01 The two records
R117 (ASV_i1025_SdS_Spain_10-1, two pages). Copia del Memorial dado por parte del obispo de
Pamplona: the see fell vacant on 27 January 1573 at the death of Diego Ramírez. The Pope held back the
bulls of the new bishop, Antonio Manrique, for nine months, and the memorial argues that those months’ fruits
belong to the bishop. The right-hand column repeats the sums in Roman numerals with the Spanish thousands sign
(xbnUdn L-ix, xxxbjUdn — m). Those sums are what DECODE catalogued as “ciphers within
cleartext”.
R118 (ASV_i1025_SdS_Spain_10-2, one page). The figures are undated on the leaf. The note reads:
Il Nuntio ha trattato col Sig.r Perez tutto quello che V.S. Ill.ma scrive con la cifra di 19 di sett.re, il qual Sig.r ha promesso di buoni uffici al Re, et di procurare risposta, de la quale V.S. Ill.ma sarà poi sabbato avvisata.
The nuncio has discussed with Signor Pérez everything Your Most Illustrious Lordship writes in the cipher of 19 September. He has promised his good offices with the King and to obtain an answer, of which Your Lordship will be told on Saturday. The letter therefore dates from the autumn of 1576 or 1577, not from 9 January 1576, which is only the start of the volume’s date range.
02 Is the note the decipherment?
It could have been. It is about as long as the cipher (some 200 letters written out, against about 190 digit
pairs), and 20 70 53 both opens line 1 and returns at the end of line 2. A search program divided
the first two lines into tokens of one to three digits, aligned letter by letter with the note. It kept each
token’s letter value consistent and minimised the number of distinct tokens. The note needs 43 tokens for 60
letters, and three shuffles of the same letters need 47, 51 and 48. The best alignment is also incoherent,
mixing token lengths with no stable pair structure. The note is the nuncio’s clear message, written in the
third person under the cipher. It is not the Rome decifrato.
The one nearby key on this site is Lasry’s reconstruction of the Cardinal of Como’s 1580 cipher to Dandini (Dandini 1580). It writes letters as two digits with an even second digit. This text has odd second digits throughout (53, 07, 03, 05), so it is not that system.
03 What remains open
- R118 entirely: 389 digits plus marks, not deciphered. The transcription (
r118_cipher.txt) is secure for lines 1–2 and less so for lines 3–6. The dots over digits are not recorded. - The Rome decipherment of this letter, if it survives, and the Spain nunciature key of 1572–77. Neither is on DECODE. The nunciature correspondence of these years is calendared in the Olarra–Larramendi Correspondencia entre la Nunciatura en España y la Santa Sede, which was not available online and was not checked.
- R116 (Ormanetto 1573, same series) remains in the catalogue.
04 Sources
- Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Segr. Stato, Spagna 10: DECODE R117 (ff. 245–246), DECODE R118 (f. 365). Images require a DECODE login.
- G. Lasry, reconstructed key of ASV Francia 283C (1580), on DECODE R72.
Notes, transcription and the crib aligner: ormanetto1576/.