The Raiders of the Lost Manuscript

A compelling story like an adventure novel, yet incredibly true, is that of the De Origine et Situ Germanorum, better known as Germania, one of the most important historical and ethnographic works of antiquity, written by the great Roman author Publius Cornelius Tacitus. Since 1425, when the oldest known manuscript of this classical masterpiece, included in a 9th-century Carolingian codex, was discovered, forgotten for centuries in a dusty archive of the German Abbey of Hersfeld, it has been at the center of a genuine spy story that stretched from the Renaissance to modern times. The object of a surprising treasure hunt, since its discovery, the Codex Hersfeldensis was coveted and contested by humanists, literati, popes, secret agents, initiates, and important Italian and European dynasties, including the Medici of Florence, until the Second World War, when Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler attempted to take possession of it, considering it, in a mystical and esoteric key, a true "object of power" sacred to the Aryan race.