Scans via the Internet Archive, public domain.
Codex Gigas
The Devil's Bible
The largest medieval manuscript in the world, copied in a Bohemian monastery in the early 1200s and so big it takes two people to lift. Legend says a monk, sentenced to be walled up alive, swore to write a book holding all human knowledge in a single night — and when he could not, sold his soul to the Devil to finish it, then painted his rescuer inside in thanks. The handwriting tells a quieter story: one scribe, working for perhaps twenty years.
Made
Early 13th century, Bohemia
Size
About 92 × 50 cm, 22 cm thick
Weight
About 75 kg
Leaves
310 parchment leaves
Language
Latin
Held by
National Library of Sweden
Every page of the original, in Latin, as it was written — 620 pages of scans.
What’s inside
- The complete Latin Bible (the Vulgate), Old and New Testaments
- Josephus: The Antiquities of the Jews and The Jewish War
- Isidore of Seville's Etymologies, an encyclopedia of the age
- Medical treatises
- Cosmas of Prague's Chronicle of the Bohemians
- A calendar, charms and exorcisms
- The Heavenly City, facing the full-page portrait of the Devil
Taken from Prague by the Swedish army in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, it has been in Stockholm ever since.
