The Codex Gigas is the largest surviving medieval manuscript on Earth — a book so absurdly massive that legend says a condemned monk wrote it overnight with the Devil's help to escape being walled up alive. What is actually inside is stranger than the myth: the whole Latin Bible, two full works by Josephus, a book of medicine, a book of exorcisms, and a portrait of the Devil unlike any other in Christian art.
The essential facts. Nearly a meter tall. Made from around 160 animal skins. Currently held at the National Library of Sweden after being taken as war booty in 1648.
The book's actual home. The Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm has hosted the full high-resolution digital scan since 2007 — you can page through Satan's portrait yourself.
Handles the manuscript at reading-desk range: the vellum, the ink, the strange consistency of the handwriting across 30 years of work by (as far as anyone can tell) a single scribe.
The legend: a Benedictine monk in 13th-century Bohemia broke his vows, was sentenced to be walled up alive, and offered to write a book containing all human knowledge in a single night to save himself. Midnight came. He prayed to Satan.
Full documentary treatment. The scientific dating, the legend, the Thirty Years' War theft that carried the codex from Prague to Stockholm.
The strange interior contents nobody mentions: an entire book of exorcisms, a section on medicine, a calendar of the dead, and pages of magical formulae bound into what is otherwise a Latin Bible.
Details on the Devil portrait itself — horns, red skin, split tongue, ermine loincloth, staring out of an empty landscape between two towers. Directly opposite it, on the facing page, a picture of the Heavenly City.
A shorter but visually rich walk through the manuscript, including the missing pages — an entire section removed at some point in the codex's 800-year history that nobody has ever accounted for.