Original scientific paper
Using Script against undesirable Readers (II): A Coded Message of Antun Vrančić (Antonius Verantius)
Milenko Lončar
orcid.org/0000-0002-4277-0156
; University of Zadar
Abstract
Not merely to be up to date with humanist fashion, but also out of the genuine necessities of life, the Šibenik brothers Antun and Mihovil Vrančić corresponded throughout the whole of their lives. Sometimes, they would write confidential information in code. Mihovil’s secret reports were discussed in the last number of Colloquia Maruliana by Diana Sorić and the author of the present work, but at that time a short coded missive by Antun still eluded comprehension. In this paper, I report on the deciphering of this fragment, encoded in a letter sent from France in 1546.
In the very first words of this letter, Antun boasts of having been well received by the king and of everything going his way. The continuation of the sentence is written in secret signs. Since these are different from Mihovil’s, they needed decoding. The first attempt, based on a comparison of frequency of signs and the frequency of signs in the Latin text, was not useful, for Antun’s message is too short (just a line and a half) for such an approach. It seemed then to be useful to start out from the first signs, assuming that they must have contained the beginning of some word. It became clear that in these first signs, the fifth and the seventh were the same, and so the remainder of Antun’s family letters were searched for a similar combination. A check of some eighty letters revealed that not a single possible choice corresponded with the rest of the message. Accordingly I tried using Antun’s syntactical habits in consecutive clauses (for the message consists of such a passage). I set out from the assumption that in the code there might be some active future participle, which would be useful for recognition purposes if it were in the singular, for in the -uru-section of the participle the u is repeated after the second sign. But this attempt came to nothing too. All that remained was to play on chance: to attempt to guess some word that could be expected from the context. And indeed, there was such a word, Transsilvania, which was apt in that it had the double ss, capable of being associated with the repeated sign dd in the coded text. A word this long filled in at once more than a quarter of the unknown text, and its component parts another half, and so the rest did not offer many difficulties. Only the beginning remained a problem. The first two symbols cannot be meaningfully fitted in, and so they can be interpreted as red herrings, as used by code makers to confuse code breakers. The other signs clearly hide some passive form of the verb mittere, the meaning of which fits in well with the continuation of the text, but to obtain the appropriate form, it has to be assumed that there is one more »empty« sign and one mistake by Antun. In any event, it turns out that Antun was writing to Mihovil that he might soon be able to report »great things« to his second homeland, Transylvania, in the diplomacy of which he was serving.
But even after the decoding of the text, the task of Antun at the French court remains a riddle. Looking in the circumstances of the time and among other Vrančić letters for more definite elements for an answer, I concluded that it must have been to do with Transylvanian-Austrian relations. After the death of Louis II at the Battle of Mohács, a dispute about the succession in Transylvania broke out, one that was to last a century and a half. A year or two before Antun’s arrival in France, Charles V of Habsburg signed a treaty with the King François I of France, Transylvanian ally, and then with Suleiman, thus freeing his forces and those of his brother Ferdinand for other designs. Juraj Utišenić (Georgius Utissenius), the leading man of Transylvanian politics, must have recognised the danger that had thus arisen. From one of Antun’s letters from the time after the French mission it is clear that his embassy to France concerned Austrian King Ferdinand. Judging from the historical context, this was probably one of a number of proposals for an Austrian-Transylvanian compact. Antun’s satisfaction expressed in the coded text elicits the conclusion that the proposal had met with a good reception from François I.
Keywords
Antun Vrančić (Antonius Verantius); history of diplomacy; de¬coding; Transylvania; treaty; Ferdinand of Habsburg
Hrčak ID:
120323
URI
Publication date:
22.4.2014.
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