Secret writing of Emperor Leopold II.

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Emperor Leopold II (1747–1792)

The cipher Emperor Leopold II. Served the later Emperor Leopold II. (1747-1792) in particular during his reign as Grand Duke of Tuscany (1765-1790) as the encryption method confidential to protect notes and databases . It was carried in 1959 Adam Wandruszka deciphered , but not until 1961 as a further development of an originally from the UK coming shorthand system detected.

exploration

In the course of his research for a biography of Leopold as Grand Duke of Tuscany and Roman-German Emperor, Adam Wandruszka studied numerous autographs of the monarch, which have been preserved in various archives in Vienna , Florence and Prague . In the Viennese house, court and state archives he came across two " peculiar documents in a stenographical secret script ", which were created during Leopold's two stays at the Viennese court in 1778/79 and 1784.

Table 1 with abbreviations
Table 2 with abbreviations
Examples of "Maria" and " Wikipedia " in phonetic transcription (see the explanations in the main text)

It was initially by no means clear in which language Leopold's documents were written, but according to Wandruszka's initial assessment, there was a high probability that the Grand Duke at the time - as with his other private notes - the Italian , and not - as in his correspondence with the Wiener Hof - who had used the French language. Two similar groups of characters, used as chapter headings and also appearing several times in the text, suggested that these were the terms l'imperatrice (for Maria Theresa ) and l'imperatore (for Joseph II.), but Wandruszka initially got no further with these groups of characters. However, he was able to determine that Grand Duke Leopold's secret script used a phonetic notation and therefore did not take into account the elongation h or the consonant doubling that is quite common in Italian .

A major step towards deciphering the manuscripts was Rudolf Neck's assumption that the many dots scattered over the text could perhaps be symbols used to separate words. These points do not follow the preceding sign at the same height, but were placed partly above, partly below, partly next to, partly half right above or half right below after the previous symbol. This resulted in five different positions which Wandruszka was able to identify with the vowels a, e, i, o, u as the final vowels of the individual words, read in a semicircle from top to bottom in the sense of a clock face from 12 to 6. So into the center via the abbreviation for the letter means l set point onela , a point half right above a le , a point to the right of the abbreviation a li (or gli in phonetic spelling ), a point half right under the abbreviation a lo , and a point just below the abbreviation a lu . A similar scheme applies to the word interior, with vowels between consonants being expressed by the position of the following consonant. A dash is the abbreviation for the letter n . If this is followed by a second, half right underneath, this results in non , while two lines on top of each other (=) as nan or nowcan be read, two lines next to each other (- -) as nin . Is a vowel in the initial voice or alone - which is common in Italian, e.g. B. as a (to, in, has), e (and, is), o (or, have), i (die) - there is a separate abbreviation for it and it is treated as a consonant. The same is true when two vowels meet, e.g. B. in the name of Maria . In such a case, the first a is expressed by placing the r in the middle above the m , while the second a is expressed by the separate initial fora , which is placed to the right of the abbreviation for r . If a longer word contains several a or u , this notation can result in a kind of “tower building” that extends into the line above or next in the Grand Duke's manuscripts.

use

Manuscript 1: "Allegato di No.1" (1778–1779)
Manuscript 2: "Cose particolari" (1784)

The later emperor's notes, deciphered by Wandruszka in 1959, were finally published in 1963 and 1965 in his biography Leopold II. Their evaluation revealed that the then Grand Duke, during his stays at the Viennese court in 1778/79 and 1784, made very sharp and critical judgments about all family members and that he had ventured in his two manuscripts in an unusually open manner about his anger. Leopold's use of shorthand as a secret script was due to the need to keep his thoughts secret from the Viennese court. The expression in cifra used by Leopold himself in this context also points to this fact :

  • Manuscript 1, written in Italian , bears the headings “Stato della famiglia” and “Allegato di No. 1 ”(German: 'Status der Familie' as well as 'Appendix No. 1'), comprises 52 pages and was created around the turn of the year 1778/1779. Grand Duke Leopold had been called to Vienna by his mother Maria Theresa and his brother Joseph II because of the War of the Bavarian Succession , but was very unhappy about the long stay in Vienna for various reasons. During this time he wrote several extensive treatises, on the one hand as characteristics of the members of the House of Habsburg-Lothringen living at the Viennese courtwith brief judgments about his three sisters married to Bourbon courts and about Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Milan, on the other hand as characteristics of the leading officials, about the state of the monarchy, about the Habsburg army in Bohemia, and about his conversations in Vienna with Maria Theresa, Joseph II. And other leading figures of the monarchy.
  • Manuscript 2, also written in Italian, bears the heading "Cose particolari" (German: 'special things') in plain text, was created in the summer of 1784 and is a characteristic of Joseph II . Grand Duke Leopold also found this trip to Vienna unpleasant, as he was effectively forced by his brother to hand over his eldest son Franz for further education and also to sign an agreement on the future abolition of the Habsburg secondary school in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany after the deaths of Leopold or Joseph II.

classification

Shelton's shorthand alphabet
Gerard Freiherr van Swieten (1700–1772)

It was not until 1961, two years after Leopold II's originally encrypted documents were successfully deciphered and transcribed, that his “secret” was recognized as a further development of a shorthand system originally from England , with the Hungarian historian Denis Silagi , who lives in Munich, providing the decisive clue.

The monoalphabetic substitution used by Leopold II belongs to the genus of "geometric shorthand systems" as developed in England in the 16th and 17th centuries by John Willis and his successors. Willis created the letters of his shorthand according to geometrical criteria (line, arc, circle, loop), for this purpose the vowels were not written out in full , but indicated by dots in different positions to the previous character.

The shorthand introduced by Thomas Shelton around 1624 was based on Willis' stenographic system and was widely used in the later 17th and 18th centuries. In addition to many similarities with Shelton's system, the shorthand used by Leopold II to encode his notes also has similarities to the shorthands of Theophilus Metcalfe (1635) and Charles A. Ramsay . Ramsay had translated Shelton's shorthand into German (1678), Latin (1681) and French (1681) for his stenographic textbooks , while a translation into Italian he had also written was never printed.

Since Gerard van Swieten, who died in 1772, as head of the Viennese court library and the court commission for censorship of books , had used Ramsay's translation of Shelton's shorthand system into Latin to write down his notes, Wandruszka initially suspected that van Swieten was also the model for Leopold's secret writing II. Should be looked for, not least because of Gerard van Swieten's close ties to the Maria Theresa family. Ultimately, Wandruszka preferred the thesis that Leopold II first got to know the writing system for his encrypted records in Tuscany and that it was not a completely new development, but actually Ramsay's translation of Shelton's shorthand system into Italian, which was never in print appeared and was therefore unknown to the general public.

literature

  • Adam Wandruszka : “The 'secret stenography' Leopold II.”, In: Karl-Heinz Manegold (Ed.): Science, economy and technology. Studies of history. Wilhelm Treue on his 60th birthday , Bruckmann-Verlag, Munich 1969, pp. 64–68.
  • Adam Wandruszka: "Secret script of Emperor Leopold II.", In: Walter Koschatzky (Ed.): Maria Theresia and their time. For the 200th anniversary of death. Exhibition May 13 to October 26, 1980, Vienna, Schönbrunn Palace. Organized by the Federal Ministry of Science and Research on behalf of the Austrian Federal Government. Gistel-Verlag, Vienna 1980, pp. 259-261.
  • Christopher R. Seddon: Having fun with history - Emperor Leopold II's secret writing , teaching aid for elementary schools, Schärding 2019.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adam Wandruszka: Leopold II Archduke of Austria, Grand Duke of Tuscany, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Roman Emperor . 2 volumes, Herold-Verlag , Vienna a. a. 1963-1965.
  2. ↑ Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 65.
  3. ↑ After deciphering the manuscripts, it turned out that Leopold had always abbreviated the titles l'imperatrice and l'imperatore in plain text , but always in full in his cryptography (Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 65).
  4. ↑ a b c Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 65–66.
  5. ↑ After deciphering the manuscripts it turned out that the many dots scattered over the text are symbols for vowels at the end of a word. Since almost every word in Italian ends with a vowel, these points actually separate the individual words from one another (Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 65).
  6. ↑ See Wandruszka, Leopold II., Volume I (1963), 333 ff. And Volume II (1965), 82 ff. A facsimile of the script in both volumes. The complete Italian original text of the two documents can be found in the one-volume Italian edition Pietro Leopoldo, un grande riformatore , Firenze 1968, 363 ff. And 472 ff.
  7. ↑ a b c Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 64–65.
  8. ^ House, court and state archives, family archives, anthologies, cardboard 15. See Wandruszka, secret stenography 64–65 and Wandruszka, secret writing 259–261.
  9. ↑ Wandruszka, Secret Script 259, 261.
  10. ^ House, court and state archives, family archives, anthologies, cardboard 16. See Wandruszka, secret stenography 64–65 and Wandruszka, secret writing 261.
  11. ↑ For the biography of Denis Silagi (1912-2007) see https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Silagi (French)
  12. ↑ a b c Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 66.
  13. ↑ Wandruszka, Secret Stenography 68.