Conny Waters - AncientPages.com - It took scientists centuries, but the secret code of Holy Roman Emperor Charles C has finally been cracked.
Cryptographers and other scientists from the Loria research lab in eastern France managed to decipher the King's letter, revealing a hideous plot.
Red herrings: the emperor used symbols which mean nothing to mislead his adversaries. Credit: AFP
Charles V was Austria's Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke from 1519 to 1556. He was also King of Spain from 1516 to 1556 and Lord of the Netherlands as titular Duke of Burgundy from 1506 to 1555.
"Charles V was one of the most powerful European rulers of all times, reigning over territories in Europe and the Americas. In his European dominions he had to deal with the challenges of the religious conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism. He also waged numerous wars against France and the Ottoman Empire. When he finally abdicated as emperor, the title passed to the Austrian Habsburgs." 1
A long-forgotten letter from Charles V to Jean de Saint-Mauris was kept at Stanislas library in Nancy. When it was examined, no one understood a single word of it.
Cecile Pierrot, a cryptographer from Loria, first heard of its existence at a dinner in 2019, and after much searching, was able to set eyes on it in 2021.
In 2019, Cecile Pierrot, a cryptographer from Loria learned about the letter, but it took two years before she found it. When she saw the mysterious letter in 2021, she noticed it had the bearing the signature of Charles V, but its content was "utterly incomprehensible, she told reporters
Bearing the signature of Charles V, it was at once mysterious and utterly incomprehensible, she told reporters on Wednesday.
"In painstaking work backed by computers, Pierrot found "distinct families" of some 120 symbols used by Charles V.
"Whole words are encrypted with a single symbol" and the emperor replaced vowels coming after consonants with marks, she said, an inspiration probably coming from Arabic.
In another obstacle, he also used symbols that mean nothing to mislead any adversary trying to decipher the message.
The breakthrough came in June, when Pierrot managed to make out a phrase in the letter, and the team then cracked the code with the help of historian Camille Desenclos," Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports.
"It was painstaking and long work but there was really a breakthrough that happened in one day, where all of a sudden we had the right hypothesis," she said.
Another letter from Jean de Saint-Mauris, where the receiver had doodled a form of transcription code in the margin, also helped.
More discoveries to come
Desenclos said it was "rare as a historian to manage to read a letter that no one had managed to read for five centuries."
It "confirms the somewhat degraded state" in 1547 of relations between Francis I and Charles V, who had signed a peace treaty three years earlier, she said.
But relations were still tense between the two, with various attempts to weaken each other, she said.
Charles V in the 1550s by Titian. Credit: Public Domain
So much so that one nugget of information revealed was the rumor of an assassination plot against Charles V that was said to have been brewing in France, Desenclos said.
She said "not much had been known" about the plot but it underlined the monarch's "fear".
The researchers now hope to identify other letters between the emperor and his ambassador "to have a snapshot of Charles V's strategy in Europe," she said.
"It is likely that we will make many more discoveries in the coming years," the historian said.
Written by Conny Waters - AncientPages.com Staff Writer
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