Compared with previous psalter texts, this version is a closer translation of the Greek original into Church Slavonic.

By their iconography and style, they are related to paintings in Serbian churches created after 1350 during a period when there was no central, dominant art school in Serbia.

A reliable piece of evidence used to determine its dating is the watermark impressed in the paper on which the manuscript was written (Briquet 3227).

The miniature illustrating the end of the last psalm (folio 185r) contains a heraldic design in the form of a red double-headed eagle.

This was the coat of arms of Stefan Lazarević, who became the ruler of Moravian Serbia after his father Prince Lazar died in 1389 in the Battle of Kosovo fighting against the Ottomans.

A similar depiction is found in a fresco in the Ljubostinja Monastery in central Serbia, built at the end of the 14th century.

[1] Its illuminators hailed from a more southerly area of the former Serbian Empire, specifically northern Macedonia, but it is known that painters from this region worked in Moravian Serbia in the last decade of the 14th century.

A contemporary inscription on the recto of the first leaf of the psalter indicates that the book was part of Despot Đurađ's library,[10][12] and that, at some point, he sent it to one of his sons.

[12] The Serbian Despotate fell to the Ottomans in 1459, and the Branković family went into exile in Syrmia, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary.

At the beginning of the 17th century, the psalter was in the Privina Glava Monastery on Mount Fruška Gora in Syrmia, which was then under Ottoman rule.

[9] During the Great Turkish War, Bavarian troops under Maximilian II Emanuel fought in Syrmia against the Ottomans.

The psalter came into the hands of one of Maximilian's high officers named Wolfgang Heinrich von Gemell zu Fischbach.

At the beginning of the 19th century, many valuable manuscripts were taken from monasteries to the Bavarian State Library in Munich, and this was also the case with the Serbian Psalter, which was given the shelf number Cod.

The miniatures were described and analyzed by Josef Strzygowski, an internationally reputed member of the Vienna School of Art History.