First Handbook

If you are keen on historic warfare or the fantastical war machines created for battles in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, you'll be hooked by a 1455 book by Roberto Valturio on the military arts which is full of wonderfully creative images of military machines, real and imagined.

The Vatican Library's manuscript of De re militari (On matters military) arrived online October 24 and Urb.lat.281 is a real page-turner. Leonardo da Vinci is reputed to have read this and to have been inspired by it to some of his own inventions. On folio 147v we find an astonishing dragon machine with a cannon in its snout, capable of firing incendiary missiles:

That is just part of the image.This particular dragon just happens to have a basket on its head with nine commandos wearing blue helmets, ready to jump down and hack you to bits.

Who doesn't remember the James Bond Aston-Martin with knives that emerge from the hubcaps? In this book, it's a heavy battle-wagon drawn by oxen that does the same.

On  fol. 168v there's a tortoise, a machine for getting up close to walls and battering them down, and of course it even looks like a tortoise:

Ponder the weird raking fire weapon on fol. 166r:

Or how about some 15th-century Meccano on fol. 144r:

Valturio (1405–1475) (see French Wikipedia) was a man of letters rather than a proper engineer and this handbook is derivative rather than original. It even starts off with a copious list of sources:

De re militari is also remarkable in book history. A couple of dozen manuscripts were made at great cost to be presents to princes (this is Federico da Montefeltro's copy), but 17 years later a print version appeared in 1472 for the new mass market. It is regarded as the first modern handbook on any subject, dealing with the entirety of its topic in a systematic way, and integrating images and text.

A total of 72 manuscripts came online in this batch. Here is the full list:

1. Pal.gr.14
2. Pal.gr.265
3. Urb.lat.81
4. Urb.lat.96
5. Urb.lat.248 , ‏@LatinAristotle on Twitter (Pieter Beullens) points out this is Galen, De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus in the Latin of Niccolò da Reggio
6. Urb.lat.281, De re militari (above). Anthony Grafton's Rome Reborn catalog calls the book the most important Renaissance forbear of Machiavelli's Art of War. The St. Louis catalog notes that this copy is dated May 11, 1462 and signed by the scribe Sigismondi Nicolai Alamani.
7. Urb.lat.410
8. Urb.lat.423
9. Urb.lat.674
10. Urb.lat.732
11. Urb.lat.740
12. Urb.lat.763
13. Urb.lat.772
14. Urb.lat.774
15. Urb.lat.789
16. Urb.lat.793
17. Urb.lat.797
18. Urb.lat.812
19. Urb.lat.814.pt.
20. Urb.lat.820.pt.1
21. Urb.lat.823.pt.3
22. Urb.lat.825.pt.2
23. Urb.lat.827.pt.1
24. Urb.lat.827.pt.2
25. Urb.lat.828.pt.3
26. Urb.lat.829.pt.1
27. Urb.lat.829.pt.2
28. Urb.lat.829.pt.3
29. Urb.lat.832.pt.2
30. Urb.lat.836
31. Urb.lat.837
32. Urb.lat.847
33. Urb.lat.848
34. Urb.lat.850
35. Urb.lat.854.pt.2
36. Urb.lat.855
37. Urb.lat.868
38. Urb.lat.870
39. Urb.lat.873
40. Urb.lat.881
41. Urb.lat.883
42. Urb.lat.887
43. Urb.lat.889
44. Urb.lat.890
45. Urb.lat.892
46. Urb.lat.897
47. Urb.lat.910
48. Urb.lat.916
49. Urb.lat.923
50. Urb.lat.926
51. Urb.lat.927
52. Urb.lat.931
53. Urb.lat.960
54. Vat.gr.303.pt.1
55. Vat.gr.303.pt.2
56. Vat.lat.855
57. Vat.lat.897
58. Vat.lat.920
59. Vat.lat.922
60. Vat.lat.923
61. Vat.lat.947
62. Vat.lat.951
63. Vat.lat.960
64. Vat.lat.963
65. Vat.lat.996
66. Vat.lat.1002
67. Vat.lat.1028
68. Vat.lat.1031
69. Vat.lat.1032
70. Vat.lat.1043.pt.2
71. Vat.lat.1089
72. Vat.lat.3281, a magnificent old palimpsest containing fragments from a 5th- or 6th-century Vulgate Bible, scribed in southern Italy perhaps as soon as 50 years after the death of Jerome. It was torn apart and re-used in the 12th century for the Achilleid of Statius in Beneventan script (Lowe 1 14, Trismegistos 66110).

This is Piggin's Unofficial List number 74. If you have corrections or additions, please use the comments box below. Follow me on Twitter (@JBPiggin) for news of more additions to DigiVatLib.