Codex Aesinas

The manuscript is considered especially valuable because it contains the Opera Minora (shorter works) of the Roman historian Tacitus, including the Agricola and the Germania.

The manuscripts dated to the second half of the 15th century, and had belonged to the library of the humanist Stefano Guarnieri (1425-1493), a chancellor and diplomat in Perugia, which he had built with his brother Francesco.

Annibaldi discovered the works of Tacitus in one of Guarnieri's manuscripts, and in the Agricola quaternion found eight folia consisting of sixteen pages written in Carolingian minuscule script from the early 9th century (f. 56 - 63).

Since the lettering of the quaternion matched exactly Pier Candido Decembrio's description of the Agricola in the Hersfeldensis from the year 1455,[1] Annibaldi concluded that this was a fragment of the lost original document.

Through diplomatic mediation and Himmler's influence, the Italian government permitted Rudolf Till and Paul Lehmann of the Research Association of German Ahnenerbe to examine the codex in 1939.

In 1943 the results of this examination were released along with photographic illustrations of the Agricola and Germania folia produced by the Istituto di Patologia del Libro in Rome.

Following the Allied invasion of Italy and the coup of June 1943 against Mussolini, Himmler ordered an SS command to Jesi in the autumn of that year to seize the codex.

The Herzog August Library approached the Baldeschi Balleani family in 1987 to acquire the codex, but ultimately abandoned the purchase due to the damage.

As part of the 2000th anniversary of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 2009, the Aesinas was presented to a wide audience for the first time in the three-part exhibition: "Imperium, Conflict, Myth" at the Lippisches Landesmuseum in Detmold, North Rhine-Westphalia.