A closer look
The Republic of Venice didn't conquer the Mediterranean with weapons; they did it with math nerds. By the 16th century, the Council of Ten employed a full-time cryptographic mastermind named Giovanni Soro. Soro was so terrifyingly good at cracking the codes of rival states that even the Vatican occasionally hired him to decipher captured enemy mail. The absolute genius of Soro was his diplomatic deceit: when the Pope asked him to crack Venice’s own codes, Soro would deliberately provide "incorrect" translations, maintaining the illusion that Venetian ciphers were mathematically unbreakable while simultaneously reading everyone else's mail.
