This Latin translation of Giovanni Pietro Contarini's account of the war between the Venetians and the Ottoman Empire once belonged to Sir Robert Cotton: his signature can be seen on the title page. Cotton collected a great library in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and it became something akin to an English national library. This book seems to have become part of the Old Royal Library, which then moved to the British Museum in 1757. Sold as a duplicate by the Museum in 1769, it once again found its way back into the Royal Library and was there by the time of its restructure in the 1860s.