Christina of Sweden, Alchemy and the Reginensis Collection

In 1654 Christina of Sweden, daughter of King Gustavus Adolphus, abdicated the throne at only twenty-seven, converted to Catholicism and chose to live in Rome. She brought with her one of the most extraordinary collections of her time: paintings, sculptures, medals and a library rich in precious manuscripts. After her death in 1689 those codices entered the Vatican Library, where they still form the collection known as the Reginensis.

The Spoils of War

Part of Christina's library had dramatic origins. During the Thirty Years' War the Swedish armies plundered libraries in Germany, Bohemia and Poland, carrying books and manuscripts to Stockholm. In 1648, in the last months of the conflict, Swedish troops took the Prague district of Malá Strana and the castle, where part of the collections of Rudolf II were still kept.

To this booty were added targeted purchases. Christina bought, among other things, the manuscripts collected by the Petau, a family of French scholars, rich in medieval texts. The Dutch philologist Isaac Vossius served for some years as her librarian. The queen read and annotated, and wanted scholars from all over Europe around her: Descartes too was her guest in Stockholm, where he died in 1650.

The Queen and Alchemy

In Rome, in the Palazzo Riario on the Lungara, Christina cultivated scientific and philosophical interests that included alchemy. Sources mention a laboratory and her acquaintance with practitioners of the art, and the queen herself left notes and collections of alchemical texts. For her, as for many contemporaries, alchemy was at once an enquiry into nature and a spiritual speculation.

Traditionally linked to her circle is the Marquis Massimiliano Palombara, who in 1680 had a door carved with alchemical symbols and mottoes at his villa on the Esquiline. The so-called Magic Door survives today in the gardens of Piazza Vittorio Emanuele II, the only remnant of that villa. The direct link between the door and the queen is suggestive, but not documented in every detail.

From the Queen to the Vatican

On Christina's death the library passed to Cardinal Decio Azzolino, her friend and heir, who died a few weeks later. The cardinal's nephew sold the manuscripts to Pietro Ottoboni, elected pope in 1689 as Alexander VIII, who in 1690 assigned most of them to the Vatican Library. Other codices remained with the Ottoboni family and entered the Vatican only in the eighteenth century.

The Reginensis collection includes classical texts, medieval chronicles, scientific works and some of the oldest French-language manuscripts kept outside France. Shelfmarks beginning with Reg. lat. and Reg. gr. still remind anyone consulting the catalogues of their provenance. There is no lack of codices with astrological and alchemical content, in keeping with the queen's interests, some of which still await thorough study.

The story of Christina's library shows how books followed the political and personal fortunes of the seventeenth century: plundered in war, sold by scholars' heirs, carried from one capital to another and finally entrusted to papal custody. In the Reginensis codices the memory of the Prague court, of Swedish culture and of the alchemical interests of a queen who chose Rome live side by side.