(14-02-2026, 07:16 AM)JustAnotherTheory Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Barbara of Cilli is becoming a very strong candidate for having at least owned the VMS. Here are some interesting facts:

1. The castle where she was exiled is called the Melnik Castle. The same castle was later inhabited by Jacobus of Tepenecz, whoo we know DID own the VMS because he wrote his signature on it.
   
2. Barbara was known as the "Black Queen" because she allegedly practised alchemy.
   
3. She was known (allegedly) for holding large gatherings (orgies) with a lot of young naked women and performing rituals wit them. Which reminds one of the VMS, again.
   
4. Her husband was the King Sigismund, who once employed Mariano Taccola, the man who wrote a 15th century book about water pipes, that resemble very closely some of the VMS illustrations.
   

There are many more parallels between Barbara and the VMS, and some interesting blog posts on this topic. I think we should investigate this line further.

(22-02-2026, 12:55 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.However, this would also date back the VM quite significantly. Barbara was coronated as queen of Hungary in 1405 and empress in 1433, the same year that Taccola finished de ingeneis and (allegedly) gifted a copy to Sigismund. After her husband's death, she was in exile at the Polish royal court from 1438 to 1441. Only then she moved to Melnik until her death in 1451. Her alchemical experiments are recorded from around 1440 and she allegedly scammed merchants with fake metal transformations. Whether that was still in poland or - more probably in Melnik remains to be researched. Still it's interesting there's the story she tried to trick fellow alchemist-noble You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..

Johann is interesting because his grandmother was a Visconti and he had a copy of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (see previous page) made for himself in - 1433.

(22-02-2026, 06:06 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, Barbara was known for practicing astrology and alchemy, and allegedly had orgies with naked women. So it fits her much better than her daughter.
I still struggle about a context where someone had acccess to a royal library, yet wrote clumsy marginalia in provincial German, grossly misinterpreted source imagery - and depicted the (former) queen naked. If we accept the Taccola-Sigismund connection, it must have been someone from or close to the court, yet of lesser education. Probably young.

(22-02-2026, 06:06 PM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Well, Barbara was known for practicing astrology and alchemy, and allegedly had orgies with naked women. So it fits her much better than her daughter.
I still struggle about a context where someone had acccess to a royal library, yet wrote clumsy marginalia in provincial German, grossly misinterpreted source imagery - and depicted the (former) queen naked. If we accept the Taccola-Sigismund connection, it must have been someone from or close to the court, yet of lesser education. Probably young.

1. Is the marginalia in German rather from a later age, from someone trying to decrypt some sentences?
   
2. How is it possible, that a person who grossly misinterpreted source imagery, is able to devise and handwrite a complex cypher script?
   

Quote:The account of the relations between Ulrich of Cilli and Frederick III Habsburg is associated with Queen Barbara; it is, in fact, the key to clarifying the origin of the negative historical legend of Barbara. It was there, at the court of Frederick III, that this legend was born. The foundation stone on which it later grew was Emperor Frederick’s hatred toward the Cilli family. In 1443, the famous humanist Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, a close friend of chancellor Kaspar Schlick, began working as a royal secretary at Frederick’s court. Piccolomini thus could not have had any information about the Cillis other than negative information, because he got it from Frederick III and from Schlick. He spent more than ten years at the Habsburg court, providing it with valuable services not only as a secretary, but also as a diplomat and writer. He mostly served the king in the field of ruling propaganda, and through his literary works he created the image of persons and events as his patron so desired. The king eventually awarded him the title of “poeta laureatus.” In the services of the Roman-German king, Aeneas Silvius later became the bishop of Trieste, and the bishop in Siena in 1449. His career reached its peak in 1457 when a three-day conclave in Rome elected him as pope (he took the name Pius II).
The Counts of Cilli, too, in Piccolomini’s work were put into a form that would certainly not have pleased them, and Queen Barbara could not escape Aeneas’s sharp pen either. The fact that the negative image of Barbara was born gradually in his work only after her death testifies to the fact that it is pure fiction. Piccolomini himself undoubtedly bares the primary blame in this regard. For him, Bohemian followers of the chalice were simply heretics, and the fact that Barbara lived and had friends among them was indigestible for him. And so, he made an unbelieving heretic out of Barbara as well.

The Cilli family was, at the same time, famed for strong worship of the Marian cult, by the founding of monasteries and churches, and by their wealthy endowments and donations on behalf of religious institutions. Barbara was no exception in her family: she endowed monasteries with both movable and immovable assets, and confirmed their privileges and supported them. A prayer book decorated with the beautiful illustrations of Martin Opifex, which is today kept in the National Library in Vienna, probably comes from her estate. There is no reason to doubt Barbara’s religiousness, which she ultimately demonstrated throughout her life, whether by regular participation in religious services or the mentioned donations.

Being a heretic and an eccentric medieval atheist is only a short step away from black magic. Therefore, the historical legend of the “black queen” began to circulate around the figure of Queen Barbara. And with this are linked the legends of secret alchemy labs, which she was said to have in at least three different castles, including at Samobor, not far from Zagreb.

Quote:Aside from several small mentions of Barbara’s letters and tiny references in the Old Czech Annals, we know nothing more about Barbara from this time. She lived like a queen in Mélnik, but how she spent her days and who made up her court all remain shrouded in mystery. The invented fantasy of Aeneas Silvio, who in his later literary works created the reputation of Barbara as a licentious woman, indulging herself at Mélnik in a tumultuous life with her young lovers, we can flatly condemn as a politically motivated figure of the writer’s imagination. Perhaps the only information worth considering is that Barbara devoted herself to alchemy at Mélnik, and had relatively good knowledge in this field.

The source of this information is the famous Bohemian alchemist John of Laz, known under the Latin name Johannes Lasnioro, which reportedly hides within it the verbal connection las-nien-oro that is “Laz no gold.” In his manuscript from 1440 called Via universalis, John allegedly described Barbara's capabilities as an alchemist, thanks to which she was supposedly able to make false gold and silver. This alchemy text has not been preserved to the present; we only know snippets of it published in the 18th century. In 1717, Nicolaus Petraeus published the work of another alchemist, Basil Valentine, and in the edition he also published fragments from the lost manuscript Via universalis, mainly the part devoted to Barbara. According to this, John of Laz had reports from several sources that the wife of the deceased King Sigismund was very well acquainted with the natural sciences (in arte physica). Curiosity compelled the queen to visit him, and he described their meeting thus:
I went to see her and subjected her to a test of this science, but she answered me craftily, as women are wont to do. I saw that she took mercury and arsenic and other substances which she well knew (but did not name) and made a powder from them. In this way she was able to make copper white (i.e. to silver it), and this metal looked like silver, but it could not tolerate a hammer. So, she fooled many people. I also saw how she sprinkled red-hot copper with some powder, which when it penetrated the copper and so changed it that it looked like silver and when she melted this ‘silver’, it again became copper. Another time I saw how she mixed various powders, among them ‘crocus martis’ (ferrous sulphate) and ‘crocus veneris’ (cupric oxide), and produced from them a kind of cement, which when she mixed with gold and silver to obtain at first glance pure gold and silver and thus she tricked many merchants. I saw many lies and deceptions by her, which is why I reprimanded her. She wanted to imprison me for this, but with the help of God, I calmly got
away from her.

The essence of Barbara’s alchemy performances thus consisted in the quality colouring of copper so that it looked like gold and silver. We could easily believe the narrative of John of Laz, but some things do not quite add up. First of all, if the manuscript was dated in 1440, the alchemist could not have visited Barbara at Mélnik. Only a meeting in Poland would have been possible, during the queen’s stay there in years 1438-1441; an earlier date is excluded, because in the text he describes her as the wife of the “deceased King Sigismund.” But not even this reference seems trustworthy. In 1440, only a few people referred to Sigismund as a king.
A later lover of alchemy, Zbynék Zajic of Hazmburk, had doubts about the trustworthiness of the information from Johann of Laz nearly two centuries later, when he expressed himself very unfavourably regarding Barbara’s abilities in alchemy.

Quote:She sought protection at the Polish court; long years of good relations with the Polish royal court now helped her find refuge. The flight of the queen from Hungary, where she had spent her entire life and where several months before she had been one of the wealthiest and most influential persons in the country, was not easy. Barbara left the Hungarian Kingdom in an entourage of 500 riders laden with all the wealth she was able to place on wagons. Her escort on the road to Poland was attacked by Albert's supporters, who killed 150 people in the resulting battle and captured another 200. The queen herself barely escaped with her life, but she lost all of her treasures in the fight.