Secret Messages From Kings, Princes and Emperors Finally Decoded by AI

The material includes a 1645 appeal from King Charles I of England to Prince Rupert during the English Civil War, encrypted orders from the future King Henry IV of France, diplomatic reports on Catherine the Great and secret telegrams from Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary network in China.Researchers say the messages open a body of primary-source material that show what powerful people were privately saying, worrying about, and planning at pivotal moments.Ruth Selman, principal records specialist for early modern records at The National Archives in Britain, compares newly deciphered documents to pieces of a historical puzzle.“Historic letters and documents are a bit like jigsaw pieces,” Selman tells the Sun. “You usually need a large number of them to see the whole picture. A single decrypted letter can fill in a piece of blue in the sky or it just might reveal the face in the middle of a particular picture.”“Many of the examples are striking,” Dr. George Lasry, a computer scientist and historical cryptanalyst who has reviewed many of the recent solutions, tells The New York Sun. “It happens a lot that colorful stuff is hidden in cipher.”Data scientist and AI deployment engineer Dan Bourdeau says he has run nearly 300 historical ciphers through an autonomous system built around Anthropic’s latest AI models. The system takes an image of an encrypted document, transcribes it, searches for clues, tests possible solutions, and attempts to prove that the resulting text is correct.Most of the ciphers were processed with little human involvement after the initial setup, often in 30 to 90 minutes.“In roughly an hour or less, frontier LLMs can do work that was previously accessible only to top researchers,” Bourdeau tells the Sun, adding that the same work once could take “days, months or even years” to solve.Some of the messages provide unusually intimate glimpses into familiar historical moments.In April 1645, King Charles I of England wrote in cipher to his nephew Prince Rupert, one of the Royalists’ leading military commanders, as the Royalist position deteriorated during the English Civil War. The king said he did not have enough horses to transport his artillery and urged Rupert to move quickly to help him.“I desire you to [march] speedily for my assistance,” the king wrote, asking that the prince come and fetch the artillery train if Charles could not bring it to him. The king said he had summoned General George Goring to help, “who I hope (yet will not warrant) to be able to do both,” and assured Rupert that “no time shall be lost, nor pains spared” in getting the artillery moved. The letter had not previously been published in deciphered form. Another newly readable cipher offers a financial snapshot of the fall of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s former chief minister and one of the most powerful figures in Tudor England.After Wolsey lost Henry VIII’s favor in 1529, a French agent in London sent Francis I an encrypted estimate of the wealth seized from Wolsey after his downfall, including his cash, debts, revenues, jewels, precious metals, and household possessions. The message valued Wolsey’s goods at roughly 800,000 scudi, including 150,000 in cash, 20,000 in jewels and 250,000 in gold and silver plate.The newly deciphered account gives historians a detailed estimate of Wolsey’s fortune and the scale of the wealth that passed into Henry VIII’s hands, breaking it down item by item.Another decoded message was sent to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in October 1524, after the failed siege of Marseille. Hugo de Moncada, commander of the emperor’s galleys, reported that Charles de Bourbon, the former Constable of France who had defected to the emperor, wanted to be taken to Spain.“He asked me to carry him to Spain, giving me many reasons for it,” Moncada wrote. He added that his galleys had “no bread for two days” and first needed to sail to Genoa for supplies. The passage had been left blank when the letter was published in 1854 and became readable after researchers reconstructed the cipher key.Other ciphers bring historians closer to figures before they reached the moments for which they are best remembered.Three encrypted letters from Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV of France, show him in 1585 and 1586 pressing an envoy to raise a German mercenary army.“I am in extreme anxiety,” Henry wrote in one message after going without news of the negotiations, urging his envoy to make “the greatest levy that was ever made.” Another passage ordered him to raise as many troops as possible and get them moving quickly. A postscript even offers a contemporary assessment of English privateer Francis Drake during his attacks on Spanish possessions: “Drake has made a very great prize. He is the first seaman, and among the most valiant, in the world.” The newly readable material reaches into the twentieth century as well.Bourdeau’s system decoded a 1916 telegram linked to Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary leader who helped overthrow China’s Qing dynasty, then expanded the work to dozens of intercepted messages using related cipher systems.One telegram reported the assassination of Sun’s close ally Chen Qimei: “Yingshi [Chen Qimei] was [shot?] dead by assassins yesterday afternoon.” A response from Tokyo mourned him and immediately asked: “Who was behind it?” The messages capture Sun’s network reacting to Chen’s killing in real time and also contain discussions of arms purchases, military operations and political developments surrounding Sun’s campaign against Yuan Shikai.Some of the most colorful examples are smaller.A 1596 cipher from the court of Philip II of Spain reports that officials had met to discuss a comet and that people believed “the world will end or the king will die by September.”“He does seem to be very close to it,” the writer added. “I believe in God.” Philip did die in September, although not until two years later.Selman has seen the same dynamic in material held by The National Archives. One coded letter she studied was written by English diplomat William Perwich during secret negotiations between Charles II and Louis XIV. Historians wanted to know whether diplomats on the ground knew about the highly sensitive talks.“In the end, the decoded Perwich letter did not mention these negotiations, so it provided negative evidence which supported our existing understanding,” Selman says.The letter still revealed the kind of private detail that could disappear from conventional diplomatic records. Perwich discussed the supposed influence of Louis XIV’s mistresses on foreign policy, information Selman says “would have annoyed the King had he been able to read the letter.”Selman says that human scrutiny remains essential. “Given AI hallucinations, such a task would always require extensive human verification,” she says.

Secret Messages From Kings, Princes and Emperors Finally Decoded by AI

Secret Messages From Kings, Princes and Emperors Finally Decoded by AI

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