The Giant Book That Inspired a Deal With the Devil

There is an old story about a monk who committed a terrible sin.

His punishment was death.

Desperate to save himself, he made an impossible promise: before morning, he would create a book containing all the knowledge of the world.

Then night fell.

The monk began to write.

Hours passed.

The pages accumulated far too slowly.

And sometime around midnight, when it became obvious that neither ink nor prayer was going to save him, the monk supposedly did what any sensible medieval scholar faced with an unreasonable deadline would do.

He called the Devil.

By morning, the enormous manuscript was finished.

And inside it was a portrait of the creature who had helped him.

It's a magnificent story.

It is also almost certainly nonsense.

The truth may be stranger.

Because someone really did make the book.

And he appears to have done it largely alone.

One Hand

This is where the Codex Gigas becomes truly remarkable.

Medieval manuscripts were labor-intensive objects. Producing a major book could involve scribes, illuminators, rubricators and other craftspeople working at different stages.

The Codex Gigas doesn't appear to have been made that way.

Researchers studying the handwriting have concluded that virtually the entire manuscript was written by one scribe.

The writing remains remarkably consistent throughout.

He used a script called Carolingian minuscule, already somewhat old-fashioned by his time. Each enormous page was carefully ruled into two columns of 106 lines each, and the letters themselves are surprisingly small—only a few millimeters high.

Imagine writing a page.

Now imagine writing another.

And another.

And another.

Keep going.

For years.

Possibly decades.

We do not know the scribe's name.

We do know he had patience.

How Long Does It Take to Write a Giant?

Nobody can tell us exactly how long the Codex Gigas took to make.

The National Library of Sweden has attempted to estimate it.

If the scribe could complete one 106-line column each day and worked six hours a day, six days a week, the writing alone might have required around five years.

But a monk would have had other responsibilities.

If he could devote only three hours each day to the manuscript, that estimate might double.

Then add the enormous amount of preparation.

Pages had to be ruled.

Decorations had to be created.

Illustrations had to be made.

The parchment itself had to be obtained and prepared.

Taken together, the entire project may have required twenty or thirty years.

Possibly an entire working lifetime.

The legend says a man created the Codex Gigas in one night.

Reality suggests that a man may have awakened every morning for decades and returned to it.

Somehow, that feels even more extraordinary.

Everything You Might Need

Despite its nickname, the Devil's Bible isn't simply an enormous Bible.

About half of it is biblical text.

The rest resembles an attempt to assemble an entire intellectual world between two covers.

There are historical works.

Medical writings.

A calendar.

Lists of names.

Rules concerning confession.

Texts concerning the care of the body and soul.

There are also formulas and incantations—including material dealing with illness, thieves and troublesome circumstances.

It is the kind of book someone might create if the goal were not merely to own a Bible, but to build an entire library in a single volume.

Which may explain the scale.

The Codex Gigas wasn't trying to be a book.

It was trying to be the book.

And Then You Turn the Page

Eventually the reader reaches one of the most famous openings in medieval manuscript history.

On one page stands an image representing the Heavenly City.

On the facing page stands the Devil.

He is alone.

Nearly the entire page belongs to him.

The figure crouches against an otherwise relatively empty background, staring directly outward. Horns rise from his head. His hands and feet end in claws. A forked tongue extends from his mouth.

He isn't tucked discreetly into a margin.

He isn't losing a battle with an angel.

He isn't being trampled beneath the feet of a saint.

He's simply there.

Waiting.

For medieval readers accustomed to decorated manuscripts, the effect must have been extraordinary.

It still is.

And somewhere along the way, people began asking the obvious question:

Why would a monk put that in his book?

Naturally, someone supplied an answer.

The Monk Who Called the Devil

In the most elaborate version of the legend, a sinful monk is condemned to be walled up alive. 

He begged for mercy.

To atone for his sins, he promised to create the greatest book the world had ever seen in a single night.

The monks agreed.

Our unfortunate scribe began writing.

Around midnight, he realized that this had been a terrible negotiating strategy.

So he summoned the Devil.

The Devil agreed to finish the manuscript in exchange for the monk's soul.

In gratitude—or perhaps because infernal contracts apparently included a surprisingly aggressive credit requirement—the monk included the enormous portrait of his collaborator.

Morning arrived.

The book was complete.

Legend accomplished.

There is no evidence that any of this happened.

Not a little evidence.

None.

Where the Legend Came From

The story was probably irresistible precisely because the manuscript seemed impossible.

People looked at this colossal object and struggled to imagine a human being making it.

Therefore, perhaps a human being hadn't.

The National Library of Sweden points out that the tale resembles other medieval stories about sinners making pacts with the Devil, particularly the legend of Theophilus the Penitent.

There was also a medieval belief that writing sacred books could serve as an act of penance.

One story recorded by the medieval historian Orderic Vitalis describes a sinful monk whose painstaking work as a scribe ultimately helped save his soul: his letters were metaphorically weighed against his sins.

That gives the Codex Gigas legend an interesting foundation.

Writing could be penance.

An enormous book could represent enormous penance.

And an impossibly enormous book?

Perhaps that required supernatural assistance.

Who Actually Made It?

We don't know.

There has been speculation about a monk named Herman, whose name appears in the manuscript's necrology accompanied by the word inclusus.

That word helped feed the legend.

It was interpreted as referring to someone who had been shut away or immured.

But an inclusus was not necessarily a condemned prisoner.

The term could describe a religious recluse who voluntarily lived isolated in a cell as an extreme form of devotion or penance.

Some were ceremonially enclosed in their cells, occasionally even with walls constructed around them.

Which admittedly does very little to make medieval monastic life sound less Gothic.

But there is no proof that Herman wrote the Codex Gigas.

The real scribe remains anonymous.

A Book Without a Birthplace

The Codex Gigas was created in the medieval Kingdom of Bohemia, in what is now Czechia, during the early thirteenth century. 

Its first known owner was the Benedictine monastery at Podlažice.

Curiously, scholars doubt that the manuscript was actually produced there.

Podlažice was small and relatively poor.

Producing something as enormous and expensive as the Codex Gigas would have required considerable resources.

So we know where the manuscript first appears.

We know roughly when it was made.

We can recognize the hand that wrote it.

But we still cannot confidently say exactly where that hand was sitting.

The Devil Goes to Sweden

At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops captured Prague and carried away an extraordinary amount of treasure.

The Codex Gigas was among the spoils.

It was transported to Stockholm and entered the collection of Queen Christina of Sweden.

The book had survived centuries of medieval politics, monastic ownership, transfers and imperial collecting.

Its next great danger was considerably less mysterious.

Fire.

Throw the Devil Out the Window

On May 7, 1697, Stockholm's Tre Kronor royal palace caught fire.

The blaze devastated the building and destroyed much of the royal library.

The Codex Gigas survived.

According to tradition, someone saved the enormous manuscript by throwing it out of a window.

There is even a story that it landed on an unfortunate person below and injured him.

That part may or may not be true.

The damage to the manuscript's binding, however, is real.

Which means that at some point during a catastrophic palace fire, somebody apparently looked at a 165-pound book and decided:

Out the window.

One hopes they checked first.