During the renascence period, books were generally owned by churches, monasteries, and wealthy individuals. Popes collected books for their own private library. In the fourteenth century Pope Nicholas the fifth, founded what is known today as the Vatican library. His plan was to create a “public library”, for the use of scholars. He purchased volumes and employed copyist to copy original manuscripts that could not be bought from their owners. The Pope personally oversaw works done by copiers, included in the collection of the library. He invited Italian and exiled byzantine scholars to Rome and commissioned them to translate the Greek classics into Latin for his library. When printing was invented, a collection of printed books was included. Many of the manuscripts were bound in crimson and fastened with silver clasps. Pope Nicholas died before his plan for a public library was established. Nicholas was the first Pope to leave his library as a central beneficiary of his patronage.

Pope Sixtus established a permanent area to house the volumes, records and secret archives in the Vatican palace, and called it the Palatine library. Shelves, desks, benches, and presses were added, and the director of the library prepared the first catalogue of the collection.

The reading rooms were prepared to accommodate scholars. There were frescos surrounding the library and elaborate wooden benches, where most books were chained, a practice commonly done in that time. The library grew over time, collection of books and manuscripts filled the hallways and adjoining rooms. Construction was done to accommodate the expanding library. Purchases and donations were added to the library. In the eighteenth century the Heidelberg library was transferred to Rome.

The public use to be permitted access only to the reading rooms. Scholars were allowed to borrow volumes up until the seventeenth century. Books that were borrowed and not returned in a timely fashion were accounted for, if persuasion by librarians failed, the pope himself would have to send out a recall notice.

When reformation policies by the Vatican took place, the regulations of the library changed, access too many books were prohibited and protestant scholars were not allowed into the library. Pope Leo formally opened the library to scholars in 1883. Father Franz Ehle the prefect of the library, revised regulations in a more stringent form than in the past.