The difficulty of decryption is comparable to that of the Rosetta Stone! 88 symbols, 237 compound letters 500 years ago, the king of Spain's password letter was finally cracked!
At the beginning of the 16th century, King Fernando II of Aragon on the Iberian Peninsula and his general Gonzalo used extremely complex cryptographic communications to discuss state secrets such as military deployments; For 500 years, no one has been able to decipher these letters, and many historians have tried to solve this "great mystery in Spanish history" without success. It took nearly half a year for Spanish intelligence to finally decode 4 of the letters, and it is expected that more encrypted letters will be cracked in the future.
At the beginning of the 16th century, France attacked Naples in the southern part of the Italian peninsula, which was then ruled by the Kingdom of Aragón and the two sides were at war; In order to prevent military secrets from falling into the hands of the enemy, the medieval King of Aragon, Fernando II de Aragón, communicated with the general Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba in ciphers, which were composed of 88 symbols and 237 compound letters, and to make the letters more difficult to decipher, the different words in the letters were even linked together, making decryption extremely difficult.
The cipher system used in these letters was a precursor to the classical cigenère cipher , but because the substitution table used by Fernando II at the time was not preserved , no one could crack these letters for 500 years.
In 2015, the Army Museum of Toledo in central Spain exhibited the coded letters, some of which were even more than 20 pages long. In order to solve the mystery, the museum approached Spain's National Intelligence Center and asked them to help crack the letters. Gonzalo wrote a few lines of cracked sentences under one of the letters that year, providing experts with a clue to decryption.
The Spanish National Intelligence Center spent nearly half a year decoding four of them, two of which were written in 1502 and 1506 AD. The declassifications contain instructions and deployments for military operations in the Italian Wars of the early 16th century, and Fernando II also blamed Gonzalo for not consulting the king in advance when he took diplomatic action. In addition, it took about 15 days to transmit letters from the palace of Fernando II to southeastern Italy, where Gonzalo was located.
Some have compared the decoding of the letter to the "Rosetta Stone" decryption. Rosetta Stone is a stone stele inscribed with the edict of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy V, and the text on the stele is written in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Egyptian cursive (demotic, also known as secular script, which was the script used by Egyptian civilians at that time), and ancient Greek.
Rosetta Stone uses a unique trilingual contrast writing method, which has become the key to decoding, because people can read ancient Greek in modern times, so the 19th century experts and scholars used this key to compare, analyze the content of the other 2 languages on the stone tablet, crack the lost ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic meaning and grammatical structure, and become an important milestone in ancient Egyptian studies.
Fernando II laid the foundations for Spain's 16th-century power: after succeeding to the throne of the Kingdom of Aragon, he married and co-ruled with Queen Isabel I of Castilla, laying the foundation for Spanish unification, and leading the Spanish nation to launch the Reconquista movement with a momentum not seen in centuries, and finally succeeded in expelling the Muslim Moors regime of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. In addition, Fernando II and Isabella I sent Christopher Columbus on a voyage that eventually discovered the American continent.
Gonzalo was a well-known Spanish military commander with the title of El Gran Capitán ,who was known for his victories over the Two European powers, the French Kingdom and the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Second Ottoman–Venetian War, during the "Reconquista" movement, the Italian War, and the Second Ottoman–Venetian War.
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