Letterbook of Marcellus Cervini (subsequently Pope Marcellus II), including contemporary records of the execution of Thomas Cromwell and the divorce of Henry VIII from Anne of Cleves, in Italian, manuscript on paper

174 leaves (fols. 49 & 50 blank), 280mm. by 207mm., missing a few leaves from appendix at end, else complete, collation: i^{10, ii6, iii-iv10, v12, vi4, vii-x14, xi8, xii-xiii14, xiv16, xv4, xvi10, written space 215mm. by 120mm., single column, c. 20 lines in dark brown ink in two cursive hands, acidic ink showing through pages, and causing minor damage to thin paper in places, but overall in good condition with wide and clean margins, early pasteboard binding now covered in with nineteenth-century paper}

Condition is described in the main body of the cataloguing where appropriate.
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The manuscript includes copies of the fifty-one letters written by Marcello Cervini to various European dignitaries between May 1540 and October 1554, when he held office as bishop of Nicastro, Cardinal of Santa Croce and Papal librarian. The collection ends immediately before he became Pope Marcellus II in 1555 (reigning a total of only 22 days; the sixth shortest reign of any pope).

He was the son of Ricardo Cervini, the Apostolic Treasurer in Ancona, and after studying in Siena, Cervini moved to Rome to continue his education. In 1534 he received his first significant appointment as a papal secretary for Pope Paul III (1534-49) and served as a close advisor to the pope's nephew Alessandro Farnese, who had himself been given responsibility for the near complete management of the temporal affairs of the Church. The same pope appointed him bishop of Nicastro in 1539, and cardinal-priest of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome later in the same year. In the following years he was handed responsibility for the apostolic administration of the dioceses of Reggio and Gubbio, and the library of the Vatican, adding more than 500 Latin, Greek and Hebrew volumes, preparing new catalogues of the Greek and Latin manuscripts, and persuading the pope to have the most valuable Greek manuscripts printed. He served on numerous occasions as a papal advisor and ambassador, and the principal importance of the present manuscript is the wealth of eye-witness details the letters record about contemporary European affairs in the crucial years of 1540s and 1550s when English and German Protestantism was in its infancy. In particular, the letters records rumours circulating among the Catholics on the Continent concerning the downfall and violent execution of Thomas Cromwell in 1540. Cromwell was, of course, an arch-enemy of Catholicism, who held office as Henry VIII's Vicar-General, and was a key-player in the English Reformation, personally responsible for the drafting of the Act in Restraint of Appeals which allowed Henry's divorce without papal permission, and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the present letter takes great interest in the gory death suffered by Cromwell, noting in particular the removal of his still-beating heart while he was alive (fol. 56r). A further letter (fol. 61v) notes the fruit of the Cromwell's labours, the annulment of the marriage between Henry VIII and his fourth wife, la sorella del Duca di Cleves ... Anna in July 1540 (famously on grounds of non-consummation as Henry found his new wife so unattractive he could not bear to sleep with her). Further letters record the interest of the papal court in other threats to Catholicism in Europe: two comment on the growing Lutheran 'heresy' (fols. 6v & 21r), which was at its height as Luther himself had only died in 1546; another (fol. 23v) records the pope's offer of 100,000 dutch florins to the Duke Palatine Frederick, husband of the princess of Denmark,  to secure safety for a number of the Catholic churches lost there after the Danish Reformation in 1536; and yet another (fol. 97v) alludes to secret councils held at the Council of Trent, convened in 1545 to definitively determine a unified doctrine of the Church in answer to the heresies of the Protestants, to which Cervini had access as he was appointed one of the three presidents of the council (alongside Cardinals Giovanni Maria del Monte, subsequently Pope Julius III, and Reginald Pole).

Kristeller, Iter Italicum, 1905, v, 550, records the existence of a large collection of Cervini's letters in the State Archive of Florence, but nowhere else, and the present manuscript may be the only copy of these letters outside of that repository.