by DAVID KAHN
Gabbrielli solved or reconstructed 1,755 nomenclators, dating from 1414 to 1742. They fill 16 volumes arranged either administratively (as Volume III, 130 keys to the correspondence of Cosimo I de Medici, ruler of Florence from 1536 to 1574) or geographically (as Volume XVI, 142 keys to the correspondence from France from 1542 to 1735). Death halted his work on November 26, 1873, while he was in the midst of compiling a 17th volume on ciphers for Spain. An unfinished, unbound file containing attempts, excerpts, and various keys testifies mutely to his persistence.
In the United States, Edmund C. Burnett solved many of the letters that Wharton did not in editing the great collection of Letters of Members of the Continental Congress. In Germany, more recently, Bernard Bischoff has reconstructed the ciphers used in scores of medieval manuscripts, often from just a sentence or two. Guillermo Lohmann Villena, a Peruvian diplomat, solved a number of ciphers during his exhaustive researches into the systems used by Spain during her colonization of the New World.
These mass-production artists are followed by many one-shot historical cryptanalysts who have encountered a cipher or two during their researches and have cracked it. In the late 1930s, Howard Peckham of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan solved parts of the André dictionary-code correspondence that was involved in the Benedict Arnold treason. “The reason I was able to decode [letter] No. 31 was because No. 30 exists here in both coded and decoded form, and also Washington’s proclamation, which [Carl] Van Doren mentioned [in his Secret History of the American Revolution] but did not print, is there in code and could be decoded by reference to a plain copy. These two items gave me quite a vocabulary to work with, without the dictionary.” Derek J. Price, professor of the history of science at Yale, tackled a monalphabetic substitution in an astronomical manuscript by Geoffrey Chaucer and solved it, bringing to light a cipher message by one of the greatest names in English literature.
The enormous volume of Spanish letters in the early years of modern history makes their solution a subspecies in themselves. The Belgian J. P. Devos, who published a large collection of Spanish nomenclators in 1950, found it necessary to solve an enciphered dispatch to reconstitute one of them. About the same time, Miguel Gómez del Campillo solved messages of Tomás Perrenot, señor de Chantonnay, sent to Philip II and the Duke of Alba. In 1926, a young Mexican historian, Don Francisco Monterde García-Icazbalta, won a prize of 200 gold pesos established by a merchant for the first solution of an enciphered letter by Cortéz, which is the oldest extant example of New World cryptography. Shortly before his death in 1934, the German Robert Fuchs solved a 15-page letter of Charles V that gave instructions in 1546 to a cardinal on his way to Rome. And early in the 1900s, Henry Biaudet, who forgot his copy of the key of Don Juan de Zúñiga y Requesens when he went to Geneva to study that Renaissance diplomat’s correspondence, “was able to reconstruct it on the spot without the least difficulty.”
More recently, Raoul Brunon solved several 16th-century nomenclators for the sumptuous volume, with many facsimiles of the actual cipher letters, that he and his brother Jean published in 1952, Les Français en Italie sous Henri II. In 1947, Dr. Rebeca Rosell Planas reconstructed the keys used by Jose Marti of Cuba in his correspondence before the Cuban revolution against Spain and read some of the never-before-solved portions of his letters. A century before, Dietrich C. von Rommel published the key to the nomen-clator that Henry IV of France had used with Máurice the Wise. The Babbage and Wheatstone solutions of royal letters of the 1600s fall into this category. And there must be dozens more who have similarly succeeded in a bit of cryptanalysis like this.
The thought of tearing away the veil that has enshrouded a message for perhaps hundreds of years exerts a potent lure upon all minds. Not even the professional cryptologist, who daily solves cryptograms of immediate importance, remains immune, étienne Bazeries succumbed often. He solved nomenclators of Francis I, Francis II, Henry IV, Mirabeau, Napoleon. But his greatest historical effort led to what he thought was the solution of one of the most tantalizing of mysteries—the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask.
In 1891, Commandant Gendron of the French General Staff found himself stymied in his study of the campaigns of Marshal Nicolas de Catinat, one of Louis XIV’s generals, by five ciphered dispatches to Catinat from Louis himself and by two from Louvois, the minister of war. Gendron appealed for help to Bazeries, who, after examining them, boldly declared that he would solve them—to the astonishment of Gendron, who had submitted the messages in vain to other cryptologists. Bazeries felt so confident because he had observed that the cipher numbers ran from 1 to the high 500’s and that repetitions were rife. This convinced him that the cipher numbers mostly represented plaintext syllables—a method rare since the telegraph had killed the nomenclator, and probably the reason for the failure of the other crypto-logists.
Bazeries first made a frequency count of the 12,125 groups of the dispatches, finding that the most frequent group was 22, appearing 187 times. Then followed 124, with 185 occurrences, 42 with 184, 311 with 145, 125 with 127, and so forth. With no tables of syllable frequencies available, Bazeries had to guess. He supposed the order to be le, la, les, de, des, du, au, il, et, vous, que, and so on. Then, surmising that the phrase les ennemis would crop up frequently in military dispatches, he split it into syllables and matched it with five figures that appeared together several times with only slight variations. These variations, he conjectured, represented homophones. To discover them is the first step in the solution of nomenclators. Thus, he assumed that
124 22 146 46 469
124 22 125 46 574
124 22 125 46 120
124 22 125 46 584
124 22 125 46 345
les en ne mi s
all stood for
He inserted these values throughout the cryptograms, giving him the meaning of approximately one group in every eleven. At one point, he read,
52 124 22 88 374 46 284
les en mi
Obviously, this was a case in which the second syllable of les ennemis had been broken up into letters; the 284 was still another equivalent for the plural ending, and 52 stood for que (“that”). Proceeding like this, Bazeries gradually pulverized the two-part nomenclator, possibly composed by Bonaventure Rossignol himself. He found it to consist of 587 equivalents for letters, syllables, words, and nulls, which also served as punctuation marks. One sign had the interesting function of erasing the previous sign.
After solving the dispatch of July 8, 1691, Bazeries read how displeased the king was that one of Catinat’s commanders, Vivien Labbé, Seigneur du Bulonde, had disobeyed Catinat’s orders and raised the siege of the northern Italian town of Coni. The action defeated the French Army, ended its campaign in Piedmont, and rudely jolted the pride of the haughty Sun King. The dispatch ordered Catinat to arrest Bulonde and “conduct him to the fortress of Pignerol, where His Majesty desires that he be guarded locked in a cell of that fortress at night and having the liberty during the day of walking on the battlements with a 330 309.” These two figures appeared nowhere else in the dispatches, and Bazeries, who knew that the mysterious masked prisoner of the Bastille had come there from Pignerol and was treated as a person of considerable importance, concluded that 330 represented the infrequent word masque and 309 a period or stop and published to the world his finding that Bulonde had been the Man in the Iron Mask.
The determination has been attacked on psychologic, linguistic, and cryp-tologic grounds. Bulonde, runs one counterargument, was a relatively minor soldier who did not warrant the deference that later gave rise to the speculation that the masked prisoner was an illegitimate son of Louis. Moreover, the text as cryptanalyzed would have meant “with a masked person” to Louvois, who would have said “en masque” instead of “avec un masque.” The word masque does not belong in a military repertory, and, indeed, an exhaustive examination of the much larger nomenclators of succeeding rulers of France shows not one that includes it.
But what most impedes a wider acceptance of the theory is that in 1708, five years after the death of the mysterious masked prisoner of Pignerol and the Bastille, Bulonde was still alive.
Solutions more valid than Bazeries’ wild leap at masque can, on the other hand, revolutionize some long-accepted views of events in history. One such provides unexpected support to the lingering but unsubstantiated theory that the murder of Abraham Lincoln was engineered by his own Secretary of War, the ambitious and highhanded Edwin Stanton, as part of a plot to seize control of the government and impose a hard and bitter peace upon the South.
In a bound volume of Colburn’s United Service Magazine for the second half of 1864 that he had bought for 50 cents, New Jersey chemist and Civil War buff Ray A. Neff noticed one day in 1962 what appeared to be cipher messages written in pencil in the inner margins of a few pages. The one on page 183, for example, began : J O 5 O F X 2 S P N F 6 U I F S F 8 X B M L F E…. Neff enlisted the aid of Leonard Fousché, a self-styled professional cryptographer of Collingswood, New Jersey. It could not have taken Fousché long to find that the cipher was the simplest possible, each plaintext letter being replaced by the one following it in the normal alphabet, with the numbers indicating word separations. The cryptogram on page 183 solved out as a long allegorical poem, beginning: In new Rome there walked three men, a Judas, a Brutus, and a spy. Each planned that he should be the kink [king] when Abraham should die…. Neff also found a series of much longer messages spelled out by placing dots under letters on the volume’s printed pages, reading from right to left and from bottom to top. Page 106 began the narrative: It was on the tenth of April, Sisty-five when I first knew that the plan was in action (evidently no x appeared on that page, so the cipherer used an s instead in sisty). Page 107 continued: Ecert had made all the contacts, the deed to be done of the forteenth [the date of Lincoln’s assassination]. I did not know the identity of the assassin but I knew most all else when I approached E. S. about it. Page 120 reported that there were at least eleven members of Congress involved in the plot. After a long gap, there appeared on page 245 an ominous I fear for my life. LCB.
Who was L.C.B.? Neff developed on an outer margin an invisible-ink signature of Lafayette C. Baker, chief of the secret National Detective Police. Neff feels that the “E.S.” in the dot message and the “Judas” in the substitution refer to Stanton. The Judas metaphor rests upon Stanton’s hypocrisies vis-à-vis Lincoln, such as in secretly opposing many of the President’s policies in Congress. Brutus connects with John Wilkes Booth, the actual assassin and a noted Shakespearean actor. As for the spy who walked in new Rome, the cryptogram concludes: But lest one is left to wonder what has happened to the spy, I can safely tell you this, it was I. Lafayette C. Baker. 2-5-68. Neff further believes that “Ecert” was really Thomas T. Eckert, general superintendent of military telegraphs, whose name Baker intentionally misspelled because no k appears on page 107 until near the top and Baker did not want to leave so long a gap in his dot message. Lincoln had wanted the tall and strong Eckert as his bodyguard at Ford’s Theatre; the major declined, saying he had work to do; but in fact he did not work that night and was home when notified of the shooting.
It is possible that Baker, a notorious charlatan, scoundrel, and liar, could have left the message simply to embarrass Stanton and Eckert. But Neff adduces circumstantial evidence tending to show that the secret service chief was poisoned by arsenic in a vain attempt to silence him. Furthermore, Baker pricked out a notice that The names of these known conspirators is presented without comment or notation in Vol. one of this series. Perhaps this cryptogram will force a reappraisal of one of the cruelest moments in the whole of American history—if only somebody could find the first half of the 1864 Colburn’s United Service Magazine.
The longest, the best known, the most tantalizing, the most heavily attacked, the most resistant, and the most expensive of historical cryptograms remains unsolved. It fills an anonymous, untitled volume that has been called “the most mysterious manuscript in the world.” In 1962, rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus of New York attracted worldwide attention when he asked $160,000 for this book that no one can read.
The volume itself is unprepossessing. A large octavo of about 6 × 9 inches, it has 204 pages; 28 others are lost. Its covers, of vellum like the leaves, are off. Dozens of tiny female nudes, astrological diagrams, and about 400 drawings of fanciful plants illuminate the book in blue, dark red, light yellow, brown, and an especially vivid green. Running among these decorations is the text itself. The manuscript somewhat resembles an herbal—a book, common in the Middle Ages, listing plants with medicinal properties and often giving recipes for extracting drugs from them.
At first glance, the text that is the heart of the mystery appears to be no problem at all. It does not look cryptic. It looks like ordinary late-medieval handwriting. The symbols preserve the general form of letters of that time, which they are not; they are like old friends whose names are on the tip of one’s tongue. The writing flows smoothly, as if a scribe were copying an intelligible text; the symbols do not seem to have been printed one by one. In the most cursory examination of a single page, the eye recognizes the same letters again and again, and then it sees repeated groups and even repeated words, sometimes with slightly different endings.
All this sounds as if the text, if not in a known language disguised to the modern eye by the unfamiliar handwriting, should be in some easily ascertainable tongue. Yet scholars in the most recondite languages have stated that they could not understand it. Palaeographers have declared that the script was not known to them. And cryptanalysts, whose frequency counts of the approximately 29 symbols ×some blend into others and are hard to define) looked like those of an ordinary monalphabetic substitution, and who laughed to themselves when they spotted all those repetitions that this would be simpler than the puzzle cryptograms in newspapers, turned away in chagrin when their attempt to resolve the text into church Latin, or Middle English, or langue d’oc, or some other appropriate tongue, failed utterly.
This is not to say that no one has ever claimed to have solved it. Indeed, one solution that was announced temporarily transformed the manuscript into perhaps the most important document in the history of science. Unfortunately, it, as well as the others, has been disproved.
Mystery has beclouded the manuscript since its recorded history began. That was on August 19, 1666, when Joannes Marcus Marci, the highly respected rector of the University of Prague, sent the book to his former teacher, Athanasius Kircher, the most famous Jesuit scholar of his time. Kircher had, three years earlier, published a book on cryptology and a universal language, and had boasted of having solved the riddle of hieroglyphics. In a letter accompanying the book, Marci recalled that the former owner of the book had sent Kircher a portion of the text for possible solution. To that work the owner “devoted unflagging toil … and he relinquished hope only with his life. But his toil was in vain, for such Sphinxes as these obey no one but their master, Kircher. Accept now this token, such as it is and long overdue though it be, of my affection for you, and burst through its bars, if any there be, with your wonted success.” Bars there were, but Kircher, who never shrank from bragging of what he thought were his successes, did not burst through them, for his silence on this point is eloquent.
Marci wrote that the manuscript had been bought for 600 ducats by the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. More of a scholar than a ruler, Rudolf founded observatories for Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, established a botanical garden, and set up an alchemical laboratory to which he invited numberless scientists. The presence of the manuscript at his court in Prague was later proved by the discovery in a margin of the autograph of Johannes de Tepenecz, a Bohemian scientist who was a favorite of Rudolf.
A page of the Voynich manuscript
Marci also reported the belief that the author of the manuscript was Roger Bacon, the English Franciscan friar who lived from about 1214 to 1294. Bacon had speculat
ed, centuries before they became reality, on the possibility of microscopes and telescopes, motorboats, horseless carriages, and flying machines. Popular legend credited him with great magical abilities, a reputation probably enhanced by his extensive writing on alchemy. He interests modern science because of his precocious emphasis on observation of natural phenomena, so unlike the a priori scholasticism of his time. He is not to be confused with Sir Francis Bacon, the English statesman who lived from 1561 to 1626, wrote the famous Essays, and largely shaped modern science through the influence of his philosophy—although that philosophy, insisting upon induction and experimentation, does bear a strange kinship to that of his medieval namesake. Presumably Roger Bacon would have written the manuscript in cipher to conceal secrets that, if publicized, would have left him open to the grave medieval charge of black magic.
But how did a manuscript attributed to Roger Bacon get to Rudolf’s court at Prague? Between 1584 and 1588, one of the Emperor’s most welcome visitors was Dr. John Dee, an English divine, mathematician, and astrologer who is sometimes said to have been the model for Prospero in The Tempest. Dee shared Rudolf’s interest in the occult and was an enthusiast for Roger Bacon, manuscripts of many of whose works he had collected. He knew the young Francis Bacon and may have even introduced him to the works of Roger Bacon, which may help explain the similarities in their thought. Dee may have been aware of Roger Bacon’s own brief discussion of cryptography in the Epistle on the Secret Works of Art and the Nullity of Magic. He certainly had some knowledge of, and considerable interest in, cryptology, for in 1562, he bought for Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth’s great minister, a manuscript of Trithemius’ “Steganographia,” which had not yet been published and “for wch a Thowsand Crownes have ben by others offred, and yet could not be obteyned.” Dee spent ten days “with contynuall Labor and watch” in making himself a copy.