Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander

MS 39627), contains the text of the Four Gospels illustrated with 366 miniatures and consists of 286 parchment folios, 33 by 24.3 cm in size, later paginated with pencil.

The bookbinding of red leather over wooden boards is original, but the elements of a metalwork treasure binding probably decorated with gold, gems and pearls on top of this have disappeared.

[9] The miniatures are mostly very close to those in a Greek manuscript made in the 11th century in the Monastery of Stoudios, the largest in Constantinople (now in Paris as BnF, cod grec 74), and were probably very largely copied from this or another Byzantine exemplar in the same tradition.

[12] According to Robin Milner-Gulland, "All the painters use saturated colours, relish picturesque details and confidently handle a linear, basically twelfth-century Byzantine manner that is distinctly archaic by the standards of the fourteenth century.

"[13] Folios 2v and 3r have a famous double spread miniature of the Tsar, his second wife, and his five children from both marriages, with his son-in-law on the far left, all identified by inscriptions.

All wear crowns, have halos, and carry sceptres, and above the Tsar and his wife a double Hand of God emerges from the cloud to bless them.

But only the tsar and his eldest son, standing to the left of him, wear a form of the loros, the cloth strip embroidered with gold thread and studded with gems that was a key part of the imperial insignia of Byzantine emperors.

From the previous century this had begun to be shown in imperial portraits of other Orthodox rulers, such those of Serbia, Georgia and the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia.

[15] There are a number of other portraits of the tsar; at the end of each gospel he is shown at small size in an arcade with the evangelist, and he appears in a large scene of the Last Judgement.

After the fall of Tarnovo to the Ottomans in 1393, the manuscript was transported to Moldavia possibly by a Bulgarian fugitive, marking the last time for nearly half a millennium it would be in its native Bulgaria.