Codices going and sometimes returning

The same thing happened with some handwritten copies of Mozart’s sacred works that an American soldier had stolen from the Austrian Abbey of Kremsmünster. The 18 manuscripts had unexpectedly ended up in the hands of a security guard at the San Quentin prison in California, who made the business of his life by selling them to the University of Berkeley. When university leaders discovered the murky origin of the papers, they determined their immediate return.

Although they no longer have a legal obligation, many institutions have decided to return pieces whose illegitimate origin is evident. It doesn’t always happen. The diocese of Ávila has been crying out loud asking for the return of the Ávila Bible, today in the National Library, but they have not even obtained its temporary transfer for an exhibition. The BNG has had better luck and that the Crónica Troyana, also in the National Library, does not seem to have left its small homeland, Betanzos, illegally, since the State bought it in 1886 along with the other works included in the archive of the dukes of Osuna. In this case, politics has played in favor of his return. Just a month ago, the Congressional Culture Commission supported its temporary return for an exhibition and even left open the possibility of a permanent transfer.

The case of the Glosas, as can be seen, has precedents. Judicial processes, as the case of the ‘Salamanca Papers’ demonstrates, are long, confusing and with uncertain results, but there are institutions that do not even wait for the codices to be legally claimed before, depending on the case, returning them to their place of residence. origin or at least transfer them temporarily.

The case of the Ávila Bible brings together many similarities with that of the Glosses and the other Emilian codices. Also here we find a valuable manuscript transferred to Madrid after a disentailment process developed in the 19th century. On January 1, 1869, Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla promulgated a “Decree of seizure of archives, libraries and art collections, held by cathedrals, chapters, monasteries and military orders.” The civil governor of Ávila, Juan de Dios Mora, followed his instructions and seized more than 400 documents (scrolls and codices) from the Avila cathedral, which passed into the possession of the State and ended up in the National Library of Spain.

Among them is this very valuable and very old Bible. It began to be copied in Italy, probably in some monastery in Umbria, and was moved to Spain in the 12th century, where the text and the beautiful illustrations were completed.

In recent years, the Avila bishopric has demanded – without success – the return of the codex to the cathedral. The National Library not only refuses, but due to its condition, it also did not give up the copy for the exhibition in Ávila of The Ages of Man. The bishop of the diocese, Jesús García Burillo, even threatened to take legal action: “The people have their rights,” he argued then.

The University of Berkeley (California) verified in 1990 that a series of copies of manuscripts by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and the composer Michael Haydn (brother of Franz Joseph Haydn) had been stolen in World War II. The University had purchased them in 1978 from one of the guards at the San Quentin prison, who in turn had obtained them thanks to his brother-in-law, who had been a soldier in Austria during World War II. The 18 manuscripts – religious works and songs – had been copied in the 18th century by monks from Kremsmüster Abbey, an imposing Benedictine monastery founded in the 8th century and located 200 kilometers from Vienna. Technicians at the University of Berkeley confirmed that American troops had stolen them when they occupied the abbey in 1945. “We are sad to see them go, but it had become clear that these documents had been obtained illegally, and it seemed right to return them,” he declared. one of those responsible for the library, John Roberts.

In the history of documentary restitutions, that of the 325 files returned by France to Spain in 1942 deserves a separate chapter.

In 1811, General Kellerman’s Napoleonic troops took 256 boxes with relevant documents on the conflictive Spanish-French relations of the 17th century from the Simancas Archive. Many of the papers were returned in 1815, but those 325 files were left gathering dust in Paris.

Its final restitution had to wait more than a century, when General Franco and Marshal Pétain agreed to a kind of exchange of works of art as a sign of friendship between both phil-Nazi administrations. This is how the Lady of Elche returned to Spain and this is how a work by El Greco (portrait of Antonio de Covarrubias) crossed the Pyrenees in the opposite direction, which today is exhibited in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Although French archivists and German authorities resisted, the 325 papers stolen by General Kellerman returned to the Simancas Archive on November 6, 1942.

The Trojan Chronicle is a French work by Benoit de Sainte-Maure that was translated in 1373 by Fernán Martins into Galician-Portuguese. It was part of the library of the Dukes of Osuna, which was acquired by the State in 1886 for 900,000 pesetas. Since then it has been part of the collections of the National Library of Spain. The BNG had repeatedly requested its return to Galicia because it was “living proof of Galician history and culture”, but to date it had encountered a wall. In a parliamentary response in 2022, the Government had indicated that the document was already available “to all citizens” in the National Library. However, he also pointed out that the institution was open to lending documents for temporary exhibitions. The BNG did not give up its efforts and has taken advantage of the weight of its deputy, Néstor Rego, in the government majority to obtain the support of the Congressional Culture Commission, which has supported the temporary transfer of the Chronicle to Galicia (with the vote in against Vox and the abstention of the PP). “The agreement – points out the BNG – also opens the door for, regardless of the ownership of the manuscript, the work to remain in permanent deposit in a public cultural institution based in Galicia.”

The history of the Tlaquiltenango codex is enough for a novel. This is a set of pictographic documents dated between the years 1525 and 1569, shortly after the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors to Mexican territory. The papers were discovered in 1909 within the walls of the Santo Domingo de Guzmán convent, in Tlaquiltenango, a city in the state of Morelos. The owner of the land broke off more than a hundred fragments and sold most of them to the Museum of Natural History in New York. Many years later, on April 25, 2017, a piece that was believed to have been lost went up for auction at the Alabarte room in Madrid, for a price of 100,000 euros. It measures 35 by 20 centimeters and, although it is very deteriorated, it seems to show a list of exchanges with symbols and names in Spanish and the Nahuatl language. After the claim of the Mexican Government, the Civil Guard aborted the auction and delivered the piece of codex to the investigating court number 41 in Madrid. After examining the details of the case, the judge determined its return to the Mexican embassy in Spain on November 30, 2023. Three statuettes were delivered along with the codex, returned voluntarily by a Spanish citizen. This gesture joins that of another anonymous Spanish family that in 2022 delivered to the Mexican state 19 boxes containing more than 2,500 small pre-Hispanic pieces: seals, sgraffito human bones, stone figures, metals…

One of the most notorious litigations had to do with the so-called ‘Salamanca Papers’. There were even demonstrations. These are the documents confiscated in Catalonia by Franco’s troops and which were transferred to the Salamanca Civil War Archive. Since the transition, the Generalitat had demanded the restitution of all that varied collection of files, which included police files, personal letters, various publications… The political parties said one thing and the opposite: Fraga defended their return in 1980 and the PSOE He opposed his transfer in 1989, although later both the PP and the Socialists changed their opinion and strategy. In 1995, Zapatero’s Government enacted a law expressly to order his return to Catalonia, while some specialists regretted the breakdown of the archive unit and the difficulty that arose when working with the documentation of the Civil War. In the early hours of January 19, 2006, 500 boxes of papers left Salamanca heading to Sant Cugat del Vallés, headquarters of the Generalitat archive. The dispute reached the Constitutional Court, which settled the matter in 2013, agreeing with the socialist Executive, estimating that the law did not oppose the principles of the Magna Carta.

The Museum of the Bible, in Washington, opened its doors in 2017 after an investment of 500 million dollars. It occupies a formidable eight-story building and contains thousands of manuscripts and pieces related to the two wills. One of his rarest codices was a Bible copied in a Greek monastery in southern Italy around the year 1000. The piece had ended up around the 15th century in the Theotokos Eikosiphoinissa monastery, in northern Greece. Christie’s auction house sold it in 2011 and it came to the Washington Museum through a donation from the Green family. However, when the Orthodox Church demanded the return of the 400 manuscripts that Bulgarian troops had stolen in 1917, during the First World War, the Museum authorities verified that their coveted handwritten Bible was one of them. Although they had no legal obligation, they returned it in 2022.