In 568 the Lombards descended into Italy and swept across the Venetian plain. The patriarch of Aquileia, Paulinus, did not wait to see them arrive: he gathered up the cathedral's treasure and fled to an island in the lagoon, Grado, still under Byzantine control. From that day on, the same episcopal see had two occupants, and the same Church spoke with two voices. On the mainland, protected by the new Lombard rulers, one patriarch would remain; on the island, loyal to Rome and to the Eastern emperor, another would be installed. It was not the first fracture: fifteen years earlier, Aquileia had already defied Constantinople, rejecting the imperial condemnation of the so-called Three Chapters and ending up, as a result, in an outright schism with Rome and the Byzantine East. Now that theological rift became a geographical one as well, and it would last, in different forms, for seven hundred years.

It is from this wound, a Church torn between the Lombards and Byzantium, between the Frankish West and the Greek East, that everything else springs: the legend, the manuscript, its three flights across medieval Europe and, today, the exhibition that from 12 September 2026 to 25 April 2027 reunites in Aquileia, at Palazzo Meizlik, the three surviving fragments of the Gospel of Mark, together for the first time in seven centuries. "THE GOSPEL OF MARK. Seven Centuries. Three Fragments. One European Story.", curated by Martina Dlabajová, Cristiano Tiussi and Luca Villa and promoted by Fondazione Aquileia, tells the story of how a book managed to "build identities and legitimise powers, from Aquileia to Venice to Prague". But to understand how a manuscript could come to carry the weight of a throne, one must first ask a simpler question: why, in that world, did having an apostle behind you matter so much.


Detail of the Codex Forojuliensis, preserved at the National Archaeological Museum of Cividale del Friuli. Photo © Eye Studio


The marketplace of origins

In early Christianity there was a hierarchy founded on a single criterion: proximity to Christ. The sees that could claim an apostle as their direct founder (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem) formed an almost unassailable summit, the so-called Pentarchy. All the other churches of Europe, to count for anything in that system, needed a genealogy that would tie them, even if only by reflection, to that same summit. Thus was born, between the fourth and ninth centuries, what might be called a veritable race for apostolic origins: Ravenna claimed as its first bishop Apollinaris, a disciple of Peter; Milan chose Barnabas; and Aquileia, a Roman city of the first rank, the Splendida Civitas that controlled the trade routes between the Adriatic and Noricum, the gateway to the Danube and the Balkans, laid claim to none other than Mark, sent personally by Peter.

This was not parochial vanity. It was law. Proving an apostolic origin meant being able to claim precedence, jurisdiction, independence from neighbouring sees: an argument as good in a council as an army was on a battlefield. And it is precisely for this reason that, just as the Church of Aquileia found itself split in two by the schism and the Lombard invasion, the story of its origins grew more precise, more detailed, more useful. In the eighth century, the patriarch Paulinus of Aquileia gathered and set down in writing the Legenda marciana: Peter, from Rome, sends Mark to evangelise Aquileia; Mark founds the first Christian community there (over the centuries, tradition would add the healing of a young leper at the gates of the city) and, before setting off for Egypt, brings a local disciple, Hermagoras, to Rome, so that Peter himself may consecrate him bishop. Hermagoras returns, leads the young Church, dies a martyr. Mark continues on to Alexandria, where the same fate awaits him.

No trace of this story exists before the sixth century. But by the time of Paul the Deacon, at the close of the eighth, it was already an established fact, repeated as history. It is no accident that it took hold at precisely that moment: a divided Church, its very continuity threatened by a schism and an invasion, needed more than ever to prove its direct descent from Peter — better still if that descent passed through a gospel, that is, through the most authoritative written testimony Christianity possesses. Not just any bishop to found Aquileia, but an evangelist. Not an oral tradition, but a book.



Detail of the Crypt of the Frescoes in the Basilica of Aquileia. Photo © Eye-studio

Aquileia, a hinge city between two Christianities

There is a second reason why Aquileia needed such a pedigree, and it is written in its geography. From late antiquity onwards, its ecclesiastical province extended well beyond north-eastern Italy, reaching Noricum, Carinthia and Pannonia: a vast missionary territory, contested with the Bavarian archdiocese of Salzburg and, above all from the ninth century onwards, with a far more formidable rival — Constantinople itself. These are the years in which Cyril and Methodius, sent from Byzantium, brought to the Slavs of Great Moravia a liturgy in their own language, openly challenging Latin hegemony over those lands. Aquileia thus found itself on a fault line running across the entire continent: to the west, Rome and the Franks; to the east, Byzantium and the Slavic rite; and in between, contested by the two worlds, the Slavic principalities of the Danube basin.

It is against this backdrop that the Liber Vitae must be read - the secret second life of the Gospel Book of Cividale. The Codex Forojuliensis, or Forogiuliese Gospel Book, today preserved at the National Archaeological Museum of Cividale del Friuli, contains the Gospels of Matthew, Luke and John: originally it also included that of Mark. Dating from the sixth century, the codex reached Aquileia around the middle of the ninth, probably in the time of the patriarch Theodemar (851–872), who set his signature upon it. From then on it was one of the most important liturgical books of the Church of Aquileia, and it remains to this day one of the fundamental works for understanding the history and spirituality of the Patriarchate. Between the second half of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth, more than fifteen hundred people had their names inscribed in the margins of its pages so that the community would pray for them: the emperor Louis II and his wife Engelberga, the Bavarian margrave Luitpold, and then - this is the most telling detail - the Slavic princes Pribina and Kocel, lords of Lower Pannonia, contested between Salzburg and Byzantium, the Croat Trpimir, the Moravian Svatopluk, and an ambassador of the newly converted king of Bulgaria, who left it in writing that he was the first Bulgarian ever to reach that monastery. More than three hundred of the names are Slavic. This is no generic list of pilgrims: it is the photograph of a frontier, the sign that those princes crossed, quite literally, from one shore of Christianity to the other, and that Aquileia, with its most venerated book, was playing a game that stretched from the Danube to the Black Sea.

From altar book to holy body

Until the twelfth century, the Gospel Book remained a single volume (the four Gospels together) used for the liturgy. Then, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, something happened that changed its destiny forever: the quires containing the Gospel of Mark alone were separated from the rest of the codex and bound apart, beneath a precious cover. This was the century of the Crusades and of the great European market in relics, when possession of a sacred fragment was worth as much as a fief; and it was perhaps also the moment when Aquileia - once again at odds with its rival see of Grado, by now drawn into the orbit of the Republic of Venice - felt the need to turn its legend into something tangible. A story, however authoritative, can be called into question. An object believed to have come from the very hand of the evangelist cannot: it becomes a contact relic, capable - as the fourteenth-century patriarchal inventory declares, opening its list with "liber beati Marci evangeliste, quem propria manu scripsit", the book the evangelist wrote with his own hand - of conferring upon its possessor an authority greater than any feudal title.

On this basis, in 827, at the Synod of Mantua, Aquileia obtained formal recognition of its supremacy over its rival Grado. The response was not long in coming: the following year, in 828, Venetian merchants stole the Saint's body from Alexandria in Egypt and carried it to the lagoon, providing the young Venice - until then without a patron of rank - with the apostle it needed to rival Aquileia as an equal. The body on one side, the book on the other: two halves of the same myth, soon destined to be parted again, and more than once.


Detail of the Gospel of Mark, Prague Castle Archives at the Chancellery of the President of the Czech Republic, Prague. Photo © Eye-studio


Prague, 1354: a crown in need of relics

In October 1354, Charles IV of Luxembourg, King of Bohemia, travelling to Rome for his imperial coronation, passed through Friuli and asked his half-brother Nicholas, Patriarch of Aquileia, for a portion of the celebrated Gospel for the cathedral of Saint Vitus. This was no collector's whim. Charles IV was building, stone by stone and relic by relic, a Prague that could stand comparison with Rome and Aachen as the sacred capital of the Empire: in those very years he would have Karlštejn Castle erected to house the imperial insignia together with the greatest treasury of relics ever assembled north of the Alps. Within this design, a fragment of the autograph gospel, authenticated, moreover, by a blood tie to the Patriarch who bestowed it, counted as a building block of dynastic legitimacy.




Nicholas consented, resorting to a theological argument as elegant as it was convenient: dividing a relic does not diminish it, but multiplies it. On 31 October, in Feltre, Charles IV himself noted down on the fragment, in his own hand, the circumstances of the gift, having the note countersigned by three bishops in his retinue. In Prague the fragment was carried in solemn procession, enclosed in a reliquary of gold and precious stones, and incorporated into the tomb of Saint Wenceslas, the dynastic heart of the Kingdom of Bohemia. To this day it remains the foremost treasure of the Czech state, under the shelfmark Cim 1, owned by the Metropolitan Chapter of Saint Vitus in Prague and preserved in the Prague Castle Archives. For Aquileia, giving up those pages was no act of disinterested generosity, but calculation: prestige in the eyes of a future emperor was worth as much as the authority the relic still guaranteed in the open disputes with Grado and with Venice.



Venice, Treasury of Saint Mark's. Inner side of the frame of the cover of the Gospel of Mark, with the trimmed ancient metal plaques.

Venice, 1420: the circle closes

The final chapter came with the Venetian conquest of Friuli. On 30 May 1420, Doge Tommaso Mocenigo demanded that the canons of Aquileia hand over what remained of the Gospel, arguing that the book should return to the one who had written it: Mark's pages were to be reunited with the Saint's body, kept in the lagoon for nearly six hundred years. After tense negotiations, on 24 June the five surviving quires were delivered into the hands of the Venetian conquerors; the following day - the feast of the rediscovery of the saint's body - they were already on display in the Basilica of Saint Mark.

Neither the date nor the argument chosen was accidental. Presenting that transfer as a reunion allowed Venice to appropriate the very apostolic legend on which Aquileia had founded its claims for centuries - turning it against those who had cultivated it first. The ceremony sealed, without any need to say so, the submission of the Patriarchate to the Serenissima: it preceded by a few decades the definitive suppression of the see of Grado, in 1451, and the birth of Venice's metropolitan authority. One last, unintended betrayal closes the story: the damp of the lagoon would eat away at the parchment until it became largely illegible. What remains of it today rests in the reliquary case of the Treasury of Saint Mark's.

Three powers - a patriarchate that claimed to be Peter's direct heir, a kingdom in search of a sacred crown, a maritime republic with no apostolic pedigree to boast of - built part of their authority, at three different moments and with three different strategies, upon the same manuscript. This, quite literally, is the meaning of the exhibition's title.

What remains, beyond power

The exhibition itinerary at Palazzo Meizlik, across six rooms, entrusts much of this story to images: the eight ivory panels of the Throne of Saint Mark, a seventh-century Alexandrian masterpiece on loan from the Castello Sforzesco in Milan; the architrave commissioned by the patriarch John II between 806 and 810 for the chapel of Saint Mark in Sant'Eufemia at Grado, the oldest known Western inscription bearing the saint's name outside Rome; the apse mosaics of the basilica of Saint Mark, which enriched the myth over the centuries up to the scene of the angel revealing to Mark his final resting place; and the Prague documents of 1354, with the patriarchal seals and the signature of Charles IV himself.

But it is perhaps the Liber Vitae, in the final room, that restores the deepest meaning of this story. Before becoming a bargaining chip among the powerful, that book had been a place of real encounter: Frankish sovereigns and Slavic princes, bishops and ambassadors, side by side on the same page, long before anyone decided to separate them. Reuniting the three surviving fragments today, after seven centuries, does not merely mean restoring the physical unity of a manuscript dismembered by a schism, an invasion, a coronation and a conquest. It means displaying, within the same exhibition spaces, both the book upon which powers were founded and the book upon which those powers, for a moment, met.

"The three fragments of Saint Mark's manuscript were separated by history, but they never ceased to belong to the same story," explains co-curator Martina Dlabajová. "Reuniting them today in Aquileia, in this exhibition, after seven centuries, is a historic event. In this I also find the essence of Europe: different identities which, brought into relation with one another, take on a new and deeper meaning."

THE GOSPEL OF MARK. Seven Centuries. Three Fragments. One European Story. Palazzo Meizlik, via Patriarca Popone 7, Aquileia (Udine), Italy. 12 September 2026 – 25 April 2027. www.ilvangelodimarco.org - www.fondazioneaquileia.it