The Codex Gigas — the Devil's Bible — is the largest surviving medieval manuscript in the world. It was made in early thirteenth-century Bohemia, reportedly by a single monk. Emperor Rudolf II owned it. The Swedish army took it from Prague in 1648. It now sits in the National Library of Sweden. The novel’s prologue begins in Bohemia, 1267, forty years after its completion.
The Record
The Codex Gigas (Latin: "Giant Book") was produced at the Benedictine monastery of Podlažice in Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), dating to the early thirteenth century. It is approximately 92 cm tall, 50 cm wide, and 22 cm thick, and weighs about 75 kg. The manuscript contains the complete Latin Vulgate Bible, the works of Josephus, Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae, Cosmas of Prague's Chronica Boëmorum, and various medical and encyclopedic texts — essentially a complete library of knowledge of its time, assembled in a single volume. The manuscript's most distinctive illustration is a full-page image of the Devil — the source of its popular name.
Tradition holds that it was produced by a single monk named Hermann the Recluse, who made a vow to produce the manuscript in a single night after breaking his monastic vows and being sentenced to be walled alive; he was assisted in this superhuman feat, according to legend, by the Devil himself. Modern paleographic analysis has concluded it was produced by a single scribe over a period of decades.
Emperor Rudolf II of Bohemia acquired the Codex Gigas for his legendary collection at Prague Castle. The Swedish army, during the Thirty Years War, seized it from Prague as war booty in 1648 and brought it to Stockholm. It has been in the collections of the National Library of Sweden (Kungliga biblioteket) ever since; in 2007–08 it returned to Prague on loan for the first time, exhibited at the Klementinum. The library’s own introduction to the manuscript, with selected images, is at kb.se.
Sources: National Library of Sweden; Wikipedia: Codex Gigas.
The Pattern
Two of the novel's three manuscripts passed through the collection of Emperor Rudolf II: the Codex Gigas certainly, and the Voynich Manuscript by a 1665/66 report. No specific Ars Notoria copy is documented in his collection; the three coming together at his court is the novel's invention. Rudolf II (1552–1612) was one of the most extraordinary collectors of esoteric and occult materials in European history, reigning from Prague Castle and actively patronizing alchemists, astrologers, and scholars of the occult. Rudolf's documented collecting is the factual foundation the novel builds on.
The Codex Gigas also connects to Sweden, where it has been, in Stockholm, since 1649. The novel’s seven-city dispersal scheme in the prologue includes Uppsala. Sweden, where the real manuscript ended up, is part of the prologue's map.
The Fiction
The novel’s prologue is set in Bohemia, 1267 — approximately forty years after the Codex Gigas was completed at Podlažice. The prologue's monk, Brother Aldric, is completing a different manuscript entirely — one that will be dispersed across seven cities before it can be reassembled. The Codex Gigas provides the prologue's historical texture: the parchment costs, the lamp black and iron gall ink, the physical reality of producing a manuscript of extraordinary scale in the thirteenth century.
The specific manuscript Aldric is completing, its dispersal across seven cities, and its connection to the Voynich Manuscript and the Ars Notoria are entirely the novel’s invention. The Codex Gigas, the monastery of Podlažice, and the documented history of the manuscript's long journey from Bohemia to Stockholm are exactly as the historical record shows.
Restless candlelight guttered.
Brother Aldric steadied his hand. Seven years. Two thousand, five hundred and fifty-six days of transcription. And now, in the small hours before Matins, the final figure.
He dipped the quill in ink that had cost the monastery three months' tithes. Lamp black mixed with iron gall, thickened with gum arabic until it flowed like blood from a fresh wound. The parchment was calf vellum, scraped so thin that candlelight passed through it like stained glass. Forty calves had died for this manuscript. Aldric had blessed each one.
— Masters X: The Inheritance of Frequency (Prologue, Bohemia 1267)
Get the opening chapters free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Masters X is fiction. The historical places, manuscripts, and scientific research described in The Record are real and sourced. The events, characters, and fictional interpretations described in The Fiction are invented by the author and presented clearly as such.