I’ve just uploaded a draft paper to academia.edu called Fifteenth Century Cryptography Revisited. This takes a fresh look at the topic (specifically at homophonic ciphers, Simonetta, and Alberti), and takes a view quite different from David Kahn’s (now 50-year-old) interpretation.
Please take a look: I don’t yet know where it will end up (i.e. as a book chapter, a journal article, or whatever), but I thought it would be good to push the current version up, see what people think.
The abstract runs as follows:
Fifteenth Century Cryptography Revisited
In the fifteenth century, the art of secret writing was dramatically transformed. The simple ciphers typical of the preceding century were rapidly replaced by complicated cipher systems built from nulls, nomenclators, homophones and many other tricks.
Homophones – where individual plaintext letters were enciphered by one of a set of different shapes – were, according to David Kahn’s influential interpretation, added specifically to defend against frequency analysis attacks. Kahn interprets this as a sign of the emergence of cryptanalysis, possibly from Arab sources, and also of the growing mathematization and professionalism of cryptology.
However, by closely examining key ciphers and cipher-related texts of this period, this paper instead argues that homophones were instead added as a steganographic defence. That is, the intention was specifically to disguise linguistic weaknesses in Italian and Latin plaintexts that rendered ciphertexts vulnerable to easy decryption.
Building on this analysis, a new account of the history of fifteenth century cryptography is proposed, along with a revised model charting the flow of ideas influencing cryptographic practice during this fascinating period.
Though it runs to eighteen pages, it should be easy to pick up and read. Please let me know if there’s anything that you think needs clarification, or which you think is incorrect etc.
Nick: Thanks for writing this; it’s really appreciated.
Now I have what might seem a rather hard and possibly silly question to ask.
How likely do you think that more evidence of cipher development will come forward for this period?
Obviously the more we have to work with the better. I suppose I wonder how thoroughly the historical archives in search of other examples or related information from this period have been explored and exhausted.
You mention the Urbino cipher which had been to some extent ignored by the academic community. Could there be others like it?
I guess I am asking you a close to impossible question to answer. Nevertheless I would be curious as to your opinion. More understanding of the cipher used and written from the period I think could be invaluable in understanding the Voynich.
Mark: while I would be surprised if a new primary fifteenth century source on codebreaking (such as Simonetta or Alberti) were to appear, few of the cipher ledgers have been studied in depth, and there are lots of unknown cipher documents yet to be even seen, let alone studied.
Congratulations. This is precisely the argument my brother James Comegys makes. This is precisely why my documentation that both the EVA k and EVA t are tl as documented in the historic record, and not different as Tucker would have it, is important. I have requested to join the conversation on academia.edu If you have trouble with my website my 2013 article is posted on academia.edu
Thanks Nick for your summary. May I add background to the number side pre-15th century cryptolgrapghers by
https://www.academia.edu/27481937/Arabic_numerals_Update_
Our modern base 10 decimal system formally ended 3,600 years of unit fraction based 10 encoded number systems, facts known by many that created the interesting word based cryptology methods.
Welcome to Academia.edu.
Milo Gardner
Reading ancient math and word texts as originally written
Nick: Given your comments, how do you see these other examples of ciphers coming to light?
Given the dearth of examples of cipher from the early 15th century, which is my particular interest, any more data could make so much difference.
I don’t know if any programs are being implemented to digitise these documents and I would assume also other non-cipher containing documents. Obviously these actions would greatly assist Voynich and other researchers worldwide. I would guess that improvements in handwriting recognition would make it easier for researchers to find what they are looking for amongst the plethora of documents. I would also imagine that advances in technology could make the digitisation process faster, cheaper and easier. (I suppose automated transcription of the Voynich would be nice and could be much more reliable than human transcription.)
I mentioned before the place of technology in assisting Voynich researchers obviously such as the role of the internet, carbon dating and future developments, I have speculated, such as specifically uniquely author DNA extraction and chemically isolating the geographical origins of many the materials used in the makeup of the manuscript.
I have made some preliminary enquiries with the Vatican Archives, but if the contents of their library was digitised it would make things so much easier.
What do you think we can expect going forward in terms of the putting of relevant documents online?
*programme NOT program(in the computing context)
Rather programme as an organised plan
I thought this was unclear.
Nick: Reread the article. Great stuff! Just the kind of subject I need to know more about.
How are we going to hunt out the as yet unstùdied studied cipher texts? We need a Wilfred Voynich type to go and find these and record them and make them available online. When you carried out your research in Italy how much of the relevant historical documents were you able to access?
It is cheering to think that the solution to the Voynich is in a manuscript somewhere waiting to be discovered.
Nick: Being a newby, I have no idea which are the key archives in Italy and where such documents might be.
@Mark,
I can tell you at a University near where I live, a 1 year project (pending additional funding) was just started to digitize manuscripts in their archives. It is one of the top 20 libraries in the US for holdings, and have documents dating back to at least 900 A.D.
I personally think the documents could be anywhere- the wealthy bought these items, passed them down in their family, and many went on to donate their collections to universities or even public libraries.
I do know one of the questions they are facing is annotation and search ability. And of course, funding. I also don’t know if they will be made publicly available, though most projects that use government money now need to have their data public so I assume it will be but I have hit paywalls on some European sites.
I have to assume most libraries with precious material in their collections would be moving toward digitization. Heck, card catalogs are a thing of the past- I can’t imagine even digitizing that 20 years ago when you have millions of articles in your collection!
-Marie
Are we saying that if the Nazi military used the Voynich cipher instead of the Enigma machine then they might have won World War II?
I think not, because one thing which I believed greatly helped in solving the Enigma machine ciphers was being able to guess how a message might have started or ended e.g. “Heil Hitler” and then being able to use that like a crib. With the Voynich we are in a much poorer state on the crib/block paradigm front despite the quantity of text we have to work with.
Still it is not inconceivable I think that once the Voynich cipher is known it could even have some effect on contemporary cryptography, given how hard it is to crack.
You’re taking an awful lot for granted there Nobby; besides Lily was in our camp; Voynich that is; not Lily of the lamp light Marlaine, who some say worked in the nazi lines of an evening.
Someone referred me to the following:
Le Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi lucchese. A cura di Salvatore Bongi 1892
I don’t recall having seen this before, but it is possible.
Downloadable at:
https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/hnh5100b2477167v1.pdf
Pages 408 to 410 appear to contain late 14th century Milanese diplomatic ciphers.
“CCCCLXI Chome lo duga di Milano mandava E RICEVEA LÈCTORE CONTRAEACTE.”
So I take that to mean that we can date the ciphers to around 1461 missing the M for 1000. Tell me if I have got that wrong.
If so what strikes me is how little development in ciphers there has been in roughly the next 40 years in comparison to roughly the following 40 years.
With the 1461 cipher key we have 3 homophones on the vowels and a single substitution on the other letters.
In the Francesco Barbavara cipher key in Mantua cipher ledger, which must be dated to between 1395 and 1403, we see exactly the same 3 homophones on the vowels and a single substitution on the other letters.
So in 40 years there appears to be little or no developments.
If we look at the 1435 Modena “In Milano” cipher key we see a big jump in the complexity of the Milanese cipher keys.
Then if we look at the Filippo Maria Visconti 1447 cipher key we see another big jump in the complexity of the Milanese cipher keys.
The complexity of diplomatic cipher keys does then not appear to increase until near the end of the 15th century.
So in a period of at most 45 years it looks like we have a transformation in the complexity of cipher keys. It is clear that in some of the more minor city states we barely see any advances in cipher design over this period. Which city states were leading the charge in these advances is as yet unclear from the cipher data I have at the moment, but Milan was certainly one of the leaders.
According to wikipedia:
Giovanni Sercambi (1348–1424) was an Italian author from Lucca who wrote a history of his city, Le croniche di Luccha, as well as Il novelliere (or Novelle), a collection of 155 tales.
This dates the cipher to at least 40 years earlier than I suggested. Which suggests even less change in ciphers over a long period of time.
After all my to-ing and fro-ing on dating the ciphers in the Giovanni Sercambi book have been suggested online by someone to be dated to 1397, which makes sense. Still this is a useful reference point for where Milanese ciphers were at that time.
I find the following quote from:
“The First Resident Embassies: Mediaeval Italian Origins of Modern Diplomacy” by Garrett Mattingly” in “Speculum: A Journal of Mediaeval Studies Volume 12 October, 1937 No. 4 pages 423 to 439”
of particular interest. Though much of this article is of interest.
“Permanent diplomacy made important advances in the reign of Filippo Maria. The last of the Visconti trusted in guile rather than force, and found diplomacy a congenial arm. He knew the advantages of organization, of regular channels of information, of established methods of procedure. Perhaps, too, his indecisive temperament found in long and tortuous negotiation a refuge and a substitute for action. His secretary, Francesco Barbavara(Not to be confused with his uncle who was Gian Galeazzo’s chancellor), built up the Milanese chancery along lines which were to make it, under Cicco Simonetta, perhaps the most efficient in Europe. His secret political agents reported from all quarters of Italy. He welcomed ambassadors from the Italian states, and did his best to establish diplomatic liaisons among the remaining Ghibelline powers. But, until the last year or so of his life, it is his diplomacy outside the peninsula which is most significant. He sent embassies to the kings of Aragon and Burgundy, and twice to the Turks, probably with the idea of stirring up the enemies of Christendom against the Venetians. And, for more than seven years, he was continuously represented at the court of the King of the Romans, during most of which time Sigismund was also represented at Milan.”
I need to read more in Osio on the subject to understand more on the diplomatic activities under Filippo Maria Visconti.
Cardinal Francesco Capaccini(1784-1845) apparently studied the historical ciphers in the Vatican Archives. However I don’t know where in the archive the ciphers that he studied were, they may be in a place in the archives that I already know contains ciphers or somewhere new.
I need to look further into the Vatican archives. Other writers like Meister seemed to have missed some, which makes me wonder if there is much more to be seen.
For completeness I should look further into the ciphers listed in Bischoff’s writing.
Quoting from Intrighi in Vaticano: Misteri e segreti all’ombra di San Pietro, dai Borgia al Corvo by Nina Fabrizio (2013)->
‘One of these consisted of a type of encryption that a century later was known as “homophonic”. Capaccini discovered the original of this system in a manuscript written in 1401, in the Duchy of Mantua, and preserved in the Vatican Library.’
I wonder if this is a mistake and she is referring to Martino Ghisolfi Cipher Ledger in the Mantova Archive or if, fingers crossed, there is another manuscript, unknown to me. She says he discovered the origin of the system though the origin of homophonic ciphers pre-dates 1401. In short the accuracy of this information may be limited.
Francesco Capaccini was the 1st head of the Cryptographic Department of the Vatican and it appears made a systematic study of the historical ciphers in the Vatican Archive. One could hope that one might find a reference to where all the ciphers are, in any writings regarding him.
Pre-Vatican Archives
The Pre-Vatican period ranged from about 1370 to 1446. The library was scattered during this time, with parts in Rome, Avignon and elsewhere.
This is the period that we are interested in.
I believe the Avignon archive was reincorporated later.
It is not clear to me how the documents from this pre-Vatican period are distributed through the archive.
My particular interest is the reigns of Pope Martin V and Pope Eugene IV
I have been thinking about looking at non-diplomatic ciphers from pre-1450, having already studied diplomatic ciphers a great deal. Perusing Philip Neal’s list taken from Bischoff, I believe, it appears that many of the ciphers could be described within the framework of diplomatic ciphers even if they were not used for diplomatic ciphers. So the atbash or caesar cipher could be defined with a simple diplomatic cipher key. I am interested in cipher ideas contemporaneous with the Voynich that cannot be described with the framework of diplomatic ciphers of the time.
So my interest has to be in ciphers that are distinct and different from early 15th century diplomatic ciphers. For example, these could be ciphers that used anagrams as that does not tend to be a feature of diplomatic ciphers.
So from my point of view simple substitution ciphers that use all sorts of different invented alphabets could be covered under the heading of diplomatic style ciphers, they merely differ in symbol choice, and as such are of little interest to me; there appear to be many listed by Neal/Bischoff that fall into that category.
There are some ciphers which, whilst they are not described within the framework of diplomatic ciphers, are relatively trivial, though there is no harm including them. Reversal of words or sentences and omission of letters are such. Remember the Voynich could draw on multiple distinct cipher sources conceivably.
An overview makes it clear that the most sophisticated of the non-diplomatic ciphers cannot nearly compare with the complexity of the kind of diplomatic ciphers that we see by the 1440s.
I have been thinking a little about Alberti and his influences in developing the cipher disk. I get the impression that the idea for it occurred to him a significant period of time before he wrote on the subject.
Mark: Alberti explicitly claimed the opposite, i.e. that he only looked at ciphers because he was asked to.
Nick: Interesting. Thanks for that. I will have to read further. Out of interest, who asked him to and when?
According to the internet “Alberti’s treatise was written for his friend Leonardo Dati”. In wikipedia it links to a Leonardo Dati who died in 1425, which I assume can’t be the correct one, maybe the father.
Nick: It is clearly a complicated subject. I think when reading about Fontana’s disk which was somewhat similar to Alberti’s disk I confused the two. I was looking into the question as to whether the origins of the cipher disk could be found in the period from which the Voynich is carbon dated and therefore whether it should be considered as amongst the contemporary ciphers. I think it is a stretch to try to date some kind of cipher disk as having been invented before 1438, which I suppose means it can be excluded as a direct influence, though I think there is scope for arguing that the author of the Voynich could have been influenced by the same influences as Alberti or Fontana such as Ramon Llull.
If Ramon Llull should be considered a possible influence then are there other potential non-cipher influences on the Voynich cipher that need to be considered.
In general terms I am inclined to the view that everything has its antecedents. So if Voynichese is a cipher then it did not emerge out of the clear blue sky, but finds its origins in something that precedes it. Diplomatic ciphers are by far and away the strongest contenders I think, but there could be others. So combinatorial mechanisms could be something to consider.
Nick: What you say about Alberti only looking at ciphers, because he was asked to, does seem consistent with what I have read and I can’t see any reason to doubt him in that respect.
The simplicity of the non-diplomatic ciphers we find in Bischoff would make me inclined to believe that if they had any influence at all on Voynichese it was a very small one.
However learning about Ramon Llull actually appears to open the door to Voynichese being a polyalphabetic cipher or exhibiting features related to polyalphabetic ciphers. Whilst Fontana did not invent a cipher disk it seems that he invented something similar and I believe that Alberti possessed many books by Ramon Llull, also I think Kahn suggests a link between the two. If the author of the Voynich also had books by Ramon llull then perhaps he/she also developed some kind of cipher disk or even conceivably if the author knew directly or indirectly Fontana’s work then that could have influenced the development of a cipher disk of some kind given Fontana’s development of something very similar to a cipher disk.
Anyway, the Voynich script is much more consistent with diplomatic ciphers. Though it is possible that Voynichese is a hybrid of a complex diplomatic cipher of the 1400s and Lullian influenced polyalphabetic cipher, producing something very complicated indeed.
All in all, my inclination is still towards Voynichese being a verbose cipher influenced by diplomatic ciphers and using a significant filler text in the form of “null” words and so probably with no polyalphabetic influences. But I must confess the idea of some combinatorial mechanism being used as part of the cipher working is enticing. Are there other mechanisms outside those of Llull which could have been an influence?
Regarding Llull and the origins of the cipher disk and Voynichese in general I think it is to be expected that most technological developments have precursors. So if Voynichese is a cipher there must have been influences on it. It seems inconceivable that someone would invent as sophisticated a cipher as Voynichese with no acquaintance with ciphers or technologies which could be modified for encipering. People make intellectual jumps from one idea to another, so they do invent new things, but normally those new things have a source that is pre-existing. Probably the greater the imagination and ability of the inventor the greater the intellectual jump they may have made from one idea to the next.
I was curious and to some extent still am curious about the history of the invention of the steal engine. The conventional presentation is that James Watt invented the steam engine and George Stephenson the steam train. This greatly simplifies reality. Here is a less simplified, though of course still simplified idea of how it was developed:
1) Robert Boyle developed his Boyle’s law, which deals with how the pressure and volume of a gas are connected. (This was enhanced to include temperature.)
2) Denis Papin developed the pressure cooker.
3) Thomas Savery developed a model of a steam pump that he demonstrated to the Royal Society.
4) Thomas Newcomen constructed a full size steam pump and installed it at various mines for pumping out the water.
5) James Watt improved the design of the steam pump to greatly increase its efficiency and extend its possible uses.
Steam Train
1) Richard Trevithick created the first high-pressure steam engine and the first steam train.
2) George Stephenson improved on Trevithick’s design making for a much more efficient and faster steam train.
We tend to remember the people who made these inventions a widely used commercial success.
So what is the point of all this? Well, I fundamentally oppose the idea that Voynichese if it is a cipher it was developed without significant influences on it. It may have been influenced by diplomatic ciphers of the time, it may have been influenced by the precursors of the cipher disk, it may have been influenced by some ideas from non-diplomatic ciphers and it may have been influenced by 2 of these or all 3. (There may be another potential influence(s) that I am as yet unaware of.)
Voynichese has visually most in common with diplomatic ciphers given the nature of the symbols in the script, it also, I would argue, gives some indications that nulls of some kind may be present in the text. Diplomatic ciphers are, as if often pointed out, in and of themselves insufficient to predict the properties that we see in the Voynich. Non-diplomatic ciphers are too simple to be the sole influence and it seems they are few and far between, making it unlikely that the author would come into contact with them. I think it is hard to say whether some kind of disk or other pre-existing mechanism could be the basis for the encoding, but if so why the need for the special script?
Nick: Thanks for the comment on Ninja. There is obviously no urgency to look at what I think must be a cipher key for King Rupert of Germany, but I was curious about the shorthand, not being familiar with such things. In general there are a few cipher keys that I have found interesting, because of their distinctive features and some others because of their links to Milan/B. As an example the Venetian cipher in the Guinigi cipher ledger includes some number shorthand/symbols that I don’t think I have seen elsewhere. I haven’t yet made a list of the cipher keys that interest me.
I mentioned the Tironian notes not, because I necessarily think they have anything to do with the Voynich, but just because I don’t really understand them and how I should use them and which ones appear in cipher keys and which don’t.
Regarding your point about nulls you are right that I haven’t studied their usage. I haven’t studied the usage of homophones, in the sense that I don’t know if people tend to loop through them in sequence when substituting or do they select each homophone in a randomish way. How do people tend to select which null symbol to use and when? I suppose one cannot glean this from looking just at cipher keys and one would need to study a significant number of letters to see how different people implemented the cipher key in practice.
If you are interested Venetian ciphers and cipher keys you may be interested in the following:
In the Lucca cipher ledger there is a cipher key headed->
“Cyfra cum domino Marino Caravello et cum domino Zaccaria Trevisano de Venetiis. Ac etiam cum fratre Bernardo de Dandolo notario in cancellaria Venetorum.”
This can also be found in Meister’s book “Die Anfange der Modernen diplomatischen Geheimschrift” on page 56 and 57.
This cipher key has a distinctive feature that includes codes for numbers 1 to 10; it is unusual to encipher numbers even in this very simple way in ciphers of this period.
This cipher key appears to me to be Venetian in origin as it does not look like a typical cipher key from Lucca and it is addressed to representatives of the Republic of Venice. So I think it is reasonable to believe that the same cipher key would have been in the Venetian cipher ledger. I think this is dated to earlier than the Michele Steno cipher of 1411 as it does not have homophones for non-vowels. So I think it is mostly like dated from between 1400 and 1411 as Paolo Guinigi became Lord of Lucca in 1400.
This and other examples illustrates the usefulness of determining the identity of the people for whom each cipher key is intended to be used to communicate with. I believe that Lydia Cerioni has done this for the Tranchedino cipher ledger, but I don’t think this has been done for Paolo Guinigi’s cipher ledger or Francesco Gonzaga’s cipher ledger or the Codex Urbinate cipher ledger. This can be quite hard as often the handwriting is hard to read and then the correspondents can often be hard to identify as they can be relatively minor historical figures representing one state/lord or another. Nevertheless I think this would be enlightening.
I should make a correction that the 1411 Michele Steno cipher does not really have homophones for non-vowels(it may have one for the letter “s”.) And re-examining the Lucca Venetian cipher key it appears not to use homophones at all. So I would say that the dating conclusions still stand, but not for the precise reasons given. Apologies for the inaccuracy!
It seems to me that early 15th century Papal ciphers seemed to consist of a long list in alphabetical order of word substitutions for the names of individuals such as:
A)
………
D)
…
“Donald Trump” -> “Orange”
………
N)
…
“Nick Pelling” -> “Cursed”
………
W)
…
“Wilfred Voynich” -> “Finder”
………
I must say that I have not studied this area in much depth, but this rather primitive cipher often, it appears, is absent of the kind of unusual symbols we see in other ciphers of the time. It is worth noting that this cipher design seems to possibly be at variance with what we see in earlier papal ciphers. Though one should remember that Gabriel de Lavinde’s cipher ledger was for an Antipope not a Pope and therefore may have differed from the kind used by the Pope. Certainly a lot more could be done to investigate this area.
All in all, this makes papal ciphers of the period seem rather simple, though there is, I think, probably a lack of data as to how they evolved over time. It does illustrate the fact that there was some degree of variability between different states and the precise nature of the ciphers they used. It seems to be that there were different trends and strands of cipher designs between the states many of which probably came over time to be unified into a standard design.
Hopefully over time I which become more confident in my understanding of these questions.
I have been studying the Albertoni Cipher Ledger. The DECODE database people have obtained photoreproductions of the whole manuscript. It is a cipher ledger dated from 1444 to 1480. So it covers a very similar period to the Codex Urbinate. It is laid out much like the Tranchedino and the Urbinate with a list of the cipher keys at the start like a contents. It is a large cipher ledger. I would have thought of a similar or larger size than the Urbinate.(I haven’t counted them yet)
The cipher keys are generally of the kind found in the other two cipher ledgers.
When it comes to unusual features there are some glossary items with more than one symbol similar to homophones.
I was interested by some of the more complicated glossary symbols and possible Voynich parallels.
There are plenty of the following Voynich symbols: 4o 4p Ip cp
Mark Knowles: this is great news, fantastic!
My first question is obviously where 4o appears in the 1440-1460 range (putting aside 40 in later numeral-based ciphers).
My second question is whether there are any ciphers with verbose pairs, particularly for Roman number-letters (IVXLCDM). I’ve spent a load of time looking for these, but without any success (so far).
Nick, Mark
I’m interested in ledgers from the Papal court during its time in Avignon. I know that some records from that period exist, but would be grateful for any directions/advice about how to begin finding their description and location.
There is a ledger in:
Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der Päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des XVI. Jahrhunderts
Author: Aloys Meister
You can find it on archive.org I believe
I have referred to a collection of cipher keys in the Vatican Archives in the section for Castel Sant’Angelo in comments somewhere on this blog. Search online using site:ciphermysteries.com
Nick: Did you see this?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10224469/Dickens-academics-offer-300-reward-decipher-authors-mysterious-letters.html
Nick: Now, this has got me thinking. Is the Albertoni cipher ledger a cipher ledger of the Duchy of Milan that somehow ended up in the hands of the Albertoni family? How did it find its way to Cremona? Someone needs to go through the ledger and identify the correspondents. In some instances one may find the same key in other ledgers like the Tranchedino and the Urbinate.
I haven’t taken so much interest in the Albertoni Cipher ledger as the earliest cipher keys date from 1444 which is right at the end of my time period of interest.
When people use the word “discovered” when it comes to manuscripts and the like it seems to me that they usually mean “realised the importance of” or “publicised the existence of”. So when the Cremona State Library announced a couple of years ago that they had discovered a cipher ledger then it seems to me that they had really noticed it, though I could be wrong. Similarly, Wilfred Voynich didn’t “discover” the VM, he publicised the existence of it.
Nick: There is a 1450 cipher key in the ledger headed from what I can read “Cum Dominico Guagardo”. “Guagardo” is most likely not the correct spelling, but the writing is not easy to read. It shows elements in the symbols it uses that I think are akin to what we might expect from a verbose cipher.
It may help to know that the Vms ‘4’ shape seems so far not to derive from the numeral, and representing ‘4’ in that way in printed books doesn’t begin until long after the Vms’ date range. Information on the second point was fairly easy to find, but just to be sure I asked a master of printing whose passion (for about forty years) has been the history of his craft and his response was that, while not able to access his personal library at present, he knew that the form wasn’t used by Gutenberg and doesn’t appear in any printed book until much later than the range we have for the Vms.
The printer doesn’t want his details published anywhere, but if you want, I’ll email.
Also – which may seem off-topic – anyone who has contacts in Lyons who might be willing to assist. There’s a list of the notae, as symbols and/or abbreviated letters which (according to Carruthers, who cites Harrison Tomson) is the key to Grosseteste’s annotations in his books and is to be found in the first fifteen folios, in a Bible (Lyons MS 414).
Even if quite irrelevant for study of the Vms, I expect some of your readers might like it for its own sake. I’d like a copy or a link if anyone sees it.
The symbol “4” was certainly being used in the early 15th century to represent the number four. This is clear to me as there are documents that I have seen with dates written such as “1440”.
Mark Knowles: while it’s true that some people did start using the funky new number system earlier than others, some documents are actually copies of earlier documents. For example, the Tranchedino cipher ledger we now see is actually a copy of a copy.
Nick: In Paolo Guinigi’s cipher ledger we see the use of the symbol “4” for the number four in the context of counting as well as in years. Clearly Roman numerals were often used to represent years, but there does seem to me to be quite a lot of evidence for the use of arabic numerals throughout the early 15th century. Arabic numerals appear to have been written as we see now, except for the symbol for the number five, which sometimes looks a bit different from how it does now. I don’t know when Arabic numerals were first used in Italy or how their usage spread and amongst whom.
I must confess that I don’t know or understand the history of the Tranchedino cipher ledger or for that matter the Albertino cipher ledger and naturally I wonder if there are other hopefully earlier cipher ledgers out there still waiting to be “discovered”.
Nick: You might find the following interesting regarding the Albertoni cipher ledger->
https://www.lanuovapadania.it/cultura/ecco-il-codice-segreto-degli-sforza-il-regalo-domenicale-della-biblioteca-di-cremona-su-fb/
It refers to the Codex Z 198 in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana di Milano and the Manuscript Reg.Duc. 39 of the Archivio di Stato di Milano. I assume that they are of a later date or are included by Cerioni in her books.
What makes me sad about the Albertoni cipher ledger is the dates that it covers namely the 35 year period from 1444 to 1479. We have plenty of evidence for ciphers from this period, however the evidence from previous decades, 1410s 1420s & 1430s, is sparse at best.
How I would dream of a Milanese cipher ledger that covers a 35 year from say 1408 to 1443. Unfortunately, I doubt such a ledger survives. This period was a time of dynamic evolution of Milanese ciphers by 1444 they had largely crystallised in the form that we see for the rest of the century. By contrast the difference in the level of sophistication between Milanese ciphers of 1404 and 1444 is stark. I believe their ciphers were simplified for practical ease of use from the 1430s to the 1440s making those of the 1430s more advanced than their successors.
I would welcome a better understanding of how and why the Albertoni family came to possess such a large cipher ledger as this could give me insights as to where I might look for other cipher keys.
It is a bit funny finding a discussion about the use of Arabic numerals on a site called “Cipher Mysteries”. In Italian (and Medieval Latin and Spanish etc.) “cifra” means (Arabic) numeral; due to the use of Arabic numerals in encoded texts, “cifrare” (literally: writing/using Arabic numerals) means “to encode” and “decifrare” means to “decode” or “to decipher”…
Anyway, traditionally the introduction of Arabic numerals in Italy is attributed to Fibonacci and his “Liber Abaci”, written in 1202 (it is taught even in primary schools around here). In the copy of the Liber Abaci of the National Library of Florence (Codice Magliabechiano Conv. Soppr. C 1, 2616), from the early XIV century, the numeral “4” is indeed shaped as the symbol of the Voynich.
Knowles: “Guagardo” might be “Guagliardo”, which in turn could be an alternate spelling for “Gagliardo” (gallant, brave).
Nick: Personally I don’t think the use of the symbol “4” as a numeral in the 15th century presents any problem vis a vis the “4o” symbol or the “4P” symbol for that matter. The number forty was written “4 0” with a space between the digits whereas for the “4o” symbol the “4” and the “o” are joined together. “4o” was treated in ciphers as a symbol in its own right as were other symbols that served as combinations of known symbols. When symbols were used in cipher keys they left behind their previous meanings and merely became substitution symbols. So if for example a symbol was used elsewhere as some kind of abbreviation when it entered the cipher key it lost its previous meaning.
testing..
Mark, Thanks for posting the Meister reference. What I’m hunting are any surviving commercial and financial ledgers from, say, the last five years of the Avignon papal court, if you happen to know where in the Vatican archives such material, if there is any, might be found. With no certainty such records still exist, no specific shelf numbers and no idea in which library they might be kept if they exist, I can’t ask the librarians’ help.
Stefano,
I have just read your comment (above). The origin of ‘cifre’ is even more interesting. It originally meant something like a whistling wind (of the desert) and was the sound made by the djinn. It referred later to the ‘0’ as zero, and so to Arabic numerals and so on.
Via a quotation from a monograph published in 1915, it happens I’ve just mentioned the same early example from Florence which, as I see now, you’d already brought to notice. As far as I know so far, that manuscript is still the earliest mss known with an upright ‘4’ shape; not every copy of Leonard of Pisa’s text used it.
If other readers would like to see that Florentine example, I’ve illustrated it in the latest post to ‘Voynich Revisionist’ blog. Post is entitled, ‘Anomalies. Consider this…’
Nick: Have you had any luck splitting that pdf file?
Mark Knowles: I’ve had a bit of a disappointing day today, but I’ll try again shortly.
Nick: If it is a problem then don’t worry it is really not urgent. I imagine that if you can just split it into 2 or more pdfs that should give you smaller files to work with.
a curio –
“Among the earliest uses [of the Arabic numerals] outside the algorisms themselves is that made by a Perugian notary from 1184-1206, as a kind of secret code, to indicate the number of lines in his legal documents.”
Charles Burnett, ‘The Semantic of Indian Numerals in Arabic, Greek and Latin’, Journal of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 34, No. 1/2 (April 2006) pp.15-30. [JSTOR]
Diane: I can well imagine some of the northern Incas getting by in basic Nahuatl and like dialects but, Peruvian notaries of 12th century era would struggle with Arabic numeric codes and such. This baring in mind the Spanish under Pizzaro, with a few Arabic speaking Moorish foot soldiers no doubt, didn’t arrive until around 1532 or so. I’d strongly recommend on this basis alone, that your Chuck Burnett go back and check his history, something’s surely amiss.
Dear John,
To quote someone who *does* have a knowledge of Nahuatl and who considered the book by Janick and Tucker,
““The most nefarious problem is that [it] is pseudo-rigorous – that is it, it works hard to give the appearance of being rigorous scholarship while in fact it is not at all. … citations are used only for circumstantial evidence. As soon as we look at the concrete examples and the readings they … rest on pure speculation – often uninformed speculation.”
Magnus Pharao Hansen.
To read the review in full, see ‘Was the Voynich manuscript written in Nahuatl?;
https://nahuatlstudies.blogspot com/2018/12/was-voynich-manuscript-written-in.html
Feel free to recommend it to other Voynicheros who may have been misguided enough to take the ‘Nahuatl’ idea on faith as unfortunately the publisher did. I can only suppose Springer had decided to by-pass the peer review stage, since no competent historian would accept the ‘Spanish Kabbalist missionaries’ tale, nor any competent codicologist or palaeographer accept so late a dating, nor any competent linguist who knew Nahuatl accept that aspect of the storyline.
John Sanders: “Perugian”, but I think you probably know that already.
Mark Knowles: *snort*
I am waiting from some enciphered letters from the Florence and Milan State Archives. I sent them emails a little while ago requesting photoreproductions of the letters. I hadn’t heard back from them so I phoned them on Friday and spoke to the relevant archivists. On a positive note they said that they had received the emails, but it could take a month or two before they had the results. That seemed reasonable to me as I hadn’t been able to give them precise archive references, as I don’t have them, but I could give them quite a bit of background information based on other documents which should help significantly in locating them. Unfortunately I am quite an impatient person, but I will just have to wait to see what they come back with.
On a related note I have been in touch with archivist Marco Maiorino, who is an archivist in Vatican archivist who specialises in their medieval diplomatic documents. I have explained to him that I am interested in early 15th century ciphers and I was wondering if he knows of any enciphered letters or cipher keys in their archive from this period. What I fantasise at the moment about is him locating, if they survive, the intercepted Milanese enciphered letters from 1430. These were sent from the Duchy of Milan to their ambassador to Rome, but were intercepted by the Papacy which caused a diplomatic incident. I have no knowledge that they were successfully deciphered by the Papacy, though they might have. In fact I rather wonder if they weren’t as the incident seemed to raise the ire of the Milanese more than the Papacy, who if they had deciphered them and found some nasty secret would have made fuss. Probably these documents don’t survive, although I haven’t tracked down the primary sources that describe the incident. The period of the late 1420s and 1430s seems more difficult as it seems like ambassadors and envoys were being used more as opposed to direct communication making it more likely that the ciphers were lost. I don’t hold out much hope that the 1427 enciphered letter from the envoy to Holy Roman Emperor, to be, Sigsmund, referred to in Osio, has survived. Probably there is out there some Milanese enciphered communication from the late 1420s and 1430s that I am completely unaware of, waiting to be located.
I have been wondering for some time if there could be some early 15th century Milanese ciphers in Spanish archives. Given how heavily the Kingdom of Aragon was involved in the Italian peninsula and that King Alphonso V of Aragon had many dealings with the Milanese it seems possible that some enciphered communication may have survived there. Still I have, as yet, no evidence of such and preliminary researches have not been promising. And those records, such as in the case of the Kingdom of Naples, could be elsewhere in Italian not Spanish archives.
I also have wondered if any correspondence has survived between the Duke of Savoy, who was also an Antipope, and the Milanese, but where that might be is unclear.
I suppose I have considered the major diplomatic correspondents that the Milanese would have had. Though if they were major, envoys or ambassadors were more likely to have been employed.
Nevertheless, if my current experience is a guide, it is likely that in fact if I do find what I am looking for it will be with a correspondent that I haven’t even considered.
Mark Knowles: that’s very interesting, I don’t recall a story about the Papacy intercepting Milanese enciphered letters in 1430, may I possibly ask what your source is for this?
Nick: I found other references to this event, but this is one->
https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/guarniero-castiglioni_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/
“Nei mesi immediatamente successivi all’elezione del nuovo pontefice, che aveva assunto il nome di Eugenio IV, il C. fu protagonista di un incidente diplomatico sorto fra il papa ed il duca di Milano. Dovette infatti vibratamente protestare con il papa, poiché erano state intercettate ed aperte lettere cifrate a lui indirizzate provenienti dal ducato.”
Which google translates as:
“In the months immediately following the election of the new pontiff, who had taken the name of Eugene IV, Guarniero Castiglioni was the protagonist of a diplomatic incident that arose between the pope and the Duke of Milan. In fact, he had to vigorously protest with the pope, since encrypted letters addressed to him had been intercepted and opened from the duchy.”(Guarniero Castiglioni was the Milanese Ambassador to Rome)
The attraction of these letters to me is that first of all the fact that the letters are for the then ambassador to Rome makes it very likely that the Milanese would use their most advanced ciphers as this is a very important correspondent and one not representing another state that might be inclined to steal the Milanese cipher techniques. In addition the implication seems to be that there might be multiple letters which should help a lot if the cipher is difficult to crack.
Given my line of thinking I would be very surprised if the cipher used was not really very interesting. However I imagine that, without more clues, working out where such enciphered letters might be in the maze of the Vatican Archives will be tough even for an archivist with expertise in the diplomatic documents of the time.
More unrelated, but interesting news to follow…
An email that I sent to Professor Juan Carlos Galende Díaz of the Dpto. Historia de América y Medieval y Ciencias Historiográficas, Facultad de Geografía e Historia,
UCM has lead to him referring me to the following articles:
– Antonio. M. ARAGO I CABAÑAS, “Una clau criptográfica del segle XV”, Cuadernos de Arqueología e Historia de la ciudad, 12 (1968), Barcelona, pp. 171-176 (analyzes the key of a document sent on March 18, 1437 by Ambassador Guillem Ramón de Montcada to the King of France).
– Josefa CORTÉS ESCRIVA y Vicente PONS ALÓS, “Una clau criptográfica d’Alfons el Magnánim per a la guerra amb Castella (1429)”, Saitabi, XXVIII (1978), Valencia, pp. 25-31.
I contacted him as I found an article that he had written called “LA ESCRITURA CIFRADA DURANTE EL REINADO DE LOS REYES CATOLICOS Y CARLOS V” which addresses historical Spanish ciphers, though of a slightly later era. I did not anticipate that he would have any interesting references, but contacted him just on the off-chance.
M Knowles: “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark’ or “Something
is rotten in the state of Denmark” . I can see your point on a slight variation in sentence construction making not the slightest difference in meaning overall meaning. I wonder if Bill the Bard gave much thought to the layout when puting the final touches on Hamlet four hundred years before the Voynich authors.
…..well three hundred years, but I think you probably know that already!
John Sanders: Well, I am glad you fully appreciate the purpose of that statement. If the Bard were writing 400 years before the Voynich I think the sentence construction could have been different. A more pertinent question might be why you chose to comment on this blog about it rather than on the Ninja forum?
Mark: No need for me to comment at present on Ninja at present. If and when the middle age era faithful finally see the folly of their ways, I’ll share the joys of late discovery being happy with my contribution, by then there’d be no need to join the celebrations. Still doesn’t mean I can’t share interest in new research concepts being tauted regularly for discussion at arms length. Certainly puts us Somerton Man misfits to shame.
John,
By sharing his material and thoughts here, Mark is making matter available to all 500+ subscribers to this blog. I find it a little disturbing that your comment seems to carry an overtone suggesting that there is any particular place where people “ought” to be posting or sharing.
Here, unlike mailing lists or forums, one doesn’t have to join the gang in order to read comments and *follow links*, and decisions about what to admit, or block, is entirely up to one person who has a fairly Voltarian idea of free speech. In my experience, forum moderators are nice guys who, being chiefly concerned to maintain a nice atmosphere, are vulnerable to lobbyists. I’ve seen one mailing list and three forums reduced to silence principally because some lobby-gang so narrowed the parameters of conversation that none could be opened or engaged which the dominant minority didn’t want. Things can become so ridiculous in an online forum that there are “names which one may not speak.”
That sort of forum, of course, isn’t one you’d want to join, nor me – nor anyone of sense, I’d say.
Looking at:
https://mobiroderic.uv.es/bitstream/handle/10550/27844/SI_XXXVI_1986_002_25.pdf
The photo at the bottom looks rather interesting as it looks like it could be one of many cipher keys.
The article lists a cipher key from 1429 and one from 1437.
It refers to Biblioteca Arxiu Historic Maiansia – Col.legi Corpus Christi of Valencia
So I wonder if I should contact these guys to get photoreproductions and see how many cipher keys or enciphered letters they have.
Diane: Anything of mine that you are inclined to find ‘a little disturbing’ gives me all the more confidence that I’m getting my message across. Unlike your good self I’ve not been denied access to Ninja, it’s just that I’m in awe of the vast amount of collective unflappably ignorant intelligence mustered on one forum
A bit more research leads me to believe, what I think is to be expected, that the Kingdom of Aragon was much more advanced in its use of ciphers in the early 15th century than the other states in the Iberian peninsula, which it seems on the whole did not encipher messages. This is unsurprising as the Kingdom of Aragon was heavily involved in Italian politics. So almost certainly cipher techniques spread from the Italian states to the Kingdom of Aragon probably through the use of shared cipher keys. In fact the 1429 cipher key looks just like a typical Northern Italian cipher key for the time, though more like an Italian cipher key from the 1410s than the 1420s. Of course as I have previously stated what I am interested in is enciphered letters used by the Kingdom of Aragon to communicate directly with correspondents in Italy; unfortunately the 1429 and 1437 cipher keys seem to have been used for Iberian and French political correspondence.
“In fact I rather wonder if they weren’t as the incident seemed to raise the ire of the Milanese more than the Papacy, who if they had deciphered them and found some nasty secret would have made fuss.”
Unless they didn’t want to reveal they were able to decipher them…
Tavi: That is certainly possible. It would be nice to have an account of the incident from the point of view of the Papacy as it might provide some clue as to the location of the letters whereas a Milanese account would be much less interesting given that it is unlikely to lead to the details of the cipher in the light of the destruction of Milanese cipher records.
John, I’m sorry to say that the comment you mention wasn’t meant for you at all. I was distracted while in the middle of writing it and mistakenly put ‘John’ where I should have said ‘Mark’ and vice versa. I’ve asked Nick if he can find time, either to be kind enough to correct it for me, or to delete it, but he’s obviously had no time to spare.
Diane: If I understand your comment. I would say that you may not understand the context for my remark. I made a comment on the Voynich Ninja forum and rather than reply to that comment on the Voynich Ninja forum where I made the comment, John chose to make an offhand remark about it on this blog. Unless someone had also read my comment on the Voynich Ninja forum they could not understand what the reference was to in John’s comment on this blog. So this comment was intended for me only and not for the benefit of the users of this blog as a whole.
Nick: I am very much coming to the conclusion that the idea of a golden age of Milanese cryptography being the era of the Sforza’s, Cicco Simonetta and Nicolo Tranchedino is a complete and utter myth. This era appears to me to be more one of stagnation where ciphers developed very little from the end of the reign of Filippo Maria Visconti until the end of the 15th century. In fact the 1530 Milanese cipher that we see in Meister in of itself seems little different from ciphers that we see before Francesco Sforza became Duke. I haven’t studied Cicco Simonetta Rules of Decipherment, however I believe it has been argued that they were rather out of date and given the time relatively unsophisticated, though I wouldn’t like to express an opinion.
More to follow…
Nick: Continued…
By contrast it seems that the period from around 1395 to 1447 was a period of big change and advancement of Milanese ciphers. The earliest example that I know of is a Milanese cipher dated to 1397 and which utilises homophones, so I can’t be certain as to when homophones first emerged in Milanese ciphers. Clearly from the Mantua and Modena ciphers the use of homophones began around 1400, so I would be surprised in the Milanese ciphers were using homophones decades earlier. I would guess that the use of homophones spread fairly rapidly amongst the Italian city states. So the choice of 1395 as the rough starting point of that era of cipher change is to some degree speculative.
More to follow…
Nick: Continued…
The Milanese ciphers from around 1400, other than the use of homophones on vowels, are very simple, so many major developments occurred after that time. The reign of Giovanni Maria Visconti (1404-1412) remains an unknown as I am unaware of any ciphers that survive from that time. However I speculate that given the general massive foreign policy failure of that regime they probably weren’t hugely innovative in the cipher field especially as many skilled people from the previous administration had been executed or exiled. This leaves the reign of Filippo Maria Visconti, where I think major cipher innovations happened. Really the Zaninus/Conradinus and Johannes cipher keys generated from enciphered letters from 1424 are core to this argument, though the Marcolino Barbavara cipher key from 1445 hints at this.
Of course, a major implication of this is that the Voynich manuscript is carbon dated, 1404 to 1438, to a period of major innovation in Milanese ciphers and generally also the ciphers of other political actors in the Italian states, although I would say on the basis of all the ciphers from this period, that I know of, it looks like the Milanese state was significantly more innovative than the other states.
More to follow…
Nick: Continued…
If if we combine the features of the 1424 Florentine cipher that we see in Meister “Die Anfange…” and the 1424 Zanino Riccio cipher they encompass all the features that we see in the Milanese ciphers throughout the rest of the century. And the Zanino Riccio cipher appears to have features that we don’t see in those later 15th century ciphers. So surprisingly it appears that all the 15th century diplomatic cipher innovation had already happened by 1424.(I don’t include Alberti’s work amongst the diplomatic ciphers in this particular context.)
But there is an important gap in the Milanese cipher record as I know it and that is from 1425 to 1444. The question for me is what happened in that gap? If there are features in 1424 Zanino Riccio cipher not found in later ciphers then maybe there are more advanced features in the 1430s Milanese ciphers also not seen in later ciphers. Did Milanese cipher innovation largely stop in 1424 or did it continue on a pace? Did it merely incorporate the features seen in the Florence cipher and stop there?
More to follow…
John, re your remark about ‘being denied access to ninja’ – at the time I felt it was not the best response the moderator might have made to my asking to caution another member, whose abuse had moved from inventing slander behind the scenes to overtly libellous comments being made – and thus published – in public.
Apparently the moderator felt the most expeditious solution was to ban the person being libelled and keep onside with the culprit and his mates. As I say, forum managers of such forums are easily persuaded to confuse a lobby-group for a democratic majority. In the past two decades, nothing similar has ever happened in the academic mailing lists to which I still subscribe.
As I say, I don’t think the ‘moderator’ made a proper decision, but for me the only only downside has been that I’m prevented accessing my own research notes and the bibliographic references I recorded nowhere but the forum library, expecting to have them handy.
Nick: Continued…
I date the writing of the Rosettes folio to the 1430s, the Council of Basel began in 1430. So Milanese ciphers from the 1430s are of particular interest to me.
Anyway, how could Milanese ciphers from the 1430s be more sophisticated than those from after 1447? Well, if the Zanino Riccio 1424 cipher has features not found in later Milanese ciphers why couldn’t the same apply to ciphers from the 1430s and maybe to a greater extent.
But why would they make their ciphers simpler and easier to crack? I think, because they reached a point when other pressures took hold. Ciphers don’t only need to be hard to break they also need to be easy to use. A cipher needs to be not too much work to create the cipher key. If just constructing a cipher key is a big undertaking than that is a problem. However much more importantly I think it needs to be easy for an ordinary diplomat to write an enciphered letter and likewise to read an enciphered letter. If the cipher key is too complicated they won’t be able to do this effectively. So I expect that there was a decision to standardise and crystallise Milanese cipher keys in a form which was sufficiently straightforward for all parties to be able to use it. Therefore features in earlier cipher keys that were deemed impractical or just difficult to use in general were excluded leaving the standard cipher key template that we see for the rest of the century.
Now of course there are varying degrees of speculation in these remarks regarding 1430s Milanese ciphers this is my hypothesis which further evidence may make look more or less likely.
More to follow…
Nick: Continued…
So where do I think this fits in with the Voynich? Well, I suspect that the Voynich cipher is most closely related to Milanese ciphers of the 1430s. This doesn’t mean that it is identical to a Milanese diplomatic cipher of the 1430s as I suspect the authors added a further level of complexity to the Voynich cipher. However I hope that Milanese ciphers from the 1430s will give a clearer insight into the nature and structure of the Voynich cipher, especially ciphers used in communication with important correspondents. Anyway it doesn’t seem beyond belief that innovative inventors of diplomatic ciphers in the Milanese chancellery would be much more likely to invent an advanced cipher such as the Voynich cipher than your average man in the street would be.
There are a variety of individuals in the Milanese administration and I have not seen any document indicating who created a given cipher and who was responsible for designing ciphers, so it is hard to say who was the mind or minds began the cipher innovations. Zanino Riccio was Ducal secretary until 1425 when he was followed by Francesco Barbavara and given their role administering the Milanese chancellery and writing numerous enciphered letters they could be plausible candidates. However I may never find out who was designing their ciphers.
Nick: I should qualify a previous point. I think it is very possible that ciphers were used much more in the era of Cicco Simonetta. There may well have been much more diplomatic enciphered communication going on. However it looks like the ciphers were no more advanced than the previous ciphers from before the time of Simonetta in Milan. I think key factors are war and peace. In the early 15th century there were the 4 wars in Lombardy whilst after the Pact of Lodi of 1454 there was a long period of peace. Historically I think it is clear that war is a much greater motivating factor in the advancement of cryptography than peace is; just think of the Second World War in Britain.
Hi Diane.
If you have nowhere to write, you can write to me, for example. I will study it scientifically and then let you know. What to do next. I have a big heart.
Nick: I wanted to get that all off my chest. This is where my currently thinking has arrived at.
I think there is a striking intersection between my early 15th century cipher history analysis and my Rosettes analysis particularly when related to questions of authorship as both theories point in very similar or it could be said related directions. I would suggest that in this respect the coincidence of two essentially independent lines of thought pointing in a similar direction is striking. I say independent as my Rosettes theory was not dependent or formed on the basis of historical cipher research, in fact I have only done this research later. Similarly my historical cipher research as it pertains to authorship and its conclusions are not dependent on my Rosettes analysis; I have endeavoured to assemble as many ciphers from the early 15th century as I can and base my conclusions only on that complete set of data.(If anyone is aware of any early 15th century ciphers that I am not then I would appreciate if they let me know.) I will adjust my analysis in response to new evidence. Speculation comes into my analysis when I try to draw two independent lines of thought together namely dating implications from my Rosettes analysis, the evidence of Milanese cipher history and also the common implications of authorship and the possible implications for 1430s Milanese ciphers.
I know reading this has been a long haul, however I think that some of the things I have said should be interesting and provoke thought.
Mark Knowles: it’s an interesting angle, sure, and there’s a good argument to be had that historians claiming ‘cipher superiority’ for Sforza Milan may simply have been hopefully extrapolating from a single, large (albeit well-known) cipher ledger, combined with the wealth of Sforza-era paper documentation (the “Mundo de carta” referenced by Francesco Senatore).
Having said that, we’re still reading between the lines (quite literally) for 1400-1450 cryptography, and so I think much of your account is still extrapolating somewhat. For example, I don’t really buy into either the “war drove the development of cryptography” position or “the post-Treaty-of-Lodi expansion in diplomacy drove the development of cryptography” position: both seem like overly neat post-rationalisations: “armchair history”, if you like. Cryptography mainly grew because it was thought useful, and you didn’t have to be much of an “intelligencer” to come up with convincing-looking ciphers.
All the same, I think you’ve found some terrific instances of 1390-1450 cryptography that are starting to shed light on this period’s cryptography: but we’re not yet really moving towards anything like a synthetic account of the development of cryptography in this period. My article on 15th century cryptography is the only paper I know of that is starting to move in this general direction (please correct me if I’m wrong!), so it should be painfully obvious that there’s much more ground still to be covered here.
Nick: On the extrapolation front you are right. I am extrapolating much more than I would like to. There is a serious shortage of examples of Venetian ciphers for the period, a couple of examples. Likewise there is not very much evidence of Papal ciphers, a few examples. Venice and the Papal states being 2 of the biggest players in cryptography of the period this seems a serious omission. In fact, despite my dedicated efforts to track down early 15th century ciphers and the very large number that I have collected I very much doubt that there is the quantity of evidence surviving to this day that I would like to produce a clear and complete picture. So I must do my best to come to the best conclusion that I can come to on the basis of limited data. As you would say “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” and just because we have few examples of Venetian ciphers from the time it does not been that the Venetians were not doing interesting and creative things over this period. Though one could say that we have no evidence of Corsica being a hotbed of cryptography at that time; this doesn’t mean that we should consider it could have been, but then Venice is not Corsica.
More to follow…
Nick: Continued…
I commented against this blog post in these recent remarks not as a specific critique of the arguments of your paper, but just as it seem that this post was one of the most relevant to what I wanted to write about. I tend to comment against this post or your earlier “Fifteenth century cryptography” post or the “Milanese enciphered letters” post as they seem to best fit the subject matter of many of my comments.
I agree that there is much more ground to cover though how much more remaining ground survives I am still quite uncertain of.
I do think, however, that the evidence is very strong that there was a big change in the complexity of ciphers used by Italian states, including Milan, from the period of roughly 1395 to 1445 and quite a small change in the complexity of ciphers used by these states in the period 1445 to 1495. Similarly there also appears to be quite a small change in the complexity of ciphers used by Italian states in the period 1345 to 1395.
More to follow…
Over Ninja an undisiplined cam guy has been granted leave to put up his claim for Tartaglio (the stutterer) the rather capable self taught 16c mathematitian as author of B 408 VM. I only managed about a minute or so of his unintelligible rambling before signing off, although in fairness viewers were told that they could skip forty minutes of crap if they wanted the good stuff. So maybe there’s some hope for a VM pretender like moi to get on board over there and piss in a few pockets if I promise not to put shit on those resident who might not care to debate certain issues with a plebe. Greg Hodgkins the man from U of A, who was denied possibly critical isotopal transfer (C3/C4) variation for input into his C14 dating process is the only expert I need answers from. If he comes over to Ninja for a chat, well and good I’ll do likewise. Failing that I’ll consider puting up some new data come to light on the Vinland Map outcomr that givrs lie to the Tartar Relation and the bulls head watermark cop out.
Nick: Continued…
On the war versus peace influence on the development of cryptography you could well be right.
Yes, I agree I have worked very hard to assemble a large collection of early 15th century ciphers. It is also the case that there is more work to be done in studying the ciphers that I have already collected. Ideally I would like to have identified the correspondents on all of the many cipher keys and likewise make an effort to date each cipher key given the historical context as accurately as I can. There are still enciphered letters in my collection of photoreproductions that have not been deciphered though they are from periods that I am less interested in.
I aim to assemble more early 15th century ciphers with a particular interest in Milanese ciphers and within that an even more particular interest in Milanese ciphers from between the years 1424 to 1445; so much so that I have offered £250 to anyone who can locate a Milanese cipher from between 1424 and 1445. There are definitely more early 15th ciphers out there to be found, but how difficult it will be to find them is another question.
I would welcome the opportunity to collaborate with on the writing of a future paper combining your efforts and approach with the insights that have come from my recent research.
I would mention here, though in all probability I have said this elsewhere on this blog, that the dearth of Venetian cipher records for the early 15th century is largely due to the fire of 1483 in Venice.
Dear Prof. Josef Zlatoděj,
Thank you for your kind offer.
I have been sharing some work through free-access blogs.
Nick: To see the great increase in complexity of diplomatic ciphers in the early 15th century “primo quattrocento” relative to decades before or after it is in fact really apparent just by looking at Meister “Die Anfange…”. If one compares the 1395 Mantua cipher key with the 1448 Milanese cipher key there is a great difference. And if one then compares the 1448 Milanese cipher key with the later 15th century ciphers keys, such as those in the Tranchedino cipher ledger there is very little difference. Importantly the same trend is observed for other ciphers, so these two 1395 and 1448 cipher keys do not seem to be unusual outliers. Now I know that you have suggested that cipher keys like the 1448 Milanese cipher key could have been added to successively and therefore may not reflect the actual state of Milanese ciphers such as the 1448 date. That sounds plausible. The chief difficulty this presents in this instance is with cipher keys generated from enciphered letters. It is inconceivable that enciphered letters from a given date were updated at a later stage. And these letters fit with the same pattern.
I think you are spot on when you suggest that the wealth of Sforza era enciphered documentation has naturally created the impression of a poverty of ciphers in the pre-Sforza era. However as we know the 1447 fire is heavily responsible for that pre-Sforza deficit of Milanese cipher material. Now, as I have suggested, ciphers may have been used much more in the sforza-era than in the primo quattrocento. But obviously this does not necessarily mean that there was a difference in the complexity of those ciphers. It is, however, equally possible that there was not a huge increase in the use of ciphers in sforza-era Milan and again the 1447 fire accounts for the differing quantity of surviving ciphers from those periods.
I would suggest that the only conclusion that one can come to on the basis of the evidence is, as I have stated, that the roughly 1395 to 1445 fifty year era saw a big advance in the sophistication of the diplomatic ciphers used by the Italian states and the 1445 to 1495 fifty year era saw a small change in the sophistication of diplomatic ciphers used by the Italian states. I am very ignorant of what was happening in terms of 16th century cryptography, but it does appears that the kind of ciphers used at the end of the 15th century continued to be used widely afterwards. In short I would argue that the primo quattrocento was in fact a forgotten “golden age” in cryptography. A golden age which neatly overlaps the period from which the Voynich manuscript is carbon dated.
Nick: In fact my argument here does not really detract from your Antonio Averlino theory as it would not have been necessary for significant advances in diplomatic ciphers to have been made for him to invent an innovative cipher, after all Alberti managed to. What it does rather do is somewhat tarnish the reputation that some have given Cicco Simonetta and Tranchedino as great cryptographers. Similarly it elevates the status of earlier generations of Milanese cryptographers who have been largely forgotten in this respect.
Nick: I will at some stage write to Professor Senatore to update him on my research as he expressed an interest.
Nick: There is a possibility that Cicco Simonetta and/or Tranchedino were making significant contributions to cryptography before Francesco Sforza became Duke when he was a condottieri.
Nick: From what I understand Cicco Simonetta entered the service of Francesco Sforza in 1444 and Nicodemus Tranchedini entered the service of Francesco Sforza in 1428. There is the letter discovered by Ekaterina Domnina in a Moscow archive between Simonetta and Tranchedino before Sforza became Duke. On the whole from what I know there is no reason to believe that they were particularly inventive as cryptographers before Sforza became Duke, but then the data that we have is very limited.
Nick: Is it the case that Cicco Simonetta published his rules, so that they could be read by the wider public? If so I wonder if Cicco Simonetta’s rules were the cutting edge in decipherment techniques then why did he make them public? Surely the his colleagues in the Duchy of Milan would not thank him for assisting their enemies in cracking their ciphers. It would make much more sense if the rules were outdated.
Mark: Simonetta’s notes on cracking ciphers were noted in a private diary, along with all manner of other (dated) entries. Perret’s (1890) article – https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28227/28227-h/28227-h.htm – notes that Simonetta had (while young, as he was born in 1410) written a treatise on Francesco Sforza’s chancellery, and speculates that Simonetta’s Regule may have formed an extract from that.
The treatise was “Constitutiones et ordines cancellariæ secretioris illustrissimi principis et excellentissimi d. d. Francisci Sfortiæ Vicecomitis ducis Mediolani”, as noted by Argelati in “Bibliotheca scriptorum mediolanensium”, Milan, 1745, t. II, col. 2166-168, “though it is not known what became of it”.
If you check Argelati’s Tome II (p.2166), you see that the full title is “Constitutiones, et Ordines Cancellariæ Secretioris Illustrissimi Principis, & Excellentissimi D. D. Francisci Sfortiæ Vicecomitis Ducis Mediolani, &c. factæ per Magnificum Dominum Cicchum Simonettam de Calabria, Ducalem Secretarium &c. sub die Veneris octavo Novembris, anno MCCCCCLXV. Indictione quartadecima &c. Hæc MSS authentica in fol. extant penes Clar. Advocatum Sitonum.” So this was written not in 1435 (as Perret miscopies it) but in 1465.
Personally, I believe that Cicco Simonetta’s notes on cipher-breaking more likely date to the first 5-10 years of the Sforza Chancellery (so 1450-1455), and that he was copying them into his diary rather than composing the work – I argued in Curse that Simonetta didn’t seem to understand what he was copying, because he wrote “mula” rather than “uvula” (which unusually has three u’s in a row).
Nick: Thanks a lot for the background information. Well, I suppose it may be the case that that the Sforza chancellery was much more adept at breaking ciphers than prior Milanese administrations. However it may also be the case that there was no great improvement in cipher breaking skills by the Sforza administration. This is an area where the evidence is really lacking and I would think is likely to remain so. I can best speak to the complexity of the ciphers used where as I have said before there appears to be no significant increase in the sophistication of ciphers used in the sforza era. The question is do they go in tandem. Did not the ciphers become more complex in response to advances achieved in cipher breaking? This is the so called “arms-race” argument. Again this situation is opaque especially in the context of the early 15th century.
Nick, Is there an error in the printing, or maybe a typo in the post?
“MCCCCCLXV” appears to read 1,000+(5×100)+50+10+5 but in Latin numerals, 500 is represented by ‘D’ – not five ‘C’s.
Just replacing the 5 ‘C’s with a D – as MDLXV – however, gives you 1565.
To get 1465 – MCDLXV as *M+ (D-C)+L+(X+V).
and for 1435 – MCDXXXV.
So even if the printer was out of ‘D’ type and just replaced it by 5 ‘Cs’ it still doesn’t read. I guess in such a case (pardon the pun) the printer should just use 4 ‘C’s.
?
Nick: Received an interesting email from Ivan Parisi who specialise in the history of cryptography. I was referred to him by Professor Senatore some time ago, but have only followed up recently. Unsurprisingly his research appears to have focused more on the late 15th century than the early 15th century. Nevertheless he may know something that I don’t which can help me locate more early 15th century ciphers.
He certainly appears to be very interested in my research, so maybe I will be more help to him than he to me, we will see.
Nick, Have you come across any up-to-date list for ciphertexts (from anywhere) covering a/the period up until c.1400?
I’m thinking – more musing at present – that what we have in the Vms might reflect an imported method if the Voynich text is .. what’s the right word.. encoded, encrypted? as well as using what could turn out to be a mix-and-match of alphabets.
I’m still not convinced it has been encrypted because as Sam G. once said, there’s no system for encrypting a plain text known from that time which could beat modern decryption programs. I also think that the format of the Vms is an argument against it. Obviously meant to be a portable, ready-reference sort of book and the fold-ins would make pen-and-paper decryption a real pest. Pity our ‘Colorni’ experiment went no-where. I had hopes of it.
“Sam G. once said, there’s no system for encrypting a plain text known from that time which could beat modern decryption programs.”
If there was then the Voynich manuscript would not be so special.
I should add that there are plenty of undeciphered (in modern times)documents from the 15th century, although that is not to say whether those that have not yet been deciphered would be difficult to decipher.(Recently I received an email which mentioned, amongst other things, undeciphered letters in the Vatican archives from 1458.)
Yeah, that’s what Sam G said. And I can tell you this. There are many manuscripts and books from the Middle Ages that are encrypted. I’ve already deciphered several. For example: MS 408. Codex Rohonczi, Constance Chronicle, Hajek Chronicle, Cosmo Chronicle. All use the Kabbalistic Numerology System. Anyone who wants to understand the text should master it. It is a very complex and complicated system. And what is very important is this. You need to find out in what language the text is written! Then you can be successful in decoding. Not otherwise. No computer will ever be able to translate such encrypted text. Several universities are working on this. And they have very powerful computers for that. My colleague Professor Ivan Zelinka has been trying to decode it for ten years at VSB. And they’re still in the beginning, like a lot of other people or ants. The Kabbalistic numerology system looks like this: all letters have a numeric value. All !!! The letter A, I, J, Q, Y, = 1. The letter B, R, K, = 2. The letters C, G, S, L = 3. etc. The system of 8 numbers covers the whole alphabet. It is also very important to know the language used at that time. There is a big difference between the current language and what was spoken and written in the Middle Ages.
M R Knowles: Who is/was Sam G., either a quitter, or a realist, hence a man with vision and destined to go far in my estimation. So if I were you, I’d never say no till I tried and, like the great Ken Howard used to say with confidence “when you’re on a good thing, stick to it”.
John Sanders: Ah, good old Ken. What a great quote of his. He will be sorely missed by people who have any idea who he was.
John,
‘Sam G’ was one of the brightest and most clear-sighted and clear-thinking of the newcomers to the ‘Voynich community’ a few years ago. Being so bright, he soon backed away because it was obvious to him that unless one were willing to talk about nothing but German books and manuscripts, you’d be either ignored, or ostracised or pack-attacked.
That was the reality. I remember we began an interesting discussion about mosaics. He (or maybe Koen) had consulted a person at the Getty Museum who said one of the centres in the month-folios most resembled a certain mosaic from Syria; the other man of those two noted a similarity to another mosaic in north Africa – about the same time and also during the Byzantine era.
The thread was, first, absolutely swamped by the ‘Germanists’ posting nothing but pages from German manuscripts and then, we we started a new thread with a title excluding such material, they lobbied the moderator to declare even discussing possible antecedents/origins for the images “off topic”. Making historical research ‘illegal’ so to speak.
I think Sam’s probably still around somewhere, and he’s not the only one to have been turned off, by any means, by such rabid behaviour. But a man with an unusually lucid mind and sad loss to the study in my opinion.
Diane: I did wonder what happened to our belligerant theorists who were most emphatic but had no hope of making converts of people like Rich or moi. I had some rather interesting discussions with German Peter the trained chemist, (gone now sadly) who failed miserably in his efforts to convince me that the F80r (?) 19th C. obstetric pelvimiter (with measure stick) was a match for a huge tree trunk puller . I’ll keep an eye out for Sam G. and see if he knows anything about Kenny Howard; If he’s from Sydney it’s ‘London to a brick on’ that he does.
John,
If you’d like to me be more exact about the detail you mean, perhaps I can offer a non-tree-puller explanation, with an illustration from an appropriately dated ms.
The main problem with any 20thC-fake sort of explanation is one you may not appreciate, and that is that Europeans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries simply did not have the same attitude to picture-making, to perspective (or lack of it), or to the purpose of a drawing as did the people who first made the images in the Vms. By that time, and still today, Europeans had become firmly habituated to thinking that an image was intended to be ‘a picture of’ a physical object. They’d quite lost the art of earlier and other eras in seeing images as “pictures about” things. This is also, btw, the most fundamental error that Voynich writers have been making since 1912.
Once you become accustomed to reading drawings in that other way, you know that e.g. the image of a pair of dividers may, possibly, be meant for the physical object but depending on the context provided by all around that detail, may allude instead to such things as an epithet attached to some group of people, or to the name given by the Arabs to an asterism which marked the first lunar mansion in the annual circuit, or something else again. Context, and stylistics, are crucial factors to establish before even beginning to try and read a pre-modern image. Rather like determining the nature of a script, the age of the ‘hand’, and then the specific language and the parameters established by time, place and community attitudes. It’s how we know whether a picture of a woman and child is, or isn’t, a madonna and where and when that ‘woman and child’ was given this specific expression. Sorry to go on, but no matter how many amateur enthusiasts might be convinced of the ‘modern fake’ story, I would be very surprised indeed if any competent iconologist, codicologist or palaeographer would be.
Sorry.
Diane: phoey, I’m obviously not getting through you but, rest assured that you’re not alone by any stretch. Some long forgotten Greek philosopher, can’t recall which one, opined that a picture paints a thousand words which obviously doesn’t set well with some. So looks to me like you and they will be forever seeking answers in all the wrong places…..and yes I’m sorry for that too.
john a Diane.John, that’s what Plato said. About it all. To find out what a picture in the manuscript means, you will also need to know the meaning of the symbols. Second, you must read the text. And then you have a chance to find out what the drawing means. It will show you all, including some scientists and academics. This is an example that blog administrator John Pelling has already discussed here. This is a picture where women in a container are drawn. And above them is what John calls “Pipes.” The drawing, of course, is not a pipe. But in essence, it expresses the word “LIVED”. (Czech ,ŽILA). Eliška drew “ŽÍLA” for you there. (Czech -ŽILA). The picture shows a 6 + 1 woman. That means 6 daughters + 1 mother. Daughters, Kateřina, Barbora, Markéta, Hedvika, ELISABETH, Johanka. Mother – Anna Hlohovská Slezská Pistovna. The wife of John II. from Rožmberk. Therefore, the vein is divided into 6 parts. That means 6 daughters. and one part on the right is the mother. So not some awkward “Pipes”. But the word “LIVED”. Diane, no scientist has a chance to find out what is written in the manuscript text. Even if he had 10 universities and 20 degrees. The scientist must mainly use the brain and must also successfully absorb what I am writing to you.
Nick: It appears that the Tranchedino has been digitised and put online. Matthias? posted this link on Voynich Ninja. I thought you might be interested as I imagine that you haven’t seen the original. I assume there is nothing new there that I haven’t already seen in the black and white scans nevertheless it is nice that the original is online->
https://digital.onb.ac.at/RepViewer/viewer.faces?doc=DTL_8971216&order=1&view=SINGLE
Nick: You may find the following interesting->
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-63757443.amp
I am not suggesting that it has a bearing on the Voynich cipher, but just mentioning it as general interest.
Subsequent to the presentation that I was requested to do by Dr. Jessika Nowak and Dr. Ivan Parisi for the 28. Oktober 2022 Geheimschriftenzoom III organised in coordination between the University of Wuppertal and the University of Tuscia(I am working on a paper drawing from the presentation and expanding on it), I have been studying in more detail the 1424 Milanese cipher in the Florence Archives. I have come to the conclusion that from all the diplomatic ciphers that I have seen from the 15th century, including those in the Tranchedino Cipher Ledger, this cipher is the most advanced. (Whether the Alberti cipher counts as a diplomatic cipher is debatable as is whether it can be said to be more advanced in general)
To conclude that a 1424 Milanese cipher is more advanced than Milanese ciphers dated to 1490 seems like a bold assertion and yet it seems to me to be the correct one.
Of course one cannot say what new evidence may reveal, but one has to work with the evidence that one has now.
If the 1424 Milanese cipher is really the most advanced diplomatic cipher of that century it further underscore the importance of locating Milanese ciphers from over the next decade and a half. Clearly by the 1445 Milanese Marcolino Barbavara cipher many of the sophisticated earlier features had been lost, presumably for reasons of simplification, so how Milanese ciphers evolved and how complicated they became before being simplified after 1424 is of interest.
Michelle Lewis has been doing some excellent work studying non-diplomatic ciphers. It does seem to be the case that non-diplomatic ciphers in the 1st half of the 15th century were overall much simpler than their diplomatic counterparts.
My understanding is that ciphers used in diplomacy advanced little from the 15th century up to the 19th century, though I am not an expert in this period. If so it further supports the notion that Milan in the early 15th century was a centre of cryptographic innovation.
Hi Nick
Which text do you think is the best at explaining how to decipher/break homophonic substitution ciphers such as in the Tranchedino? So that if I was given a typical late 15th century Italian diplomatic cipher what procedure(algorithmish) should I follow to decipher it? I know some books that discuss it and obviously I am familiar with Cicco Simonetta’s rules. However I thought you might have a preferred text.