The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander [first edition]

The Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander is the outstanding treasure of a cultural and spiritual Renaissance in fourteenth-century Bulgaria, and a masterpiece of Byzantine manuscript art. The Gospels' creation was not only the supreme achievement of Bulgarian medieval culture; it also marked its final flourishing, 500 years after the introduction of Christianity and the Cyrillic script into Bulgaria and shortly before the country's collapse under the invasion of the Ottoman Turks.Commissioned, in 1355 for Tsar Ivan Alexander, the Gospels was completed in just one year by a single scribe, Simeon, and by artists of the Turnovo school, the Bulgarian capital, ecclesiastical and cultural centre, of the time. It contains 367 miniatures, among which is an outstanding portrait of the Tsar himself and his family. Following the fall of Turnovo in 1393, the manuscript was moved to safety across the Danube to Moldavia. By the early seventeenth century it was in the monastery of St Paul on Mount Athos and it was here that in 1837 the young Hon. Robert Curzon contrived to acquire it as a souvenir of his visit.