After 5 centuries, a letter written in secret code by the Holy Roman Emperor was eventually decoded, revealing that he was concerned about being killed
French scientists have decrypted a letter sent by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1547.
The three-page letter reveals 16th-century secrets, including assassination worries.
The secret language of the message took months to crack for the French team of specialists.
The Stanislas Libary in Nancy, France, has reported that French experts have decrypted a letter signed in 1547 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.
The surreptitiously coded letter conveyed the most important concerns of Rennaisance Europe’s most powerful man amid a period of religious and geopolitical turmoil. It demonstrated that Charles V was concerned about an assassination attempt by an Italian mercenary and was putting his relationship with King François I of France first.
The three-page letter, written in plain handwriting at points and in a strange code at others, reveals 16th-century royal secrets, including a rumor that François I’s head of war, Pierre Strozzi, was plotting his assassination.
The letter had been lost in the Stanislas Library for over five centuries. According to the BBC, French cryptographer Cecile Pierrot learned about the intriguing historic paper at a dinner party and sought for it in the library’s basement.
Charles V ruled over a massive European empire that included Spain, southern Italy, the Netherlands, great swaths of central Europe, and substantial portions of the newly discovered Americas.
The emperor’s letter to his envoy at the French royal court was written against the frenetic backdrop of continental wars and religious struggle between Catholics and Protestants, making it critical to communicate covertly and not give away any valuable information to inquisitive eyes.
The letter’s contents were unknown until now since it was made up of around 120 encrypted symbols and some French sentences.
Pierrot assigned each symbol a name and put the improvised alphabet into Python, a programming language, but it was unable to decipher the enigmatic language.
Pierrot and her team, which included French cryptographers Pierrick Gaudry and Paul Zimmermann, as well as historian Camille Desenclos, got to work for months sifting through Emperor Charles’ peculiar script, recognizing decoy letters and experiencing slow and steady eureka moments.
The team has not yet released a comprehensive translation, but the themes uncovered have provided an essential insight into the mind of a great character at a watershed moment in European history.
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