Tetraevangelia of Tsar Ivan Alexander

No other object shows the Second Bulgarian Empire looking at itself. The manuscript was copied by the monk Simeon for Ivan Alexander at the height of his reign, and its programme of 366 miniatures does not stop at the Gospel narrative: it opens with the tsar standing among his family, named, crowned and dressed in the regalia of a Byzantine emperor.

That family portrait is the single most important piece of visual evidence for the Bulgarian court of the fourteenth century. It fixes who was reigning, who was heir, and how the dynasty wished to be seen — beside Christ, in imperial purple, at a moment when the empire was already fragmenting.

The codex left Bulgaria after 1393 and passed through Moldavia and Mount Athos before Robert Curzon acquired it in 1837; his family gave it to the British Museum in 1917. It is fully digitised and in the public domain.