For a while, I’ve had an itch (a Voyn-itch, if you prefer) I couldn’t work out how to scratch.

You see… about six years ago, I found an old history book digitized on archive.org (if I remember correctly): it related how Francesco Sforza assembled an ongoing ad hoc council of representatives of various city-states surrounding Milan, told them all the inside news of what was going on, and even asked their opinions on what Milan should do – Big Tent politics, Quattrocento-style. These representatives then wrote copious letters back to their rulers, passing on as many of Milan’s secrets as they could remember. Fascinating stuff, so I made a mental note to look the reference up again, because it would be a great place to see if I could find a critical edition of whichever of those despatches still existed, to use them to read around critical dates in my reconstructed Averlino/Voynich narrative, to see if any detail either strengthened or refuted my hypothesis.

But do you think I could ever find that book again? That’s right – not a hope.

So anyway, I’d practically given up on finding those despatches when, while (inevitably) looking for something completely different  this evening, I stumbled upon one stonkingly huge set of them. The sixteen volume series is entitled Carteggio degli oratori mantovani alla Corte Sforzesca (1450-1500), with each slab containing 500 to 700 pages of letters sent from Milan back to the Gonzaga court in Mantua. The ones that seem to have been published so far are:-

1. 1450-1459 / 2. 1460 / 3. 1461 / 4. 1462 / edited by Isabella Lazzarini
5. 1463 / edited by Marco Folin
6. 1464-1465 / 7. 1466-1467 / 8. 1468-1471 / edited by Maria Nadia Covini
10. 1475-1477 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
11. 1478-1479 / edited by Marcello Simonetta
12. 1480-1482 / edited by Gianluca Battioni
15. 1495-1498 / edited by Antonella Grati, Arturo Pacini 

For me, the two most interesting things to look at would be the reception in Milan of the De Re Militari incident which happened sometime in 1461 [Vol.3]; and also August / September  1465 [Vol.6], which is when Domenic Dominici the Bishop of Brescia rode into Milan with his copy of what is now known as ‘Vat. Gr. 1291’ (René Zandbergen’s favourite circular Byzantine nymph-fest, which Fulvio Orsini would then buy), before then leaving  for Rome with (I strongly suspect) Antonio Averlino in tow.

Of course, any other fleeting mention of Antonio Averlino / Filarete in the 1450-1465 volumes of these despatches could well turn out to be extraordinarily useful, never mind any rumours or talk of a mysterious unreadable herbal as well! 🙂 One day I’ll get a chance to go through these myself (because the British Library has a copy of all of the above), and who as yet knows what’s there to be found?

In the meantime, please leave a comment here to tell me if there are any other sets of despatches published or currently being edited that were sent out from Francesco Sforza’s ‘Big Tent’ in Milan circa 1450-1465, thanks very much!

As I mentioned here recently, I’ve been trying to grasp the structure of the humanist community of astronomers / mathematicians orbiting around Nicholas of Cusa and Cardinal Bessarion in Rome… but so far haven’t found any definitively useful books on the subject. Thony Christie has a nice article here, and there’s a book on 15th century Viennese astronomy here (for Regiomontanus and Peurbach), but sadly not a great deal else that rises far above Wikipediaesque factoids.

All the same, here’s the connection map I’ve put together: it’s far from complete, but it’s probably a decent enough starting point. Doubtless you’ll note plenty of familiar names!

Map of the community around Nicholas of Cusa and Bessarion

Also, I found a nice blog post containing pictures of Bessarion: mirroring his life-long interest in astronomy, the Greek epitaph on his tomb (below) says “I, Bessarion, raised this tomb to hide my bones; my soul will seek the stars whence once it came.” Not particularly religious for a Cardinal, perhaps, but I like it all the same!

The greek epitaph on Cardinal Bessarion's tomb

Though Professor David A. King is best known, academically speaking, for his detailed study of astrolabes, I first ran across him via his epic (2001) tome “The Ciphers of the Monks” (summarised here): there, what happened was that one particular 14th century astrolabe from Picardy had some markings in an unusual number system first devised by Cistercian monks, and – like the proper devotee of historical arcana he assuredly is – King began collecting all the occurrences of that system he could find, which culminated in his book on the subject. There’s also a nice paper here on how the same number system was also used for tallying / gauging wines in the late Middle Ages.

All of which provides a suitable introduction to King’s most recent excursus beyond mainstream astrolabe history, because for this too the herald for his ‘call to adventure’ was an astrolabe with unusual markings on it (this time, an angel and an apparently acrostic dedication). But this second astrolabe also had a remarkable provenance – that Renaissance king of astronomers Regiomontanus had constructed it and presented it to his patron Cardinal Bessarion. Once again, David King set out to try to uncover the meaning of an astrolabe’s curious engravings – but his research journey carried him onwards to the artist Piero Della Francesca, right at the heart of the Renaissance project…

The angel part of the astrolabe engraving looks straightforward enough (note the parallel hatching on the top wing-edges, the trendy crosshatching in the background, the mid-Quattrocento “^” for “7” in the 60/70/80/90 sequences, and the early-Quattrocento ‘4’ shape at the bottom):-

Similarly, the dedication looks straightforward enough too at first glance (note the looped early-Quattrocento ‘4’ in 1462):-

 SVB DIVI BESSARIONIS DE
CARDINE DICTI PRAESI
DIO ROMAE SVRGO IO
ANNIS OPVS :~ 1462

King translates this as: “Under the protection of the divine Bessarion, said to come from the cardo, I arise as the work of Ioannes in Rome in 1462“. But the clever part, King believes, is that Regiomontanus’s slightly clunky Latin manages to cleverly conceal a number of additional messages to his new patron Bessarion:-

Here eight hidden vertical axes of an acrostic contain all sorts of hidden messages that would have especially pleased the Cardinal once he had figured them out: references to himself and his rank, to Regiomontanus, and to an old Byzantine astrolabe that he had shown to the young German. The angel is Bessarion, but not the Cardinal. There are several plays on the Latin word cardo, meaning “hinge, axis or pole”. In brief, two astrolabes come together in one, two poems, two languages, two Bessarions, two men who used the name Ioannes, two places, Rome and Constantinople, all come together in one.

Ummm… eh? It’s just a dedication, isn’t it? When I first looked at it, all I really noticed was the word “DEI” vertically hidden at the end: but Professor King thinks that the wobbly spacing and stretched letters indicates that there is much, much more going on here. However, it has to be said that after it was auctioned by Christies in 1989, precisely the same evidence was used to argue that it was “suspicious”, and that it even might be a “19th-century fake”: so be aware that we are now entering the kind of is-it-a-cipher/is-it-a-hoax territory that should be eerily familiar to Cipher Mysteries readers…

The other thing you need to know is that Bessarion also owned a spectacular Byzantine astrolabe dated 1062, which also had “:~” on one of its engraved bands of text: King agrees with Berthold Holzschuh that the two astrolabes are connected in some way, and that perhaps part of the reason for Regiomontanus’ presenting it to Bessarion in 1462 was to mark the 400th anniversary of the making of the magnificent Byzantine astrolabe.

So, let’s take a deep breath and dive deep into King and Holzschuh’s acrostic world, to see if his theories hold water (or if they sink like a stone)…

Firstly, Holzschuh suspects that the primary secret message held here emerges if you reorder the words to mirror the start of the Greek text on the Byzantine astrolabe:.

SVB BESSARIONIS PRAESIDIO
SVRGO
IOANNIS OPVS DICTI DE CARDINE DIVI
ROMAE 1462

…which (because the Latin word ‘cardo’ means hinge or axis) he translates as “Under the protection of Bessarion, I arise in Rome in 1462 as a work of Ioannes explaining the rotation of the universe“. He also notes that the angel’s fingers “point to 4 and 8 hours on the horizontal scale of the markings below it, suggesting we should look for eight items in the four lines of the epigram“. The eight vertically hidden messages he highlights look like this:-

(Note that this is adapted from p.12 of David King’s Regiomontanus theory webpage, but that the DEI ESIO (ESIO TROT‘, surely?) acrostic ringed in red was mislabelled VIII).

Now, I have to say that I really am particularly impressed with the acrostics marked I (SVB CD ANNIS) and VIII (1062 / 1462), in that these not only tie in neatly with the “:~” on Bessarion’s 400-yearold Byzantine astrolabe, but also nicely explain (a) the curious starting position of “SVB” on the top line and (b) why IOANNIS is split over two lines. However, sorry to be a dreadful cipher party pooper but I don’t actually buy into a single one of the other acrostics suggested, nor into any of the hundreds of tenuously complex patron saint / birthday / symbolism / IO / 1407 / golden section etc arguments that are used to support them. No, not even the angels’ fingers.

To my eyes, the astrolabe’s acrostic angle does tell a hidden story: that Regiomontanus presented this to his patron in 1462 with a silent nod to the 400th anniversary of Bessarion’s Byzantine astrolabe. Perhaps there’s even “DEI” hidden on the right (though this seems way too prosaic and straightforward for the needs of King’s complicated exegesis). However, I honestly don’t see any evidence of anything else hidden in the message that is beyond pure chance, i.e. that you could not also extract from just about any other Latin inscription of comparable size and date.

Hence, I just can’t make the giant leap over to the second plank of King’s narrative, which connects Bessarion’s patronage of Regiomontanus (as expressed in the 1462 astrolabe) to Piero Della Francesca’s epic painting “The Flagellation of Christ“, which Martin Kemp (1997) rightly described as “sumptuously planned”. This single work has caused more art history ink to be spilled in vain than perhaps any other painting (yes, even more than the Mona Lisa): King tabulates (pp.23-24) over forty subtly nuanced theories about who the various characters represent, before adding Berthold Holzschuh’s (2005) theory to the list – that the bearded man at the back being whipped is Cardinal Bessarion, and that the man in red at the left of the foreground group is Regiomontanus.

Nope, sorry – this theory doesn’t work for me either. There’s maths and geometry aplenty in Piero’s work, sure, but I completely fail to see how it links to Bessarion and Regiomontanus on any level. Perhaps my idea of what constitutes evidence is just too limited, or maybe I’m just too stupid to grasp how these two objects do really form part of a vast Renaissance patronage fugue. 🙁

If, however, you’re still intrigued by all this, there’s a nice set of slides on King and Holzschuh’s theory here: and a 2007 book by David King on the subject, with the snappy title Astrolabes and Angels, Epigrams and Enigmas – From Regiomontanus’ Acrostic for Cardinal Bessarion to Piero della Francesca’s “Flagellation of Christ” (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner) that you can buy on Amazon, though be warned that even a second-hand copy is a hefty £120 (yes, really!) Enjoy!

Fans of historical novelist Christopher Harris have a new Voynich Manuscript-themed book of his heading their way in early 2009: to be published by Dedalus Books, “Mappamundi” is a non-Byzantine sequel to the final book in Harris’ Byzantine trilogy, “False Ambassador” (if that’s not too confusing). I asked him how he came to find the Voynich Manuscript:-

“As far as I can remember, I first came across the Voynich MS in an article in New Scientist (17 November 2001). As you would expect, the focus of the article is on cryptography, linguistics, statistical analysis, etc. I was intrigued by the strangeness of the MS, and thought I might be able to use it in a novel. (I have an interest in lost or mysterious manuscripts, e.g Plethon’s ‘Book of Laws’, which features in my ‘False Ambassador’.) I read what I could about the MS, and later got hold of the Gawsewitch facsimile edition (I don’t know if it’s available in the UK. I bought mine from Amazon.fr).”

Aside from the role the VMs takes on Mappamundi, what are his thoughts on what the VMs is or contains?

“Personally, I am inclined to believe the Art Brut theory, which suggests that the MS may be the production of a psychotic outsider who had seen herbal/ alchemical/ esoteric manuscripts, and attempted to replicate them obsessively, but without any understanding of the originals. There are examples of this in the 19th & 20th centuries, and it is quite possible that some 15th century monk, or amateur scholar, was similarly afflicted.

However, it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out to be a coherent document, capable of being translated.”

All of which is fair enough: more on this as it happens…

Over the years I’ve spent looking at the Voynich Manuscript, I’ve become progressively more accustomed to its ways, to the point that it is no longer an enciphered grimoire to me, but simply a book we cannot as yet read. When learning to juggle, the primary force which keeps the ball in the hand is not gravity but fear: all the while people see the VMs as a dark, Necronomicon-like repository of ancient evil (basically, confusing unreadable with unspeakable), their fears prevent them from grasping what it actually is.

Yet there’s still something odd about how the Voynich Manuscript is rooted, upon what it stands: specifically, it seems to my eyes to have one foot in early modern European (specifically Northern Italian, I would say) culture and the other in late medieval Byzantine culture. Though I’m still unable to satisfactorily express how this works, what I can say is that many of its herbal drawings have a structural quality that is neither medieval European (slavishly copied, overstylised, unrealistic) nor Renaissance European (emblematic rather than symbolic, abstract). The closest match I’ve found is in Byzantine herbals, many of which are drawn from life, but which have a kind of secret inner numericality: not Kabbalah, but topology / geometry.

I’m therefore always on the lookout for good stuff relating to Byzantium, but its 1000-year history is fascinating for many other reasons: the rich seam of inspiration the Romantic poets found in the marvellous decay of Venice was perhaps but a shadow of the irony and wonder to be discovered in Byzantium’s own history.

And so a book I’m looking forward to is “Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire” by Judith Herrin (Princeton, 2007), which seems to have exactly the kind of overall historical narrative all the fragments of Byzantine history I’ve ever read lacked. There’s a helpful review here: the hardback’s £25 RRP is a little hard to swallow, for sure, but what can you do? (Errrm, wait for the paperback?)