Dating a Cipher

[Mark Knowles]

I have just received an email from:

Doctor Charalambos Dendrinos,
Senior Lecturer in Byzantine Literature and Greek Palaeography,
University of London

He was interested and pleased to see the letter.

He says:

"Τhe letter is written in Greek minuscule (with many spelling errors) and signed by Theodore Xanthopoulos, the Turkish aga’s emin bei and ardamarios, responsible for collecting taxes from the ports (skalla, skallomata) of Avlon (in Albania). The letter is addressed to the guild of the merchants in Florence and confirms the renewal of the operation of a company (syntrofia) with a certain Florentine merchant Metastianos, as requested by the Florentine authorities. The letter is dated Wednesday 1st May, without mention of the year."

He may produce a more complete translation.

Needless to say I am disappointed as there are not a huge number early 15th century ciphers surviving and this one looked quite distinctive and unusual, which made it look intriguing.

I will inform the archive that the inventory entry is quite wrong.

There is not a lot more to say, though it does demonstrate that archives can get things quite wrong in their inventories; it is not the first time I have noticed something mislabelled. Nevertheless with so many documents to classify it should hardly be surprising that archives make mistakes from time to time.

Thanks to those who correctly identified it as it has saved me some time from studying it. The purpose of my question was to determine whether it was an early 15th century cipher and it is clear it is not a cipher.