Could this monastery on the Greek island of Patmos be relevant to the VMS?

[DG97EEB]

However, the Venetian governance from 1207 onward would make pre-1450 swallowtails very plausible.

I also have searched about dates on the beginning of Venetian governance, without success.

I asked Claude to do a deep research... Take with the usual llm pinch of salt ..

The Patmos hypothesis fails on every empirical test that matters for the Voynich Manuscript (Beinecke MS 408). The monastery was a strictly Byzantine Greek institution; its scriptorium produced Greek liturgical, patristic and classical codices — not Latin-script herbals — and there is no documented Latin or vernacular manuscript production at Patmos in the c. 1404–1438 radiocarbon window.

The "swallowtail/Ghibelline merlons" argument collapses on architectural dating. The fortifications visible in modern photographs took their final form in the mid-17th century (after the 1646 earthquake) with Venetian or Rhodian craftsmen adding the characteristic sloping scarpas, (Kastra) and the entire west wing plus the entrance spire were rebuilt from scratch after the 1956 earthquake. There is no published archaeological or codicological evidence that the iconic crenellations as depicted today existed in the 14th–15th century, and Patmos's masonry crenellations are not the V-notched Ghibelline type associated with Lombardy.

Patmos was never under direct Venetian administration; it was nominally under the Duchy of the Archipelago (1207) and then increasingly under the Hospitaller Knights of Rhodes (after 1309) and Ottoman protection (1390 tax, 1523/1537). Latin contact was real but mediated almost entirely through papal/Hospitaller diplomatic documents (Vranoussi catalogues 68 Latin documents in the archive — privileges and tax-related, not literary or scientific texts). (EJournals) No prior Voynich scholar of standing has proposed a Patmos provenance, and the manuscript's Northern-Italian parchment, Italo-Germanic iconography, and Latin-script marginalia point firmly away from the Greek Aegean