A mere twenty-two days after his ascension to the Throne of St. Peter in May of 1555, Pope Marcellus II lay on his deathbed. He would not survive into the evening.
Physical exhaustion would be ruled the official cause of death, but rumors already busied the back rooms of Vatican City. Poison was the most favored, for Marcellus was only fifty-four years old and hadn't been frail or sickly. To the contrary, he'd been a vigorous man, known as a champion of the Vatican Library, and before that as an unrelenting papal emissary during the throes of the Counter-Reformation. In that role, fueling the current whispers, he'd won the enmity of no less than Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. It was only weeks before that the emperor had openly opposed Marcellus's rise to the papacy.
Other treachery could not be ruled out. Only three cardinals were present in Rome for the conclave, and until just before his election, Marcellus had never even been made a bishop. If one were to set aside God's own influence for a moment, Marcellus was hardly a consensus pope.
The Vatican's most skilled physicians surrounded the papal bed, but whatever the cause of his illness, the state of medicine was not in Marcellus's favor. He was beyond any human help when his personal secretary eased away from the holy bedside, his place taken by someone more anxious to witness this death.
The secretary slipped into the pope's private chapel and genuflected. Standing once more, he glanced over his shoulder and then gathered into his arms the richly illuminated book of hours that lay open on a pedestal. He then turned and left the papal apartment through the attendants' quarters.
Later, some would say they'd seen the secretary approach the opening to the necropolis upon which the vast new Basilica of St. Peter was being built. No particular evidence of this came to light, however, and the searches were futile. The only complete agreement ever reached was that the pope's personal secretary had disappeared, and with him an extraordinary book of hours for which no written record existed, not even in the meticulous Vatican Library.
Three days later, Pope Marcellus II was laid to rest. It would be another 417 years before the book of hours was seen again.
In 1972, workmen came across it in a long-forgotten storage room along the Grand Canal in Venice. Though carefully wrapped, time, water and worms had severely damaged its covers and many of its pages. Its poor condition, along with disputed claims of ownership and the vagaries of scholarly research, would relegate it to obscurity for nearly forty more years.
Now, the book of hours had emerged once again.
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