Cardinal Morosini, legate in France, to Cardinal Montalto, 1588–89

01 The documents and the key

Francia 22 is the volume of Morosini’s originals and ciphers from 25 July 1588 to 20 September 1589 (ff. 10–583). DECODE holds 36 of its cipher enclosures, items 22/1 to 22/37 (22/29 has no record; R23–R26 and R50, inside the same run of record numbers, are other material). Most are marked dup.to, the duplicate sent by a second courier; the clear covering letters that go with them are partly transcribed on DECODE as well.

The key is Meister no. 40 (Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der päpstlichen Kurie, pp. 393–394), issued to Morosini on 8 June 1587. Each letter has two or three homophones: a 21 212 2, e 35 153 5, i 17 171 7, n 10 01 0, o 91 191 9, r 00 13 1, s 54 45 4, t 51 15 6, u 37 173 3, and so on. There are about twenty codes for clusters (cr 22, pr 33, st 47, str 49) and twenty for words (che 56, per 64, non 61 71, quando 99). A three-digit nomenclator is marked with a dot on the middle figure: 111 the Pope, 113 the King of France (“S. M.tà Christ.ma”), 116 the Queen Mother, 129 Duca di, 131 Cardinale di, 133 Arcivescovo, 227 Heretici, 232 “il già Re di Navarra”. An 8 with any following figure is a null.

02 The murder of the Guises

The despatch of 23 December 1588 (R43) begins, once the figures are cut up:

… questa matina il Duca di Guisa nela camera di S. M.tà è stato per ordine di S. M.tà amazato a colpi di pugnale, et la sua morte è seguita a questo modo. […] domandato a chiamare il Duca di Guisa che si trovava nel consiglio di stato, venuto et entrato subito nela camera fu preso […] con molte pugnalate, et dopo havere indarno usata grandissima difesa con le mani et [co’] denti, senza però mai havere potuto metter mano ala spada […]; posti prigioni il Cardinale di Guisa, che si trovava pure in consiglio, il Duca di Nemurs, il Duca d’Elbeuf, il Principe di Gianvile, l’Arcivescovo di Lione, il prevosto de’ mercanti di Parigi […] et data guardia al Cardinale di Borbone.

(This morning the Duke of Guise was killed with daggers in His Majesty’s chamber on His Majesty’s order. Called from the council of state, he came in and was seized, and, after a great defence with his hands and teeth, without ever getting his hand to his sword, died of many dagger blows. The Cardinal de Guise, Nemours, Elbeuf, Joinville, the Archbishop of Lyon and the prévôt des marchands of Paris were arrested, and the Cardinal de Bourbon put under guard.) The duplicate of the next day (R44) adds that the Cardinal de Guise “questa matina solamente è rimasto privo di vita”. The legate, because a cardinal had been killed, leaves the answer to the Pope.

03 All thirty-six, in brief

Dates in square brackets come from the context or the series; the quotations are from the decoded text, spaced into words and lightly normalised.

04 Method

DECODE’s transcriptions give the figures one by one, marking a dotted figure X Y^. Z. Dotted groups were taken as nomenclator codes. The rest of each page is a single string of digits, and each position can open a code of one, two or three figures. The decoder (morosini1588/decrypt.py) keeps, at every position, the best-scoring reading for each four-letter context. It scores the letters it emits with the repository’s shared Italian 5-gram model (lang/, it-cinquecento, built from Renaissance letters and nunciature reports, without spaces). It charges a fixed cost for a null (8 and any figure) and a larger one for a figure it cannot place. A page of 1,500 figures runs in about a second. The Spanish enclosure (R35, a copy of Philip II’s letter to the Queen Mother) comes out in readable Spanish although the model is Italian. R53 and R54 are in a different key: syllabic, one or two figures, the dot on the first figure of a code. For these the decoder uses Lasry’s partial reconstruction on DECODE (R53, R54 DOC_3187/3188).

05 What remains uncertain

• Nomenclator: 113 is “Il Re di Francia, S. M.tà Christ.ma” in Meister and reads as “S. M.tà” throughout (H). 165 and 166, printed “quelli” and “questi”, serve for every form of quello and questo (H), and 161 likewise for quanto (C).
• Dotted groups not in Meister’s table (162, 191, 250, 516, 617, 712, 716, 770 and a few others, about one per page) are left open. Most are probably a dot mis-set in the transcription, since undotted they read as ordinary letters.
• Letter-level slips: roughly one to three letters in a hundred come out wrong. These are transcription errors or a homophone cut the wrong way (“euisone” for Soissons). The decoded pages are given as the decoder leaves them, in decrypt_raw.txt; the summaries above and the quotations are readings of that text (H for the sense, C for individual proper names such as Soissons, Nevers, Poigny).
• R53 and R54 (22/32–33): second key, known only in part. Perhaps half of each reads (M). The rest waits for the key, which is probably among Meister’s or the Vatican’s cipher registers for 1589.
• Item 22/29 is not on DECODE and was not seen. The clear covering letters were not edited here.

06 Sources

• Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Segreteria di Stato, Francia 22 (“Francia, card. Morosino, 1588 e 1589”), items 1–37: DECODE R18–R22, R27–R49, R51–R58. The images need a login; the digit transcriptions (by DECODE volunteers, 2016–17) and the clear transcriptions of R18/R19 are attached to the records.
• A. Meister, Die Geheimschrift im Dienste der päpstlichen Kurie von ihren Anfängen bis zum Ende des XVI. Jahrhunderts (Paderborn 1906), pp. 393–394, no. 40, from the Argenti collection.
• G. Lasry, reconstructed keys “ASV – F22” and “ASV – F22b” on DECODE (October 2020).
• No printed edition of Morosini’s legation turned up (there is no Acta Nuntiaturae Gallicae volume for 1587–89); searched 19 September 2026.

Decoder, notes, the decoded pages and the summaries: morosini1588/. Page images are not reproduced beyond the crop above.