Noailles to the Cardinal de Lorraine, Venice, 1558

At a glanceNot solved · text not obtained

The letter: François de Noailles, French ambassador at Venice, to the Cardinal de Lorraine, 13 November 1558: news of the Levant galleys, Candia and Corfu, with three cipher blocks.
Where: Bibliothèque nationale de France, français 3151 no. 33, ff. 59–60v (Gallica btv1b9059865k, views 60–62); catalogue item 10, with two other letters.
The cipher: Invented symbols, 262 in all in three blocks (Michael Brackx’s count), in an alphabet different from La Guiche’s of 1551.
How it was tried: Checked here for a decipherment: the court’s is written beside each block, in the inner margin of f. 60r and the outer margin of f. 60v. Michael Brackx has transcribed the blocks and largely recovered the key from the glosses (issue #113); not yet checked here.
Still open: The start of every gloss line on f. 60r, lost in the gutter, and a check of Brackx’s reading.

This page was split on 14 October 2026 from the joint entry for catalogue item 10. La Guiche’s Rome letter of 1551 and Seure’s Lisbon letters of 1558 are in other ciphers, each with its own page: La Guiche to Montmorency, 1551 and Seure’s Lisbon letters, 1558.

01 The letter and its marginal decipherment

Cipher lines with a column of clear words in the inner margin — BnF fr. 3151 f. 60r (Gallica btv1b9059865k, view 61): Noailles’s two cipher blocks, with the court’s decipherment in the inner margin, partly hidden in the gutter. Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France, fr. 3151 f. 60r, via Gallica btv1b9059865k view 61.

The letter is in clear (the Levant galleys, Candia, Corfu) with three cipher blocks: two of three lines each on f. 60r, and one of seven lines on f. 60v, which Michael Brackx found (issue #113) and our first notes missed. The court’s decipherment is written beside each block, so the letter was deciphered when it arrived. On f. 60r it stands in the inner margin, and only part of it is legible, because the start of each line runs into the binding: « … mauluaise … e pauur[eté] … [cond]uitte q[u’il] donne a … affaires », « [gr]and seigneur … [entre]prend sur luy et le … de la Tou[ss]aint ». (Our earlier reading of these glosses had « gouvernement », « ne luy » and « de la fortune »; Brackx corrected them.) On f. 60v the gloss stands in the outer margin and is nearly complete.

02 What remains open

The hidden start of each gloss line. It needs the volume opened flat, which only the BnF can do.
The cipher itself. 262 symbols in three blocks. Michael Brackx reports a key recovered from the glosses and a French language model, with 246 of the 262 symbols given a value; we have asked for his files and have not yet reproduced it. Where the f. 60v gloss is legible over unread groups, it gives cribs for the gaps. The printed edition of Noailles’s embassy (Vertot, 1763) has not been searched.

03 Sources

BnF français 3151, Gallica btv1b9059865k, view 61.

Notes: targets/noailles1558/. The work so far was done in the joint entry, targets/guiche1551/, on 21 September 2026.