Scientists have deciphered the code used to write Emperor Charles V’s letter. This was reported by AFP.
Charles V ruled the Holy Roman Empire from 1519 to 1558. At that time it was the largest state in Europe, located on the territory of modern Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, western Poland, northern Italy and eastern France. However, it was the king of Spain and his overseas possessions that made him the most powerful man in Europe. The main rival of the provinces of Charles V was France, and the emperor waged numerous wars against him.
In 1547, Charles wrote a letter to his ambassador in France, encrypting its contents with a personal code. It remained in the library in Nancy for centuries and was only discovered in 2021. Cryptographer Cecil Piero was able to identify individual families from among 120 types of characters and, after six months of work, was finally able to decipher them. It turned out that the emperor encoded all the words with separate characters and replaced the vowels after the consonants with special characters, probably inspired by the Arabic language. He also used meaningless signs to mislead those trying to decipher his text.
From the contents of the letter, it can be concluded that the relations between Charles V and Francis I were extremely strained in 1547, despite the peace treaty signed three years earlier. The letter cites rumors that the French had assassinated Charles – obviously either the rumors were false or the plot had failed. According to historians, Charles knew almost nothing about these plans, but was wary of them.
Now experts plan to find other parts of the correspondence between Charles V and the ambassador in France, in order to restore the whole picture of events.