Z IS FOR ABRAHAM ZACUTO

     Abraham Zacuto was born c. 1452 and died sometime between 1510 and 1520, so it might be a bit of a stretch to call him a 16th-century personage, but I've gotten all the way up to Z in this Challenge, barely cheating along the way, so you're just going to have to cut me some slack with this.  Thank you.  He was a very interesting man, and well worth bending the rules for.  The story of his life reads like a well-plotted novel: every good turn of events is followed by a bad one, and vice versa.
     Zacuto was born in Salamanca, Spain, into a family of that city's Jewish nobility, and was given an outstanding religious and secular education.  As an adult he became a mathematician and astronomer, served as the rabbi of his community, and taught astronomy at several prestigious Spanish universities, becoming quite well-known in academic circles.  Unlike Copernicus, whom we discussed for the letter C, Zacuto apparently specialized in applied, rather than theoretical, astronomy.  From what little we know, it sounds like the first 40 years of his life were satisfying ones.  In 1478 he published, in Hebrew, a "Great Book" of 65 very detailed astronomical tables that corrected a navigational problem no one had been able to overcome before, and was thus of great practical use to seafarers.  The book, soon translated into Spanish and Latin versions, became a huge success, and no 16th-century European maritime explorers embarked without a copy of it. 

     Then all the Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism were expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in August 1492, beginning one day before Christopher Columbus embarked on his voyage to the New World with Zacuto's charts on board for guidance (a copy of the charts with Columbus's own handwritten notations is preserved in Seville).  Rather than undergo forced conversion (as some historians believe Columbus did, having possibly been born a Jew), Zacuto fled to Portugal, along with tens of thousands of other Jewish refugees.  His academic reputation had preceded him and allowed him to land on his feet.  He was soon appointed as the Royal Astronomer and Historian to Portugal's King John II. 
     For most Jewish immigrants to Portugal, their respite (bought from King John with cash) was only temporary; less than a year after granting them asylum, King John ordered that all remaining Jews in the country who refused forced conversions be enslaved.  Of course, exceptions were made for valuable citizens like Zacuto, who remained at court in Lisbon.  King John died in 1495 and was succeeded by Manuel I, who for a time maintained Zacuto in his royal position and consulted with him as to whether Vasco da Gama's proposed voyage to find a sea route to India would be feasible.  Zacuto supported the plan, and he personally trained da Gama and his crew before they departed on their voyage in 1496, bearing with them Zacuto's navigation charts as well as the new, more portable kind of astrolabe he had invented to be used at sea to determine latitude.
     But in 1497, bowing to political pressures (he wanted to marry the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, whose views on harboring Jews we all know), King Manuel ordered that the Jews in Portugal must either convert to Christianity or be deported without their children.  Zacuto and his son Samuel were among the few who managed to escape the country in safety. They fled first to Tunis, where in 1504 Zacuto wrote a history of the Jewish people from the time of the Creation to the year 1500, which was repeatedly reprinted for centuries afterward.  From Tunis, under the increasing threat of Spanish invasion, he moved on to elsewhere in the Middle East - possibly Turkey, possibly Damascus.  Exactly where he spent the rest of his life is unknown, but it is said that he was buried in Jerusalem. 
     The moon crater Zagut is named after Abraham Zacuto.

    In THE DISCOVERERS, Daniel Boorstin (my go-to awesome quotemeister) was writing about Jewish cartographers, but I think what he wrote was equally applicable to astronomers like Zacuto, who mapped the skies rather than the Earth: "It was no accident that Jews played a leading role in the liberation of Europeans from the slavery of Christian geography.  Driven from place to place, they helped make cartography, still the special preserve of princes and high bureaucrats, into an international science, offering facts equally valid in lands of all faiths.  Marginal both to Christians and to Muslims, the Jews became teachers and emissaries bringing Arab learning into the Christian world."

                                                      Vermeer: The Astronomer

                     *              *             *              *              *              *               *             *

     And thus ends my 2015 A to Z Challenge.  It's been an incredible journey for me.  I've learned so much, I've made some new cyberfriends, and I feel like I've been part of something meaningful.  I'd like to thank the Academy - oops, wrong speech.  But I truly would like to thank every blogger who stopped by here during April, even if it was only once, regardless of whether they had time to leave a comment.  I started doing this Challenge last year thanks to Yvonne Ventresca, who told me about it.  And this year I had the extra satisfaction of being a Minion, which made me feel like I was doing a little bit to give back, even though I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to visit other blogs.  There was a comment left on my yesterday's post about how one person can change history, and indeed, that is true.  Well, one person, Arlee Bird, thought up this Challenge a few years ago, and look at the amazing thing he's wrought!  Bloggers from all around the world come together for one month to share a common goal.  The alphabet is, of course, secondary, but it does add a layer of structure and an added element of challenge.  Well done, all of us!  And that includes everyone who successfully finished as well as everyone who tried but didn't quite make it this time.  There's always next year!  I hope to see everyone back again in 2016!  And until then, here's an Irish blessing that may well date back before my beloved 16th century:

May the road rise to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back;
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And, until we meet again, may God hold you in the palm of his[/her] hand.

    

Y IS FOR YI SUN-SHIN

                                                                    (1545 - 1598)

     Yi Sun-Shin (or Sun-Sin) was a Korean admiral who is remembered as a national hero for turning back a relentless eight-year invasion by Japan.
     Yi was born into a noble family in Seoul but was raised in Asan, near his mother's family.  He passed the government examinations to become a military officer in 1576 (after failing them on his first try because he fell off his horse and broke his leg).  Yi first made his mark as a strategist on land, defending border territories from Jurchen marauders from Manchuria, China.  In 1583, he lured the Jurchen into battle and captured their chief.  Soon after that, he became a naval officer.  Although at the time he had no naval experience at all, he proved adept and soon rose through the ranks. 
     The Korean government and military were rife with corruption and backstabbing.  Other officers were jealous of Yi's rapid rise, and spread false accusations about him which led to his discharge from officer rank.  He was imprisoned and tortured, and when he was released he was demoted to a common soldier.  Soon, though,  he was assigned to run a military training center in northern Korea, which he did very well.
     Within the span of a few months in 1590, Yi received four different promotions, culminating in his appointment as commander of the naval forces in Left Cholla Province. While in that post, he resurrected and developed the famous kobukson, "Turtle Ship," considered the first ironclad battleship in history.  Cannons and guns could be fired from every side of these ships, and the dragon's heads on the bows could not only fire cannon, but also discharge smoke screens to conceal the ship's position from enemies.  The decks were covered with armored plates which were studded with spikes and knives to prevent boarding by hostile forces (the Japanese ships were taller than the Korean ones, and leaping onto the decks of the vessels they wanted to capture was a Japanese m.o.).

      In 1592 Japan invaded Korea as a first step in its plan to conquer China.  Because Yi was one of the very few who had foreseen that the invasion was inevitable, he and his troops were well-supplied and well-prepared, despite the lack of cooperation he received from the government.  Japan increased the size of its fleet to 1,700 ships, hoping to defeat the Korean navy through sheer numbers.  But the Korean ships were structurally stronger than the Japanese ones, and Yi proved to be an exceptionally able strategist and leader.  His forces defeated the Japanese invaders again and again, although they were greatly outnumbered.  They fought four major operations against the Japanese during 1592,  consisting of at least 15 battles, and Yi's forces decisively won every battle.  While the Japanese invading land forces were very successful against Korea, their navies kept suffering humiliating defeats.  In 1593, Yi was appointed the joint naval commander of the three southern provinces.
      In 1597, a Japanese double agent convinced the useless Korean king that the Japanese were about to launch a massive attack and insisted that Yi and his forces be sent to set an ambush.  Knowing how treacherous the area was for ships, and probably smelling a rat, Yi refused the king's orders.  As a result, Yi was once again arrested, imprisoned and tortured.  Upon his release, he was demoted to the rank of a common soldier.  But his replacement as commander was disastrously inept, and under his watch the Japanese virtually destroyed the entire Korean fleet.  Yi was quickly reinstated in his old post, but the Japanese wasted no time in attacking his greatly reduced navy, trying to finish it off for good this time.   Miraculously, helped in part by a shift in the tides, Yi's 13 remaining ships defeated the Japanese force of 333 ships at the Battle of Myeongnyang, while suffering almost no casualties and losing none of their own tiny fleet.  This resounding naval victory is credited with turning the course of the war against Japan and eventually leading to that country's retreat after eight years of continuous war.  Unfortunately, Yi was not alive to see the final victory.
     In December 1598, during the Battle of Noryang, Yi's forces once again defeated the Japanese and were pursuing them as they fled, but Yi himself was struck by a stray bullet.  Aware of his imminent death, he famously said to his son and nephew, "The war is at its height. Wear my armor and beat my war drums.  Do not announce my death."  They obeyed his commands and kept the troops fighting until victory was achieved.  Thus, even after his death, Yi and his forces remained undefeated in every battle they fought with the Japanese.
     Yi's noble deeds in protecting his country have been commemorated with statues scattered throughout Korea.

X IS FOR HUANG XIUMEI

    

     Huang Xiumei, also known as Huang E (1498-1569), one of the most noted female poets of the Ming dynasty era in China, might not have even been remembered in the 21st century if her life had been happier.  But because all but about six years of her long married life were spent separated from her husband, who was in permanent exile far away, we know of her through the poems she wrote to accompany her letters to him.
     Xiumei was a highly intelligent daughter of a high-ranking government official, and was given the equivalent of a man's education in her family home in central Sichuan.  In 1519, she married Yang Shen, the son of another prosperous Sichuan family and a rising intellectual; the two shared a strong love of poetry.  All was apparently good for them until 1524, when Yang Shen took part in a rebellion against the current emperor.  He and the other rebels were beaten as punishment, and he was then exiled to Yunnan in the far southeast of the country (just north of present-day Laos) and was never pardoned; for the 35 remaining years of his life, other than for brief periods, the couple remained far apart, exchanging letters and poems across the distance.  Xiumei lived with her husband's family.  To quote from WOMEN WRITERS OF TRADITIONAL CHINA, edited by Kang-I Sun Chang: "Huang Xiumei became the central figure in the Yang family household, responsible for running the estate, rearing the children and grandchildren (none of them her own), and providing for their education and general well-being.  While Yang, lionized as a literary giant in Yunnan, lived a relatively free if frustrated life embellished by a number of romantic encounters, she lived the proper and constrained life of an upper-class lady, seeing to her husband's financial needs and those of the entire Yang clan with hard work and devotion."  Wait - who is the spouse who was banished into exile?
     And this is the part I find so interesting.  Evidently at one point, Xiumei lived with her husband for three years in Yunnan.  Judging from their poems, the two of them loved each other.  So why didn't she just stay with him there?  Maybe it was because the emperor imposed a three-year time limit, although to me that seems unlikely; no one seemed to interfere with Yang's celebrity lifestyle in any other way.  Maybe either Yang himself, or his family back home, decided that Xiumei was indispensable to them and refused to let her go.  I imagine her as not only feeling beholden to the Yangs for her upkeep, but also as being a classic alpha dog, taking over the running of the household because she couldn't help herself, even if it hurt her own interests.  But I also think there was a third possibility.  Maybe she was the lady who protested too much.  Despite all her poems of longing and loneliness, maybe she stayed with the Yangs because that was exactly where she wanted to be - running the show, making the decisions, not subordinate to a husband.  She outlived Yang Shen by ten years.
     But I digress.  Xiumei isn't known for her lifestyle, like some 16th-century Kardashian; she's known for her poetry, a bit of which I will share.  Controversy surrounds her poems; some scholars attribute most or all of "her" poems to Yang Shen, claiming that he for some reason assumed her persona and gave her credit for poems he himself wrote - although it's not clear why he would have done that.  In any event, here are a few of the most famous poems attributed to Xiumei, in their English translations (I confess that my Chinese is a little rusty, in the sense that I've never spoken or understood a word of it):

1.  I remember when we were together: shared pillow, same coverlet,
     Together we drove out all sadness, together expelled all ills.
     Jade-green sleeves, richly carved saddles,
     Through cold and ice, to far streams and distant peaks.
     But that good time of joy was not to endure;
     This blighted marriage has now worn my spirit thin.
     I sigh long sighs, sunk deep in gloomy thought -
     No need to pursue those old promises.
     The mood for billing and cooing has long since been swept away,
     So don't bring up again that old line about "one quarter-hour being worth
     A thousand pieces of gold."

2.  Incessant rain brings on light chill.
     I see luxuriant bloom on all the trees now battered;
     My eyes are filled with muddy roads ascending to the immortals;
     How many layers of peaks in the clouds?
     How many bends in the rivers?
     To the edge of the heavens as far as I can see,
     And my heart breaks in vain.
     It is so hard to send a letter,
     The heartless migrating geese will not fly all the way to Yunnan.

No, Xiumei, the geese will not fly all the way to Yunnan... and neither did you.

 

 

 



W IS FOR SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM

     Francis Walsingham (c. 1530 - 1590) was born in London to a well-off, well-connected family and educated at King's College, Cambridge and abroad, and was admitted to the bar at Gray's Inn in 1553.  Walsingham leaned Protestant; he left England for Switzerland and Italy when the virulently Catholic Mary Tudor took the throne.  He continued his legal studies at Basel and Padua, and did not return to England until 1558, after Mary had died and her Protestant sister Elizabeth I succeeded her.  In 1559 he was elected to Elizabeth's first parliament.
     By 1569, Walsingham was working with William Cecil to search out and counteract plots against Queen Elizabeth, and he helped to foil the Ridolfi Plot designed to depose Elizabeth and replace her with her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
   In 1570 Walsingham was appointed ambassador to France, where in 1572 he witnessed the horrendous weeks-long St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of French Huegenots (Protestants) were slaughtered.  This experience marked Walsingham deeply, and in the future, whenever the opportunity arose, he showed no mercy to Catholics.  He supported the torture of Catholic priests and the extraction of confessions from suspected conspirators by use of torture.  He also supported giving land grants in Ireland to English settlers, who he believed would work the land more productively than the Irish had been doing.  This policy fostered Irish resentment, needless to say, and the eventual result was centuries of horrific English-Irish warfare, a.k.a. "The Troubles."
     Walsingham returned to England in 1573, having earned the Queen's trust by the loyalty and talent he had shown during his years in France.  In December of that year, Walsingham was appointed to the Royal Privy Council, and became the Queen's Principal Secretary (an office later known as Secretary of State).  In that role, he became an indispensable advisor to the Queen, second only to William Cecil, the Lord Treasurer.  Walsingham was in charge of all of Elizabeth's correspondence and decided the agendas of council meetings.  He was a big supporter of British trade and exploration, including Francis Drake's circumnavigation of the globe (1578-81).  Perhaps most importantly, he became known as Elizabeth's "spymaster;" he employed a master cryptographer, as well as a fleet of "intelligencers" throughout Europe and North Africa that enabled him to foil many and varied plots against the Queen's life.  Walsingham didn't invent spying, but he's the one who raised it to an art form.
     Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Walsingham's lifelong faithfulness to Queen Elizabeth was the fact that the two of them didn't like each other very much, and they both knew it.  His surviving letters (not to her, of course) contain observations such as "I would to God her Majesty would be content to refer these things to them that can best judge of them [i.e., him], as other princes do," and that there was not a councilor in her service "who would not wish himself rather in the furthest part of Ethiopia than to enjoy the fairest palace in England."  But neither of them ever let their personal animosities get in the way of their professional relationship, and they worked together to their mutual benefit for over 20 years.  
     In 1582-83, Walsingham uncovered another plot to kill Elizabeth and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots.  The British ringleader was executed and the Spanish ambassador, who had been deeply involved, was expelled from England.  By 1585 Mary, Queen of Scots had been imprisoned, and was tricked into believing that she ha a single means of secret communication with the outside world (letters hidden inside a beer keg).  Those letters enabled Walsingham to prove that she had been engaged in yet another plot against the Queen's life.  Mary was tried, convicted, and in 1587, despite Elizabeth's reluctance, executed.

                          MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (WITH HEAD STILL ATTACHED)

     From 1586 on, Walsingham began to receive reports from his spies about Spanish plans to invade England.  By keeping himself well-informed on all the preparations, he was able to order counter-preparations, and thus he contributed greatly to the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
     Walsingham's health had been in decline since 1571, and became very bad in the late 1580's.  But he continued to work; he attended his last Council meeting two weeks before his death from cancer in 1590.  His political legacy is decidedly mixed, but as a spymaster, he was second to none.

V IS FOR ANDREAS VESALIUS

                                                                  (1514 - 1564)
     In my posts about Louise Bourgeois Boursier and Ambroise Pare, I mocked the physicians of the sixteenth century for being close-minded, snobbish, petty, lacking in imagination, and willing to blindly adhere to ancient traditions even when their own experiences showed them those traditions were wrong.  In today's post I'm going to present the flip side: a sixteenth-century physician who was brilliant, innovative, and not afraid to buck the establishment.
     Andreas Vesalius, born in Brussels, was the son of Emperor Charles V's apothecary.  Andreas received the best medical education available in Europe and received his degree of Doctor of Medicine with highest honors in 1537 from the renowned University of Padua.  Two days after he passed the examination, the University installed him as a professor of surgery and anatomy.
     It soon became apparent to everyone that in teaching anatomy, Vesalius was not going to conduct business as usual.  Once again, I'm going to quote from the brilliant Daniel J. Boorstin, writing in THE DISCOVERERS: "unlike the professors before him, Vesalius did not stay seated high in his professorial cathedra while a barber-surgeon with bloody hands pulled organs out of the cadaver.  Vesalius himself handled the body and dissected the organs."  (Sorry if you're squeamish.  At least I'm not telling you where they got the cadavers from.  Believe me, you don't want to know.)  In addition, although charts and drawings were very uncommon teaching tools at the time, "To help his students, he prepared... four large anatomical charts, detailed enough to show the student the body structure when there was no cadaver at hand.  Each part was labeled with its technical name.  An accompanying glossary and index listed the names of the parts in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew."
     In 1538, Vesalius published his Six Anatomical Tables, in part because one of his teaching charts was plagiarized and it seemed that the others might soon be.  So he collected them all and published them in book form, along with his own drawings of the veins, arteries, muscles and nervous system.

     Even with all his new techniques, though, Vesalius was basically using the same source materials for his teaching that everyone else was: the writings of Galen, an eminent Greek physician who had died in the year 200 A.D.  As was the case with other scientific fields (see my "C" post on Copernicus), it was still considered sacrilege to question any of the pronouncements of the classical scholars.
     But as he continued teaching and dissecting, Vesalius couldn't help but notice that many of the features Galen described did not actually exist in the human body, although they may have existed in other animals.  Vesalius did not leap to any conclusions, but the method he proposed for checking Galen's findings was revolutionary in itself.  As he wrote in 1539, "I gave careful consideration to the possibility that anatomical dissection might be used to check speculation."  In other words: Vesalius proposed to apply the scientific method of checking Galen's writings against his own observations. And when he did that, he found verifiable proof that in many instances, Galen had been wrong.
     As a result of his studies, Vesalius produced his masterwork: De Humanis Corporis Fabrica (Structure of the Human Body) published in 1543.  Below is the illustrated title page:
    

     The scene shows Vesalius himself performing a "public anatomy," as the University of Padua required.  The two men crouched unhappily under the dissecting table are barber-surgeons, who used to do this kind of work themselves, but are now reduced to sharpening the professor's razors.
     The book was gorgeously illustrated throughout by some of the best Italian artists available.  It was an instant success.  Fifty years later, most European medical schools were teaching Vesalian anatomy.  Some of his findings were later disproven, but the findings themselves were far less important than his innovation in method.  He taught physicians to think for themselves.
     Ironically, soon after the Fabrica was published, Vesalius left the university setting to become a physician to the court of Emperor Charles V.   He stayed there for another twenty years, being mocked by the other physicians as a mere "barber" and catering to the whims of spoiled, capricious patients.  Vesalius may well have regretted his impetuous decision, but because he had been replaced at Padua by his friend and pupil Fallopius (yes, the one the tubes were named after), it isn't clear whether he could have returned to the academic life even if he had wanted to.  Aside from updating the Fabrica in 1555, Vesalius never published another book. 
     In 1564 Vesalius left for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  But as soon as he arrived in Jerusalem, he received a message from the Venetian Senate asking him to return and assume the professorship at Padua that had just become vacant due to the death of Fallopius.  Vesalius began the voyage back, but he was killed in a shipwreck off the Greek coast.  

U IS FOR POPE URBAN VII

    
     Born Giovanni Batista Castagna, Pope Urban VII (1521 - 1590) was a man ahead of his time; he enacted the world's first public smoking ban, threatening to excommunicate anyone who "took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it through a pipe or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose."  Unfortunately, the other major thing for which Urban VII is known is having had the shortest papacy in history: 12 days (September 15th to 27th, 1590),  ending with his death from malaria.  Kind of makes one wonder what the living conditions were like for popes in those days, doesn't it?
     Remember back, back, through the mists of time, to when I first announced my topic for the A to Z Challenge?  Of course you do.  And as you recall, one of my self-imposed rules was going to be "no religious leaders," although I said there would be one exception.  Well, I thought being Pope for less than two weeks deserved an exception, not to mention that there didn't seem to be many notable 16th-century people whose surnames began with the letter U.  If you know of another one, please give me a shout-out!  But Urban VII (the only Pope Urban during that century - yes, of course I checked the list) is my choice.
     Despite his exceedingly short reign at the peak of his career path, Urban VII led quite an eventful (and very privileged) life up to then.  Born into the nobility in Rome, he finished his studies at the University of Bologna with doctorates in both civil law and canon law.  After what seems to have been a short stint as a constitutional lawyer, he entered the Roman curia (the administrative arm of the Holy See) and became sort of an ecclesiastic civil servant, embarking on a series of assignments, both civil and clerical. 
    
     1553: Archbishop of Rossano
     1555-59: governor of Fano
     1559-1560: governor of Perugia and Umbria
     1562-63: participated in Council of Trent
     1565-72: apostolic nuncio (ambassador) to Spain
     1573-77: apostolic nuncio to Venice
     1576-77: governor of Bologna (I'm not sure how he could be in Venice and Bologna at the same time, but then, he wouldn't have been the last absentee governor, would he?)
     1578-80: papal legate to Flanders and Cologne
     1583: became a Cardinal; served in San Marcello
     1586: inquisitor general (yes, that Inquisition)
    
     Urban was not a fan of the tradition of nepotism; he would not employ any of his relatives in the court offices, and forbade them from assuming new titles based on their connection to him.  Urban ordered the poor of Rome to be numbered so that he could distribute alms to them.  In his will, he left all of his considerable fortune to the Fraternity of the Annunciation to be used as dowries for impoverished girls.  Sounds like he would have been a good Pope.  That is all.
    

T IS FOR JOHANNES TRITHEMIUS

                                                                  (1462 - 1516)

     Does this man look like a merry prankster to you?  He doesn't to me, but in fact, that's exactly what he was.  And his most elaborate practical joke kept everyone fooled for roughly 500 years.
     Let's go back to the beginning.  Born in Germany into what sound like humble circumstances, Trithemius craved learning but had a stepfather who didn't believe in education, so he taught himself Latin, Greek and Hebrew in secret.  He left home at 17 and landed at the University of Heidelberg.  At the age of 20, he took refuge from a sudden snowstorm in the Benedictine Abbey of Sponheim, and decided to stay.  It must not have been an A-list place, because the following year he was elected abbot.  He stayed on until 1506, building the abbey's library from 50 volumes to several thousand, and writing his own two-volume work on the history of Hirsau Abbey, one of the most important Benedictine abbeys in Germany.  But that treatise was soon found to contain several fictional passages.  That discovery, along with Trithemius's reputation as a magician, led to a parting of the ways between him and Sponheim Abbey.  Luckily, he was offered the post of abbot at St. James' Abbey in Wurtzburg, where he remained for the rest of his life.  At some point he became a respected advisor to the Emperor Maximilian.
     Trithemius was a prolific writer who produced many books, mainly historical works, into which he occasionally inserted references to fictional people, apparently just to entertain himself.  (What a cut-up, huh?)  But his most famous - some might say infamous - written work was his three-volume Steganographia  (Greek for "hidden writing"), written in around 1500.  Privately circulated, the books caused such a stir that Trithemius resolved never to publish them.  In fact, their first publication was in 1606, fifty years after his death, and even then they were promptly placed on the Catholic Church's list of banned books.

     What was the problem?  Well, Books 1 and 2 described systems for encoding messages, and are thought to have been the first published works on cryptography.  That was okay.  But the 22-page Book 3 was, at least on its face, about communication between people through the mediation of spirits, and it was couched in the language of the occult.  Trithemius described a hierarchy of angels and spirits that governed specific earthly regions at specific days and times - a handy reference tool, so that readers could know exactly which spirit to contact.  Then all one has to do is write a cover message to the correct angel and conjure the spirit who'll act as courier.  The spirit then delivers the cover message to the recipient, who has to conjure the spirit again himself in order to receive the secret reply message from the angel.  All pretty simple, really, when you know how.  To the Church, all of this was distinctly NOT okay.
     Book 3 also contained many tables of numbers

without any real explanation of how to use or interpret them.  But what made things even worse is that Trithemius still had the reputation of being a magician - a reputation he had acquired by, in fact, being one (although the reputation probably mattered more than the actual facts).  Trithemius had no problem reconciling magic and Christianity; he's quoted as having said, "The word magic is the Persian term for what in Latin is called wisdom, on which account magicians are called wise men, just as were those three wise men who, according to the Gospel, journeyed from the East to adore, in his crib, the infant who was the Son of God in the flesh."  The institution of the Church was not quite as broad-minded as its Benedictine son was, however.  To the Church, magic meant black magic, which required consorting with the devil.
     Steganographia  remained banned for a long time, but became something of a cult classic.  In 1676, a counselor to the Archbishop of Mainz claimed that Book 3 was written in code and that he had cracked it; unfortunately, he wrote up his findings in a code of his own invention, which apparently nobody cared enough to try to decipher.  (No, I'm not pulling a Trithemius here!  This is actually true!  You can look it up!)  And so things stood until 1993, when Thomas Ernst, a German professor teaching in the U.S., published a 200-page paper in a Dutch cryptology journal describing how he had figured out that Trithemius's  number charts were actually all encrypted messages, written in a fairly primitive form of substitution cypher.  Jim Reeds, a mathematician in New Jersey, didn't know about Ernst's findings, and in 1998 he independently cracked the code again.  So it's official: in Books 1 and 2, Trithemius taught cryptography, and in Book 3, instead of talking about it, he performed it.  And it only took 500 years for someone to figure that out.
     You got us, Johannes Trithemius.  Good one!  Somewhere, I'm sure, you're holding onto your chubby sides and laughing like a lunatic.