For the hundredth anniversary of the resurfacing of the Voynich manuscript, Claudio Foti presented evidence that Poggio Bracciolini may have been responsible, at least in part, for writing or ordering the writing of the Voynich manuscript. I thought his evidence was intriguing, so I decided to learn more about the characters involved. What I found was even more interesting. Of the numbered points below, some are just setting, while others I believe contribute credibility to this claim.
1. Poggio was called by John XXIII to the Council of Constance, southernmost Germany, 1414–1417, over which Sigismund presided in the sense of "defender of the Catholic Church." Its purpose was to determine the succession to the papacy, as well as what to do with heretics. Poggio spent time travelling Europe directly thereafter, collecting old books from libraries on the way. Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus were burned as a result of the Council, the latter at least against the preference of Sigismund.
2. Sigismund, who was already king of Hungary and Croatia, was coronated king of Bohemia in 1419. Martin V was pope from 1417 to 1431, and his election ended the Western Schism.
3. Guarino da Varona was an Italian translator contemporary to Poggio who set out to study at Constantinople and returned home with a case of books (another was lost at sea) from there. Guarino was a student of John Conversini of Ravenna, while Poggio was a student of John Malpaghini of Ravenna. All three Johns of Ravenna were students of Petrarch.
4. According to the Italian Wikipedia, John Malpaghini of Ravenna transcribed the Familiares of Leonardo Bruni into Rotunda, or Semigothic. Considering that one of his contributions to the time is in developing typography, Semigothic (Rotunda) certainly bears concrete resemblances to the Voynich script in how it treats curves and lines, and does flourishes, and the curve-line distinction is shown to be material in the Voynich manuscript by Brian Cham at You are not allowed to view links.
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5. Poggio found Manilius' Astronomica during his trip to Constance for the Council of 1414–1417. He does not disclose whether he found it in Germany, Switzerland, France or elsewhere. He has a scribe copy it, and becomes frustrated with the scribe's superlative ignorance.
6. At the time, there was a high popular premium on proving the great antiquity of The Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus.
7. The Florentines were clearly tasked with the creation in situ of a Hungarian royal court culture and knowledge base. Those situated by Sigismund's court almost certainly all knew each other and worked together on things.
8. This one (with the next) is the clincher for me. Foti already mentions it, but I think it carries great weight: Poggio writes that Piero Lamberteschi offered 500 florins for him to go to Hungary and partake in the writing of a book for three years. The way Poggio spills the details to Niccoli in the letter makes it clear that no one is supposed to know that this is happening. He's supposed to be presumed to be in England, and only lets it be known that it is the writing of a book in an oblique manner. He says he's thinking of accepting, but asking for 600 florins instead of 500.
9. Almost nothing is known about Piero Lamberteschi, other than that he and Poggio were friends and collaborators of Cosimo de' Medici, who "found" the Corpus Hermeticum. It is said that Lamberteschi is a cardinal; my guess is that Sigismund was given great liberty over appointments in his burgeoning region and was allowed to appoint himself a cardinal at his whim. Poggio likely saw him as a fellow widely learned Florentine. Online, we get little more than the entry of one book at one library: I Cherubini del Rigagnolo. So apparently, Lamberteschi liked cherubim enough to make them the title of a fantasy romance he wrote.
Given all this, I think that it is a very reasonable hypothesis that Marci's memory of Rudolf II paying 600 gold ducats for the manuscript is what naturally happened to a true statement after a long game of telephone: the King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor paid 600 florins for it. (Or indeed ducats; Poggio in his letter could have chosen the well-known Florentine word as equivalent, since the weights were almost exactly the same.) Rudolf II was interested in the occult, so when it was forgotten exactly which King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor did this, they naturally identified it as Rudolf II, due to his interest in the occult.
Four heads of Hungary later, Matthias Corvinus founds the largest library north of the Alps in Prague in 1460, where I'm guessing they store all the books going back to Sigismund's collection. Five heads of Hungary thereafter, it's Rudolf's library, and the book is sold to Jacobus de Tepenec after his death to settle his debts. Or Jacobus is just clearly the person in Rudolf's court to whom the book should clearly go, because he had been initiated into the Jesuit order and taught how to read the Voynich manuscript. In either case, it ends up in a Jesuit library, which is meet since it had been started by academic ancestors of the Jesuits, and the set of all people who knew how to read it from a certain point forward were Jesuits.