Vatican Apostolic Library

Vatican Apostolic Library, official library of the Vatican, located inside the Vatican Palace. It is especially notable as one of the world’s richest manuscript depositories.

The library is the direct heir of the first library of the Roman pontiffs. Very little is known of this library up to the 13th century, but it appears to have remained only a modest collection of works until Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) greatly enlarged it with his purchase of the remnants of the imperial library of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which had recently been conquered by the Ottoman Turks. Popes Sixtus IV (1471–84) and Julius II (1503–13) further enlarged the library, and under Sixtus V (1585–90) the architect Domenico Fontana erected the library’s present building.

In the early 21st century the library possessed more than 80,000 archival manuscripts (mostly in Latin or Greek), more than 1.6 million printed volumes, and some 8,600 incunabula, in addition to coins, medals, prints, drawings, engravings, and photographs. In 2010 the BAV, in association with a number of partners, began a long-term project to digitize and make available online its entire collection of historic manuscripts and incunabula. The process would not only open a vast resource to a much wider public, but it would enable fragile documents and bindings to be protected from further potential damage caused by handling. In 2020 an estimated 25 percent of the archive had been digitized.