The Alchemist's Code

AFTERWORD

A book can have too much reality. I used modern time-keeping because the Venetian day began half an hour after sunset, which meant that noon varied from about fifteen o’clock to about eighteen. Yes, they used a twenty-four hour day, but clocks never struck more than twelve. Clocks were rare. The pendulum clock was not invented until sixty years later.

Polyalphabetic ciphers were known in the sixteenth century, but governments continued to use their cumbersome nomenclators. The reason may be that spelling and alphabets were not yet standardized. (The present English alphabet was introduced by Noah Webster in 1826 but was not universally adopted for another fifty years.) Thus it is anachronistic to describe Alfeo or Vasco writing out their alphabet-they might have come to blows over what the correct Venetian alphabet was. Without such agreement, substitution ciphers would easily have degenerated into nonsense. Codebooks, in contrast, did not rely on spelling. Veneziano, by the way, was a language in its own right in which the laws of a sovereign state were recorded. Its modern equivalent is still spoken today, although commonly regarded as a dialect of Italian.

The traditional date for the election of the first doge of Venice was 697 A.D. In 1297, the aristocracy “closed” the Golden Book, restricting the vote and public office to men recorded there and their legitimate sons after them. Venice was not a democracy as we understand the word, but it kept its independence for eleven hundred years, the longest-surviving Republic in history. Hostile armies could not cross the lagoon, and navies could not sail it when the Venetians removed the markers showing navigable channels, as they did in time of war. By Alfeo’s time, La Serenissima ’s great days were over and it had entered into its long decay, but it was not until 1797, two centuries later, that a French army under Napoleon Bonaparte arrived on the shore with artillery that could reach across the lagoon to bombard the city. Rather than see Venice destroyed, the Great Council voted itself out of existence and Lodovico Manin, the only mainlander ever elected doge, removed the corno as a sign of his abdication. Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica, which explains the Maestro’s quatrain on Chapter 28. Bonaparte gave the city to Austria, and it did not become part of a united Italy for another seventy years.