A coin and a secret code tell of tales of two emperors

LONDON—History holds many secrets and mysteries which may be unlocked by certain objects like a coin long dismissed as a fake or a coded letter finally unlocked by researchers aided by modern technology.

In London, a forgotten Roman emperor has been rescued from “obscurity” after UK researchers determined a coin long dismissed as fake was in fact authentic.

The coin featuring the profile of an emperor named Sponsian was among a handful of similar coins found in Transylvania in present-day Romania in 1713.

They had been considered fakes since the mid-19th century due to their jumbled inscriptions and unusual design.

But researchers who studied one of the coins housed at The Hunterian collection at the University of Glasgow in Scotland have now concluded that the coin is genuine after comparison with others with a similar history.

“Scientific analysis of these ultra-rare coins rescues the emperor Sponsian from obscurity,” said lead author professor Paul Pearson, of University College London.

“Our evidence suggests he ruled Roman Dacia, an isolated gold mining outpost, at a time when the empire was beset by civil wars and the borderlands were overrun by plundering invaders.”

Gold mines

The Roman province of Dacia, a territory overlapping with modern-day Romania, was a region prized for its gold mines, according to the study published in the Plos One journal.

It is believed that it was cut off from the rest of the Roman empire in around 260 AD with Sponsian, possibly a local army officer, forced into assuming supreme command until order was restored.

The earth science researchers reexamining the coins used powerful microscopes in visible and ultraviolet light to help reach their new verdict.

They believe Sponsian could have authorized the creation of locally produced coins, some featuring an image of his face, to support the economy in his isolated frontier territory.

Curator of numismatics at The Hunterian, Jesper Ericsson, said he hoped the study would kick-start interest in this long-lost figure.

“Not only do we hope that this encourages further debate about Sponsian as a historical figure, but also the investigation of coins relating to him held in other museums across Europe,” he said.

The coin held in Glasgow is one of only four Sponsian coins known to still be in existence.

Another of the four is on public display at Romania’s Brukenthal National Museum.

Another team of researchers has cracked a five century-old code which reveals a rumored French plot to kill the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain Charles V. Charles was one of the most powerful men of the 16th century, presiding over a vast empire that took in much of western Europe and the Americas during a reign of more than 40 years.

Charles’ code

It took the team from the Loria research lab in eastern France six months to decipher the letter written in 1547 by the emperor to his ambassador in France.

The tumultuous period saw a succession of wars and tensions between Spain and France, ruled at that time by Francis I, the Renaissance ruler who brought Leonardo da Vinci from Italy.

The letter from Charles V to Jean de Saint-Mauris had languished forgotten for centuries in the collections of the Stanislas library in Nancy.

Cecile Pierrot, a cryptographer from Loria, first heard of its existence at a dinner in 2019, and after much searching was able to set eyes on it in 2021.

Bearing the signature of Charles V, it was at once mysterious and utterly incomprehensible, she told reporters on Wednesday.

In painstaking work backed by computers, Pierrot found “distinct families” of some 120 symbols used by Charles V.

‘Snapshot of strategy’

“Whole words are encrypted with a single symbol” and the emperor replaced vowels coming after consonants with marks, she said, an inspiration probably coming from Arabic.

In another obstacle, he also used symbols that mean nothing to mislead any adversary trying to decipher the message.

The breakthrough came in June, when Pierrot managed to make out a phrase in the letter, and the team then cracked the code with the help of historian Camille Desenclos.

“It was painstaking and long work but there was really a breakthrough that happened in one day, where all of a sudden we had the right hypothesis,” she said.

Another letter from Jean de Saint-Mauris, where the receiver had doodled a form of transcription code in the margin, also helped.

Desenclos said it was “rare as a historian to manage to read a letter that no one had managed to read for five centuries.”

It “confirms the somewhat degraded state” in 1547 of relations between Francis I and Charles V, who had signed a peace treaty three years earlier, she said.

More discoveries to come

But relations were still tense between the two, with various attempts to weaken each other, she said.

So much so that one nugget of information revealed was the rumor of an assassination plot against Charles V that was said to have been brewing in France, Desenclos said.

She said “not much had been known” about the plot but it underlined the monarch’s “fear.”

The researchers now hope to identify other letters between the emperor and his ambassador “to have a snapshot of Charles V’s strategy in Europe,” she said.

“It is likely that we will make many more discoveries in the coming years,” the historian said.