It was built on top of a mountain with very steep cliffs and it looks like it was built to withstand a prolonged siege.Īnother noticeable feature of that VMS drawing is the coned tower with balcony and windows. In any case, what we see depicted in the VMS is clearly a fortress. But due to the V-opening in the middle of the M, the archer's head would be exposed to incoming projectiles of the attackers when he went to reload. I said decorative purposes because M-shaped merlons are somewhat useless for military defense: typically, an archer would shoot an arrow in the open space, then fall back behind the wall to reload. Specifically, it is the feature labeled M-Shaped Merlons (strictly, openings at the top of castle walls) that ties it to northern Italy as they used M-shaped merlons for decorative purposes on chateaus built there during the 14th and 15th centuries. The idea of origin in northern Italy is reported to have been derived from the following drawing in the VMS, to which I have added labels, a couple of which are merely guesses: Some sources even suggest that it was compiled by Italian monks ignoring the fact that this manuscript of drawings doesn't show us a single depiction of a monk or a monastery, nor even anything biblical for that matter. In the opening paragraph of its article on the Voynich manuscript, Wikipedia tells us "the text may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance." Other sources including documentary films about the VMS are more forceful in claiming authorship in Italy (particularly Northern Italy). It's as if the VMS is the only surviving relic of an episode of medieval history about which all historical records have been erased. It's not just the never-seen and undecipherable VMS script that could not be found elsewhere: VMS drawings of imaginary plants, of a strange cosmology, and of nude women trying to survive in a tropical swamp, are all things without parallel in medieval literature. Scholars have examined virtually every extant medieval manuscript in search of similarities with the VMS. Radiocarbon has dated the VMS parchment to the early 15th century (from 1404 to 1438), but if the VMS is a copy of earlier writings (as some scholars have claimed due to its flawless redaction), we remain in the dark as to where and when the original was created. That's why we are able to read Plato and Aristotle today. In medieval times it was common practice to copy old manuscripts on to fresh parchment every century or two (or whenever the older version began to fade) in order to preserve those writings. Its pages display drawings of Europeans and of European culture yet, beyond the broad conclusion that it comes to us from the Middle Ages, scholars have been unable to specify who wrote it. The Voynich manuscript (aka VMS) has been referred to as the world's most mysterious manuscript and this is certainly a designation that is well-deserved. ON THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT AND THE MYTH OF NORTHERN ITALY