15 Vatican Artifacts Hidden From the World for Centuries

[00:00:00]Somewhere beneath the Vatican, on 85 km of shelving inside climate controlled rooms that most people will never see.

[00:00:07]There are documents and objects that have not been touched in decades. Some have not [music] been touched in centuries. The Vatican has been accumulating things for 2,000 years.

[00:00:16][music] Relics and manuscripts and diplomatic correspondents and confessions and works of art and the bones of martyrs. Some of it is on display. the cysteine chapel ceiling, the Apollo Belvadier, the gallery of maps, the parts the world knows. But most of it is not on display. Most of it is in the dark, filed away in boxes with old catalog numbers waiting. [music] Not all of it has been hidden by design.

[00:00:41]Some things were lost by accident.

[00:00:43][music] Some were misfiled. Some were sealed for political reasons that expired centuries ago, but whose effects linger in institutional habit. Some were simply stored carefully and responsibly in conditions that preclude public access for conservation reasons that any serious museum curator would recognize.

[00:01:02]And some were kept away from the world because what they contain would have been [music] in their time genuinely dangerous to the institution that holds them. These are 15 Vatican artifacts hidden for centuries. [music] Some of them have now been partially revealed.

[00:01:15]Some remain completely sealed. and a few of them changed the world [music] or could have if anyone had found them sooner. 01. The Shenan parchment, the document that absolved the Knights Templar. For nearly 700 years, one of the most consequential documents in medieval history, sat misfiled in the Vatican's apostolic archive, not hidden by design, but simply lost. a parchment [music] roughly the size of a dining room table covered in meticulous Latin script that proved something that historians had long suspected but could never confirm that Pope Clement V had privately absolved the Knights Templar of heresy in 1308 [music] just years before ordering the entire order dissolved. The Knights Templar were one of the most powerful military and financial organizations in the medieval world. A brotherhood of warrior monks who had fought in the crusades accumulated vast wealth across Europe and answered to no authority except the pope himself. That independence made [music] them dangerous. King Philip IVth of France deeply in debt to the Templars and coveting [music] their wealth engineered their destruction. On the 13th of October 1307, a Friday which may be the origin of the Friday, the 13th superstition he had every Templar in France arrested simultaneously on charges of heresy, blasphemy, and obscene secret rituals.

[00:02:37]The Shenan parchment dated 1,38 records the interrogation of the Templar leaders by papal representatives at Shenan Castle in France. It shows that Clement V [music] personally absolved Grandmaster Jacqu deto and the order's senior leaders of the heresy charges.

[00:02:54][music] He found them guilty of immorality but not heresy. He planned to reform the order, not destroy it. Then politics intervened. Philip IVth's pressure was relentless. In 1312, [music] Clement reversed himself and dissolved the Templars under duress. In 1314, Jacqu de Mole was burned at the stake in Paris. He reportedly cursed both the king and [music] the pope from the flames. Both were dead within the year.

[00:03:20]The parchment that proved Clement had absolved them before condemning them was filed under the wrong reference number somewhere in the course of the archives eight centuries of reorganizations.

[00:03:30][music] It sat there misfiled and undisturbed until 2001 when Vatican researcher Barbara Frail stumbled upon it while looking for something else entirely. The Vatican published it in a limited scholarly edition in 20007799 copies each priced at 8,377. [music] It rewrote a chapter of medieval history that had been considered settled for centuries. [music] The document had not been deliberately hidden. It had simply been lost, which in an archive of 85 km of shelving is not a mystery at all. It is an inevitability. 02 Mary, Queen of Scots's last letter to the Pope written three months before her beheading in November 1586. [music] From a cold prison cell at Fathering Hay Castle in Northamptonshire, England, a woman who had already spent nearly two decades in captivity picked up a pen and wrote what she knew might be the last important letter of her life. [music] She addressed it to Pope Sixstus V. She was Mary, Queen of Scots. She had 3 [music] months left to live. The letter is extraordinary. Mary knew she was to be tried [music] and likely executed for her alleged involvement in the Babington plot, a Catholic conspiracy to assassinate her Protestant cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, and place Mary on the English throne. She wrote to the Pope professing her Catholic faith with absolute conviction. She railed against what she called the >> [music] >> illegitimacy of the tribunal that would try her. She begged the Pope for intercession. The Pope did not intercede. Mary was tried, convicted, [music] and beheaded on the 8th of February, 1587. Her execution was notably botched. The headsman required three blows [music] of the axe. When he lifted her severed head, it fell from his grasp. Her auburn hair had been a wig. Beneath it, her natural hair had turned entirely white during her years of imprisonment. Her letter remained in the Vatican's archive, unread by the general public for over four centuries.

[00:05:20]It was among the 105 documents selected for partial publication in 2007. inches of scholarly volume. When it was finally photographed and examined, the scholars noted something poignant. The handwriting was clear and steady throughout. Whatever fear Mary felt, [music] it did not reach her pen. The archives hold one further document related to Mary's execution that is even less known. A record of the formal diplomatic protests the Vatican lodged with the English crown after her death.

[00:05:49]They went unanswered. Within 2 [music] years, the Spanish Armadas sailed for England. History moved on and the letter stayed in its folder in the dark. 03 the 6 0 meter scroll of the Knights Templar trials of parchment the length of a city block. [music] The Chinown parchment revealed the private absolution but it is only one piece of the Vatican's archive of the Knights Templar's destruction. The main record of the trials, the official minutes of the ecclesiastical proceedings that stretched across several years beginning in 1307 is preserved on a single continuous scroll of parchment [music] approximately 60 m long that is nearly 200 ft, the length of a small city block. This scroll was created by the church's own scribes who recorded every session of the interrogations in meticulous [music] detail. The charges read, the responses given, the confessions extracted many under torture, and the [music] verdicts delivered. It is one of the most comprehensive surviving records of a medieval trial in history, and it [music] sat in the Vatican's archive, largely inaccessible to outsiders for 700 years. What it contains is genuinely disturbing. The confessions recorded in the scroll describe rituals that the Templars were accused of during their initiation ceremonies, [music] spitting on the cross, denying Christ, engaging in obscene acts. Modern historians believe most or all of these confessions were extracted under extreme duress torture was legally sanctioned in medieval inquisitorial proceedings. The men confessed to what their torturers wanted to hear. The scroll was partially published in the 2007 Vatican scholarly edition, but the full document [music] in its 60 m entirety has never been publicly exhibited. It is too fragile and too large for conventional display.

[00:07:31]Researchers who have requested access to it described the [music] experience as surreal, unrolling a document the size of a room written in ink that has survived seven centuries, telling a story of power, betrayal, and manufactured guilt. Jacqu de Mole, the Grandmaster, whose absolution was recorded on the Shenan parchment, [music] recanted his confession before being burned. His final words, his real ones, not the extracted confession, are not in the scroll. [music] They were spoken aloud in the open air of Paris on a March evening in 1314 and no scribe was there to record them. 04. The Galileo trial documents the paper trail of a scientific inquisition in 1633. The Inquisition summoned Galileo Galile to Rome. He was 69 years old in [music] poor health and had already published the dialogue concerning the two chief world systems the book that argued using his telescopic observations that the earth moved around the sun [music] rather than the reverse. He was charged with heresy for contradicting scripture [music] and the church's established cosmology. The trial documents, the interrogation records, the charges, [music] the testimony, Galileo's own statements, and the final decree of condemnation were preserved in the Vatican's archive from the moment the trial ended. They were not available to scholars for over two centuries. Not until 1881, when Pope Leo I 13th opened limited sections of the archive did researchers begin to see what they actually contain. [music] What emerged was a picture considerably more nuanced than the simple church versus science narrative that popular history tends to tell. Galileo's position was [music] complex. He was a Catholic who believed his astronomy was compatible with faith.

[00:09:10][music] He had powerful patrons and powerful enemies within the church. The Inquisition's proceedings were conducted according to formal legal protocols. His eventual sentence was house arrest rather than execution. And he continued his scientific work until his death in 1642. But the documents also contain something that no apologist for the church can explain away. The transcript of the moment Galileo retracted his findings. Whether he did so out of genuine fear, pragmatic calculation, or simple exhaustion is something the words on the page cannot tell us. The handwriting is neat and composed. He wrote that he objured, cursed, and detested his errors. He had seen what happened to Jordano Bruno, who had not retracted and had been burned at the stake in 1600. The apocryphal quote attributed to Galileo, and yet it moves, supposedly muttered after his recantation appears nowhere [music] in the trial documents. Historians consider it almost certainly a later invention.

[00:10:07]What the documents do preserve is the actual unmbellished record of how one of the greatest scientific minds in history [music] was forced to choose between his conclusions and his freedom. The Vatican formally acknowledged the error of Galileo's condemnation in 1992, 359 years after the [music] trial. 05 the Henry 8 anulment petition, the letter that created the Church of England. It is not a particularly impressive looking document by the standards of what the Vatican's archive contains. It is a petition written in 1530 from 85 English clergymen, lords, and noblemen to Pope Clement IIIth requesting that the pope enol the marriage of King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon so that the king could marry Anne Bolin. But attached to the lower edge of the petition are 85 wax seals, each hanging from a length of red ribbon [music] and bearing the personal insignia of a signatory. When the document was examined for the 2012 Vatican exhibition, Lux in Arcana, historians noted that the seals clattered and clinkedked against each other when the document was handled. It sounded, one observer wrote, like a wind chime. It was this document more than almost any other single object in the archive whose refusal changed the shape of the Christian world. Pope Clement IIIth said no. He had his reasons.

[00:11:27]Katherine of Aragon was the aunt of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, [music] whose army had recently sacked Rome and whose political support Clement desperately needed, granting the anulment would have been diplomatically catastrophic. Henry proceeded anyway. He declared himself supreme head of the Church of England. He dissolved the monasteries. [music] He broke with Rome.

[00:11:47]The English Reformation, which would eventually give rise to the Anglican Communion with its 85 million members worldwide. traces [music] its institutional origin to the fact that a pope in 1530 looked at those 85 wax seals and said no. During Napoleon's invasion of Italy in 1810 when the French army seized the Vatican's archives and began transporting them to Paris, a quick-thinking archavist hid this particular petition inside a chair cushion to protect it from confiscation.

[00:12:12]The ruse worked. The document survived.

[00:12:15]It came back to Rome after Napoleon's defeat and it has been in the archive minus a few months inside a chair ever since.

[00:12:23]06 Napoleon's plunder the archives that were stolen [music] and never fully returned. In 1810, Napoleon Bonapart did something that no foreign conqueror had attempted in centuries. He dismantled the Vatican's archive and shipped it to Paris. The operation was enormous. More than 3,200 crates and baskets of documents were loaded onto enormous wagons and transported north across the Alps to France.

[00:12:45]>> [music] >> Napoleon's intention was to create a centralized archive for his empire in Paris, [music] and he wanted the Vatican's records as part of it. The transfer took years to complete. The archives librarians and archavists watch their life's work, centuries of papal correspondents, diplomatic records, trial documents, theological manuscripts disappear into French hands. After Napoleon's defeated Waterloo in 1815 and his abdication, the Vatican negotiated for the return of its archive. The French government agreed in principle, but then the practical realities asserted themselves. The French government was broke and transporting 3,200 crates back to Rome required money they did not have. They provided insufficient funds. The Vatican officials in Paris, desperate to recover what they could, were forced to make agonizing choices. They sold portions of the archive individual documents, bundles of manuscript to raise the money needed to [music] transport the rest.

[00:13:40]What came back to Rome represented somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of what had [music] left. The rest had been sold, lost, damaged in transit, or simply scattered across France and Europe by the chaos of the Napoleonic period. Some of those documents eventually found their way into French libraries and private collections where they still reside. Some were never recovered at all. Historians have spent two [music] centuries trying to reconstruct what is missing. The gaps in the Vatican's archive, the folders that are empty, the correspondence that begins [music] and then stops mid thread, are in part the legacy of Napoleon's plunder. An archive that spans 12 centuries is missing pieces from the most dramatic period in French history, and nobody can say with certainty what exactly is gone. [music] 07 The bones beneath the high altar, the secret excavation of St. [music] Peter's tomb. In 1939, Pope Pius the XI 11th died and left instructions that he wished to be buried in the Vatican Gro, the underground chambers beneath Street Peter's Basilica. To accommodate the burial, workers began [music] digging, and almost immediately they found something that nobody had officially prepared for. [music] A necropolis, an ancient Roman city of the dead stretching beneath the Basilica's foundations. The discovery was immense and immediately classified. Pope Pius I 12th authorized a full excavation but kept it strictly secret [music] for 10 years through the entire course of World War II and the years immediately after archaeologists worked in near total secrecy beneath one of the most visited buildings on Earth with tourists and pilgrims walking directly above them completely unaware. The excavation was not officially acknowledged until 1949 when rumors began circulating and became impossible to suppress. What they found was extraordinary. [music] Directly beneath the basilica's high altar, the altar that had been considered the site of St. Peter's tomb since the earliest Christian centuries, they discovered a second century monument built into [music] what is now called the red wall, the so-called trophy of gas, a memorial that ancient Christian writers had said marked the burial place of the apostle.

[00:15:44]The niche under the shrine was empty, but a nearby repository in the wall labeled Loculus 9 contained fragments of human bone mixed with animal bone and other debris. A forensic analysis conducted in the 1950s was inconclusive.

[00:15:58]Then in 1953, a Vatican archaeologist named Margarita Guarduchi examined bones that had been transferred to a different location during the excavation and never properly cataloged. Her analysis published in 1965 concluded [music] that these were the bones of a robust man of advanced age consistent she argued [music] with St. Peter. Pope Paul V 6th announced in 1968 that the relics were identified in a way which we believe convincing. [music] Pope Francis briefly displayed them at a public ceremony in 2013. They have not been publicly displayed since and independent forensic verification has been impossible. The bones sit in a reoquaryy beneath the altar. 12 centuries of pilgrims have prayed above them without knowing whether they were there. 08 the papal bull that divided the world the intercedator of 1,493.

[00:16:49]On the 4th of May 1493 just over a year after Columbus returned from his first voyage to the Americas, Pope Alexander V 6th issued a document called the intercatera. With the stroke of a pen he divided the entire non-European world between Spain and [music] Portugal. The document drew an imaginary line from north to south through the Atlantic Ocean. Approximately a 100 leagues west of the Cape Verie Islands. Everything to the west of that line, essentially all of the Americas, was granted to Spain.

[00:17:18]Everything to the east, essentially Africa and Asia, was granted to Portugal. The grant included not only trading and colonial rights, but the explicit instruction to convert the indigenous peoples of those regions to Christianity. The Intercedera is one of the founding legal documents of European colonialism. It [music] was the papal authority that Spain cited for centuries to justify its conquest and [music] exploitation of the Americas. The document's theological and legal basis was a concept called the doctrine of discovery. [music] The idea that Christian monarchs could claim sovereignty over lands inhabited by non-Christians. The interetera was its most explicit expression. The original document sat in the Vatican's archive for centuries. It was published in scholarly form in the 19th century [music] and historians have examined it extensively, but its practical implications continued to reverberate for centuries after it was written.

[00:18:09][music] Indigenous peoples across North America cited it as recently as the 20th century in legal challenges to colonial land claims. In 2023, Pope Francis and the Vatican formally repudiated the doctrine of discovery, [music] acknowledging that it had been used to justify violence and dispossession against indigenous peoples. The inter Kyedera was not rescended. It has long since ceased to have any practical force, but the repudiation acknowledged its historical consequences. The document remains in the archive. Its legacy remains everywhere. 09. The Michelangelo letter. The day an artist wrote to warn the pope. His guards hadn't been paid. Among the hundreds of letters from historical figures preserved in the Vatican's archive, from emperors and queens, from explorers and inquisitors, there is one that stands out for being almost comically mundane.

[00:18:59]A letter from Michelangelo to the Pope, written sometime in the mid6th century, warning that the Vatican's guards had not received their wages in 3 months and were threatening [music] to quit.

[00:19:10]Michelangelo Buoneri was at the time of writing the most famous artist in Europe and arguably the most famous artist who had ever lived. He was working on his later commissions for the Vatican, the Pauline Chapel Frescos or possibly architectural work on Street Peter's Basilica depending on the dating of the letter. He had a complicated lifelong relationship with the papacy. Forced to paint the Systeine Chapel ceiling by Julius II against his own wishes, he spent years in contentious negotiations with various popes over commissions, payments, [music] and working conditions. The letter about the guards reads in its preserved form as a practical communication from a man who was clearly embedded in the daily life of the Vatican institution, not as a visiting artist, but as a semi-permanent resident who noticed when things were going wrong. He wrote, [music] "In essence, the guards haven't been paid for 3 months. They are threatening to leave, and [music] this is a serious security problem that needs to be addressed. What happened next is unknown. The Vatican's archive preserves the letter, but not the response.

[00:20:10]Whether the guards were paid, whether they left, whether the Pope read the letter at all, none of it is documented.

[00:20:16]The letter sits in its folder in the archive, a tiny window into a very specific afternoon in 16th century Vatican life, written in Michelangelo's handwriting, preserved for five centuries, read by almost no one. 10.

[00:20:31]The Lincoln and Davis letters, two Americans, one Pope, and the Confederacy. In 1863, as the American Civil War entered its bloodiest year, two men sat down on opposite sides of a vast divide and each wrote a letter to the same recipient, Pope Pius I 9th in Rome. Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, wrote to request the Vatican's moral support for the Union cause. Jefferson Davis, [music] President of the Confederate States of America, wrote to request the Vatican's moral support for the Confederacy.

[00:21:02][music] Neither man was Catholic.

[00:21:04]Neither man was writing out of theological conviction. Both were writing out of the cold diplomatic calculus of a war in which every ally, every source of moral legitimacy, and every international relationship mattered. The Pope's response was carefully neutral in substance. [music] He acknowledged both letters without endorsing either side, but it contained a diplomatic slip that the Confederacy immediately exploited. In addressing his reply to Jefferson Davis, Pius used the title illustrious and honorable Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America. This was the closest any foreign sovereign or head of state had come to formally recognizing the Confederacy. Confederate newspapers celebrated it as de facto recognition. The Vatican hastily clarified that no such recognition had been intended. The clarification did little to undo the damage. Both letters Lincoln and Davis's have been preserved in the Vatican's archive since they [music] arrived. They were among the documents briefly exhibited in the 2012 Luxen Arcana exhibition when most of the world saw them for the first time. A president who freed the slaves and a president who fought to preserve slavery. Their letters stored side by side in the same archival folder, separated by a little cardboard divider.

[00:22:15]History [music] makes strange neighbors.

[00:22:17]11. The letter from Genghaskhan's grandson. The Mongol demand for the Pope's submission. The letter is written on paper that has survived 800 years. It is addressed to the pope. It is an [music] ultimatum. In the 13th century, as the Mongol Empire expanded westward across Central Asia and [music] into Eastern Europe with terrifying speed, the Mongol greatcons periodically dispatched letters to European rulers demanding their submission. Pope Innocent IV had sent diplomatic envoys to the Mongol court in 1245, hoping to negotiate an alliance against Islamic [music] powers. The Mongols response delivered by Guyuk Khan, grandson of Genghaskhan, arrived at the Vatican in 1246. The letter preserved in the Vatican's archive is remarkable for its tone. It is not a negotiation. It does not propose alliance. It demands submission to the will of the eternal heaven under whose mandate the Mongols claimed to rule the world. The Pope was instructed to come personally to the Mongol court to present [music] himself.

[00:23:14]Failure to comply was implied to carry consequences. Pope Innocent IVth did not comply. The Mongol Empire did not invade the papal territories. Its western advance was halted for reasons unrelated to papal diplomacy. But the letter remained, documenting a moment when the most powerful military force in the world wrote to the spiritual leader of the Christian West [music] and told him politely but unmistakably that it considered him a subject awaiting acknowledgement [music] of that fact.

[00:23:39]The document was among the 19 documents never before seen in [music] public that were included in the 2007 Vatican scholarly volume. When photographs of it were published, scholars of Mongol history noted that its phrasing followed the formulaic structure of Mongol imperial correspondence. Exactly. It was not a special communication for the Pope. It was the standard letter sent to all foreign rulers. The Pope had received a form letter from Genghaskhan's grandson. He filed it and said nothing. 12. The Native American birchbark letter, a chief writes to the Grandmaster of Prayers. Tucked among the diplomatic correspondents of 19th century popes between letters from European monarchs and American presidents, is an object that stands out not just for its content, but for its physical form. A letter written not on paper or parchment, but on a strip of birch bark. The letter was written in 1887 by a chief of a Native American tribe. The precise identification of the writer and his community has been disputed among historians, but the letter itself is genuine and preserved in excellent condition. It is addressed to the pope referred to in the letter as the grandmaster of prayers. The letter describes the conditions of the trib's life expresses reverence for the Catholic faith through Franciscan missionaries and requests the Pope's blessing and protection. The Birchbark letter was displayed at the 2012 Vatican exhibition alongside Henry VIII's petition, Mary, Queen of Scots final letter, and the Galileo trial documents.

[00:25:05]It was by any measure the most visually striking object in the exhibition, a piece of forest material, folded and inscribed that had somehow made its way from the forests of North America to the highest office of the Christian church and been preserved for over a century.

[00:25:20]What the Pope's response was, [music] if any, is not recorded in the archive.

[00:25:25]What the chief's life had been before and after writing this letter is not documented in the Vatican's files. The Birchbark Strip exists in isolation, a voice from a community under enormous historical pressure, speaking directly to the most powerful religious authority in the Western world. [music] in the only writing material readily available.

[00:25:44]It is one of the most unexpectedly moving objects in a collection that contains no shortage of remarkable things. 13. The pious 12 [music] files the Pope, the Holocaust, and the archive that cannot be fully read. Of all the restricted portions of the Vatican's archive, none have attracted more sustained [music] historical controversy than the records of Pope Pius I 12th's pontificate, specifically his correspondence, decisions, [music] and actions during the years of the Nazi regime and the Holocaust. Pas 12th led the church from 1939 to 1958 through the entirety of World War II. [music] His conduct during the Holocaust has been debated for decades. Critics accuse him of silence in the face of genocide, of knowing what was happening to Europe's Jews, and failing to speak out, fearing Soviet communism more than Nazi terror or protecting the church's institutional interests above all else. His defenders argue that he worked [music] through quiet diplomacy to save thousands of Jews, that a public denunciation would have endangered the lives of Catholics across occupied Europe, and that his silence was a form of protective calculation rather than indifference.

[00:26:48]The full documentary record that would allow historians to resolve this debate has been unavailable for most of the post-war period. All Vatican archival records from 1,939 onward have been classified under a general rule that documents less than 75 years old are not accessible to outside researchers. Pope Francis announced in 2019 that the Pius I 12th archive would be open to scholars and access began in March 2020. The opening delayed by several weeks due to the CO [music] 1 19 pandemic in what many historians found grimly symbolic. Researchers who have now accessed the files describe a collection that is vast, partially disorganized, and genuinely ambiguous.

[00:27:26]There are documents suggesting quiet intervention. There are gaps where intervention might have been expected and was not recorded. There are letters that will be interpreted differently by different historians for decades.

[00:27:37][music] What the archive does not contain and what no archive ever could contain is a record of the conversations that were never written down. [music] The decisions made in person that left no paper trail. The moments of conscience or its absence that happen in rooms with no [music] witnesses. The files have been partially opened. The argument has not been resolved. It may never be. 14. [music] The thousands of unseen paintings. The art that never makes it to the gallery. The Vatican museums are among the most visited art institutions in the world. Approximately 6 million people walk through them each year. They see the Syine Chapel, the Gallery of Maps, the Raphael rooms, the Laun, the Apollo Belvadier. They see extraordinary things. They do not see the rest. The Vatican's art collection is enormous. Accumulated over five centuries of papal patronage, diplomatic gifts, religious donations, and archaeological excavation. The portion on public display represents a small fraction of what the institution holds.

[00:28:36]Thousands of paintings, sculptures, [music] decorative objects, and sacred artifacts sit in climate controlled storage on sliding metal racks in locked rooms, never shown to the public and never likely to be. The reasons are partly practical. There is simply [music] no space to display everything. And constructing new gallery space within the constraints of a sovereign micro state is impossible. The reasons are partly conservationist. Many works are too fragile for the light, temperature fluctuation, and vibration that public display would create, and some reasons are theological. The church does not view its art primarily as aesthetic objects to be exhibited, but as sacred objects to be protected. [music] Not every devotional painting commissioned for a long demolished chapel needs an audience. What is in there? The honest answer is that even the Vatican Museum's own staff do not have a complete picture. The digitization project ongoing for decades has cataloged significant portions of the collection, but digitization proceeds slowly when you are working with objects that span five centuries and fill warehouses.

[00:29:39]Items are periodically rediscovered by curators. A painting attributed to a minor Renaissance artist turns out to have been made by a major one. A devotional object of uncertain origin turns out to have a documented provenence reaching [music] back to a medieval pope. miscataloged, underststudied, stored in silence. The art that the Vatican shows the world is extraordinary.

[00:30:00]The art it does not show is an unknown of genuinely unknowable dimensions. 15.

[00:30:06]The Codex Vaticanis, the oldest Bible in existence, [music] read by almost nobody. Of all the artifacts described in this script, the Codex Vaticanis may be the one with the most profound implications for how the Christian world understands its own foundational text.

[00:30:21]It is by scholarly consensus one of the oldest and most complete surviving manuscripts of the Christian Bible believed to date from the early 4th century AD likely produced in Alexandria or Cesaria around the time the emperor Constantine legalized [music] Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. The manuscript is written on vellum thin sheets of processed animal skin in a precise consistent [music] Greek hand. It contains most of the old and new testaments with some lacun sections of Genesis, the Psalms, Hebrews, [music] the pastoral letters and revelation are missing likely lost in the deterioration of the outermost pages over 17 centuries. What remains is approximately 759 leaves of ancient text. For most of its [music] documented history, the CEX sat in the Vatican library, largely inaccessible to outside scholars. Its existence was known from at least the 15th century [music] when it appears in a Vatican catalog. But the church was extremely reluctant to allow external examination. In the 19th century, the German biblical scholar Constantine Vontishorf visited [music] Rome and was permitted to see the codeex, but only briefly and under strict supervision, he nevertheless memorized and wrote down as much as he could before being stopped. The Vatican was not amused. Highresolution digital images of the entire codeex were finally made publicly available online in 2012, representing one of the most significant acts of archival transparency in the Vatican's modern history. For the first time, any scholar anywhere in the world could examine the oldest Bible in existence, page by page, in detail [music] no previous generation had achieved. But the physical manuscript remains, as it has [music] always been, in the Vatican Library. Its vellum pages covered in ink that has survived 1700 years are handled by a tiny number of designated archavists following conservation protocols so strict that the act of turning a page is considered a stress event requiring documentation.

[00:32:15]The world's oldest Bible sits in a climate controlled case in the Vatican Library a few hundred meters from where 6 million tourists walk every year.

[00:32:24]Almost none of them know it is there.

[00:32:26][music] Fewer still will ever see it.

[00:32:28]And that is in some ways the most fitting note on which to end this account. The Vatican has hidden things deliberately and things that hid themselves by accident. It has kept documents sealed for political reasons and kept objects in the dark for conservationist ones. Its secrets are sometimes dramatic and sometimes bureaucratic. But the Codex Vaticanis, the oldest [music] Bible preserved across 17 centuries, finally digitized and shared with the world, is a reminder that the most astonishing things [music] are not always the most concealed.

[00:32:58]Sometimes the most extraordinary artifact is the one that has been cataloged, protected, and simply allowed to outlast everything [music] that would have destroyed it. What these 15 artifacts have in common is not secrecy for its own sake. [music] Some were hidden to protect political interests the chin and parchment which proved the church had wronged the Templars. Some were sealed to protect the institution the pious the 12th files [music] whose contents remain genuinely disputed. Some were simply lost, the Napoleon [music] plunder, the misfiled parchments, the documents that slipped through the cracks of eight centuries of reorganization. And some were preserved with extraordinary care for extraordinary lengths of time in conditions that no other institution on earth has maintained so that they would still be here, still legible, still revealing when the technology finally existed to share them with the world.

[00:33:48]The Codex Vaticanis is 1700 years old.

[00:33:51]The chain on parchment survived seven centuries misfiled before Barbara Frail found it on a Tuesday afternoon in 2001.

[00:33:58]Mary, Queen of Scots's letter, preserved the handwriting of a woman 4 months [music] from death. And the birch bark letter from a Native American chief written on a material that should not have survived a century is still there in its folder, waiting for someone to read it again. The Vatican is a strange [music] institution. It guards some things too jealously and too long. It has made errors of concealment whose consequences [music] are still being measured. But it has also in its peculiar and ancient way kept faith [music] with the idea that what has been written down deserves to survive in 85 km of shelving. That is no small thing.

[00:34:32]Which of these 15 hidden artifacts surprised you the most? Drop it in the comments. We read everyone. Thank you so much for watching and please like and subscribe for more like this. Subscribe for more like this. Subscribe for more like this. Subscribe for more like this.

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