When he was 17 years old he escaped from his home and wandered around looking for good teachers, travelling to Trier, Cologne, the Netherlands, and Heidelberg.

Travelling from the university to his home town in 1482, he was surprised by a snowstorm and took refuge in the Benedictine abbey of Sponheim near Bad Kreuznach.

Trithemius wrote extensively as a historian, starting with a chronicle of Sponheim and culminating in a two-volume work on the history of Hirsau Abbey.

[5][failed verification][6] [7] His forgery regarding the connection between the Franks and the Trojans was part of a larger project to establish a link between the current dynasty of Austria with ancient heroes.

Trithemius seemed to have a falling out with Maximilian regarding their differences when the emperor wanted to organize a separate ecclesiastical council in 1511, in slight of Pope Julius II.

In a letter he wrote to the polymath Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, another famous occult writer and supposed magician – he appeared to criticize the vanity of Faust, who possessed inferior skills and went against the teachings of the Church.

Literary scholar Andrew McCarthy opines that Trithemius considered himself a true necromancer, who studied in order to gain knowledge of the workings of the universe without attracting publicity.

In the 1569 edition of his Tischreden, Martin Luther writes about a magician and necromancer, understood to be Trithemius, who summoned Alexander the Great and other ancient heroes, as well as the emperor's deceased wife Mary of Burgundy, to entertain Maximilian.

[24][25] However, mentions of the magical work within the third book by such figures as Agrippa and John Dee still lend credence to the idea of a mystic-magical foundation concerning the third volume.

[26][27] Additionally, while Trithemius's steganographic methods can be established to be free of the need for angelic–astrological mediation, still left intact is an underlying theological motive for their contrivance.

The preface to the Polygraphia equally establishes that the everyday practicability of cryptography was conceived by Trithemius as a "secular consequent of the ability of a soul specially empowered by God to reach, by magical means, from earth to Heaven".

Possible explanations are that either its real target audience was the selected few such as Maximilian, or that Trithemius wanted to attract public attention to a tedious field.