Codex Argenteus, the silver book, thus called on account of its silver binding, contains fragments of the four Gospels in the Gothic language. The translation was made from the Greek original by Bishop Wulfila (b. 318-d. 388), the apostle of the Goths. The writing is done in so-called encaustum (printing with heated stamps) of gold and silver letters on vellum of scarlet color. This copy is considered to have been made toward the end of the fifth or in the beginning of the sixth century, when the East Goths still held sway in Italy. Its early fortunes are unknown, but it is supposed that the book was found in the possession of the Visigoths (or West Goths) when their empire was seized by the Franks, and donated to the monastery of Verden by some munificent Frankish chief. Here, in the Benedictine abbey of Verden, on the river Ruhr, in Westphalia, the book was discovered at least as early as 1554, when the scholars Cassander and Gualther of Cologne are known to have had copies which can have been made from no other source.
After the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, the Codex was transmitted to Prague for safety. In the year of 1648, Prague, or rather the older portion of the town, was captured by the Swedish general, Count Hans Christopher Kœnigsmark, who, among the vast treasures of the Bohemian capital, found also the Codex Argenteus which he presented to Queen Christine. All the books and manuscripts of the queen were in the care of her librarian, Isaac Vossius, a learned but eccentric scholar of Dutch parentage. Vossius was at first Queen Christine’s teacher of Greek, not a very agreeable position, for the queen called him to the castle at three o’clock in the morning for her first hour. In 1650 he had to leave court and country on account of a quarrel with that light of learning, Claude de Saumaise (Salmasius), another one of the foreign scholars in favor with the queen. In 1653 he was called back, and again took charge of the books of the queen, but soon returned to Holland. Before his departure he gathered several costly books and manuscripts, among which Codex Argenteus, with or without the queen’s private permission, taking them with him. In 1670, Vossius came to England, where he died, in 1688, as court chaplain at Windsor. King Charles II. of England said of him: “Vossius believes in anything but the Bible.”