National Library of France
An international team of codebreakers has successfully cracked the cipher of over 50 enigmatic characters unearthed in a French archive. The team discovers that the letter was written by Mary, Queen of Scots, to a trusted ally while imprisoned in England by Queen Elizabeth I (her cousin). In a new paper published in the journal Cryptologia, the team explained how they cracked Mary’s code and deciphered and translated some of her letters. This publication coincides with the anniversary of Mary’s execution on February 8, 1587.
“This is a really exciting discovery,” said co-author George Lasry, an Israeli computer scientist and cryptographer. “Mary, Queen of Scots, left behind a vast corpus of letters which are held in various archives. However, other letters from Mary Stuart, referenced in other sources, are found elsewhere. There was previous evidence that it was missing from these collections, such as not found in the .The characters we deciphered were most likely part of this lost secret communication.” Lasry is part of the multidisciplinary DECRYPT project dedicated to mapping, digitizing, transcribing, and decoding historical cryptography.
Mary tried to protect her most private letters from being intercepted or read by her adversaries. For example, she engaged in what was commonly called “letter locking” at the time to protect her personal letters from prying eyes. As we previously reported, her Jana Dambrogio, an archivist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Library, when she was a Fellow of the Vatican Secret Archives in 2000, after discovering such a letter, said she ” coined the term “letter lock”.
These “locked” Vatican letters dated to the 15th and 16th centuries and featured strange cut-off cuts and corners. D’Ambrosio realized that the letters were originally folded in an ingenious way. It was essentially “locked” by inserting a piece of paper into the slit and sealing it with wax. You couldn’t have opened the letter without tearing the piece of paper – providing evidence that the letter had been tampered with.
public domain
Queen Elizabeth I, Catherine de Medici, Machiavelli, Galileo Galilei, John Donne, and Marie Antoinette are some of the famous people known to have used letter seals. There are hundreds of techniques for locking letters, including a “butterfly lock”, a simple triangular fold, and a clever method known as a “dagger trap”. rock. Mary, Queen of Scots, used an intricate spiral her letterlock in her last letter (addressed to Henry III of France) on the eve of her execution for her treason in February 1587. .
From an early age, Mary was trained in cryptography by her mother, Marie de Guise. A substantial collection of her letters housed in various archives includes her intriguing references to other missing letters of hers.John Bossey, author Under the Molehill: Elizabethan Spy Story (2002) suggested that these missing letters may have been ciphered to Mary’s extensive network of associates and allies. This network was fatally compromised by Sir Francis Walsingham (Elizabeth I’s spymaster) around mid-1583, ultimately leading to Mary’s trial and trial. execution for treason. Like many before him, Bossy thought those letters were lost.
Join Lasry and his fellow codebreakers, physicist and patent expert Chisei Chi and pianist and music professor Norbert Biermann. As part of DECRYPT, they were scouring various archives for cryptographically encrypted documents, especially those that had no provenance yet. They discovered several collections in his archives online at the National Library of France and identified 57 fully encrypted documents. Other items in the collection date from the 1520s to his 1530s, mainly on “Italian affairs”. None of the letters’ texts were written in clear language, so it was not possible to determine who wrote them without deciphering them first.
