{
  "id": "biblia-poliglota-complutense",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The Complutensian Polyglot Bible (Alcala de Henares, 1514-1517)",
  "summary": "The Bible that Cardinal Cisneros had set in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin at the new university of Alcala, and whose New Testament volume carries a printed colophon dated 10 January 1514. Read from the sheets it is less a monument than a working instrument: parallel columns keyed by superscript letters, marginal columns of Hebrew and Aramaic roots, a Greek dictionary bound in at the back, and errata leaves that correct the book in four scripts.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "books",
    "printing",
    "philology",
    "hebrew",
    "greek",
    "renaissance",
    "universities",
    "sixteenth-century",
    "spain"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "nebrija-gramatica-1492"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "toledo-school-of-translators"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "covarrubias-tesoro-1611"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "first-printing-press-americas"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-language"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "libros-que-se-imprimen-y-pasan-a-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "vives-tratado-del-socorro-de-los-pobres"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Complutensian Polyglot Bible?",
    "When was the Complutensian Polyglot New Testament printed?",
    "Who printed the Complutensian Polyglot Bible and who paid for it?",
    "What languages are on a page of the Complutensian Polyglot?",
    "How much did the Complutensian Polyglot cost to make?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The New Testament volume prints its own imprint at the end. The colophon reads that this work of the New Testament, \"grecis latinisque characteribus nouiter impressum atque studiosissime emendatum\", was brought to a happy end \"in hac preclarissima Complutensi vniuersitate\" - in the university of Alcala de Henares - \"de mandato et sumptibus\" of Cardinal Francisco Ximenez de Cisneros, by \"industria et solertia honorabilis viri Arnaldi guilielmi de Brocario artis impressorie magistri\", and it dates the work \"Anno domini Millesimo quingentesimo decimo quarto. Mensis ianuarij die decimo\" - 10 January 1514.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-novum-testamentum-1514"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "That date is the date of printing and nothing more. The volumes opened here carry no papal privilege, no publication licence and no statement of when copies were released, so the sheets settle the priority of the Alcala Greek New Testament over Erasmus's Basel edition of 1516 in no direction at all. This object records the printed date and declines the priority question, which turns on the privilege and the distribution rather than on the press date.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-novum-testamentum-1514"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The Old Testament tome announces the novelty on its own title page, printed in red and black under the cardinal's arms: \"Vetus testamentum multiplici lingua nunc primo impressum. Et imprimis Pentateuchus Hebraico Greco atque Chaldaico idiomate. Adiuncta vnicuique sua latina interpretatione.\" The claim of a first is the book's own, made in its own words, and is registered here as such rather than as a verified fact about the history of printing.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-vetus-testamentum-1517"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The Pentateuch page is a six-part machine, not a display of languages. Across the top run three columns - the Septuagint with a Latin translation set between its lines, Jerome's Latin, and the Hebrew - with an outer margin carrying a column of Hebrew roots tied to the text by superscript letters; across the foot, the full width of the page, run the Aramaic Targum, its own Latin translation beside it, and a second marginal column of Aramaic roots. Every element is a lookup aid for a reader working between the versions.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-vetus-testamentum-1517"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The compositors kept the columns level by filling short Latin lines with rows of o-shaped sorts, which are visible down the Vulgate column of the Deuteronomy pages. The alignment of the versions was treated as part of the argument of the book, worth spending type on.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-vetus-testamentum-1517"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "In the New Testament volume the Greek and the Latin face each other and are keyed word to word by small superscript letters, with capitals A to D down the outer margin dividing each page into quarters for citation and with scriptural cross-references beside them. A reader with no Greek could follow the Greek word by word; that was the point of the apparatus.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-novum-testamentum-1514"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The New Testament volume was issued with its own toolkit. Its title page lists, after the biblical text, \"vocabularium grecum continens omnes dictiones totius noui testamenti et insuper sapientie et ecclesiastici grece et latine cum breuissima quadam in initio ad grecas litteras introductione\" - a Greek-Latin dictionary of every word in the New Testament, plus Wisdom and Ecclesiasticus, opening with a short introduction to the Greek alphabet - and then an index of the etymologies of the Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic words \"ab initio matthei vsque ad finem apocalypsis\".",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-novum-testamentum-1514"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The first tome carries errata leaves that correct the book in four scripts. The heading concedes the fault plainly - \"Quoniam inter imprimendum quedam perperam impressa esse reprendimus, sic emendentur ut est infrascriptum\" - and the corrections run in separate sections for the Septuagint, for the interlinear Latin, for the Aramaic, and, in a parallel column set in Hebrew type, for the Hebrew and Aramaic errors that arose, in the book's own words, \"incuria librariorum\", by the carelessness of the copyists.",
      "sources": [
        "biblia-complutense-vetus-testamentum-1517"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "A manuscript note bound at the end of the Regensburg copy, headed \"De rebus gestis Francisci Ximenii, Iohan. Sambuc. pag 43\", puts figures on what the enterprise cost. It says the care of editing the sacred Bibles lasted about fifteen continuous years from 1502; that Alfonso de Zamora, professor of Hebrew, often reported that seven Hebrew manuscripts now at Alcala had been bought from various regions for four thousand gold pieces; that Greek codices came from Rome and Latin ones from foreign places and from various libraries in Spain, some written in Gothic characters nearly eight hundred years old; and that with the printers' and scribes' salaries and the rest the total would come to fifty thousand gold pieces and more.",
      "sources": [
        "nota-manuscrita-sambuco-ximenez-ratisbona"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "Those figures are worth exactly what their chain of transmission is worth, and the chain is long: an owner of this copy copying by hand a printed life of Cisneros by Sambucus, which reports what Zamora said out loud. They are registered here because they are the only account of the cost that the volumes themselves carry, and they are the reason the confidence on the preceding claim sits at 0.7 rather than higher.",
      "sources": [
        "nota-manuscrita-sambuco-ximenez-ratisbona"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The same note also records what the money bought and what it displaced. Manuscripts were gathered to Alcala at great expense from Rome, from abroad and from Spanish libraries, and the note says nothing at all about what became of them afterwards. The much repeated story of the Hebrew manuscripts of Alcala being sold to a rocket-maker is not in this volume, is not sourced here, and is not asserted by this object.",
      "sources": [
        "nota-manuscrita-sambuco-ximenez-ratisbona"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language coverage of the Complutensian Polyglot is a paragraph in the history of biblical scholarship, usually spent on whether Erasmus beat it into print and on an unsourced anecdote about the fate of the Hebrew manuscripts. Neither question can be answered from the book, and this object does not pretend to answer them. What it does instead is open the volumes: the colophon that dates the New Testament to 10 January 1514 and names both the cardinal who paid and the printer who set it, the title page that claims the first in its own words, the six-part page with its two columns of roots and its Latin lines padded with rows of o's to hold the alignment, the Greek dictionary and Greek primer bound in at the back, and the errata leaves in which the book corrects itself in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic and blames the compositors by name for the fault. The cost is on the record beside the achievement, in the one witness the volumes carry, with its weak chain of transmission stated rather than hidden.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-19",
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    "name": "The Complutensian Polyglot Bible (Alcala de Henares, 1514-1517)",
    "description": "The Bible that Cardinal Cisneros had set in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin at the new university of Alcala, and whose New Testament volume carries a printed colophon dated 10 January 1514. Read from the sheets it is less a monument than a working instrument: parallel columns keyed by superscript letters, marginal columns of Hebrew and Aramaic roots, a Greek dictionary bound in at the back, and errata leaves that correct the book in four scripts.",
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    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Nouum testamentum grece et latine in academia complutensi nouiter impressum (New Testament volume of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible)",
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      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Vetus testamentum multiplici lingua nunc primo impressum. Et imprimis Pentateuchus Hebraico Greco atque Chaldaico idiomate (first tome of the Complutensian Polyglot Bible)",
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      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Manuscript note headed 'De rebus gestis Francisci Ximenii, Iohan. Sambuc. pag 43', bound at the end of the Regensburg copy of the Complutensian Polyglot, tome I",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=2I9UAAAAcAAJ"
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    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The Complutensian Polyglot Bible (Alcala de Henares, 1514-1517)"
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