cell where it was kept and then it was the Swedish general Konigmark who took it to his country as booty after the Thirty Years' War. Today it is kept in the National Library in Stockholm.
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