Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouch
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This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain. Robert Curzon(1810-1873), 14th Baron Zouch, was a notable Victorian English traveler, travel writer, and diplomat, active mainly in the Near East. He is perhaps best known as being responsible for the "purchase" of some of the most important early Bible manuscripts from Eastern Orthodox monasteries.
He was born in 1810, and educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church College, Oxford, In his Visits to Monasteries in the Levant [1849], he described and justified his takings. He visited Mount Athos in 1837, and at the Monastery of St Paul, he recounts how the abbot said 'We make no use of the old books, and should be glad if you would accept one,' upon which he took two, including a fourteenth-century illuminated Bulgarian gospel, now in the British Library.
