The Voynich Manuscript Owners - Deep Dive

welcome to the inaugural episode of deep dive so what is this video well for all of you watching who can remember back to that fabled month of August 2019 you will remember that I put out a poll asking my subscribers if they wanted to see an informal follow-up video commenting on my current project the reason why I put this polar is that I was noticing this pattern where where I would finish doing the research for a new video get far into the writing process and then discover that I had plenty of superfluous material there all seemed quite interesting within its own context but really didn't have a place in a script considering the larger topic this has been particularly the case both in the Voynich manuscript video that I just released and in the Bronze Age collapse video that came out earlier this year in the case of the Bronze Age collapse video this actually became a real problem for me outside of the channel at one point in my reading process I briefly came across the theory that the historical Troy or hissarlik as it's known in western Turkey was one of the sites where there is evidence of see people activity this is only really a footnote when it came to the larger topic of that video but for some reason it stuck with me and several books worth of reading later I now have plenty of materials stored away in the back of my head that one day will probably become a devoted video to this topic when it came to the Voynich manuscript video I also had a problem which was there was simply so much material I could have quite easily justified making that video two hours long if I really wanted to go into some of the points regarding possible decipherment so the manuscript the illustrations and even if I just wanted to give a true background to each of the people we know have owned the manuscript at some point this became a problem later on in the production I had said that I wanted to get content out every couple of months or so so that you guys had something to watch and if I was going to end up making a two-hour video on the topic this would result in a significant delay so after restraining my instincts to try and be as completionist as possible within that single video I instead decided to save some of this information and come back to it in today's video now before we get started I want to emphasize that this video is going to be largely unscripted I will be referring to the notes in front of me that I took throughout the production process of the Voynich manuscript documentary but what I'm really aiming forward this video is a much more informal style with that said I want to clarify that this isn't going to be the regular form of content that I'll be producing from now on this isn't an excuse for me to start becoming lazy and not probably scripting out the videos as I have in the past I only want to do this in the future in the case of videos as I said like the Bronze Age collapse video or the Voynich manuscript video where there's plenty of extra information and it will not take me long to turn around an additional video just for anyone who wants to know a little bit more about the topic also for anyone who stumbled across this video who hasn't seen the Voynich manuscript documentary that I made check out the description below there should be a link there if you decide you want a little bit more afterwards there's always this video in fact I kind of see this whole video as something of an experiment going forward maybe it'll work maybe it will be interesting to hear my kind of raw thoughts on each person involved in the Voynich manuscript background maybe it will just be a meandering mess that no one in their right mind would ever want to listen to let's get started you [Music] so if you've been paying any attention at all to the comment section on the Voynich manuscript video you might see the main point that people been calling me out on and that's that I didn't really go into great detail when it came to the manuscripts illustrations I talked very briefly about how the materials used to create the manuscript so for example the ink and the pigments were very conventional methods for creating a medieval manuscript what I didn't talk about at all is what plants the illustrations in the manuscript might actually represent there have been a whole host of different claims for this over the last few decades and the reason that I cut this out is because there isn't really anything conclusive or at least there's nothing that the wider research community around the Voynich manuscript has definitively come out in support of and said these are the particular plants seized represent one particular theory around the illustrations of the plants however is very interesting so in the mid 40s there was a botanist by the name of Hugo O'Neill and he came forward and said some of these illustrations are actually of plants from the new world so one of the examples he gave is that the illustration on folio 93r is actually that of a sunflower which are only really native to southern and northern America if these claims are true then by necessity means that the Voynich manuscript must have been composed after the discovery of the new world by Christopher Columbus as Europeans would not have any knowledge of these plants at this point the problem with this theory however is that the earliest voyagers by Columbus to the new world didn't take place until right at the end of the 15th century and as I described in the video carbon dating has traced the origin point of at least the parchment on which the manuscript is written to the early 15th century so if we wanted to say that this new world theory is correct we would have to make one of two different concessions the first one would be that the carbon dating of the parchment on which the Voynich manuscript is written is somehow incorrect all we would have to say that the parchments itself was made in the early 15th century but in fact it wasn't used for composition until many decades later bear in mind that this amount of parchment would have been extremely expensive to produce at the time so it seems quite unlike with it someone would go to the effort of producing such a large batch of parchment and then not use it until well after their own natural lifespan had expired now I did say that have been plenty of theories as to which plants these illustrations represent what I would like to say the least criticized series of identifications that I was able to find during the course of my research were those by dr. Edith Sherwood so she has claimed over the last couple of decades that she has managed to identify a total of 124 out of the hundred and 26 plants that our present within its covers the reception to these claims however have been quite mixed by the rest of the voyage community some people such as the late Stephen Beck's actually used her work to compose their own supposed solutions to the manuscript most researchers however seem to have been quite skeptical about her claims furthermore what has damaged dr. Sherwood's credibility of these identifications is that she has been a major proponent of the theory that Leonardo da Vinci actually wrote the Voynich manuscript this is a very very big claim for obvious reasons so I'll come back to this but this is the reason why quite a few scholars have been dubious of her claims so when it comes to the corset of researchers who really specialized around the Voynich manuscript so people like Rene's and Bergen James gilliguy Rafael prink Stephen Skinner etc they essentially only endorsed free identifications and they're all from illustrations in the first herbal section of the manuscript if you're interested they make these identifications in the 2016 publication the Voynich manuscript the world's most mysterious and esoteric codex in it they claim that the plant shown on folio to vie bears some resemblance to a water lily in addition the plants on folio 9v supposedly resembles a pansy or a vial of some type finally the tree shown on folio 35v has a characteristic series of leaves that resemble those of an oak tree but what complicates matters is there's also these strange almost grape like fruits that hang from the tree which obviously are not known in any oak tree so this lack of direct identifications makes it quite difficult for us to say what the purpose of these plants are within the Codex that might seem disappointing but there's a number of problems when it comes to identifying these illustrations and relating them to modern-day plants with which we're more familiar the first two of these problems are really down just to the passage of time firstly we have to take into account that there are many types of seed bearing plants that have gone extinct over the last five centuries this often gets overlooked when compared to animal extinctions but over the last 250 years alone we've lost nearly 600 different species of seed bearing plants and this is a little terrifying because it's vastly beyond the baseline amount that you would have expected to have gone extinct in that time as a result of this it's entirely possible that some of these plants shown within the Voynich manuscript have actually since gone extinct the second point that I alluded to is the over the last few hundred years and really since the birth of Agriculture human beings have been constantly tinkering with and selectively breeding plants to imbue within them attributes that we prefer so it's a possibility that we've actually managed to kind of slowly gene edit these plants into forms that just don't resemble their medieval equivalents another problem is that these plant illustrations are not labeled individually anywhere within the manuscript they're all presented alongside large blocks of text that have been carefully drawn in around them this means that one theoretical way that we could crack the manuscript is not available to us and as a result we can't have a concrete identification of any of the images the final thing I want to cover really when looking at the front illustrations is there's a strange discrepancy in how they are drawn so if you look at the underlying ink they're very finely and very carefully drawn out with someone who clearly has a very steady very practiced hand this isn't the case however with the pigments that have been applied to them in almost all cases they're very roughly dorbz gone in a very amateurish fashion this is actually led to a theory that either there were two separate people involved in making these illustrations with the first being a far more experienced artist and the second attempting to fill them in kind of after the fact all the idea that the original composer of this manuscript came back to it in later life and decided to paint over the illustrations they'd previously made but for some reason their own artistic skills had degraded in this time and were left with the crude result when it comes to the other illustrations within the manuscript I don't really have as much to say so the star charts themselves are incredibly intricate but they haven't really been related back that much to modern constellation patterns that we observe or at least I haven't explored that in any great depth when it comes to the zodiac symbols that can also be found within the manuscript however there's a little bit more to say these illustrations are actually quite generic for the time you would expect to see most of the images they used depict each individual zodiac symbol but there are just a couple a couple of discrepancies in the case of the sign for cancer you would normally expect to see a crab of some sort but here it's instead Illustrated using a pair of lobsters so it slightly confounds our expectations there in addition the sign for Sagittarius which is normally depicted as a centaur holding a bow is replaced by a human male carrying a crossbow so slightly unusual for the last part of this section I want to move on to probably the biggest elephant in the room it's easily the most confusing aspect of the manuscript and I haven't really discussed it in any depth at all and that is the strange depictions of naked women bathing in these almost intestine like baths that seem to be filled with some sort of green alchemical mixture so there's two things which really stand out about these illustrations the first one is the manuscript only ever really depicts female bathers so unsurprisingly this has led to some theories that these bathing practices either have a medicinal practice purely associated with women and as a result the obvious candidates of menstruation or childbirth have been mooted or that these bathing practices are some form of ritual behavior that would have been specific to women around this time period one thing that seems quite safe to say is that this doesn't really seem to be depicting a public or a casual bathing area which we can surmise from the fact that we don't have mixed genders bathing and that the women are completely naked in the illustrations now as far as I could tell there haven't really been that many credible theories put forward that really explain what these seams depict there is one theory however I saw that I thought was quite interesting and it was put forward by dr. Steven Skinner in the source I mentioned earlier one explanation he offered is that these scenes actually depict what's called a mikvah which is a ritual form of bathing the Orthodox Jewish women will undertake after menstruation or childbirth interestingly as well the illustrations of these strange bathing structures seem to be really interested on the correct flow and purification of water and we do know that this would have been a major concern in a mikveh where water that beavers had already used would have been required to be drained away without returning it to the original reservoir of ritually pure water so that's about everything I wanted to say when it came to the manuscripts illustrations but before we move on to talk about some of its earlier confirmed owners let's go back to this theory that Leonardo da Vinci could potentially have drawn the manuscript there seems to be this trend I've noticed in society where if we find an object from around the time period where he was alive people try to go out of their way to associate mysteries of some type with him so I remember quite a few years back now I actually saw a book that purported that the Shroud of Turin had been fate by Leonardo da Vinci during his life based on the simple fact that the figure in the Shroud of Turin happens to look a bit like him at the end of his own life in the case of the Voynich manuscript there are a few facts that could lead one to assume da Vinci's involvement in some fashion the first is the style of how these illustrations were made within the manuscript from the workbooks of da Vinci that still exists we know that he actually drew on all the illustrations directly onto the parchment before he then surrounded them with text this is the same way that the Voynich manuscript was composed in addition he also used a large amount of mirror writing as I described in the Voynich manuscript video itself to disguise his ideas from his apprentices and from rivals so these two factors together make him a relatively attractive candidate for the Voynich manuscript original composer the problem again however is his lifespan doesn't really overlap particularly well with the carbon dating evidence that we have for the parchment of the Voynich manuscript again we could leave open the possibility that the parchment wasn't used for many decades after its creation but otherwise it seems difficult to square da Vinci's involvement that's basically everything I have to say directly relating to the Voynich manuscript itself what I want to do going forward however is talk a little bit more in detail about some of the owners of the manuscript in particular aspects of their lives that I didn't really cover in the original video but I think are interesting and in some cases historically pertinent there are additionally three owners that we basically completely overlooked during the course of the previous video and I'd like to go back and spend a little bit of time of them trust me at least two of them have really interesting lives ah Rudolph Rudolph Rudolph when it comes to Rudolph the second I was very much tempted to try and start off by saying something witty to the degree of never has a man through such an action save the lives of so many but as I went back and I reread my notes on Rudolph's life I think that that statement is only really half true I'll go into that in a bit more depth in a minute but before we do so I thought it would be useful to go back and take another look at Rudolph's childhood and really try to understand how he became so indecisive as a ruler so I mentioned before that at the age of 11 Rudolph was sent off to Spain to be educated by his uncle Oh second I went a little bit into how stiff and informal the Spanish Court was but I don't think I emphasized but the second very peculiar way of governing so everything about the etiquette and the formalities of the Spanish court at the time was designed almost purely around trying to enhance the majesty and the awe that nobles and courtiers would have had upon encountering through it his style of governing also was designed to accentuate this he had a policy that I've heard described as splendid hesitation he would keep his own counsel he wouldn't take as long as he possibly could before making a particular decision and he would be the sole arbiter of what decisions were made within the sprawling Spanish Empire I think it's worth emphasizing that at the time the Spanish Kingdom was a recent invention it was only two generations removed from being unified and the Constituent kingdoms of Leon castile and Aragon was still in existence as functional entities they each had their own cause at the which the king was the head and as a result the administration of the Empire really relied on a keen interest by the ruler in the bureaucracy of the state this way of policymaking is quite similar to the one with Rudolph would eventually assume although he himself would not show the same level of diligence that thought ii did when it came to the day-to-day running of his empire one thing that I don't think I really got across as well Iver in the video was that philip ii was an ardent Catholic he would go on to frequently criticize of a ruler's for indulging Protestants within their lands in particular Rudolph's father Maximilian and the venture would do the same for Rudolph himself in fact as far as I can tell much of Rudolph's oay rulership involved him effectively being berated by his uncle via a letter as might be expected vote also went to a great degree to try and instill the same degree of piety in his two nephews so at this time both Rudolph and his younger brother Ernst were at residence in the court under his tutelage this resulting environment led very much towards Rudolph's stiff personality his seclusion his habit of keeping final decisions within his own purview but despite Philips intentions this actually had the effect of pushing rudolph further away from the church so much so that he was frequently denounced as an atheist around his reign rudolph would remain within the spanish court for eight years with his younger brother by the time he returned to the court in austria he had effectively grown up completely isolated from his four younger brothers so he had ernst who was one year younger than him matthias who was five years younger maximilian who was six years younger and he also had Albert and wenceslaus on top of that this meant that by the time he returned to the court his brothers were essentially strangers to him they would have been little more than infants when he first departed for Spain and in fact just to get him back to the Austrian Court Maximilian had to pull some interesting diplomatic maneuvering with Philip so a few years before Rudolph's arrival at the Spanish Court though they've had actually married a French princess by the name of Elizabeth of Molloy this was his third marriage he'd previous had been married to Mary the first of England and had also been married to a Portuguese princess before then however during Rudolph's time in the court his wife Elizabeth passed away from a miscarriage now this was particularly a problem for Philip because at the time he had only one legitimate son who was Carlos Prince of Asturias how us unfortunately fell victim to the propensity amongst the Habsburgs for insanity this was mostly due to the high degree of relatedness within the family there was a repeated pattern of nieces being married to uncles in order to avoid land passing outside of the dynasty by the time Rudolf was already in the court Carlos would have been showing signs of this insanity and in fact he would die a couple of years before Rudolf returned to Austria as a result though it needed a new heir and for this to happen he also needed to remarry so as part of the diplomatic maneuverings around this marriage Maximilian was able to return Rudolf announced to Austria the price of this was very high though because it meant that he had to send his daughter Anna to be the new queen of Spain and made Sion phasis in the original video of how Rudolf was seen as too stiff by the court when he returned to Austria it's a little more subtle than that so his father in particular was not pleased with the form of education and etiquette that Rudolf had been educated in by comparison however his mother Maria of Austria was quite pleased with this result the simple reason that she had been brought up in the Spanish Court and she came to associate this with refinement and etiquette compared with the more informal Austrian Court it's probably not surprising to hear that this was not the only rift between Rudolph's parents in fact the ideological differences between the two likely contributed to more secretive nature of Rudolph's personality in later life so Maria much like her brother thought the second was a very very pious Catholic whereas Maximilian was about as close to a humanist as you could have been at the time much like his son after him he pursued a policy of tolerance when it came to the protestant princes of the Empire and even the Protestant subjects within his own lands particularly within the kingdom of Bohemia despite this they still managed to have 16 children so one quote I saw on this I'm forgetting exactly where I saw it was that they met in body if not in mind by the time that Rudolf returned to the court his father was really becoming an old man at the time he was in his late 40s and he had been emperor for almost a decade in order to secure a smooth succession he immediately went about confirming Rudolf as Co ruler in his various realms so by the virtue of his birth Rudolf was already an Archduke of Austria along with the Prince of Hungary maxximum was successful in confirming him as his Co ruler but in the case of the kingdom of Bohemia he had a few difficulties he ended up both issuing and not issuing a proclamation of sorts for Bohemia so in order to secure his sons succession the Bohemian nobility demanded that he confirm the Peace of Augsburg now this was a piece that had been conducted between the Protestant Prince's of the Empire and Maximilian zone called Charles v wherein each Prince was given the right to choose his own religion so Maximilian had to play something of a balancing act he had to first win over the Bohemian nobility by affirming these rights but he couldn't do so at the cost of alienating the other Catholic princes for a reason we'll go into in a second as a result he only informed me confirmed this he never issued any imperial proclamation or edict ordering it to be so fortunately though this was enough to secure Rudolph's coronation as King of Bohemia where he was crowned in 1575 the same year he became the formal heir to Maximilian as king of the Romans now at the time the king of the Romans was elected by a number of princes within the Empire and it seems likely that one of the reasons Maximilian did not form we've issued the C date was in order to avoid angering the Catholic electors of the Empire so if we fast forward a year later Maximilian dies of a heart complaint and suddenly in his mid-20s Rudolf is the most powerful man on the continent in theory but as I mentioned in the original video rather than pursue the traditional prerogatives of the Emperor so things like expanding the borders of the empire restoring the Imperial position within the Empire and reclaiming that degree of control over northern Italy Rudolph himself focused almost entirely on his own pursuits so this included scientific pursuits collection of artwork architecture and in addition to this he was a widespread patron of leading artists and scientists from all over Europe during the period he also spent a large degree of his time pursuing what would now be considered occult practices but we have to be careful in how we categorized those at the time many of these practices were considered mainstream scientific for so what I'm referring to specifically here are the twin practices of astrology and of alchemy so astrology is a now debunked science where it was claimed that information regarding human and terrestrial events could be determined by observing the motions of the planets and other interstellar bodies at the time this was considered every bit as legitimate as astronomy in addition Rudolf also focused on some of the alchemical interests of his times so traditional alchemy focused on three major goals the first one was the transmutation of base metals into more sought-after materials such as silver and gold the creation of panaceas to cure illnesses and also cope with the largest goal which was the creation of the elixir of life and in Europe around this time in particular these ideas were tied up with the concept of a philosopher's stone this in itself was capable of all three in extension to these activities Rudolf would accumulate this vast collection of artwork texts an occult works this was referred to as the scammer and it's construction really drove Rudolf in a way that consumed most of his finances due to the scale of purchases he made both in artwork and books he actually had to take loans from many prominent members of the nobility in addition to these pursuits there was also some interest in what was termed secret writing within Rudolph's court so I think it should be noted that the steganography R which was a famous work on cryptology was actually first circulated within his court before it went on to be printed so from this you can see where Rudolph's interest in something like the Voynich manuscript may have come from one thing I didn't really have a chance at all to cover in the video was Rudolph's personal life so at the time of Maximilian's death he hadn't been able to organize any form of marriage for Rudolf this is something that Rudolf would play to his advantage but that would also eventually come back to bite him and I'll explain that a little bit later much like Elizabeth the first of England who he was a contemporary of Rudolf would repeatedly use his bachelor status as a tool in diplomatic maneuvering for out his entire reign he would essentially offer himself as a suitor but as with many things in his life he never really followed through on pursuing one particular marriage alliance and as a result he was still attempting to make marriage plans at the end of his life many decades later but to fill the hole of having a formal empress and family he resorted to other methods he actually had a vast number of mistresses as far as we're aware and with some of them he would actually end up having families of illegitimate children the best well-known example of this was a noble woman by the name of Catherine Estrada she became somewhat of a life companion for Rudolph gender bearing him seven children including his oldest son don julius ceaser de austria although rudolph didn't stay faithful to her and it's not felt that she was really an emotional companion in fact Rudolph would have so many mistresses that they're largely just grouped under the name of his Imperial women in addition to this due to his unmarried status it was heavily rumoured during his reign that he was actually gay and he was claimed to have had a number of homosexual affairs with both his court chamber lanes and with his pages although it's unsure how true these rumors were he also continued his father's policies when it came to religious tolerance at the time of his accession in Bohemia most of its nobility was Protestant and despite the urgings of both his uncle and the Pope he would go on to tolerate Protestantism for the rest of his reign he based himself largely out of Prague which at the time which at the time had a heavily mixed Protestant and Catholic population and rather than entertaining the more firebrand ideas of hardline Catholics of the time he really had this idea that he was somehow going to reunify Christendom in Western Europe through a process of intellectual argument and reason and eventual compromise and mediation as with many of his schemes he only really pursued these objectives intermittently but by doing very little to change the status quo in this regard it's likely he probably put off the start of a major war in the empire between Catholic and Protestant forces the remainder of his reign it wasn't until several years after his death that the 30 Years War broke out and we'll talk a little bit more about that in the future however you might remember that when I started discussing rudolph i said that this policy of inaction was only half true and what i was specifically referring to were his actions to the eastern frontier of the Empire so at the time large sections of Central Hungary had been occupied by the Ottoman Empire which also occupied over large areas of Europe in particular the Balkans Bulgaria Greece in addition to having their own Hartman's in Turkey and possessions were in both Arabia and northern Africa at the time of Rudolph's reign the various Sultan's of the Ottoman Empire was still involved in trying to move their borders westward and to take control of all of Hungary if possible as a result it's not really a surprise that one of Rudolph's other goals within his reign after he intended to unite Christianity his next objective was to turn these forces to the east and to try and reclaim the lost sections of Europe for Christianity in aid of this goal he would pursue a policy of aggression towards the Ottomans throughout his entire reign now during the first couple of decades of his reign this was largely limited to border conflicts and smaller scale skirmishes but by 1593 a large-scale war broke out this war now known as the long Turkish war had the pretext that the Ottoman Sultan of the time Mehmed the third arbitrarily decided to change the amount of tribute that they demanded from the Empire so for several decades the Empire had been paying an annual tribute to the Ottomans in return for a tenuous peace after the sort and arbitrary doubled this amount war soon broke out and this war didn't really achieve a huge amount it dragged on for 13 years with massive loss of men and with several near scares where it looked like where it looked like the Ottomans were actually going to achieve one of their goals and occupied Vienna the indecisive nature of this war combined with how long it progressed for really came back to bite Rudolf so his failure to both provide leadership throughout this war and to see it through to a conclusion eventually led to the loss of much of his power this was due to a few factors one of them you may remember from earlier I mentioned before that Rudolph had a number of younger brothers and his oldest brother earns two died his obvious heir at this point was his younger brother Matthias Rudolph and Matthias were not a good match in temperament whereas Rudolph was somewhat of a humanist and neo Plato it's and only really a public Catholic Matthias was strongly devout although not quite as much as his successors in addition Matthias had somewhat alienated himself from Rudolph so during the early decades of Rudolph's reign there was a conflict raging in the western part of the Empire in the Spanish Netherlands so at the time philip ii was lord of both modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands and for many decades by this point the northern provinces had been in rebellion against Philip this war known as the eighty Years War was one that matthias tried to intervene in as a young man in order to try and bring about a peace now this did not go well in fact Matthias managed to alienate both sides of the conflict and had to be recalled back to Austria by his brother who gave him a severe scolding for his actions by 1605 however Matthias had managed to build up trust amongst the other Archduke's in particularly Rudolph's other younger brothers eventually the poor war situation actually led to rudolf being forced to give over power over the war effort to matthias one thing I want to emphasize now is that Matthias was not really any better than Rudolf when it came to war however he did manage to resolve the conflict and the price of a treaty that was something of a disaster so first he made peace with the Prince of Transylvania who had thrown his lot in with the Ottomans and then he went on to hash out a peace treaty with the Ottomans themselves the main feature of this peace treaty was the payment by the Empire of a massive tribute to the Ottomans ten times the amount that they were used to previously paying in addition there were some communication difficulties when it came to the exact details of this treaty so the Ottomans were under the opinion that this was treated to be renewed every three years with a new payment coming each time whereas the Austrians quite understandably thought that this was a one-off payment from there this process of power slowly ABing away continued for Rudolf in 1608 he was actually forced by the other Archduke's of Austria to make Matthias the ruler in the Austrian heartland and also to grants him rulership over the western part of Hungary that they still controlled in addition he suffered another tragedy around this time I mentioned before that though at the seconds oldest son Don Carlos had descended into schizophrenia and madness at the end of his life this fate unfortunately also be felled Rudolf sold his son the aforementioned Don Giulio as he grew up Don Giulio increasingly showed signs of schizophrenia he became prone to violent outbursts and he also started to commit acts of violence towards animals this erratic and violent behavior only escalated over the course of his remaining life and around the same time that Rudolf was forced to cede the throne of Hungary to Matthias Giulio was actually imprisoned and the reason he was imprisoned was quite gruesome what essentially happened was that he abducted a daughter of a local barber and proceeded to murder her in quite brutal fashion as a result he was imprisoned for his actions and would live out the rest of his life in confinement a year later however probably the only great act of Rudolph's reign unfolded in 1609 he concluded a grievin with the Bohemians that led to him signing what was termed a letter of majesty this guaranteed religious freedom in Bohemia and to be clear that means religious freedom between Protestantism and Catholicism this was different however from the Peace of Augsburg so the Peace of Augsburg gave individual Prince's their right to determine the religion of their subjects this went a step further and not only was the nobility capable of choosing their religion this same right was extended to their subjects this moment of success however was only brief for Rudolph in 1611 he was no longer able to stave off mattias his ambitions and after a final armed showdown where in which he failed essentially to meet Matthias on the battlefield he was also forced to cede the throne of Bohemia to his brother in addition to this he also had to accept Matthias as his acknowledged heir and allow his election as king of the Romans there is an interesting twist though to this so you remember that Matthias was an ardent Catholic however in order to secure the agreement of the Bohemian nobility he actually had to agree to honor the letter of majesty that Rudolph had signed this had the inadvertent effect of alienating the Catholic electors within the Empire as well meaning that in order to secure his election of king of the Romans the ardent Catholic Matthias actually had to rely on the Protestant electors within the Empire and luckily for him that included himself as the King of Bohemia left with only the somewhat empty title now of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf seems to have descended quite rapidly downhill from here he had repeated bouts of depression and by all accounts had several violent outbursts that's only worsened in the final year of his life eventually in January of 1612 time ran out for Rudolf he took to his deathbed early in the month and by the twentieth he passed away from gangrene in his final days it said that he regretted ever becoming Emperor and expressed the degree of regret that his older brother Ferdinand who had died as a one-year-old child had not lived to take the throne in his place in his final hours he would also tell his chamber lanes the following My dear friends when my father recalled me from Spain so that I could come back to my country I was seized with such a joy that the following night I could not sleep why should I be sad at present why should I not be more joyful since I begin my voice towards my celestial home there is no separation no change and no evil in his final hours he refused to take the last rites stating that we would only want a priest if one could be found of our own kind so in terms of legacies Rudolf didn't really leave any great mark upon the world compared with his ancestors he was no Charles the fourth or fifth he was no Frederick the first but perhaps he left a better legacy so for the thirty five years of his reign the Empire remained largely at peace the great conflict that would break out only six years later was delayed and for this reason his subjects in Bohemia having once considered him quote the reclusive prog are actually said to have mourned his passing remembering him instead as the good emperor who brought them peace and prosperity his other somewhat scant achievements were almost immediately undone after his death his personal archive of artwork and books was largely destroyed during the course of the 30 Years War and what remained of it would eventually be sold off by his successors in addition matthias would prove no better a rule than him so much so that by the end of his reign the initial stages of the 30 Years War were already breaking out after the election of ferdinand ii as Matthias is heir things rapidly went downhill the defenestration of Prague took place in 1618 where emissaries of the Emperor were thrown from a building by members of the Bohemian nobility it was feared that as a hard-line Catholic ferdinand ii would soon impose harsh measures on the protestant citizenry of bohemia which he would eventually go on to do as a result be butter of majesty that ruled offside effectively became void for centuries to come there was one goal of Rudolph's however that would eventually be achieved by one of his successors later in the sixteenth century his eventual successor Leopold the first was successful in liberating Hungary from the Ottomans moving on from rudolf ii we have this slight problem that the three people who own the manuscript after him aren't really is interesting in terms of their life story they do have a few interesting tidbits here and there but for obvious reasons history hasn't really chronicled their lives in the same level of detail as the holy roman emperor however i do still have a few things to share when it comes to the next three owners of the manuscript so a quick refresh from the video itself as far as we're aware rudolf ii seems to have purchased the manuscript somewhere in the early 17th century and then pretty quickly passed it off to one of his favorites one yeah caboose houjicha whose name i eternally struggle with and I'm probably still getting wrong in some fashion so sorry about that one something I feel that I didn't really get across in the main video was just how rich whole teacher was were in his lifetime in fact he had such wealth that he would routinely lend money to rudolf throughout remainder of his life much of which he was never able to recoup in any significant fashion rudolph was an eternally cash-strapped ruler and this was due to the fact that he maintained such an elaborate set of interests and the fact that he liked to sponsor so many prominent artists and scientists within his court in addition he also spent vast amounts of money when it came to remodeling his castle in prague and on the various wars that he conducted in the east it may have been as partial compensation for these debts that whole teacher received the Voynich manuscript in the first place although the information we have about this is very limited at the moment prior to receiving the Voynich manuscript or teacher did receive another form of compensation however so he actually was made a knight by rudolph as far as i'm aware he had to petition for this it wasn't given to him out of the goodness of Rudolph's heart but in 1608 he was raised to the nobility as a knight in fact he was listed as a knight with two horses so pretty fancy stuff as part of his in noblemen he was actually entitled to a monthly renumeration for his services which again Rudolf didn't we pay him at any point and he didn't actually manage to receive the old money until after the Emperor's death in 1612 the death of his major patron however doesn't seem to have been a huge blow to whole teacher shortly after Rudolph's death his successor Matthias was actually compelled to give him a township in exchange for the vast amount of debt that Rudolf had owed to him so as a result he became the leader of a Township known as Melnick in the modern Czech Republic for the next few years of Matthias has rain while teacher was really able to maintain his prestigious position as an imperial chemist and appears to have lived in some comfort as a result however towards the end of Matisse's reign as the 30 Years War was beginning to break out we see a marked reversal of his circumstances during the beginnings of the conflict in Bohemia itself he actually took an ardently Catholic stance and this became a big big problem in the year ahead for context 1618 really saw the outbreak of hostilities in Bohemia due to running disagreements between the largely Protestant nobility of the area and B soon-to-be holy roman emperor ferdinand ii who had been named as matthias as air 39 was an ardent Catholic and he believed in reuniting Christendom within the Empire by force if necessary unlike the somewhat more conciliatory Catholic Matthias due to this and complaints that the letter of majesty that rule ii had signed towards the end of his reign simply wasn't being respected the nobility took the extraordinary move in 1619 of turning against ferdinand by this point Matthias had died and he'd already become Emperor but in response to his refusal to honor the letter of majesty the Bohemian nobility responded by taking the pretty incredible step of divesting him of the throne so they actually offered the crown to another prince within the empire that man was frederick v who was the Prince elector of the plateau 9 at the time due to him taking a pro Catholic stance in hostilities or cheecha soon fell foul of the protestant forces that were in the ascendancy in Bohemia at the time of 1618 he was imprisoned although it doesn't seem like the terms of his captivity were too distressing to him he would spend much of the next 18 months in prison we're not sure of the exact date but roughly in January of 1620 he would actually be traded for another prisoner after which she was promptly thrown out of Bohemia however shortly after that the Protestant forces within Bohemia were defeated by Ferdinand at the Battle of the white mountain as a results of this Catholicism was reestablished within Bohemia and would really remain in the ascendancy there until the 20th century thanks to this hot sheet she was able to return to his Township and he seems to have lived out the rest of his life in relative comfort until his death two years later one footnote is that he actually died on the grounds of the Clemente omit self to the best of our knowledge his death came about when he suffered an accident where he managed to fall from his horse and died as a result of the injury this was slightly interesting to me because at the moment I'm also reading about William the Conqueror and for those of you who know a little bit about his life that's also the suspected method by which the great William the Conqueror had died he supposedly fell off his horse and landed with his saddle underneath him and drove the pommel into his stomach causing some form of injury or hernia that eventually led to his death after Hall cheech's death were not immediately sure what happened to the manuscript we do know that at some point in the decades afterwards it was picked up by barcia's as we discussed in the main episode I really don't have that much more to talk about when it comes to bashes he didn't leave behind any extent works that we know of there's not a great deal of information regarding his life outside of the letters he exchanged with Kircher and with Marcy we do know that he was considered at the time to be a somewhat serious man of learning and a respected Alchemist but unfortunately there aren't any existing works that we know of that can be attributed to him after his death the manuscript made its way to Yan Marci as I discussed in the main episode Marci I have a little bit more information that I could talk about compared to barcia's we do know that he was actually very very successful so he rose to become the chief physician of the entire bohemian Kingdom he received a doctorate from Prague University and he managed to basically marry into wealth so his wife was actually the daughter of a famous gem cutter which would have given him some financial security we also know that in his early education he was actually intended for the Jesuits order much like Kircher was however it seems that he diverted during the course of his education more towards becoming a physician interestingly his brother actually became a Jesuit instead although I think there's an account somewhere of his brother being thrown out of the order so how good a Jesuits he was he's really up for debate one correction here I would actually like to make from the video itself it's not so much a mistake but as a clarification I kind of hinted in the main body of the video that the 30 Years War may have been a factor in Massey deciding not to send the manuscript immediately onto Kircher in Rome as soon as it fell into his possession whilst this could still have played a factor we actually now know that the reason for Massey divesting himself of the manuscript was that he was actually moving into care at the time so he'd been suffering from a series of eye problems that only worsened in his later life and that eventually prevented him from continuing his correspondence with Kircher so if we remember Godfried Kiner had to send letters on his behalf in the very final years of his life as a result it seems more likely that his reason for sending the manuscript onto Kircher at this time is because he was getting rid of all his worldly possessions given he wouldn't be able to take them with him into care so that's really all I can say about the Free known owners of the manuscript after rudolf ii when it comes to v owner however Athanasius Kircher that's where things change and change quite radically my initial thought was that i wanted to go through and give a full summary of coach's life and the various scientific measures he looked into so for those of you who need a refresher Kercher was at the time basically considered the great scientific genius of his era this became a little more complicated towards the end of his life as I will go into but it's not really an exaggeration to say that he was a polymath he was incredibly productive across a massive range of fields and creating a full definitive breakdown of his life was an act that I realized is kind of beyond the scope of this video you could almost do a two or three hour video just looking at everything I finishes Kircher looked into instead I decided to go through and give you basically a summary of his early life all by his main achievements one point I want to make before I start going into Kircher however is in my time reading about scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries I've never really come across anyone quite like Athanasius Kircher this is a man who pursued groundbreaking studies in Egyptology sign ology studies into the plague and microorganisms studies into optics and hearing Volcanology geology just an incredible range of different interests but what's kind of incredible about his gigantic output is he got almost every single thing that he published on wrong there are several reasons for this probably the most prominent of these is he spent much of his career reliant on funding from the Pope or from the Holy Roman Emperor who were staunch Catholic backers and at the time he would have been expected in his works to reaffirm central church dogmas and really to put aside any findings he had that ran contrary to the church's official position in addition his personality is somewhat fascinating bear in mind he was raised in an order that really stressed humility before the Lord and in fact many of their initiation practices were designed to break down the egos of novices and in issues but when it came to his works and his publications he was something of a roofless self-promoter I'll give some examples of that shortly but he would often produce these vast volumes really finely crafted and designed to give the weight of authority and to really build his own reputation just by their physical presence what's almost contradictory to that though is he was an incredibly naive man by all counts on several occasions he made massive personal blunders that almost resulted in his death and I will talk a little bit about those cuz they're really quite interesting in addition he had a habit of simply repeating reports sent to him in his works which potentially explains why many of the volumes he produced exceeded a thousand pages and it should be remembered that many of these works are not little a5 sized books these are big cushion sized volumes that he produced before we come to all that however let's look a little bit at his early life so a fallacious Kircher was born in 1602 and a relatively small town known as Golder within central germany he came into the world a very interesting time for golda so around the time of his birth the local ruler who was a Catholic Prince by the name of Balthazar bond earned back I believe was a fanatical Catholic and for much of his reign he pursued this policy of trying to cleanse Golder of any sign of Lutheranism or his practitioners his primary way of doing this was to burn people at the stake for witchcraft and he ended up executing more than 200 people during his reign for this Kircher however was spared from any real involvement in this he grew up in a quite comfortable family his father was actually gold as mayor at one point which gave him quite a privileged upbringing as a result he actually had access to many books and different manuscripts early on in his life and this is probably the genesis of where he started his intellectual pursuits by been exposed to book learning a very young age his father went out of his way to indulge these pursuits he taught him Latin he taught him music and he really drilled him on the foundations of geography all of which interest Kircher would react Splore in his later life as a sign of the devotion of his father to indulging his son he actually hired a local rabbi as well to teach Kircher Hebrew so from an early age he could speak German he could speak Latin and he could speak Hebrew as well so he was already well set for a scholarly career however his reputation for being absent-minded and naive really originates from him even as a young boy so there are actually two accounts of him in his early life that come down from Kircher himself where through his naivety he was almost killed the first of these was when he went swimming with some friends and he made the mistake of getting too close to the current that was being stirred up by a water wheel as a result he accidentally allowed himself to be dragged underneath the water wheel which could very easily have crushed him or drowned him and as a result the world would never have heard of Athanasius Kircher he also gave us an account of how he was almost killed at festival in Golda so some of these festivals were mapped at the time by horse races and during one of these races he made the mistake of standing too close to the edge of a crowd this led to him being pushed out into the way of the oncoming horses and and according to him he panicked and just collapsed into a fetal position in front of the oncoming hooves very fortunately for him however he managed to make it through the instant unscathed having survived these two events it became increasingly clear as he grew up that he was going to be destined for the church so at the age of 10 he was sent away by his father to a Jesuit school in manes at the time the Jesuits were still a relatively new order and they were actually greeted by a lot of suspicion by Protestants who basically saw them as a counterinsurgency parked the counter-reformation against Lutheranism this will be further illustrated by the time we get to the 30 Years War but their order at this time was undergoing a period of success so so by 1600 their membership had already sworn to 16,000 and they were kind of becoming their own network across most of the world at the time they also pursued the ideas of developing culture and scholarly pursuits really in line with the ideals of the Renaissance in fact they were kind of combine this with their own ideas of spirituality and Kircher wasn't really an exception to this in fact when you look at later pursuits this meshing of the spiritual and the practical together really informed who he was as a scholar and they also limited him in some ways that will be toe so Kurt remained at the school until 1618 where by all accounts he took the message of humility that the Jesuits tried to instill into its novices a bit too seriously to the point that many of his superior is actually thought that he was quite stupid this was standing sharp contrast to his personality in later life but for the moment he didn't seem to be particularly exceptional despite this he was able to complete his secondary studies and in 1618 he was sent to another Jesuit school in Paderborn this is where his teaching process became quite brutal in nature so at the time novices at the Jesuit Order were expected to go through this regime of being deprived of sleep food warmth to beat themselves with cords and chains and wear hair shirts and really to focus their lives on contemplating works of Christ and the life that God supposedly intended for them this entire regime was basically designed to strip novices of their ego and of any interest that they had before they joined the order initially Kircher went along with this and really focused on trying to appear humble before his instructors and to hide the fact that he actually had a really keen intellect to quote him at the time this silence and masking of my ability caused both and the students to consider me stupid despite this he would encounter two major dogmas during his time at Paderborn that really shaped his ideas and his publications in later life the first of these was the Catholic teachings on physics at the time so during this period a lot of the teachings endorsed by the church relied on having an ancient source and in this case the source was the ideas expounded by Aristotle so Aristotle envisioned a universe that was both infinite in nature and that had been perfectly designed by its creator according to his teachings the earth itself was composed of four main elements so this would be the typical earth water air and fire in addition to this there was a fifth element which was known as Aoife these elements were ordered on top of each other and the core tenant of this system was that the earth itself was fixed at the center of the universe where it was orbited by the Sun and the five known planets at the time of Mercury Venus Mars Jupiter and Saturn one thing to emphasize is that these orbits were supposedly perfect spheres at the time and supposedly they were guided by an otherworldly intelligence which guaranteed that perfect circle's the 2nd dogma that Kircher came into around this time was the idea of spontaneous generation this was the idea that rather than having a biological explanation many creatures such as worms flies and insects were actually spontaneously generated from decaying and nonliving matter this was an idea that Kircher would cling to throughout his entire career and it really went on to inform his studies when it came to when it came to the transmission of disease and of the early studies into microbiology that he conducted by all accounts Kercher's studies proceeded relatively normally so at the age of 22 we had his first real exposure to the ongoing conflicts of the 30 Years War when the college had to be closed and an evacuated due to approach to a Protestant army this army was led by the Protestant prince-bishop Christian of Brunswick who was known for his varial and hatred of Catholics he would actually go on to brutally sack paderborn which compelled Kircher and the rest of the Jesuits in residence there to flee away from the town through a harsh winter in order to avoid his wrath this is actually the third occasion where Kircher almost died by all counts they were heading towards the town of düsseldorf and they tried to cross the River Rhine in midwinter this was a problem because the Rhine was only partially frozen and during the course of their crossing Kircher found himself stood on an ice floe separate from the rest of his fellows that broke off and proceeded to track him down River he only narrowly managed to escape from this predicament by actually leaping into the waters near one of the banks and wading through the icy river to safety after several more trying situations he and the rest of his group managed to make it to Cologne where as with much of Germany there was another Jesuit college so here he was able to continue his studies and it's really here the his intellectual abilities started to mark him out from his colleagues and to attract the attention of his superiors for the next few years after this Kircher was sent to various places throughout germany to continue his education this would prove highly perilous for him when he was actually sent off to a town known as heli genstat in Saxony which I probably just got the name wrong of so apologies for that he was sent off there to act as a grammar teacher but he made the somewhat strange decision of traveling the roads wearing his full black Cossack and religious garb of the Jesuits this decision marks the fourth time that a Phinehas was nearly killed on the road he was waylaid by what he'd himself described as a group of heretic horsemen who probably was simply bandits from the area looking to rob a traveling Jesuit priest according to the account he laid out in his autobiography he was stripped of all of his possessions he was violently beaten and by all accounts it looked like the horsemen were preparing to lynch him this is where Kircher again becomes a somewhat unreliable witness given that's only his account that we have to rely on according to him his life was spared when he gave up and collapsed to the floor and started to loudly pray for his salvation at which point one of the horsemen essentially turned to his foes and said why are we doing this we don't really need to kill this guy do we after which they supposedly gave him back everything he owned which is a bold claim and allowed him to continue on his journey after being sent back and forth throughout these towns in Germany kocha was eventually ordained into the priesthood around 1628 after this he was actually sent to be a Jesuit representative at the courts of one of the most powerful electors within the Holy Roman Empire this was the archbishop of maine's who at the time was a man by the name of Johann von Kronen Berg the position of Archbishop of maine's was formally the number two within the Empire as he acted as the head of the College of electors that responsible for selecting the heir to the Holy Roman Empire however by the time Kircher arrived in the Archbishop's court he was very elderly and by all accounts highly paranoid so he actually executed a total of 1,500 people during his reign for suspected witchcraft and in fact one of the people he executed if I remember correctly was one of his nephews so he was very very serious when it came to these charges kocha however seems to have been spared from any suspicion during his time at the court in fact he seems to have been there mostly just to entertain the aging Archbishop in order to do so he would stage elaborate displays of fireworks which was still a novelty within Europe at the time and he also created a bunch of kind of power tricks based around magnetism one of his early claims to fame and probably one of the things which sparked his later career when it came to the work he did on magnets he created what he termed a magical clock where he had a type of sunflower seed that would always turn the clock to point to the Sun and thus tell you the time of day this was a trick that he talked up for much of his career and it almost certainly seems to have been a cheap parlor trick this clock operated by having a cork placed VIN above water with the seed inside but what that cork also seems to have disguised is a lodestone so his clock was actually relying on magnetism rather than some intrinsic properties unique to sunflower seeds as he claimed at the time he also supposedly created some sorts of cartographic tool using magnets at the time the elector was actually trying to survey an area that had fallen into his hands as a result of the various conflicts that were ongoing in the 30 Years War and by all accounts Kircher was able to achieve this in record time supposedly he was rewarded for this by being asked by the archbishop to apply this tool to the wider region around mains and würzburg and these efforts were only for tadesse of the elector shortly afterwards again were going largely by Kercher's word on this one as is quite characteristic of Kircher in his earlier life he quickly grew very bored of life in mains where he basically was nothing more than an entertainer for the archbishop to try and pass the time he seems to have become more interested in sundials he did some early experiments in telescopes and he also continued his studies into magnetism as I just described eventually though he grew so sick of this lifestyle that he made quite a bold move and one which really gives us a hint as to his future personality and his somewhat growing ego at the time in an attempt to change his lot in life he started to petition his superiors to send him out as a missionary literally as he describes to anywhere and in aid of this he made a really brazen move he sent a letter to the Superior General of the entire Jesuit Order so he is a completely unknown priest at this time and he decides to go to the highest possible Authority within his order in fact he basically lectured this is Superior General in the course of his letter reminding him that life is very short and you can see he was he was worried that he was going to be reduced to essentially being an entertainer for this archbishop for the rest of his career perhaps due to the audacity of this letter his reward was receiving no missionary appointment at all and he ended up remaining in mains for another year during this time he also made a discovery within the library at würzburg that would one day form the basis of his growing reputation as a scholar so according to his own account he came across a book of hieroglyphics with which he claims have been immediately intrigued and that he wanted to know more about at this time many scholars fought the Egyptian hieroglyphics actually concealed some of the earliest learning in human history in fact many conjectured that the wisdom supposedly hidden away in the hieroglyphics actually was transmitted down since the time of Adam and before the great flood as a result anyone who claimed to have translated any significant portion of hieroglyphics almost immediately would have made themselves one of the preeminent scholars of the day kocha would actually use these ideas very early on in his career to build up his reputation so he suddenly seems to produce this Arabian manuscript almost out of nowhere which he would use as a kind of a bartering tool so he would claim he was always on the verge of breaking through and unlocking the ancient secrets that surely lay inside and that must have been derived from these more ancient wisdoms hidden away in the hieroglyphics in addition to this he also wrote his first work here on magnetism this isn't really the more developed works that we come to see later on in his career however it's a small pamphlet about 63 pages and it's really highly derivative of other ideas about magnets that come out at the time in 1630 people were still in the process of debunking some of the more spiritual aspects of what magnets were claimed to be able to do so they were claimed as a sort of cure-all that could be used to draw out evil vapors within the body despite this there was still no actual explanation as to how magnetism worked at the time so they still retained a high degree of spiritual significance for their properties alone as a result purcha didn't really make much of a splash with this first publication and without the intervention of another event it's entirely possible that his career could have stagnated from this point onwards 16:30 saw something of a period of peace within the Empire compared to the conflict which had raged for the previous 12 years in fact at the time kerchief wrote letters where he basically said our peace is finally at hand now I can get on with this work without this constant fear of invasion so in 1630 Sweden decided to enter the war on the side of the Protestant forces and in aid of this their King Gustav Adolphus invaded northern Germany he soon managed to take würzburg and again this was another place where Kircher was that was quite brutally sacked and he was forced once again to flee so he had you managed to make it as far as France in this case he first fled to Paris where he lingered for a while and then he went on to the papal territory of having known in southern France this is where he really got his big big break there's a great quote in the autobiography of Khurshid that John Glassie wrote which is really good by the way I'd recommend it it's called a man of misconceptions but he describes Kercher's repeated turns of good look as him falling upwards at every opportunity when he arrived in southern France it was lucky in that he met a really distinguished astronomer at the time along with a great patron of letters this was a man by the name of Nicolas cord Fabry de peiresc she's a bit of a mouthful I'm gonna call him Paris going forwards Horacio was one of the major nodes what the time was termed the Republic of Letters that spread across Europe and that increasingly promoted the ideals of the Enlightenment using this ancient Arabic manuscript that he'd managed to bring with him from würzburg Kochi managed to impress Parrish quite a lot although how much he actually showed the manuscript to him in the early days is a little bit of a controversy the two of them actually wrote letters about their meetings that wildly contradicted each other where Parrish was much more doubtful about Kercher's claims whereas Kircher talked about how impressed he'd made this eminent scientist either way Harish played a significant role in coach's future development as a scientist so in 1630 the Imperial astronomer Johann Kepler passed away and of all people Kircher was chosen to take his place by the emperor this in itself was obviously a great stroke of luck for Kircher but the appointment didn't quite pan out and the reason for this is that in the time in-between his appointment which didn't happen at all 1633 Paresh had been busy writing letters to his superiors in rome basically saying don't let this man go off to Vienna with his fabulous manuscript it will be lost to our order forever if you do so on the strength of his arguments the Jesuit Order decided to change their plans and they ended up sending another priest in Kircher's stead to go to Vienna instead he was assigned to the Collegio Romano Ming Rome now Koecher has an interesting claim in this regard he actually claims that by the time news of his reassignment arrived he had already set sail for Vienna according to him his plan was to first sail down to Rome take in the ancient city and then head on to Vienna where he would take up his appointment this is quite an interesting claim mostly because Rome is so out of the way in terms of travel to Vienna that it seems more likely that he just headed straight to Rome in order to take up his new appointment and this later claim is just an embellishment he made during his final years before he left a big non though he had the fifth time but he almost died this is a running pattern with Kircher where through his naivety or through what we will soon see strange stupidity he almost got himself killed this is where whilst walking in the gardens are having yawn he apparently managed to sit down on a device designed for turning water with a horse running inside it and he actually got snagged and pulled into the device and poured inside the main cage where he almost drowned and was only saved by the intervention of others to round this off he then managed to nearly die for the sixth time on his voyage down to Rome he would be repeatedly blowing off course by storms and according to him the captain of his ship at one point decided to take refuge in the caves along the coast of Italy and they were almost dashed against the rocks in the process eventually however he managed to make his weight of Rome somewhat seasick by all accounts but he did make it there upon arriving he was immediately given the assignment by a rather important Cardinal at the time to first produce a full translation of this Arabic manuscript that he'd produced and then to go on and use his expertise to create a full set of commentaries on Egyptian obelisks which at the time was still a source of great interest and were untranslated so over the next year he conspicuously failed to do this instead he really put his efforts into producing a dictionary of the Coptic language this was still a significant thing for him however as it's the first event that really brought him to public attention and in fact we can see in barcia's letter when he contacts Kircher it was instigating event for him trying to get Kercher's interest in the Voynich manuscript he also was probably the first person to make the link between the language of Coptic and ancient Egyptian from which it is ultimately derived although he didn't go as far as he could have this is simply because he didn't think that the hieroglyphics were a simple phonetic language he thought that their wisdom was laid down in elaborate allegories that could only be understood a truly wise this was quite a common theory at a time so he kind of went along with this with this dictionary we can really see his ego beginning to grow though at the end of the book he made the rather bold claim that he was now on the very very verge of translating the hieroglyphics and that he would go on to provide this translation in the book Egyptian he dopus however his work at this time was suddenly interrupted so there was a Protestant German Prince at this time of essay I think it was who had been convinced to convert to Catholicism and as part of this conversion he'd been awarded certain honors by the Vatican and he was traveling down through Italy to receive them one of these honors was awarded by the Knights of Malta so the time Malta was ruled over by a monastic order who had been given the rites the island by emperor charles v curiously enough he actually rented them the island in perpetuity in return for the gift of one live Maltese Falken every year it was fought however that this prince would need a confessor for his trip to Malta so the Jesuits decided to assign Kircher to fulfill this role Kircher apparently was not happy with this but he had very very little choice so he ended up going to Malta as part of this princes entourage but he seems to have had a miserable time whilst he was there he spent most the time lobbying his various patrons in Rome to allow him to return there however he did have some very useful developments whilst he was on the island so whilst he was there he spent a lot this time studying the geology of Malta and he also made a very very lucky acquaintance and this time you'll see how apt the phrase falling upwards goes when it comes to Kircher because he had a habit of introducing himself to people who either were or went on to be incredibly influential and who aided his scientific career on Malta he met the papal representative who was a man by the name of Fabio chichi this man would go on to become Pope Alexander the seventh and by all accounts he became good friends with Kircher they both had an interest in foreign language and they especially had an interest in breaking ciphers so cheeky would have had to have an interest in this as part of his communications with the Pope after a year at Malta Kircher was able to successfully lobby to return to Rome this marks the seventh time that he almost died during his travels back to Rome he lingered in sicily for a significant amount of time and he would eventually land near Calabria in 1638 he arrived right on time for a series of devastating earthquakes in the region so it's estimated that somewhere in the region of 10,000 people actually died as a result kocha however managed to survive it without many problems I think the best account we have here this time is he describes one episode where before suddenly started shaking and he fell flat on his face which somewhat underplays the violence I think of these earthquakes in addition he became highly intrigued by the volcanoes of the region at this time so this leads me directly to what are we on now the 8th time the Athanasius Kircher was almost killed I think we should describe him not as the master of a hundred arts but it's the man that God simply couldn't kill he decided to climb Mount Vesuvius which at the time was still smoking it had a major eruption seven years earlier in 1631 and by all accounts would still have seemed very dangerous at the time this didn't stop Kircher however not only did he hike his way up to the top of the volcano he actually was lowered over the side and into the volcano's chamber itself so he was certainly brave if nothing else according to Kircher though the site of the chamber on the inside of the volcano would eventually stimulate his interest on the inner workings of the planet and it's no surprise he would eventually published volumes discussing that very topic after arriving back in Rome he encountered a problem which was the Cardinal who would act as his patron and essentially run out of money and as a result his attempt to publish works at this time would largely stymied by a lack of money for printing instead he largely seems to have worked as a teacher in this time so he became chair of mathematics at the Collegio Romano which was actually a very prestigious position so he wasn't doing badly by any means so officially stymied from working on his Oedipus Egypt curse he instead sent the next two or three years compiling a truly gigantic volume on magnetism this is the true follow-up to the somewhat slim pamphlet he had published in his time at würzburg this work eventually ended up being 916 pages and it covered essentially all aspects of magnetism that were known at the time so included vast amounts of magnetic data that had been sent to him from Jesuit colleges all over the world he actually managed to coin the phrase electromagnetism which is their significant achievement in itself given it still used widely within physics today the problem however with this publication is that Kircher was still wedded to these ideas of the earth being the center of the universe and the wider ideas of Aristotle so he spent much of the work actually arguing against heliocentrism which would no doubt have brought him admirers within the Catholic Church in order to get this work published he actually made the rather novel act of reaching out to the Holy Roman Emperor at the time who was Ferdinand the third son of the aforementioned ferdinand ii and in order to secure the dedication for this work the emperor would actually send him math sums of money so he was able to compile a truly ornate and fantastic looking volume full of all these intricate diagrams and engravings and this is where he really established this pattern of producing these really authoritative looking volumes which almost garnered him respect simply by their mere existence so this book generated a huge amount of interest from scholars throughout Europe that isn't to say however that it was all positive interest a lot of the reason that coach's reputation would suffer in the centuries ahead was because around the time he was at work the skills of rationalism and empiricism that relied on only accepting knowledge that had been tested were really starting to come into their own under people like Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes Kircher came from a much older school of scholastic thought that really relied on respect for ancient tenants and on melding spiritualism with the physical world around you so it's not surprising that many of the adherents of empiricism rubbished his work as soon as it came out so he wasn't done here by any means in 1646 he would publish a massive tome that covered the light and shadow so he spent most of this looking at sundials giving you his theories on fireflies chameleons for essence jellyfish how you could bend light using a series of mirrors and he also provided one of the earliest descriptions of a microscope some of his claims as to the observations he made with them are kind of dubious though so he claimed to have seen worm-like organisms inside vinegar and cheese and it's thought that the primitive setup he described for his microscope wouldn't actually have been capable of seeing this there was also another problem with this work which is many of the observations he made in it were extremely vague so there are accounts of contemporaries and correspondence from the time who spent huge amounts of money trying to replicate his findings when it came to optical observations and often many of them had no degree of success whatsoever regardless of these claims however these two works really made coach's reputation as a preeminent man of science and as a known polymath within Europe from this point onwards he produces a literally stupefying number of works I think he produced something like 40 works over the course of his entire life and many of these volumes are gigantic some of them are spread across multiple volumes often they're in excess of a thousand pages so I can't give you a complete breakdown of everything that Kircher produced in his life instead I think I'll probably just give you a quick roundup of the major things he produced so the first thing he did after producing a work on light rather aptly was to produce some volume on music this did include some interesting observations of things like vocal organs in animals along with what he later claimed was an example when the earliest megaphones he actually was quite tetchy about this claim in older age as there were other claimants at the time to the title of its inventor however the problem with Kircher is he didn't have any formal musical training so he wasn't capable of playing any instruments but as I assigned of his growing ego he still felt fit to produce a massive volume on what he considered the proper forms of music over much of the decade after producing this he also grappled with hieroglyphics by all accounts he claims have had great difficulty in his translations in the 1650s however he produced free volumes on the subject which kind of put him over the top in terms of putting him as the absolute pinnacle of scholars of in Europe unsurprisingly these volumes are gigantic and a real problem of them is the first two of these volumes are almost entirely devoted to the methodology he was going to use to provide these translations rather than any of the translations themselves they're actually largely confined to the final volume that he produced I mentioned before though kocha didn't think that Egyptian hieroglyphics represented an actual day-to-day language he thought that they were elaborate allegories and metaphors that we use the disguised wisdom so they would only be readable by truly wise men in addition to this the main sauce that he used in his claim translation was an item known as the been buying tablet this was actually a Roman e'er reproduction of hieroglyphics that had turned up after the sack of Rome by charles v forces a century prior to coach's arrival there the result was a translation that is by all accounts complete gibberish to demonstrate this let's compare coach's translation of hieroglyphics to the more modern understanding of the language so for the simple phrase a cyrus says as which have cropped so quite frequently of a knob whisks for obvious reasons Kircher generated the translation the treachery of typhoon ends at the throne of Isis the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis so yeah his translations essentially just produced gibberish in addition EDA passage if Lucas really shows just how large his ego had become at this time there's this fantastic front piece on them showing the Sphinx being forced to admit to Kircher that he had solved her riddle so he's not really paying any attention to these Jets or what concepts of be a humble servant of God anymore and indeed he would continue this trend throughout many of the books he produced over the course of his life where often he seemed to focus more on producing these really impressive volumes full of fancy engravings and diagrams and where he could he tended to pepper in as many starett looking languages as possible and in fact he would often go into such details about what the church considered to be prohibited practices as part of trying to lend an air of the occult to his works that he found himself the victim of the Jesuits censors because they basically turned around and said you wrote works that condemn what we consider to be practices of black magic but your volumes also read as a hell to you condemned them so much you actually described every single thing about them luckily for him however due to his powerful patrons he was largely shielded from any of the censorship until very very late in his career where often censors seem to intervene more to prevent him from being embarrassed rather than because of reasons of theological dispute throughout this time he also built up what is by all accounts one of the most impressive museums in Europe within the wings he'd been assigned at the Collegio Romano there's a depiction of these I showed in the Voynich manuscript video of itself I want to stress however that the depiction this shows of this cavernous hall with these gigantic 8 meter obelisks and all these different biological specimens and strange automata and sculptures all over the place that's not likely they're being correct given what we know of the physical scale of the building he was also really good at using this museum as something as a propaganda so he would prominently display his own books here for the benefit of any visitors or scholars within the Collegium in addition to these pursuits he was also one of the first men to actually try and study disease using a microscope and some of the ideas he crafted whilst there very much speculation considering the resources he had available to him at the time they're quite close to the modern germ theory of disease after viewing the blood of plague sufferers during an outbreak of plague in Rome in 1656 he came up with the theory that the plague was being spread by infectious agents within their blood now how he came up with this is quite disputable from a scientific standpoint so what he would do is he would view them under these microscopes that didn't have the resolution to see the bacteria that we now know to spread the plague instead what he would have seen if he turned the microscope on any organic material was what looked like a massive wriggling worms and that's what he described in his work on the subject this really tied in as well with his ideas about spontaneous germination so this was the theory I mentioned earlier that that vermin and insects were actually spontaneously generated from rotting biological matter Kircher would remain wedded to this theory for the rest of his life it was only strengthened by his own first-hand observations so he turned the little creatures he saw as anima cools and the theory he had was what turned one of universal sperm this idea that organic objects that were subject to rot and some sort of intrinsic property you're seeding that allowed other organisms to arise spontaneously from them in this case these theories were largely discredited by the time of his death and he would actually somewhat damage his reputation by trying to refute critics of this theory to the point where I mentioned before members of Jesuit Order had to step in to prevent him from publishing quite embarrassing defenses of his theories there's one last area of study I want to mention from Athanasius Kircher and that is something I eluded it before when I was talking about his time he spent on Malta so you remember before I mentioned he spent some time studying geology and Volcanology he actually generated this vast theory on the basis of this about what he termed the inner workings of the earth so according to the theories of Kircher the inside of the earth was filled with vast amounts of channels and chambers above fire and water these were required in order to replenish the oceans and in the case of the fire to prevent it from freezing over this system was maintained by the water of the world's oceans running into a vast Maelstrom which he claimed was off the coast of Norway a fun aside there is actually a Maelstrom system there though not the one he described from this system water would run through the various channels and chambers of the earth where it would be rena ruched and cooled down somehow I mean it would be expelled again from another outlet that was supposedly located near the southern pole he also attracted some controversy within this book so obviously if it's on geology and Volcanology and the inner workings of the earth he would have to encounter chemistry in some fashion at the time chemistry was highly tied to the practice of alchemy which kocha seems to have been partially against some of the sources I found said that he was very much against alchemy as a whole but as far as I can tell what he was mostly against was the idea of the Philosopher's Stone which he claimed to be a foolish fantasy but he did take some alchemical concepts where base metals could be transmuted into more valuable materials as established fact somehow in addition to all these scientific pursuits he also managed to produce a volume on China so at the time China was very poorly understood in Europe by most people and kerja took it upon himself to rank one of the very first encyclopedias of China the problem with this encyclopedia however was he spent a lot of it trying to establish a supposed link between the ancient Egyptians and the birth of Chinese culture his main two arguments in favor of this were the fact that their writing systems looked a bit similar basically and supposedly that China also had a caste system which he took as proof that they had been founded by the ancient Egyptians however we have to give credit where credit was due this work was highly influential throughout Europe and an interesting footnote is its popularity in England may very well have contributed to the British obsession when it came to tea of all things one thing to note on Kircher is he does seem to have changed some of his ideas in later life he pretty much held the line when it came to this idea of universal sperm that he had but he seems to have come closer to the idea of heliocentrism over the course of his career interestingly by the time he decided to write a volume debunking some ideas of Aristotle the Pope at the time who was the aforementioned Alexander the seven who he'd met at Malta had actually banned any direct discussion of these concepts so Kircher quite ingeniously wrote one of the earlier works of science fiction what he did is he framed a narrative of an angel taking a scholar who was very much a stand-in for himself on a tour around the universe and whilst this still argued against heliocentrism to a degree he also used the opportunity to have this angel figure debunk some ideas of Aristotle so as we reach the end of coach's career his position as this preeminent scientist within Europe is distinctly on the wane the increasing rise of rationalism and empiricism really damaged his reputation and led to many of the claims in his books being ridiculed by proponents of that school unfortunately he also seems to have been quite aware of this he started writing an autobiography of himself that looks like it may have been an attempt to kind of set the record straight and revive his reputation and legacy unfortunately due to a combination of ill health and a general decline in his reputation this autobiography was never actually collected in his lifetime and in fact languished for the better part of two centuries before finally being printed in fact towards the end of his life he started to be the victim of a persistent series of pranks by some of his detractors where people would send him what were essentially nonsense ciphers daring him to break them and him not realizing they were nonsense he would promptly write up an authoritative sounding translation of it and send it back and in the process make somewhat of a fool of himself in his later life his output really begins to slip he started to have heart troubles and general ill health in his old age his output finally began to slow down and eventually it ceased altogether one interesting thing around this time though is one of his students who was a man by the name of Johann Kessler as she went through all his works and in a response to his critics who demanded more experiments to back up his claims he essentially pared down all of church's work just to the core experiments that we know he actually conducted whilst the results of this were quite mixed some of his experiments had more scientific rigor than others this actually was received quite well towards the end of his life so there's a statement in John glasses biography of him that basically says what would the world have looked like if a fan asia's Kircher had had a good editor towards the very very end of his life coaches health declined very precipitously he eventually died from the after-effects of a stroke on November 27 1679 even in death much of his accomplishments would be eclipsed as the very next day the celebrated sculptor and artist Bernini died and as a result the elaborate attention that was played to his funeral rites completely overshadowed the burial of Kircher unfortunately the overwhelming majority of claims and findings he produced over the course of his life have now been roundly debunked and in fact much of the appreciation for him now comes not from the quality of the scientific work he produced but from the artistic value of the engravings and the diagrams that he produced for his volumes kerja did provide a very useful service to the more empirically minded scientists of his day in that he provided a vast amount of material for people to test against and confirm and fundamentally the idea of Sciences your ideas are supposed to be replicable by other scientists independently in addition he also inspired a generation of scientists many of whom seem to have gotten a free pass when it came to their more eccentric ideas a good example is that some of his ideas seem to have inspired people like Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton and many people now know that Isaac Newton was a major practitioner of alchemy so he himself had faults when it came to scientific reasoning okay I think I've gone on far far too long when it comes to a fan asia's Kircher but all his faults as a scholar he was certainly an interesting individual and the idea of a world without Athanasius Kircher to me is quite a sad one because he had such an interesting and varied career so if Kerch is deaf this largely wraps up anything I have to say about the renascence owners of the Voynich manuscript the less loose then that I want to tie up before moving to the modern owners however is the 30 Years War itself I mentioned it in the main Voynich manuscript documentary I mentioned it a great number of times here however I decided as part of this video I didn't want to go into a comprehensive discussion of the 30 Years War that's because I'm planning at some point in the future to actually make a full edited video on the subject until then the only real thing I want to get across is just how damaging this conflict was by its conclusion literally a third of Germany's population had been killed and there's a description of this in John Glass's book on Kircher that I really think gets across just the horrors that this war would have entailed it comes to us from the English scholar CV Wedgwood and it's a description of the sack of bamberg in 1630 at bamberg the bodies lay unburied in the streets and on both sides of the rhine there was famine in bavaria there was neither corn left to grind nor seed to sow for the year to come plague and famine wiped out whole villages mad dogs attacked their masters and the authorities posted men with guns to shoot the raving victims before they could contaminate their fellows hungry wolves abandoned the woods and mountains to roam through deserted devouring the dying and the dead ironically enough when it comes to Voynich himself I don't really have that much more to mention this is due to a couple of factors the first of these is that there isn't really a compiled biography of Wilfrid Voynich at the moment which means we really have to rely on statements that he made or on the few records that are available so there are a few factors about his early life that we can say with relative certainty so I mentioned that after leaving University he was picked up by the Czarist police so what I didn't mention was that Voynich wasn't just arrested for his efforts within the revolutionary group proletariat he was actually arrested for attempting to free two fellow members of the group from warsaw citadel unfortunately for him and the other members of proletariat however there was actually an informant within the group at the time who was able to tip off the Czarist police force the results of this was that he and several of his conspirators were apprehended in the attempt in addition there's another factor about Voynich which is relevant when discussing his time in incarceration so Voynich actually came from something of a noble family and this was probably the reason that he alone amongst his co-conspirators was not executed immediately in fact until later on in his life he would actually style his surname as divine itch in ting at his noble roots now in the video itself I simplified the period of voyagers incarceration but what I didn't mention was he actually had two separate periods of incarceration and this was because he managed to escape from the first one after the second arrest however whatever noble credentials he had didn't protect him any further and he was exiled to Siberia as I detailed the second problem we encounter when discussing voyages early life is actually Voynich himself so as I tried to get across in the video he was really quite a ruthless self promoter and he would often present facts about his earlier life to try and give himself something of a mystique as a result some of the claims he made about the period after he managed to escape from Siberia are very dubious so to remind you he managed to escape from Siberia after what he termed his period of revolutionary schooling and he claims to a thirst fled to Mongolia and then as far as Shanghai in China before eventually making it to London the problem with these claims is that the travel time in the late 19th century largely preclude this from being possible so he was on the run for a hundred and fifteen days before he reached London by comparison the amount of time it would take for him to take a boat from Shanghai to London at the time would actually have been longer than this period so it's very doubtful that he was successfully able to travel to Mongolia then to Shanghai and then to take it a voyage on to London instead the amount of time that he was on the run for almost perfectly matches the amount of time it would take someone to head west through Russia and arrive in Germany so I just accused Voynich of being something of a self promoter but when you look at his record as an antiquarian and there's a bookseller he had something of a deserved ego to give you an impression of just how successful he was as a bookseller I'm going to tell you for a start that he sold three thousand eight hundred books now this figure isn't his lifetime figure this isn't even the amount he sold when he was in America or that he sold during his time in Europe this is simply the number of manuscripts that he successfully sold to the British Library in fact he is so successful in this regard that he's one of only two people to have their own shelf designation within the library itself however this success didn't come without a few problems in 1905 when he was still relatively new to the antiquarian trade he managed to sell an illuminated manuscript to the British Library this was later determined to be a forgery in fact for a time it was thought to be a forgery done by an individual known as the Spanish forger there was a highly prolific forger of medieval manuscripts who was active during the late 19th and the early 20th century modern reappraisal though has largely discounted this living it was simply the work of an unknown forger in order to actually sell this many books however Voynich had to be something of a roofless salesman and there are great stories about him one story that is frequently repeated about him is that on his many buying trips to the continent he would frequently arrive at Abbey's or monasteries and be shown by the monks their collections of illuminated manuscript or medieval texts and he would react by saying what's a lot of old rubbish you have here let me give you new proper books for your library so in return for the expensive manuscripts he would give them relatively cheap trade books that he had a great profit to himself one other thing I would like to mention is his marriage to Ethel Voynich actually came about because of his term in Siberia as unlikely as that might sound so whilst he was there he met a family known as the kerala family and these people had actually managed to meet ethel on a trip and before Voynich escaped from siberia they asked him to greet her on their behalf so it's interesting how that small quirk eventually led to his marriage apart from that I really don't have anything else to add I would like to finish though by reading a quote about Voynich that I found I thought was quite amp'd as a summary of the man Voynich had exuberant fantasy and took his results with reality in which he solemnly believed he later became a very front squats Aquarian book dealer and made a considerable fortune which she was always happy to share with anyone and so in that man lived agreement incredible fantasy truly American pragmatism and good heart when it comes to the free other owners of the Voynich manuscript two of them I have very little to say about the first of these is an nil who acted as voyagers secretary during the later parts of his career and who would go on to help Ethel in managing his business after his death the problem I had in researching the video was there simply is very very little information about her by all accounts he seems to have just been a simple book clerk and any fame that she's largely comes purely from her association with Voynich and his wife the Verona is slightly different I mentioned before that a man by the name of hands Pete Krauss was able to purchase the manuscript from an after Ethel's death what I didn't mention about him because I will admit I didn't do that much research about him was that he was probably the most successful book dealer of all time now I will admit this information probably isn't that interesting to anyone outside of the antiquarian trade perhaps the most interesting fact about him though was that prior to him conducting business in America and elsewhere in Europe he had actually started his book business in Vienna in 1932 but after the German annexation of Austria in 1938 he was arrested for being Jewish and unfortunately was sent to Dachau concentration camp he would remain there for several more months before he was sent on the bhooshan wold again for a period of several months luckily for him however he would eventually be released under the proviso that he leave Austria within two months and after that I haven't got much more to say he became an incredibly successful businessman he actually wrote his own autobiography which makes him probably the only person other than Athanasius Kircher on the list of Voynich owners to do so but putting an nil and hence P Krauss aside the remaining modern owner of the Voynich manuscript fo Voynich is actually quite an interesting figure it was actually something of an accident that I chose her as the first subject covered in the video this was more due to the fact that she was the only modern owner who had existing video footage of her available which even then was quite expensive to come by it turns out British pathé like to license their footage at a hefty fee but now when I look back in hindsight after the video has been completed I'm actually a little disappointed that I didn't get to go a bit more into Ethel's life because she was a very very interesting character in her own right more than enough of a match for Voynich himself and in fact as I learn a little bit more about her life you can really see how she was formed as a person so what I didn't really know about her was that her father was actually the mathematician George Boole who invented boolean mathematics and is a significant figure in his own right however George would actually die while steffel was still a baby and this really flew off what could have been a very conventional trajectory for the rest of her life her father's death largely left the family destitute eventually his wife relied on a small government pension in order to raise his daughters before she eventually found an appointment as a librarian at Queens College in London what further complicated Ethel's life is that she grew up initially to be something of an unhealthy child which is interesting considering how old she eventually lived to be now her mother largely attributed this to the poor quality of the London air and in order to combat this she had a sent to Lancashire to live with a brother this was not a pleasant experience for Ethel however because by all accounts her brother was quite abusive towards her so the main account I could find from her which comes to us by lieu of Wikipedia is that he would actually force her to practice the piano for hours in quite a cruel and abusive fashion luckily for Ethel however she was able to return to London at age ten and escape from her brother's abusive behavior by all accounts as she reached her teenage years she became more of an isolated and more of a modeling figure so she tended to dress largely in black and she also started to be referred to by her middle name of Lily life would change for her however when at the age of eighteen she actually gained access to a legacy from her father and this actually allowed her to pursue something of an academic career so between the years of 1882 and 1885 she would study piano and music composition in a somewhat prestigious School in Berlin but what's significant throughout this period is that much like Voynich before her she began to be drawn more and more towards revolutionary politics after 1885 she kept up these revolutionary activities so she was in contact as I mentioned for Voynich himself with Stempniak so this is survey so this is Serge a krichinsky there was a major revolutionary figure of the time what I actually found surprising about her from this time was not only was she able to learn Russian as we could have surmised from her involvement with the free Russia paper Jack she moved to Russia for a period of time working as a governess in st. Petersburg 20 years of 1887 and 1889 by 1890 we can find her back in London once again where she joined the Society of the Friends of the Russian freedom this is the Society that I mentioned in the main Voynich manuscript episode that Wilfrid Voynich himself joined and indeed it's hell she would meet him in 1890 I can't find much information about their early relationship but I do know that by 1895 that she had effectively made herself his common-law wife so she was calling herself mrs. Voynich but as I mentioned in the Voynich manuscript video itself they didn't actually marry until 1902 going by what I could remember from my notes I had originally thought that this was due to the fact that boy had taken up British citizenship at the time but I was actually wrong about this it turns out because Voynich actually on became a British subject in 1904 by this time she'd really managed to launch Voynich himself as a book dealer in addition to her revolutionary activities she'd also written a book by the name of the gadfly this would be the first of several novels that she would eventually publish and I kind of took it on myself for this episode to sit down and actually read through it it's the work that she's most well-known for and I felt that this would perhaps give me some understanding of her as a person the problem going in I had though was I made some in reflection quite silly assumptions so I fought this is a woman publishing a novel in the late 19th century I mentally had this picture that it was going to be something like a Sense and Sensibility of Pride and Prejudice upper crust English aristocracy vibe to the novel the problem with this was I hadn't really read that much into her background at the time and you can see how she would end up writing something very different from my initial assumptions I was very much going by the few stereotypes I knew of the period I don't want to spoil that much about the gadfly itself but it largely follows a young man by the name of Arthur Burton so he's very clearly cast in this somewhat naive romantic role as the young man who scenes injustice around him in the world and has to be involved in some sort of cause to stop this so the novel follows how he gets involved with a revolutionary society it seems to be very much inspired by some of voyagers activities and by those of another person who we will come to shortly so at the beginning of the book after Harbor Z's ambitions of becoming a priest and this is largely influenced by his initial father figure of Padre montón Ellie who is his priest and confessor however he becomes involved with the initial stages of the Italian reserve the Italian Risorgimento so this book is actually set in 1840s Italy which at the time was under the dominance of both Austria and various other smaller states rather than being the unified country that we now know those of you out there who know a little about Italian history we'll think 1840s revolutionary movements in Italy this might not go so well and I don't want to spoil anything going forward but let's just say that Arthur is sort of betrayed to Apple to revolutionary forces in some ways it's quite similar to the opening of the book The Count of Monte Cristo where Dante's is betrayed quite casually by an acquaintance which results in his imprisonment the difference with the gadfly however is that Arthur actually brings this about himself through his own naivete I won't mention how because I think it's actually a book that some of you might enjoy reading it involves a lot of interesting history from around the time and whilst the characters I found was somewhat somewhat caricature ish I thought that it did explore interesting themes and the position of Arthur against the eventual villain is quite interesting and I really didn't expect it from my early experiences of reading the novel perhaps due to these somewhat romantic themes the gadfly was a fantastic success upon its initial publication this became a little bit of a curse actually for Ethel going forwards so over the next couple of decades she would write several more novels and none of them actually managed to do as well as her debut I will confess I haven't looked that deeply into these novels but from what I'm told they cover very similar themes and that might be why she was unable to replicate the first success that she'd had with the gadfly where the book however was a truly gigantic success was in Russia this isn't too surprising because at the time it was published in Russia the Bolsheviks had taken over and established the Soviet Union and the obvious revolutionary themes in the book would probably resonate quite well with the government at the time and they would be keen to promote it but that's not to say it wasn't also genuinely popular with people at the time in addition it would also go on to great success in the People's Republic of China after its establishment in the late 1940s in fact in total the gadfly is actually estimated to have saw two and a half million copies within the Soviet Union alone along with more than another two million copies in China unfortunately Ethel herself knew nothing of these sales and didn't see any royalties of them until well into her old age in fact what I found to be quite an interesting historical footnote was that she was actually aided in securing royalties for her work by a certain Adlai Stevenson so Stevenson was the Democratic candidate for president in the 1952 and the 1956 elections unfortunately he was unsuccessful in both he had the slight problem of having to run against World War two war hero Dwight the Eisenhower in both elections and he lost by large margins however he was more successful in the case of Ethel so in the end he was able to secure her some payment for the royalties although unfortunately she only received $15,000 which considering the four and a half million copies sold between the two countries to me seems a little unfair to be honest in addition to her relationship with Voynich f4 is also claimed by some sources to have had an affair sometime in the late 19th century the man with which she had this liaison was actually a russian-born operative who at the time was working for what's termed the emigres intelligence network of Special Branch it was a man by the name of Sidney Riley Sidney Riley many of his experiences in life shall we say have a very close parallel with the events within the gadfly and it's conjectured that the central character is actually based off Riley interestingly the affair itself also seems to have taken place in Florence in Italy which probably gave her even more inspiration for the novel so I didn't do that much research into him but the brief summary I was able to find is that he was an incredibly accomplished spy so he's alleged to have acted as a spy on even a double agent for at least four of the great powers of its time and in fact it's quite likely that he was the inspiration for probably the quintessential spy in all fiction which was James Bond Ian Fleming himself would later admit that he was one of the many people whose careers and characteristics he kind of blended together to form his iconic character unfortunately as I mentioned before Ethel was never really able to replicate the success that she had with the gadfly by the time that she and varnish eventually relocated to America she'd actually turned away from her writing and had largely returned to her earlier passion of music again unfortunately she didn't have anywhere near the same level of success when it came to her compositional efforts all of her music remains unpublished to this day and the few sources I found commenting on its quality generally described it is actually quite amateurish which might explain her lack of success in this area in terms of a modern legacy fo Voynich is one of those figures whose largely faded away from the popular consciousness often I get the sense that in the Western world at least she's largely noted more for her association with her husband and the manuscript that he owned rather than for her own merits as an author or as a musician probably the only substantial thing of notes after her death was there is actually a minor planet that's named after her so I guess she did better than some that's really it when it comes to the modern owners of the manuscript the only thing I really have left to comment on at this point is the actual production process of this video itself believe it or not when I started out making this video much as was the case with the Bronze Age clients video my initial thoughts were ooh it's something of a mystery therefore I won't have that much to say about it there's probably not a lot of information that's relevant and this will probably be a nice quick episode that I can put out in between episodes of the history of Britain from both the running time of the main video and from this video itself now you can tell that this was definitely not the case and I probably should have known a bit better given the wide range of theories around the manuscript itself it makes sense that it would have an equally long-running history the production of the episode itself despite the length wasn't a huge problem for me I just remember this period in late July where I was thinking wow I'm gonna get this out way ahead of my normal rate of videos maybe I'll come in at under 2 months and it'll be my longest video and at the moment why I consider to be my best work so I was really optimistic going forward with this episode and it wasn't until I had the copyright issues that I detailed in the separate patreon video that I'm starting to encounter problems with the editing process now I did talk about this a little bit on my patreon only audio updates I think probably whined about it is the best phrase who I ended up doing where I was talking about how no episodes this long they just tend to get me down and it's such a slog to finish them maybe I need to start doing some short content and on reflection I think that those sentiments were quite self-indulgent and the real problem wasn't that the video was too long or too much of an editing job for me I think the big problem was having to divert back to fixing the copyright problems with episodes 2 & 3 of history of Britain and then having to come back again to this video just the break in between and losing the momentum that I'd built up so far it just took me a little while to get over that when I was actually editing that video because it was designed with a slower pace and I wasn't making as many frantic edits partly because I also think have improved a little bit as an EDD I was getting through you know eight to ten minutes a day in terms of editing which is quite fantastic some of the earlier episodes of the history of Britain I'd get through maybe three to five minutes a day so you can see how at one point I felt like I'd have a rough draft done within a week I think I've learnt from this experience though that losing momentum can really be a problem and hopefully I won't have any major disruptions like I had with the copyright issues that I mentioned so unsurprisingly I really consider this to be my epitaph to my involvement with the Voynich manuscript in any fashion I think that having produced what is probably ended up being over three hours of content now on the subject really is enough for anyone to make and probably more than anyone will want to listen to so I don't ever see myself coming back to this topic there is one notable exception to that rule however and that is if someone is demonstrated to have solved the manuscript I think I'm gonna have to come back and talk about that at least a little bit so is hoping that doesn't happen okay thank you all for listening guys I really appreciate just how much support you've given the channel so far as I've said in other places I really didn't expect to get more than a few hundred views on some of these videos so I'm just continually blown away at the continuing interest that they've been getting before I go I'd like to mention to you guys that I am currently running a small patreon to help support some of the costs incurred in creating these videos so for the Voynich manuscript video itself I actually had to pay about three hundred and fifty pounds in order to license the footage from British Bay luckily the performance of this video has allowed me to recoup this and quite a bit more but it always helps me if I can start with a few more resources that I can throw in towards the video itself and not have to gamble that each video is going to be as successful as the prior ones that I've put out if this sounds like something you'd like to support please check out the link for the patreon in the description of the video below anything you throw my way is going back 100% into the videos and I've actually been providing a regular monthly update on how I've been spending the funds that people have been so kind to donate so far apart from that if you want to hear more of my stupid ramblings you can follow me on Twitter the link is also in the description down below okay thank you all for watching guys hopefully I'll be back soon with the next episode of a history of Britain you

Channel: The Histocrat

Views: 193,597

Rating: 4.8390431 out of 5

Keywords: History, Documentary, Voynich Manuscript, Voynich, Mystery, Weird, Secret, Puzzle, Illustrations, conspiracy, Histocrat, John Dee, Edward Kelley, Rudolf II, Emperor, Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Cipher, The Gadfly, Ethel Voynich, Wilfrid Voynich, codebreaking, Athanasius Kircher, Napoleon, Egypt, Troy, Bronze Age Collapse, Leonardo Da Vinci, Bohemia

Id: 7FFFzZ6Nd90

Length: 130min 24sec (7824 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 29 2019