The Raiders of the Lost Manuscript - In Search of Tacitus' Germania #922635

A compelling story like an adventure novel, yet incredibly true, is that of the De Origine et Situ Germanorum, better known as Germania, one of the most important historical and ethnographic works of antiquity, written by the great Roman author Publius Cornelius Tacitus. Since 1425, when the oldest known manuscript of this classical masterpiece, included in a 9th-century Carolingian codex, was discovered, forgotten for centuries in a dusty archive of the German Abbey of Hersfeld, it has been at the center of a genuine spy story that stretched from the Renaissance to modern times. The object of a surprising treasure hunt, since its discovery, the Codex Hersfeldensis was coveted and contested by humanists, literati, popes, secret agents, initiates, and important Italian and European dynasties, including the Medici of Florence, until the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler attempted to take possession of it, considering it, in a mystical and esoteric key, a true "object of power" sacred to the Aryan race.
Recovered and brought to Rome in 1455 by order of Pope Nicholas V (the great humanist Tommaso Parentucelli, a former member of the Florentine Platonic Academy) by Enoch d'Ascoli, a singular and enigmatic figure, a procurer of classical texts and "lost" works on behalf of the Vatican, following the death of the Pope and then of Enoch himself, it was dismembered into three parts and its traces were lost. The part containing Tacitus's Germania, destined to go down in history under the name Codex Esinate, was rediscovered in 1902 in Jesi, in the library of Count Aurelio Guglielmi-Balleani. With the evolution of events in Europe and the advent of the Third Reich in Germany, the spread of the news of the discovery of the oldest manuscript of the Germania did not leave indifferent the exponents of those cultural and intellectual circles that gravitated around the National Socialist Party and were devoted to the exaltation of Germanicity and the presumed purity of the "Aryan" race. Promised by Mussolini to Hitler in 1937, after September 8, 1943, it became the object of the craving of Heinrich Himmler, who sent an SS battalion to Jesi with the order to requisition it. But the manuscript was fortunately not found.