Sir Thomas Phillipps
1 media/Phillipps3_thumb.gif 2021-12-14T21:00:35-08:00 Augusta Holyfield c739f1a590c1303b0333b51590f41e3e1b28c19d 39447 1 Photograph of Sir Thomas Phillips, British antiquarian and book collector plain 2021-12-14T21:00:36-08:00 Augusta Holyfield c739f1a590c1303b0333b51590f41e3e1b28c19dThis page is referenced by:
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2023-01-14T10:22:21-08:00
by Augusta Holyfield '22
After King Louis IX's death, ownership of the Crusader Bible may have been transferred to his brother, Charles of Anjou. Charles conquered Naples and probably brought the manuscript with him to Italy, where it received its Latin inscriptions.
The chain of ownership becomes fuzzy until the manuscript comes into the possession of Cardinal Bernard Maciejowski, the Bishop of Cracow, Poland. Cardinal Maciejowski studied theology in Rome beginning in 1582, and it was during this time that he likely received the manuscript.
The cardinal was a supporter of Sigismund III Vasa, the king of Poland, and in 1604, Maciejowski gifted the manuscript to Shah Abbas I of Persia as part of a diplomatic envoy. Around 1608, when the Shah finally received the Crusader Bible in Isfahan, Shah Abbas had the Persian inscriptions added. The manuscript remained in the royal library in Persia until 1722, when Afghans invaded the city and looted the treasury and library. Sometime after it was looted, a Persian Jew came into contact with the manuscript and added the Judeo-Persian inscriptions.
The Crusader Bible didn't reappear until the early 1800s, when John d’Athanasi, a Greek antiquities dealer, bought the manuscript from a merchant in Cairo for three shillings. In 1833, d'Athanasi sold the manuscript to the London dealers Payne and Foss through Sotheby's. Payne and Foss quickly sold it to the devoted manuscript collector Sir Thomas Phillipps. The Crusader Bible remained in the Phillipps collection until 1910, when the Phillipps Trust offered the manuscript to Pierpont Morgan for £10,000. At first, Morgan declined the sale and when he died in 1913, all new acquisitions to his collection stopped.
However, in 1916, Belle da Costa Greene, the librarian of the Morgan collection, had a second opportunity to buy the manuscript. She jumped at the chance at purchasing it for the original 1910 asking price, without waiting for permission from John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., Pierpont Morgan's son and heir. The Morgan Crusader Bible became the centerpiece of the Morgan collection and sparked J.P. Morgan's interest in continuing his father's work.
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