Holy Roman Emperor written Letter secret code finally revealed after 5 centuries

 French scientists have decoded a letter written by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1547.  The three-page letter reveals 16th-century secrets, including assassination fears.       The secret language of the letter took months to decode for the French team of scientists.   The Stanislas Libary in Nancy, France, has announced that French scientists have decoded a letter signed in 1547 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

 

The secretly coded letter revealed the most important concerns of Rennaisance Europe's most powerful man during a period of religious and strategic conflict. It demonstrated that Charles V was concerned about an assassination attempt by an Italian mercenary and was putting his relationship with King François I of France first.   The letter had been forgotten in the Stanislas Library for nearly five centuries. According to the BBC, French cryptographer Cecile Pierrot heard about the mysterious historic document at a dinner party and searched for it in the library's basement.

Charles V ruled over a vast European empire that included Spain, southern Italy, the Netherlands, large swaths of central Europe, and large portions of the newly discovered Americas.  The emperor's letter to his ambassador at the French royal court was written against the febrile backdrop of continental wars and religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants, making it critical to communicate secretly and not give away any valuable information to prying eyes.   The contents of the letter remained unknown until now because it was made up of approximately 120 encrypted symbols and some French passages.

                                                      Pierrot named each symbol and loaded the improvised alphabet into Python, a programming language, but it was unable to decipher the mysterious language.
                                                                                                                                                               Pierrot and her team, which included French cryptographers Pierrick Gaudry and Paul Zimmermann, as well as historian Camille Desenclos, set to work for months wading through Emperor Charles' strange script, identifying decoy letters and having slow and steady eureka moments.   The team has not yet released a complete translation, but the themes identified have provided an invaluable insight into the mind of a giant figure at a pivotal point in European history.