An early French digit cipher: deciphering a letter from the King of France to the Duke of Nevers (1592)

Abstract

We deciphered a single letter written in 1592 by Henry IV, King of France, to Louis de Gonzague, Duke of Nevers, held in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF). The ciphertext mostly consists of contiguous digits, and demonstrates an early use of digit ciphers in 16th-century France. In this letter, Henri IV exposes some parts of his current military strategy against the Catholic League. After deciphering the letter, we were able to locate the original cipher table in another BnF manuscript, illustrating how codebreaking may assist historical research both to reconstruct the content of encrypted letters and to identify anonymous cipher tables.