Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche, styled The Honourable Robert Curzon between 1829 and 1870, was an English traveller, diplomat and author, active in the Near E.
Background
Curzon was the son of the Honorary Robert Curzon, younger son of Assheton Curzon, 1st Viscount Curzon, and his wife Harriet Anne Bishopp, 13th Baroness Zouche (Bishopp also spelled Bisshopp). Baroness Zouche succeeded to the Barony from her father Sir Cecil Bisshopp the 8th Baronet Bishopp, of Parham Park in the county of (today) West Sussex (from 1815 the 12th Baron Zouche of Hayngworth) after her brother Lieutenant-Colonel Cecil Bisshopp and Sir Cecil"s heir was killed in the War of 1812 against the Amercicans.
Education
Curzon was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford.
Career
He was responsible for acquiring several important and late Biblical manuscripts from Eastern Orthodox monasteries. The Bishopp Baronetcy was inherited by a cousin. 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 Street 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.
In 1842-1843 Curzon was joint British Commissioner in Erzurum as part of the British-Turkish-Persian-Russian boundary commission sitting to delineate the Turkish and Persian frontier. Lord Zouche succeeded his mother in the barony in 1870.
In 1834 he brought some manuscripts from Palestine (including the Greek New Testament codices 548, 552-554) and in 1837 from the Athos peninsula, among them the important Bulgarian Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander and the gospel codices 547, 549-551, 910-911). They are now transferred to the British Library.
Membership
10th United Kingdom Parliament]
In 1831 he succeeded his father as Member of Parliament for Clitheroe, a seat he only held until the following year.