(01-04-2026, 05:31 PM)Mark Knowles wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I know a lot about the Barbavara family. In fact I have met the surviving members of this family. There are two different Francesco Barbavaras from the 15th century. The first ran the government of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan. There is a cipher key in the Cipher Ledger of Francesco Gonzaga in Mantova headed "Francesco Barbavara" from around 1400(I forgot to mention this). The second and the person I am more interested in was Ducal Secretary and Head of the Chancellery to Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, from 1425 to 1433. One can also find enciphered letters written by his brother Marcolino Barbavara from the 1440s in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in the Library in Paris. Of course, the ciphers I refer to here can be found in my archive. I particularly associate the Voynich manuscript with another brother Abbot Antonio Barbavara who collected rare plants and had an interest in medical and scientific matters.(The first Francesco Barbavara was the uncle of the second Francesco Barbavara.)

I really appreciate your assistance. I think the most useful things you could do, in my opinion, would be to study the inventories available online for the Turin archives and/or any other archives in towns/cities you might be able to visit nearby. You might then be able to determine if they have early 15th century documents than might include ciphers.

Alternatively, I increasingly think a useful exercise would be to go through the cipher ledgers for Lucca and Mantova in my archive and identify who all the correspondents were and who those correspondents worked for. These involves the difficult, but not impossible task of, trying to read the handwriting and then researching who that person was. For example, as I said, one of the cipher keys in the Mantova Ledger is headed "Francesco Barbavara" if I didn't know who that was I could research him with Google and discover that he worked for the Duke of Milan.

Anyway, anything you can do to advance our knowledge of early 15th century cryptography would be of value. However, I daresay you have other responsibilities to take your time, so you must not do more than is feasible for you.