Ways of knowledge transfer

Royals, princes, ambassadors and delegates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Central Europe used ciphers, code words, and signs for the syllables when exchanging diplomatic and political information with each other. Ferenc Rákóczi II applied a complex homophonic system when discussing his love affair in French with his political ally and lover, Elżbieta Helena Sieniawska (1669−1729), wife of a Polish palatine. ¹ His generals, Sándor Károlyi and Miklós Bercsényi, used a vulnerable monoalphabetic system of graphic symbols to arrange military business. ² An even simpler method was applied by the poet Bálint Balassi a hundred years earlier to conceal intimate family business, a cipher that assigned the first half of the alphabet to the letters of the second half and vice versa. ³ The would be palatine István Illésházy only enciphered the vowels in his private letter to his wife, Katalin Pálfy in his exile in 1605, and even those in a well- recognizable fashion. ⁴ The merchant Zsigmond Szaniszló also coded private affairs – financial details, names of certain people, a few liberal comments, his wife’s extramarital affair – in his lengthy diary between 1682 and 1711. Like Illésházy, he only coded the vowels, so this ciphertext can be decoded at first reading. ⁵ The Transylvanian politician, Gábor Haller covered up his private secrets in his diary from between 1630 and 1644 – his alcoholism, marriage plans, details of his bedtime fantasies – using two different ciphering methods, one similar to the pigpen method of the Freemasons, consisting of dots and squares, and another one based on letter transposition. ⁶