Published: Less than 20 min ago
Emperor Karl V’s code has been cracked – and it may be about assassination plans for one of Europe’s most powerful men, written in cipher.
That’s what researchers who tried to decipher a document from the German-Roman emperor in the 16th century to his ambassador in France think.
The researcher and cryptographer Cecile Pierrot and colleagues have put a lot of effort into deciphering the letter from 1547, which had been forgotten in a library in Nancy until a couple of years ago.
Pierrot heard about the document at a dinner and traced the letter in 2021.
The problem was that the text was illegible.
– Entire words were encrypted into a single character, and vowels were often just marked with a dash, Pierrot said on Thursday when she announced the discovery.
– Suddenly one day – after an intense six months – a breakthrough came, when we were able to decipher an entire sentence. It showed that our theory about the code was correct, she continues, praising the collaboration with historian Camille Desenclos. A clue was the Arabic way of marking vowels after a consonant.
And so were the contents: the coded letter was addressed to the then ambassador Jean de Saint-Mauris and shows that the relationship with the then French king Francis I had deteriorated greatly.
Also, which was news to historians, Emperor Charles V wrote of his fear that France was plotting to assassinate him.
The two regents had concluded a peace treaty three years earlier, but the peace was about to collapse.
The fears of a plot were not borne out.
French King Francis died already in the same year that the letter was written. Emperor Karl lived a couple more years, but abdicated in 1555 in grief for, among other things, having been forced to give Lutherans freedom of religion.
He then died quietly in a monastery in San Juste in Spain the following year.