The Merchants of Venice—In Code

The secret in secretary is hidden in plain sight. In late Middle English, a secretary was literally one who kept secrets. In sixteenth-century Venice, there were professional cifrista, cipher secretaries, that is, cryptographers, writing secrets in code to secure communications from prying eyes. The Venetian city-state, which then dominated the politics and commerce of Northern Italy, the Adriatic, and the eastern Mediterranean, actively conducted its affairs in code. Cryptology was so important and widespread in Venice’s Stato de Màr (State of the Sea) it became professionalized and state controlled.

Scholar Ioanna Iordanou explores how cryptology was first an intellectual pursuit that evolved into amateur use by merchants and rulers and then became professionalized in the 1500s, “premised on specialist skills through professional training.” There would ultimately be a cryptology department in the Doge’s Palace, the secreto or Black Chamber on the top floor.

As Iordanou notes, conventional histories of cryptology put its origins in high diplomacy, not to mention Renaissance polymaths showing off their skills to each other. Commercial sources of the development of cryptology have largely been ignored. But in Venice’s maritime empire, statecraft and business were fundamentally inseparable, and “protecting vital information through code-words and symbols” became common practice.

“The ruling class, which was actively engage in international trade,” Iordanou writes, “did not see a distinction between trade and politics, as political affairs could affect one’s business and livelihood, and commercial pursuits could have diplomatic implications.”

Iordanou gives an example from the 1430s: noted merchant Andrea Barbigo used his own cipher in his confidential communications with his agent in the Levant. The Venetians eventually called such missives lettere mercantile, or mercantile letters. In the early 1500s, the young merchant Andrea Gritti used such encoded letters to communicate back home from Constantinople. Gritti, a future Doge of Venice (head of state), also negotiated a peace treaty between Venice and the Ottoman Empire in 1503. He filled lettere with commercial jargon that actually detailed the actions of the Ottoman fleet.

Word substitution, called in parabula (in parable) or the Cicero method, was the type of code used by Gritti. This became widespread throughout Europe. In Venice, “where pretty much everyone had a service to sell,” it even diffused down to skilled and unskilled manual laborers. Iordanou writes that the Sephardi Jewish merchant Hayyrim Saruk, on a clandestine mission for Venice in Constantinople in 1571, created a book of code-words that used “drugs” for the Ottomans and “rabbi” for the Pope. (Early codes were, well, simpler than they would become.)

Venice was hardly alone in state-sponsored cryptography. Cicco Simonetta, author of the 1474 Rules for Deciphering Enciphered Documents Without a Key, was one of the first professional cryptologists employed in state administration—in the duchy of Milan. The Vatican would have an Office of the Cipher Secretary to the Pontiff by 1555. But Venice, where cifrista was coined, went all-out:

“The Venetian ducal chancery, the civil service organization that housed the Venetian state bureaucracy […] oversaw several cryptology functions,” Iordanou explains, “including cryptography, cryptanalysis, deciphering, and astonishingly, the development of a well-defined training and development regime for state cryptologists.”

The appointment of Giovanni Soro as Venice’s official cipher secretary in 1505 marks the beginning of the professionalization of the cifrista. Soro served Venice for forty years, becoming legendary as a code-maker and code-breaker. The Florentines and the Popes would also send him letters to decipher.

When demographic shock through plague and Ottoman advances in what is now the Greece threatened Venice in the mid-1570s, authorities set up in-house training for new cadres of cryptologists. Agostino Amadi’s 1588 On Ciphers was eventually adopted as a textbook; the work “presented myriad ways for the production of ciphers in any language imaginable, including Greek, Arabic, Latin, and even the language of the devil,” writes Iordanou. (“Translating the devil” could be another description of cryptology.)

Even with superior intelligence—Iordanou has also written on the larger topic of the Venetian secret service—no empire lasts forever. Its possessions dismembered by the Ottomans, Austrians, and Napoleon, the Most Serene Republic of Venice became a mere municipality of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1797.

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