It was a pity to let go of an experienced scribe and herbalist, but - an order. The abbot pointed a finger upward pointedly. The demand for handwritten books was slowly decreasing … The monk asked for a supply of five types of colored ink. And he took the bags of herbs and roots with him.
A considerable number of Western cryptologists are still "breaking spears" around the decryption of the so-called Voynich manuscript (or simply MB), bought by the husband of the famous writer EL Voynich in 1912 from the Jesuits in Italy. The manuscript is now in the Yale University Library.
Meanwhile, there have been many unsuccessful attempts to read the strange manuscript, starting in the 1920s.
Retired codebreakers, professionals in their field, have tried dozens of languages from different continents, methods of frequency analysis of the occurrence of peculiar symbols, wondered over drawings … Failures gave rise to a hypothesis built on the principle “no man - no problem”. Allegedly, there is no real author and meaningful text - for example, a hoax with unclear goals.
Skeptics were denied by the twice-conducted radiocarbon analysis - both paper and ink were made in Europe in the 15th century. And the Indian professor Rao, who works in Washington, again applied frequency analysis, but in a version designed to restore genetic codes.
In the Middle Ages, they loved lattice ciphers, through the slots of which they read the text. In the case of MB, everything is more complicated, there are a lot of dummy symbols (including the icon with a "gallows" - probably so as not to be hanged as a poisoner). Now I would like to check the text with the pictures, but the plants are composite - the stamen from one, the petal from the other, the root from the third. Until we have not tried to consistently identify real medicinal and poisonous plants in this way. And in vain - it immediately becomes clear what to look for in the text. Although there are tricks here - the poison, say, is contained in the seeds, and in the picture there is a leaf. And fans of frequency analysis, even after discarding dummy symbols, will be confused by the abundance of very short words in the text.
It is also necessary to recall the Latin abbreviations of the NB type (nota bene - "on a note" with the meaning "very important") adopted in the Middle Ages. There are also many other "little things" - there are dozens of identified reading rules.
Particularly convincing are those recipes when the poisons are lethal separately (say, from belladonna and from the European clefthoof), and even more so together. The author of the manuscript did not forget to point out that it is useful to look into the right pupil to be sure of the death of the poisoned person.
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Now encryption is completely different - the key can change every half hour. This is reasonable in war - if the enemy and "split" the digital key, then the coordinates of the targets the artillerymen will already receive and use. A different matter is the collection of recipes, compiled for years "for oneself", where encryption is needed "so that they do not hang if they are caught." Here the cipher has to be very sophisticated, not digital.
You can read slowly, just to clarify the details (parts by weight, etc.). Of particular interest is the presence of Chinese plants, including the eleutherococcus root, which was then unknown in Europe, but clearly depicted in one of the drawings. We can safely assume that the author of MB traveled to China. A trip of scholars to China that was really successful in the 16th century was the mission of the Jesuits to Beijing, headed by M. Ricci. Matteo Ricci himself, an Italian Jesuit missionary, mathematician, cartographer and translator, stayed in Beijing for many years, but, of course, sent a trusted courier-courier with a report to Rome. This courier, a monk from Northern Italy, was the author of the manuscript. The history of color ink will help us uncover a historical mystery.
FEATURES OF MONASH INK
In the scriptorium of one of the monasteries in northern Italy, the monks were copying the Bible. Of course, not on paper, but on a more expensive parchment (here it is true not to put the letter "t" at the end of a word). Particularly prized parchment is not white, but with brown shades, obtained from skins of piebald animals. After buying the sheets, the monks polished them, making them coated.
In ordinary books, only a parchment cover, and paper inside, but also coated. The monks repeatedly beat finely chopped white rags in water, and then pressed layers of the resulting pulp, laying them with felt.
The trademark of the monasteries in northeastern Italy was the polishing of the finished paper with a smooth parchment stone. Large sheets were folded and folded into "notebooks", with whiter and more colored pages arranged in pairs. Now it was possible to take up the pen.
In the right hand of the scribe - dried goose or swan feathers, taken from the outer edge of the left wings of birds, so that their bend would be convenient for right-handers. In the left - a knife to clean up stains if ink drips, and even sharpen the tip of the pen as needed. An inkwell of black ink hung from his belt. They were prepared using an outgrowth on oak leaves, which remains in the form of an "ink nut" after a nutcracker hatched from a larva flies out of it. "Nuts" were soaked in white wine or vinegar. Iron vitriol was added to the solution, obtained after rusty nails lie in sulfuric acid diluted with alcohol. After mixing, dried acacia juice - gum arabic was added to the almost finished ink for viscosity.
The bright red paint - "cinnabar" contained mercury sulfide, egg glue and gum arabic and was unhealthy. It was uncorked as needed. But just at the time described, it was in Italy that red ink spread from the roots of the madder plant, so that the monk, after several years of work in the scriptorium, remained healthy.
True, he did not like white paint - it contains lead. Horns with a supply of colored ink are suspended in special mounts. Especially valuable bright blue ink is given by the abbot if necessary. They contain expensive lapis lazuli, smuggled out of Afghan lands. Green paint is somewhat cheaper - it does not require the addition of crushed malachite, more often the juice of yari-copperhead. It's even easier with a brown color - in Italy there are many volcanic soils that give the paint this shade, you can also add saffron.
In special cases, they used gold ink made from powdered gold mixed with gum arabic. They were kept in the shells of mussels or oysters and were called shells. From the middle of the 15th century, they replaced gold foil. Now the initials of the books adorned with placers of golden "frost". Gilding was applied with a pen on the finished drawing, but not immediately, but on a substrate made of a special mixture of gypsum, lead white, sugar and egg glue. The substrate was also applied with a pen. You will be tortured, in a word. Even an experienced scribe would not be able to use gilding on the road. Everything else is likely. So in the manuscript there is black, red, green, brown, even blue paint, but no gold. Only a monk with experience in scriptorium could have such a set of ink. The scribe and herbalist were selected to participate in the trip to China. He was rewriting the report to Rome, and along the way, he got acquainted with interest with the Chinese collections of recipes. On the way, the courier avoided questioning, and the overly curious could treat the overly curious with something exotic, like a lethal mixture of coffee and opium.
Flasks in drawings with "poisonous apparatus" are painted green. On one of the pages of the manuscript, one of the puffy ladies is holding a bucket with a bright blue liquid, the other with a bright red one. The plants themselves are often brown when the green color seemed unsuitable for the author. He carried a little bit of expensive blue and harmful red ink with him, but preferred safe ones - black, brown, green. I preferred the old paper, from the monastery reserves.
DETECTIVE SIDE OF THE MEDAL
The courier-monk, after a trip from Beijing to Rome, could well have received a new appointment. And then "cross" with the very famous English astrologer and intelligence officer of the 16th century John Dee, who worked in Krakow and Prague in 1583-1589.
It is known from the history of intelligence that John Dee, together with his espionage partner, the alchemist Edward Kelly, actually "filmed" information exchanged between Jesuit residents in Krakow and the leadership of the order in the Vatican. Moreover, the Jesuits working in Krakow received reports about other countries, which was very reckless, since the British were very interested in the secrets from Madrid, obtained there by competitors.
The legend becomes clear that it was John Dee who, after his failure in Prague, sold the mysterious manuscript to Emperor Rudolph II (the cunning man invented that it contains a recipe for the elixir of youth), having received permission to leave home for England. The less fortunate Kelly remained in a Prague prison until his death. Moreover, they demanded alchemical gold from him.
The poison, say, is contained in the seeds, and in the picture there is a leaf.
By the way, the first reliably established owner of the manuscript was the physician-in-law of Emperor Rudolf II named Jacob Horsike de Tepenek. Of course, he did not reveal the recipe for the elixir of youth, but the English agent was already far away …
The story is silent about how Dee got the workbook from a resident of a rival firm. The Englishman was known as a philosopher, astrologer, geographer, but by no means as an expert on poisons. So it is unlikely that the expert on poisons was himself poisoned. However, there were many ways to steal a manuscript with multi-colored drawings of composite plants.
Sergey Krivenkov