01 The letter
Venice declared war on Ferrara in May 1482. Duke Ercole I d’Este was married to Eleonora of Aragon, daughter of King Ferdinand of Naples and sister of Beatrix, Queen of Hungary since 1476. Eleonora wrote to her sister and brother-in-law for help. Matthias answered from Pozsony (Pressburg, Bratislava) on the first of June. He was himself at war with the Emperor Frederick III, whose lands lay between Hungary and Italy.
The letter is one page of Latin in a chancery hand, with the address and a red seal on the verso. The courtesies and the reasoning are in clear. The numbers, the troops, the route, the names and the plan are in cipher, set into the clear lines as short runs. DECODE holds two images (I5815, I5816). The archive keeps the rights, and the images are not reproduced here.
02 The cipher
Each letter of the Latin is replaced by an invented sign. Many signs look like numerals or letters turned about (5, 4, 9, 2, 3, 7, 8, a reversed C, L, T and its inversion ⊥, Ŧ, Π, Λ, ⊏, ⊐, ∃, ∅), which makes the runs look like a string of figures at first sight. Vowels and the commonest consonants have two to four signs each. A doubled letter is one sign between dots, ·ıı· for tt in mittere and mitteremus. There are no word breaks inside a run, but the runs themselves are mostly single words or short phrases, spaced like the clear text.
The working key below comes from lining up each run with the printed text and keeping only values that recur in at least two words:
| letter | signs | letter | signs |
|---|---|---|---|
| a | 8, V | n | ⊏, ϲ |
| b | d | o | 7, Π, Λ, + |
| c | Ͻ (reversed C) | p | ⊔ |
| d | 2, ᑐ | q | = |
| e | 5, 4, 9, ς | r | Ŧ |
| f | ϵ (once) | s | L, Γ, S |
| g | ᒪ (hooked L) | t | ⊥, + |
| h | 6 | u / v | ⊤, ∃ |
| i | 2, 3, ∅ | tt | ·ıı· |
| l | σ, ᒧ | ||
| m | ⊐, ᑐ | ||
Name signs: a looped ampersand for Veneti (and Venetorum), a crossed square for regi Ferdinando, and a q with a looped tail for Rex Hungarie, the King referring to himself. Some signs seem to serve two letters (+ for o, t and e; 2 for i and d). With about 330 signs of cipher in all, the sample is too short to tell whether these are true homophones shared between letters or two similar shapes that a transcription from the image cannot separate.
03 The reading
Clear text in roman, the cipher runs in brackets, corrections to the printed text in bold. The first lines of the letter, all in clear, are as Fraknói prints them.
… statim cum domina regina consorte nostra statuimus [mittere] in [subsidium] [vestrum] [quingentos] [equites], inter [quos] essent [centum] [usarones], idest [homines] levis [armature], qui plus [ceteris] [valent]. Sed cum examinaremus cum domina regina ‹two signs› et [aliis] nostris, per [quam] [viam] possemus [eos] [mittere], non invenimus aliquam [tutam]. …
In crastinum hinc recedet [Mager] [Balas] [capitaneus] [noster] cum [pluribus] [gentibus], iturus in [Croatiam] versus [confinia] [Venetorum], ubi [plures] etiam [congregabit]; et quotienscunque inventa erit [tuta] [transeundi] [via], statim significet [Regi Hungarie] et illic faciet [?] [venient].
Speramus cito nos [res] [nostras] ita [disposituros], ut meliori postea modo [vos] [iuvare] possemus. [Rex Hungarie] [scripsit] [regi Ferdinando] quomodo possent [diverti] [Veneti] et [confundere] [eos] et cum paucis [pecuniis].
Dat. Posonii, primo Junii 1482.
“… at once, with our lady the queen, we decided to send five hundred horse to your aid, among them a hundred hussars, that is light horse, who are worth more than the rest. But when we considered with the queen and our other counsellors by what road we could send them, we found none safe. … Tomorrow our captain Balázs Magyar leaves here with a large force for Croatia, towards the Venetian border, where he will gather more; and whenever a safe way through is found, he is to tell the King of Hungary at once, and they will come there. We hope soon to have our own affairs so arranged that afterwards we can help you better. The King of Hungary has written to King Ferdinand how the Venetians might be drawn off and thrown into confusion, and at small cost.”
04 What the printed text got wrong
- “qui plus ceteris valoris (így)”. The run is v-a-l-e-n-t. The hussars are the ones “who are worth more than the others”. The editor printed a non-word and marked it sic.
- “cum pluribus servis”. The run is g-e-n-t-i-b-u-s, with the same hooked-L g as congregabit. Balázs leaves with troops, which suits a captain sent to gather more on the Venetian border.
- “Speramus nos eos nostris contra dispositiones ut meliori postea modo possemus (így)”. The edition skipped the clear word cito, took r-e-s for eos and n-o-s-t-r-a-s for nostris, turned d-i-s-p-o-s-i-t-u-r-o-s into “contra dispositiones”, and left out v-o-s i-u-v-a-r-e, the verb the sentence needs. Read from the signs, the sentence is sound Latin: Speramus cito nos res nostras ita disposituros, ut meliori postea modo vos iuvare possemus.
- The “regest”. Fraknói ends the letter with the date and gives, as a regest written “at the end of the letter in a contemporary hand”, the words Rex Hungarie scripsit regi Ferdinando, quomodo possent diverti Veneti et confundere eos et cum paucis pecuniis. That is the letter’s own last sentence, in the same hand, before the date, with the three name signs and s-c-r-i-p-s-i-t, d-i-v-e-r-t-i, c-o-n-f-u-n-d-e-r-e, e-o-s and p-e-c-u-n-i-i-s in cipher. His words are right, but he placed the sentence outside the letter. The verso carries only the address and the seal, so if a separate decipherment exists it is on leaf 2a, which DECODE did not image.
05 What remains uncertain
- statim significet [Regi Hungarie] et illic faciet [?] [venient]. The printed text has convenire. The run after faciet is the looped-q name sign followed by v-e-n-i-e-n-t (grade C). The same sign may stand here for quod or for the syllable con-. The clear verb before the first q-sign looks more like sufficietur than significet on the image (grade M). The sense is not in doubt.
- Two name signs after cum domina regina are not in the printed text and are not read (grade I).
- Signs that serve two letters (+, 2) and the single f are grade C. The rest of the key is grade H, confirmed on two or more words.
- The two lines Fraknói gives about the letter to King Ferdinand (“Scripsimus regi Ferdinando, ut rex ipse vel dux Ferrarie possent aliquem excogitare modum…”) were checked only where they are in cipher (modum, tuto, mitteremus). His “libenter mitteremus (így)” stands as printed: the run does spell m-i-tt-e-r-e-m-u-s.
06 Sources
- Modena, Archivio di Stato, Cancelleria ducale, Carteggio principi esteri 1622, b. 1/3, nos. 2, 2a. Images: DECODE R1156 (login; images I5815 recto, I5816 verso).
- Fraknói Vilmos, Mátyás király levelei. Külügyi osztály, vol. II, 1480–1490 (Budapest: MTA, 1895), no. 131, pp. 232–233. MEK 07105.
- Nagy Iván and Nyáry Albert (eds.), Magyar diplomácziai emlékek Mátyás király korából, vol. III (Budapest, 1877), no. 14, the first printing, cited by Fraknói.
- Related letters of the same Ferrara–Hungary correspondence (Sadoleto 1482–83, Valentini 1486, Costabili 1489–93) are in ASMo, Ambasciatori, Ungheria, and on Vestigia.
Notes, the DECODE record and a text copy of the edition are in the repository folder matthias1482/. The images stay out of the repository at the archive’s request.