The most obvious difference from other parts of the New Testament is that there are no lectionaries, for the simple reason that Revelation has never been a part of the Greek lectionary. . . . It is also striking that there are a larger number of manuscripts of Revelation from the late Byzantine and early Ottoman period than is the case in the rest of the New Testament . . . The fall of the Byzantine Empire, with the ensuing Ottoman rule, was a traumatic period for the Greek world. The Book of Revelation, with its coded message of Christian endurance in a hostile world, become a valuable text, as may be seen from a number of commentaries produced in the early centuries of Ottoman rule. The fact that printing Greek books was tightly controlled by the new regime ensured that the manuscript copying continued. This is partly why Revelation, so scant in copies from every century but the fourth and fifth, seems — if the numbers of extant manuscripts is a guide — to have grown in favour slightly from the tenth century, more strongly from the fourteenth. Many of the later manuscripts contain a commentary, providing either a traditional interpretation if it was one of the three older commentaries [Oecumenius, Andreas the Archbishop of Caesarea, Arethas of Caesarea] or a veiled application of the text to the present circumstances if it was one of the new commentaries produced in the early Ottoman period.

D. C. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts, 233-234.