s are repulsed from
Ai" (fol. 10r) The book has traditionally been thought to have been created in Paris in the mid-1240s for
Louis IX of France. A suggestion by Allison Stones, expanding on conclusions by others such as François Avril, that it was instead illuminated in northern France around 1250 has not won general acceptance. The modern imagery may have been a political statement because the Franks, especially during the reign of Louis IX, saw themselves as the legitimate heirs of Rome. Under Louis IX, France took a militant position against the enemies of Christendom, taking an active part in the
Seventh and
Eighth Crusades. Ownership up to this point has been based mostly on guesswork and circumstantial evidence. The first recorded owner of the Bible was Cardinal
Bernard Maciejowski, who was the Bishop of
Cracow,
Poland. Maciejowski studied for the priesthood in Italy and likely gained ownership of the manuscript while there. In 1604, Cardinal Maciejowski gifted the Bible to Abbas the Great, through a delegation, as is evidenced by the inscription of folio 1 that reads in
Latin (translated by Daniel Weiss): “Bernard Maciejowski, Cardinal Priest of the Holy Roman Church, Bishop of Cracow,
Duke of Siewierz, and Senator of the
Kingdom of Poland with sincere wishes offers this gift to the supreme King of the Persians at Cracow the mother city of the kingdom of Poland on the seventh of September 1604.” It officially reached the Shah back in
Isfahan in 1608. Abbas seemed to enjoy the gift and after having missionaries explain the pictures, he had
Persian inscriptions added and added his own seal of ownership on folio 42v.
Lost leaves It appears that at some point several pages were deliberately removed from the book. It has been suggested that Abbas the Great tore out these pages, all involving
Absalom's rebellion, because he thought they might be a bad influence on his young son; however, others suggest that he may have removed them in 1615, as they may have provided a painful reminder of how he executed his son that year for treason. When the Afghans
conquered Isfahan in 1722, the royal library was sacked along with the rest of the city. Little is known of the manuscript's whereabouts in the succeeding years, except that a Persian Jew added
Judeo-Persian inscriptions to the manuscript, and even commented on and corrected the previous scripts. The manuscript was not heard of again until 1833, when it was sold at auction by
Sotheby's, whose records indicate that they purchased it in
Cairo. It was purchased by London dealers Payne and Foss, who subsequently sold it to manuscript collector Sir
Thomas Phillipps. When Phillipps died, his collection of around 60,000 manuscripts was inherited by his daughter, and then his grandson, who eventually began selling it off in order to pay off debts. Sotheby's sold the book at auction to
J. P. Morgan in 1910 for £10,000. ==Notes==