Visits To Monasteries In The Levant

By Robert Curzon

Published by John Murray: London 1881 6th Edition

"Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche (16 March 1810 - 2 August 1873), styled The Honourable Robert Curzon between 1829 and 1870, was an English traveller, diplomat and author, active in the Near East. He was responsible for acquiring several important and late Biblical manuscripts from Eastern Orthodox monasteries. In 1834, he brought some manuscripts from Palestine (including the Greek New Testament codices 548, 552-554) and in 1837 from the Athos peninsula, among them the important Bulgarian Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander and the gospel codices 547, 549-551, 910-911). After his death, they were first loaned to the British Museum, then donated by his daughter. They have since been transferred to the British Library. In his Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (1849), he described and justified his takings. He visited Mount Athos in 1837, and at the Monastery of St Paul, he recounts how the abbot said "We make no use of the old books, and should be glad if you would accept one'", upon which he took two, including a fourteenth-century illuminated Bulgarian gospel, now in the British Library.