Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca apostolica vaticana
Approximately ninety manuscripts originating from the Czech literary spoils of war have survived to the present day in the Vatican Library. These constitute the remnant of the private library of the former Swedish queen Christina I, which she took with her to Rome after her abdication from the Swedish throne in 1654 and her departure from Sweden. After her death in 1689, Pope Alexander VIII purchased the library, which has since formed an important part of the papal collections. Of the original library, only manuscripts have survived (more than 2,000 volumes), while the printed books were dispersed through an auction organised by the Roman bookseller Giovanni Casale in the years 1745–1747.
Manuscripts originally belonging to Czech and Moravian libraries can be identified only in part, primarily on the basis of the catalogue compiled by Andreas Wilmart; to a greater extent, scholarship has so far relied on older data gathered by Beda Dudík in the mid-nineteenth century, who, however, devoted detailed attention only to the oldest or historically most valuable manuscripts from the perspective of Czech history. Unfortunately, in the case of most manuscripts, unequivocal provenance marks—such as supralibros or ex libris of the original Czech libraries, including the characteristic shelfmarks attesting to their presence in the royal library in Stockholm in the mid-seventeenth century—were removed during large-scale rebinding campaigns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As a result of the absence of original provenance evidence, the Bohemical provenance of certain manuscripts can therefore be asserted only hypothetically or with a degree of probability. A significant advance in this area has been brought about by the comprehensive digitisation of the Reginenses Latini collections and, in part, of the Ottoboniani Latini, which contain most manuscripts from Christina’s library and have made it possible to refine the identification of manuscripts of Czech provenance.