The Voynich Manuscript: The Spy Hypothesis

The Voynich Manuscript: The Spy Hypothesis The Spy Hypothesis proposes that the Voynich manuscript (Yale, Beinecke MS 408) is not a handbook of astrology and women’s medicine, but an encrypted technical report disguised as one. According to the hypothesis, the manuscript contains: the layout of a fifteenth-century mining and ore-processing complex for argento di glama (gold-bearing silver), as it operated in the Serbian and Bosnian mining centres of Novo Brdo, Priština and Srebrenica; a detailed account of the extraction, smelting and refining of this metal, and of the separation of the resulting alloy into pure gold and silver, including the devices and reagents involved. The nine-rosette foldout is read as the plan of this production complex; the “bathing” scenes as process stages and flows; the botanical, astrological and pharmaceutical sections as a medically plausible cover for technical content. The medical format, the theme of “women’s secrets”, and the professional tradition of restricted medical writing would have given the compiler a legitimate reason to work for years on a large, unreadable book. The hypothesis places the compilation in 1427–1430, during the documented stay of the Jewish papal physician Elia di Sabato Beer (Elia Sabbato) in the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and at the court of the Bosnian lord Radoslav Pavlović. A second figure, Rusko Hristoforović, head of the Ragusan Slavic chancery, is proposed as the source of the Slavic linguistic layer suggested by the script’s digraphs and trigraphs. The cipher itself is tentatively linked to the cryptographic practice of the Milanese chancery under Filippo Maria Visconti, whose government controlled the circulation of precious metals and whom Elia later served as personal physician. The coincidence of three events in the summer of 1430 — Rusko’s death, Elia’s departure, and the Ragusan covert plans against Pavlović — is examined as a separate, explicitly speculative scenario. The paper does not decipher the text. It builds on János Zsiros’s “Mining Hypothesis” (Zenodo, 2026), takes from it only the engineering reading of the rosettes, and formulates its own model as a falsifiable historical reconstruction: each claim is separated from established fact, competing explanations are stated, and nine independent tests (codicological, engineering, economic, archival, palaeographic) are specified, with the exact archival series in Dubrovnik, Rome and Milan that could confirm or refute the model. Full text in English and Russian.