It's as pretty a description of Ontario as ever was writ, inscribed on birch bark and sent more than 100 years ago to Pope Leo XIII in the Vatican. Dated "where there is much grass, in the month of the flowers" – another way of saying "Grassy Lake, May 21," the letter written by the Ojibway Indians in 1887 thanks the head of the Roman Catholic church, "the Grand Master of Prayer," for providing Ojibways of the Espanola area in northern Ontario with a "custodian of prayer," as they described the bishop sent to preach to them.
That piece of birch bark now rests deep beneath the streets of Rome, one of the hundreds of thousands of historical gems housed along the 84 kilometres of shelving that comprise the Vatican's Secret Archives, a treasure trove of correspondence between the great and the infamous of the past 1,200 years.
And now that Ojibway letter has been plucked from the obscurity of history and comparative secrecy of the archives to join 104 other timeless treasures that helped shape and form the world we live in, published for the first time in The Vatican Secret Archives, a 252-page book lavishly illustrated with 344 colour photos and modern interpretations.
The book, $87.23 at Amazon.ca Saturday (but temporarily out of stock), is being published in English, French, Italian and Dutch editions.
And for the truly obsessive collector, there's a limited edition available for $8,400. Only 33 copies will be printed on felt and hand-stitched, and three are already reserved – one for Pope Benedict XVI, one for the Vatican Library and one for, what else, the Vatican Secret Archives.
The original letters, whether written on parchment, silk or birch bark, are reproduced in exquisite detail, and a modern commentary accompanies each document.
They range from the sublime to the ridiculous – a 1586 letter from Mary Queen of Scots, written to Pope Sixtus V several weeks before her execution, to a 1246 demand by Grand Khan Güyük, the grandson of Genghis Khan, ordering Pope Innocent IV to travel to Central Asia, his "kings" in tow, to "pay service and homage to us" as an act of "submission."
Otherwise, it warns, "you shall be our enemy."
Also included:
- In what surely must rank as one of history's most impertinent "pay up" letters, Michelangelo writes in 1550 to demand that the Vatican pay his bill, then three months overdue, and complains that his work on the dome of St. Peter's Basilica has been interrupted by a papal conclave;
- Letters from Henry VIII and the peers of England written in 1530 about the king's "Great Matter" – divorce, of course, and a matter near and dear to the hearts of any Tudors fan;
- The document conferring the Order of the Golden Spur on Mozart in 1770;
- The 1493 papal bull "inter cetera" of Alexander VI, awarding the New World, as the Americas were then known, to Spain;
- Documents from the heresy trials of the Knights Templar in 1308-10;
- The sentence of the Council of Pisa in 1409 deposing popes Benedict XIII and Gregory XII, and
- The papal bull condemning and excommunicating Martin Luther in 1520-21.
For all its marvellous treasures and historical intrigue, the Vatican insists – Dan Brown and his ilk notwithstanding – that there's very little that's "secret" about the Secret Archives.
"An aura of mystery has always surrounded this important cultural institution of the Holy See due to the allusions to inaccessible secrets thanks to its very name, as well as to the publicity it has always enjoyed in literature and in the media," Cardinal Raffaele Farina, a Vatican archivist, writes in the preface to The Vatican Secret Archives.
But, notes Bishop Sergio Pagano, prefect of the archives, the Latin "secretum" in the institution's name simply refers to the Pope's "personal" or "private" archives.
The archives were opened to researchers by Pope Leo XIII in 1881, six years before he received his letter from Ontario's Ojibways, and dozens of scholars and investigators are accredited to do their research there.
But, unlike Brown's high-tech version of low-oxygen chambers hidden away behind bulletproof glass, the Secret Archives consists of kilometres of collected letters, most hundreds of years old, some thousands, sitting on dusty shelves.
Some say it resembles an underground parking lot. But instead of cars you'll find row upon row of shelves, and the glowing arrows on the floor don't really have much to do with traffic flow – they simply point to the emergency exits.
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