Preserving the World's Rarest BooksFrom Prussia with Love: Gifting Libraries in Seventeenth-Century Konigsberg

On December 31, 1669, Bogusław Radzwiłł - Statthalter (governor) of the Duchy of Prussia, military man, and the last Calvinist member of the wealthy Radziwiłł family of Lithuania - passed away suddenly from a stroke. At the time of his passing, a few months short of his fiftieth birthday, Bogusław was arguably at the height of his political powers. Having served as the local representative of Frederick William, the Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, for over a decade, Bogusław was preparing for a return to politics in his native Poland-Lithuania. He was expected to be elected as a deputy to the Commonwealth’s upcoming Sejm, to which he was scheduled to depart only three days after his untimely passing.

Bogusław’s rise to prominence in Prussia was hardly a foregone conclusion, given the insecurity that defined the prince’s life just one decade prior. In 1655, following the Swedish invasion of the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania in the so-called ‘Swedish Deluge’ (Potop szwedzki), Bogusław and his cousin Janusz, both important magnates and military commanders, threw their support behind the enemy king Charles X Gustav. This alliance was concluded with the promise of Radziwiłł sovereignty over a portion of an independent Duchy of Lithuania, in the event of a Swedish victory. Alas, this was not to be: In October 1656, the Swedes were pushed back, Janusz was killed in a siege, and Bogusław found himself rendered a prisoner-of-war by an army of his own countrymen. 

A month later, Bogusław was freed by the armies of Frederick William, the Elector of Brandenburg and soon-to-be Duke of Prussia. The disgraced prince headed directly to Konigsberg and placed himself in the service of the Great Elector. At the Prussian court, Bogusław’s political career was reborn. The magnate was promptly honoured with the title of lieutenant general in the Elector’s army before ultimately being named Statthalter of Prussia. The role that Frederick William had played in his political resurgence was not lost on Bogusław Radzwiłł. 

In the year before his death, Bogusław had given over four hundred books to the Duke of Prussia. We know about this thanks to the Catalogus librorum quarumlibet facultatatum, à […] Boguslao Radziwil. This ten-page inventory was printed in Konigsberg in 1673 (four years after Bogusław’s death and five years after the original donation) by Fryderyk Reussner, printer to the Elector and the local university. It was compiled and edited by Sylvester Grabe, court theologian and Bibliothecarius Elector. Notably, in the catalogue’s preface, Grabe specifies that Bogusław’s donation does not reflect the prince’s entire personal library but rather a selection deemed impressive enough to be presented to the Elector. 

The decision of which items to gift to the Great Elector was thus a deliberate and considered activity; dozens of individual decisions with implications that both Bogusław and Frederick William would have been aware of. As a printed record of this transaction, the Catalogus librorum quarumlibet promotes the public images of the original collector and its recipient. For Bogusław, the catalogue is an acknowledgement and, given its release following his death, a memorialisation of the magnate’s loyalty and generosity. For Frederick William, printing Bogusław’s donation catalogue shares an image of the Great Elector as expressed by the prince’s thoughtful and thought-out gift: Frederick William, the wealthy, cultured, and modern Christian ruler.

Bogusław’s gift to Frederick William is above all a clear act of gratitude, an expression of loyalty, and an acknowledgement of the Elector’s prestige and sophistication. The printing of a detailed record of this donation is thus a means of publicizing this symbolic act and the Duke’s scholarly qualities. It is no coincidence, for example, that the Catalogus librorum quarumlibet opens with Janssonius’ Novus Atlas followed by a complete six-volume set of Georg Braun’s Civitates orbis terrarum—colossal, colourful, and costly geographies whose value was inherent and unmistakeable. 

The donation also includes older materials, printed and manuscript, whose age alone might mark them as valuable, such as a 1477 Delft Bible, one of the first printed Dutch translations of the Old Testament, and the Radziwiłł Letopis, a fifteenth-century copy of a thirteenth-century Old East Slavic illuminated manuscript detailing the history of the Kievan Rus’ that had been in the Radziwiłł family for over a century. Bogusław’s voluntary transfer of these items speaks to the prince’s gratitude to the Elector and his belief that Frederick William had the intellectual and cultural acumen to appreciate such specimens; Frederick William’s printing of Bogusław’s catalogue, in turn, acknowledges these same qualities in the donor.

      Cataloguing Bogusław Radziwiłł’s donation also had a political purpose. The Catalogus librorum quarumlibet is dominated by a multi-confessional array of theological texts. This arrangement would not have stood out in the collections of evangelically minded elites, like the Calvinists Bogusław Radziwiłł and Frederick William, who looked to stay ahead of their heterodox rivals. Such a library might have served a different purpose for the Great Elector, however, given Frederick William’s noted promotion of policies of church unity and toleration in Brandenburg and Prussia. Tellingly, the Catalogus librorum quarumlibet ends with a set of six recent volumes by the theologian Georg Calixtus, one of the leading ecumenical voices of the early seventeenth century. Bogusław’s selections in this regard thus suggest in the very least an awareness of Frederick William’s evangelical labours and a willingness to support them through material and intellectual means. To Frederick William and his court theologians, the immortalisation of this transaction in print serves as an unofficial endorsement of their movement by an important foreign-born political ally. 

The catalogue exercises a similar function in its presentation of a handful of nominally Polish and Lithuanian texts. Celebrated in a printed catalogue, Bogusław’s donation of articles like a Polish-Latin-Greek thesaurus (Kraków, 1641) and an undated Lithuanian-language psalter reveals the discredited prince’s continued appreciation of his heritage, even as he lay at rest in a Prussian cathedral. The gift further reflects Bogusław’s belief that these texts would be similarly valued by Frederick William. By printing a record of this donation, Frederick William both honours the actions of a loyal friend while sharing a version of himself that was aimed in particular at the late prince’s countrymen.