Vatican Apostolic Library
, official
library
of the Vatican, located inside the
Vatican Palace
. It is especially notable as one of the world’s richest manuscript depositories.
The library is the direct
heir
of the first library of the Roman
pontiffs
. Very little is known of this library up to the 13th century, but it appears to have remained only a modest collection of works until Pope
Nicholas V
(1447?55) greatly enlarged it with his purchase of the remnants of the imperial library of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which had recently been conquered by the
Ottoman
Turks. Popes
Sixtus IV
(1471?84) and
Julius II
(1503?13) further enlarged the library, and under
Sixtus V
(1585?90) the architect
Domenico Fontana
erected the library’s present building.
In the early 21st century the library possessed more than 80,000 archival manuscripts (mostly in Latin or Greek), more than 1.6 million printed volumes, and some 8,600
incunabula
, in addition to coins, medals, prints, drawings, engravings, and photographs. In 2010 the BAV, in association with a number of partners, began a long-term project to digitize and make available online its entire collection of historic manuscripts and incunabula. The process would not only open a
vast
resource to a much wider public, but it would enable fragile documents and bindings to be protected from further potential damage caused by handling. In 2020 an estimated 25 percent of the archive had been digitized.