Is the Voynich Manuscript's Castle on this Map?
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- Опубликовано: 6 фев 2025
- Link to map: www.google.com...
Manuscript sources in order of appearance:
*Bodmer 78 Historia destructionis Troiae manuscriptmini...
*Siege of Jerusalem: www.britannica...
*City of Hell: Biblioteca Guarneriana (S. Daniele del Friuli) ms 200 (p.51). teca.guarneria...
*Fortifications of Rhodes: upload.wikimed...
*Sarajevo Hagaddah upload.wikimed...
*Weltchronik, Kassel 2° Ms. theol. 4, f.49v orka.bibliothe...
*BNF Français 295 p.122 gallica.bnf.fr...
*BL Royal 20 D I, f. 167 itoldya420.get...
*BNF Latin 4939 f.20v gallica.bnf.fr...
*St. Petersburg, Ms lat q v xvii.2 www.bookillumi...
*BnF Latin 6823, f.025v commons.wikime...
*BL Egerton 747, f.012r commons.wikime...
*BL Sloane 4016, f.010v commons.wikime...
*BnF Français 343, f.7r gallica.bnf.fr...
*BnF NAF 5243 f.18r gallica.bnf.fr...
*Getty Ms. 26 (87.MN.33), fol. 4v www.getty.edu/...
*Lyon, Bibliothèque de la Part-Dieu, 195 (0124-0125), f. 022v arca.irht.cnrs...
*Berlin, MS HAM. 390, f .4r digital.staats...
*Beinecke MS 327, p. 28. collections.li...
*Bodleian Library MS. Tanner 190, fol. 207r digital.bodlei...
*KBR MS. 9404-05 img. 113 opac.kbr.be/LI...
Stock images from Freepik (by wayhomestudio, drobotdean, stockking, 8photo)
Castle Roncolo in Bolzano. The walls and structures we're modified around 1400 (the swallow tail wall surrounded the whole keep back then), the Vintlers then added another structure, the castle is famous for its frescoes (considered quite controversial for their explicit and frolicky nature) and some of the ones you can see have astral sun and moon designs that mirror what's in voynich. In my humble opinion Hans Vintler is responsible for the voynich. He wrote a book (Die Plumen...) in German around 1411 that has artwork that somewhat resembles that of the voynich (the astral stuff does, as do some of the characters and an archer).
There's a digital tour available online (you can see the frescoes) and you can download an audio guide for the location that talks about the history.
Could you please provide a hyperlink to where you set forth your evidence that Voynich was copied in Bolzano?
@@GeraldM_inNC RUclips doesn't seem to be a fan of my Google drive links. Hopefully you got it before they removed it.
Thanks! Both the castle and the frescos were previously added already: www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1y1hxOfGDFhqo97deJVvFNi7ASspTlp9v&usp=sharing
RUclips removes many posts with links, unfortunately I can't do much about that.
Been watching your stuff for a while, and I can’t stress enough how impressed I am by the quality of your content in regards to this topic, not to mention the variety of things you’ve been able to talk about in relation to the manuscript. Castle architecture would not have been on my list of things you could discuss in relation to the voynich manuscript.
@@Aranthappyrobot that's really nice to hear. Luckily I can draw from several years of research, and rely on the help of the best Voynich researchers out there. Sometimes it's a bit disheartening to see someone's "I solved the Voynich Manuscript it's aliens!" video rack up a million views. But I think I have a different audience ;)
If the page numbers are original and the "1 2 3 4 5" on f49v are numbers, this may hint at an italian origin as well, because at the time of its creation (1400-1425) arabic numerals were rarely used in Europe outside of Italy where Fibonacci had introduced them earlier and they spread for the first time at a larger scale. (This is just crude wikipedia information and I might be completely off - so take it with a grain of salt)
The number of buildings that fit the criteria is just overwhelming, I just zoomed in on Verona and started looking for structures other than the castle already marked on the map, found and confirmed two: Torre del Gardello built in 1370 and Palazzo del Capitanio rebuilt in 1364. I also found Palazzo del Podestà in Fabriano farther south, supposedly built in 1255. All in all, this style of merlons was extremly widespread in Italy and has been used for at least 100 years before Voynich manuscript was made.
@@Nakaska yes! It was all around in certain Italian areas. I think we can safely assume that whoever lived north of Rome and sometimes ventured out of their village would have been familiar with them.
MONTHLY VOYNICH DEEP DIVES? SIGN ME UP!
Seeing your little guy on the right reminded me of another possible lead to follow: the way people are drawn. from their hairstyles, proportions, the reddish lips on your example for instance... If there's any chance the voynich author has another extant work somewhere in the world where they've drawn people, their style could be comapred like a fingerprint to confirm likely shared authorship!
That's a very good question, but it appears tricky. I know people have tried in the past, but not much has come from it. Doing a video on this would take a few months of research I'm afraid...
I'm guessing the issue with this would be that the art in the Voynich Manuscript is pretty basic so that makes it hard really pin down. Especially since it means that the artist could easily have made something else which doesn't resemble the Voynich Manuscript because they were just putting in more effort.
Although the present manuscript was produced during the early fifteenth century, probably in southern Europe (which has to include not only Italy and France but for various reasons - contemporary cultural, trading and info networks - also England and the southwestern Mediterranean ), it is impossible to argue all the drawings first drawn by a single 'artist' and the theory that most were created at the same time or place is demonstrably wrong - if you know what details are significant. What is in the Vms - judging just by the drawings - had been gained from a number of different sources, too and only a few can be said to show a 'European' character - that's why you see the same few details (calendar's central emblems, clothing, 'castle') are discussed over and over again. Having researched the drawings, page by page, has taken this researcher more than ten years and I can assure you that there's no one-line answer to where and when the drawings were first formed, and little certainty about where the present compilation was produced in the early 15th., though Koen clearly likes a northern Italian, Milanese or Venetian possibility. Talk about the small amount of clothing shown in the ms becomes more complicated than you might think; by the 15thC, fashionable Europeans had a fad for 'oriental' styles, so you have to ask, item by item, whether a 'Turkish' or 'Arab' element in dress is original to the source-work or the fifteenth-century copy. It's not trivial research, either - archaeological reports are very helpful. As example, I'm presently looking into questions about the use of buttons and of sequins ('spangles') - to analyse a detail (10mmx15mm) in one tier of one diagram in the calendar. You have to like a manuscript a lot to care that much :} .
officially my favourite youtube channel!
@louischvs9395 thanks! That's really nice to hear.
@@voynichtalk I want to thank you too for that great job you do making these videos and interacting with the fellow "voynichers", scholars and anthousiasts
Clicked so fast when I saw this :)
I understand why it was easy to dismiss as unrelated to the Voynich Manuscript but I really want to know why a 14th century Sefardi Pesach Haggadah depicts swallowtail merlons.
@@ThaliaRosy-ee4qo me too! It's remarkable, but I don't know the answer. It's even more intriguing because the particular style of swallowtail merlons looks more Italian than Iberian.
Maybe they had Italian manuscripts? Maybe one of the scribes visited Italy and liked the dramatic merlons? Maybe they even knew enough about them to lend them certain connotations? Maybe they were aiming for the Iberian style after all? Whatever the case may be, it's a clear outlier.
@voynichtalk I thought maybe it could be related to the number of swallowtail merlons depictions from the period related to biblical stories like on judean buildings and such? Maybe they saw them as a motif of high end biblical art (the could have even been trying to copy Italian motifs). If this was the case then it would be a really interesting example of Christian artistic conventions making there way into Jewish art.
@@ThaliaRosy-ee4qo the overall associations of the motif are still unclear to me; there's also Caesar attacking the British isles, or several manuscripts about the Trojan war. The situation is probably complex. On the one hand there are examples where you can suspect certain associations, but on the other it appears like this was simply the artist's idea of what "a castle" looked like.
And in those cases where the motif had associations, those would probably have depended upon the artist's (or his patron's) own background.
We can also wonder whether the biblical connections mean anything, or are just a result of the sheer amount of biblical scenes depicted during the Middle Ages.
@voynichtalk I have just found what the page says it’s the very beginning of the Seder
This is the lachma anya [literally "poor bread," could be translated "bread of affliction" or could mean a simple/unleavened bread] that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.
All who are hungry - come and eat, all who are in need - come and celebrate Passover [or could mean "eat the Passover offering"].
Now we are here, next year may we be in the Land of Israel.
Now we are slaves, next year may we be free.
The two very large letters at the top of the page spell ‘Ha’ meaning the
I don’t think this actually brings me any closer to figuring out the swallowtails though.
I wonder if give the last line mentioning next year in freedom the castle part might represent Jerusalem or perhaps more specifically the third temple?
Still doesn’t explain the architecture itself though.
@voynichtalks
I was talking with the person who helped figure out what the text on the page said and they told me that there were a number of mistakes in the calligraphy that are common when people who don’t know Hebrew try to write it.
I wonder if the script inconsistencies they noticed are related to the out of place swallowtail merlons? Maybe a wealthy Sefardi family commissioned a goyish Italian scribe to produce the manuscript probably as a wedding gift
"Giant hands kind of caressing the architecture, an understandable sentiment" is my favorite new sentence.
Fascinating! Thanks as always!
randomly got recomended this video. why am i only now seeing this great channel.?
Great research work and infographics!
I think the most interesting part of this is that focusing text decipherment onto 2 closely related languages (Italian and/or Latin as spoken/written in the early 15th century) cuts out a lot of the wildest guesswork in how to even approach that decipherment.
There remains an issue of regional dialects, and I'm not sure how the diversity of them compares to today. And, of course, that doesn't leave out the possibility of it simply being from another language entirely, whether by a foreigner in Italy or someone not in Italy (that one Bavarian manuscript is a fascinating outlier).
I don't recall if this would count as new information, but, to the extent that it's veridical, it makes for a helpful pointer, surely.
I read a fair bit about the Manuscript and watched a few documentaries in my younger years and got very bored of the topic because almost every source I found just talked about the same subject over and over that I was beginning to think it was a novelty or at worst a grift. Genuinely so relieved to know there's far, far more to learn from it.
Komm zu mir ich brauche Leute wie dich...
I always thought the hairnets was weird, even as a historian myself I have no idea where that would come from lol
I feel like its *gotta* be just what the guy is into. Like, dude likes his pipes baths ladies and hairnets. Seems pretty normal for the weird repressed time.
I think you really do have something important though. The writer could credibility be assumed to be from somewhere in Italy. The simplified text may represent another language as an Italian would hear it.
Hawaiian for instance uses English as a base for what is a completely different language. Chinese pinyin was created by the Portuguese and while English speakers understand it the letter choices can seem odd. It has been commented that manuscript has a “Latin-ish” flavor. Could that be because it’s an Italian derived synthesis?
This guy is awewsome!
Interesting discussion.
10:59, what is the source of these ships? Im writting medieval fantasy and would love to learn more about these
This is my first time hearing about this manuscript.
I looked all over and couldn’t find the Original video. I did find this one. Falak-ol-Aflak Castle in Iran. The merlins are wrong, but they have the unique clay pipe water supply system. Not sure about the date I didn’t get that far. It wasn’t Iran. I would remember that. I’m an American living in Thailand. Like I said on your last video. It wasn’t quite the Middle East. I’ll keep looking. Great video by the way. I learned a lot. I’m like you I feel it’s going to be a combination of all the clues that will solve the codex’s origin. Very curious about the communal baths filled with naked women that make me think of a Harim. Looking forward to your next video.
I know the data is strictly inconclusive, but given the shared merchant in Venice and the similar style illustrations in their manuscripts, im inclined to think it was made in Venice, possibly even by that merchant.
I can't say I found this useful but I can say I found it interesting.
RUclips recommends "Glad it was helpful!" as a reply for me to this post.
@@voynichtalk lol. That's funny.
Great research, very rigorous.
What if this castle is just nonexisting now?
@@jakubolszewski8284 very possible. In that case, finding out the geographical range of similar structures is the best we can do.
Exactly, most medieval castles aren’t maintained and are either ruins or are nonexistent by now.
Maybe you can have an accuracy system ex we know there there, probable, worth considering
@AJ1770s that's a good idea: an extra layer with unclear dates and edge cases. Then I can add Spain again.
I wonder if the Catalan manuscript with the castles had anything to do with Alghero/Sardegna and the Aragon connection and the presence of Catalan there
I included the Catalan Atlas merely as an example of the "castles as symbols" possibility. No swallowtail merlons there, as far as I know, but it's still a fascinating medieval map. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_Atlas
Apparently associated with the Majorcan school of predominantly Jewish cartographers.
There are details in the Voynich map closely paralleled by ones in early 'cartes marine' from Genoa and from Majorca. Also, in tracking incidence of the '4o' form used in the Voynich script, I found some of the very earliest in Abraham Creques' work, which would be better called 'Cresques Atlas' or the 'Majorcan Atlas' than the 'Catalan' which misleads people into imagining it made by a Catalonian map-maker.
All the picture of the castle means is that the Voynich author had seen such crenellations. He may have travelled very widely.
@@geoffreypiltz271 agreed, and we do have some manuscript outliers. This knowledge does limit the range of options somewhat though. Can't have been a Finnish hermit.
Can have been a Finnish hermit with access to books.
@@voynichtalk It might even be meant to represent a foreign looking castle for all we know.
A Facinating art-historical study. I loved some of your manuscript finds, and the cultural and historical range you considered. Congratulations. Just btw - use of such jagged battlements occurs in some medieval maps, too, and consistently refers then to an 'imperial' limit, and occasionally the limit of human habitation. There's an interesting example of Constantinople being represented with those merlons - not necessarily literal. Of course, the Voynich drawing you call the 'castle' combines that type with the square-topped type. You're right to distinguish between literal and symbolic or purely ornamental additions in art. Good, too, to see that you've included in your 'we' some discoveries made first by non-members of the ninja forum. As for where the manuscript was made - it could have been made anywhere the type was known. By a Venetian in the holy land, or a Genoese in the Crimea...but that's ok. Really great vid.
9:28 aah, Silvio Berlusconi's house.
Moscow was razed to the ground and completely rebulit after Napoleon's invasion.
Where completely? That church & Kremlin was built like ~200 years before Napoleon and still standing, stone buildings survive fires.
@marpleka no there is almost no stone left from the original white city. It was rebuilt. It was more than a fire which destoyed Moscow. That's is historical nonsense.. a camp fire can't burn down city made of stone. They saw a second sun in the sky and the city burst into flames.
I always figured that it was by somebody who was illiterate but trying to pass themselves off as educated.
Like someone wealthy commissioned a history book to be made and the person they hired basically scammed them.
Most people of the day wouldn't have been able to tell that it was gibberish.
I have always thought the “castle” was not consistent with the rest of the manuscriptscript, in a way similar to the astrological sign drawings, if they were added to it after Vmses original construction. I would say when you are deciphering it, work out your own timeframe for its construction. Don’t let yourself be bullied.
I agree and in fact concluded fairly early on (I'm a qualified iconographic analyst) that the drawings can be assigned to several distinct chronological strata, the voynich map (known as the 'rosettes page') having undergone a substantial re-revision around the mid-fourteenth century, with the so-called 'castle' and that entire roundel being added c.1350. I do agree that our present manuscript was made in the early decades of the fifteenth-century though. Manufacture isn't to be mistaken for first composition. This was a scholarly consensus about the manuscript's date-range (its manufacture) among some s number of serious Voynich researchers even before the radiocarbon-14 confirmed it. One reason people have paid so much attention to this tiny detail in the map, and to the month-emblems is that those are among the few easily understood in terms of Latin habits in art. Most of the manuscript's drawings don't "read" by those conventions. Nice to see someone else coming to a similar conclusion about the so-called"castle" detail though.
From what little I know about Medieval manuscript production Northern Italy was generally a very productive region so that makes the possibility of the Voynich Manuscript being a medieval hoax or prank more plausible. Are you ever going to make a video about those theories or are they just not interesting enough to devote a video to?
It's a non-starter in terms of generating discussion. Proving a hoax at this stage is virtually impossible and attempting to demonstrate the negative claim - that it's *not* a hoax - is even more ludicrous of an ask. It is the deductive equivalent of throwing your arms up in the air. The glossolalia and mental illness hypotheses fall into this as well - without an agreed upon decipherment, there is nothing that can be said about them. Without a better/earlier provenance or documented origin for the manuscript, there is equally nothing that can be said about the hoax hypothesis.
Es ist kein Fake, dafür ist es zu intelligent gemacht.
I really don't see why you dismissed out of hand the 'forked' merlons in Spain. The battlements depicted in the Voynich Manuscript actually resembles them *more* closely than the Ghibelline merlons which are distinctively curved. No such curves are seen in the Voynich battlements.
The Spanish ones often appear to have something like a cap on the forks. Also the other architectural elements of the castle and its surroundings (roofs of the towers, little "houses") don't read Spanish at all.
You are right about the straight versus curved thing, but both classes also exist in Italy.
Still, I did mention Spain for the off chance that someone wants to look into it.
Because the totality of evidence already heavily indicate northern Italy, and one outlier isn’t going to change that.
@@andreaskallstrom9031 It isn't one outlier, there are multiple examples.
That isn't the point anyway, I just think they're worthy of inclusion on the map, if examples as far away as Crimea are included. For that matter the Moscow Kremlin should be included if we want to be truly comprehensive.
@@voynichtalk Can you explain what you mean about the roofs and houses?
Kremlin was built too late for it to be included @@patavinity1262
@13:09, these look more like menorah then castles
It's actually a schematic or token form for a 'Pharos' - originally the Alexandrian lighthouse. The upper version includes the dragon which we know from archaeological finds was part of the Alexandrian Pharos' lighthouse. I expect the lower represents one known to the Venetian merchant in Italy. But you're right about the sense of influence from Jewish works. In medieval Europe - for reasons too complex to go into here - Jews were often identified more with Egypt than with the Holy land. btw - those comments about the lighthouse tower aren't 'ideas' but conclusions reached as an end-result of exploring the question. It raises another interesting possibility about 'merlons' - that in some cases the form was identified as flames, not birds' (rooks/eagles) wings.
Damn ancients, yall crazy
Is not holding up a church the symbol of patronage? You know, ktetors?
@@sticlavoda5632 yeah that's what the miniature actually means
There is cryptologist Josef Zlatoděj in Czech Republic, who claims to have deciphered the Voynich manuscript, using a method based on gematria. He is missing from the list on Voynich forum. He identifies the castle as Rožmberk Castle (first mentioned 1250) and the author as Eliška z Rožmberka (born 1466). You can find more on his blog or on his old blog available via Wayback Machine.
You should watch other videos on this channel, Josef Zlatoděj's claim is incompatible wih the evidence, all of which points to first half of 15th century.
Wait, so its all just a prototype monty python joke? :)
italy
Present day Ukraine? In what time era? In just 22 years of history (1991-2014)? In Middle Ages it was tatars khan kingdom, then osmans, which always makes fights with slavs. That was built during osmans i presume.
Present day means today.
@@voynichtalkit isn't anymore. There is zero possibility Crimea will go back to Ukraine.
@@voynichtalk good joke, you should take into account city of Sevastopol there, it's like russian Constantinopol
@@napoleonfeanor The vast majority of countries still recognize Crimea as part of Ukraine. I am in no position to change that.
@@fontenbleau Wouldn't the Russian Constantinople be Moscow since it's the “Third Rome” and everything?
5:48 actually that’s England
No way. No mountains like that in England.
No that's Crimea in Russia
@@geoffreypiltz271 it’s England not the Ukraine
@@BoleDaPole no belongs to England . English were there 1st
@@avus-kw2f213 Where?
all this info comes from the research of a man named Sukhwant Singh. Hes very proud of his culture and heritage. his video ruclips.net/video/wmvmSCd2Jg0/видео.html gives VERY explicit details of every part of ms402. SPOILER!!! the page at :43 is a map of Bukhara Uzebekistan. the fort you mention is the arc fortress. foundations laid in 4th-3rd centuries BC and rebuilt and destroyed many times. Ghengis Khan fully destroyed and ransacked Killed all the citizens hiding there in the 13th century. It was rebuilt again in the 16th by the shaybanid dynasty. SPOILER!!! :42 SECONDS. THE STYLIZED ARROW AT THE BOTTOM LEFT OF THE PAGE POINTS TO MECCA. so get a map and draw a line from mecca to uzebeck and it lies in the same direction. once you watch his video youll see EVERY YOU KNOW ABOUT MS402 IS WRONG
and those swallow tail things was also something Timurid put on his walls
"Everything you knew is wrong"... including the manuscript's shelf-list number, apparently.
It's Mos-co", not "Mos-Cow". English spelling and pronunciation doesn't always match up, unless you're American, and even they fail at times. "Mos-cow" is American and "Mos-co" pretty much everybody else.
Hmm, I've always heard Mos-Cow, but then again I mostly hear American English. I sure know how the Germans say it: ruclips.net/video/lyuFLU2Zqz0/видео.htmlfeature=shared&t=73
Moss-co for me in Britain.
@geoffreypiltz271 it must be a British thing. Americans tend to prefer Moss-cow (I'm sure there's regional variation). In Dutch we also say Moss-cow. In German it's even written Moskau.
Ukraine started promoting a phonetical name of Kiev worldwide Kiiv, which is wrong in many languages (it's like writing Woshenktone instead of Washington), but everyone kinda applied. In that sense it must be not Moscow but exactly Moskwa, without exceptions, like ukrainians do.
too much hype for fake texts
6rg
@gwynedd4023 yas yas i agreee
"The Holy Land" sure is a funny way to refer to Israel.
How so? It wouldn’t have been principally known as Israel in the years between approximately 1000 BC and 1948.
Beyond the Holy Land term, it was known as Palestine, Judea, or the Levant from approximately 500 BC to 1948, which obviously covers the period discussed in the video.
It was occupied by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Muslim Caliphates, Crusader States, Mamluks, Ottomans, and British, none of them called it Israel.
We're talking medieval European manuscripts, and that's the term they used.
“The Holy Land” doesn't refer exclusively to the modern day state of Isreal and was used as a general term for what we call the Levant today since it also included cities like Antioch and Gaza. Medieval Europeans unsurprisingly weren't particularly strict about their geography.
I remember this phrase only from catholic popes, they always say that and i'm sure it's about Jerusalem under control of Pope crusaders to withdraw arabs.