From Sixteenth-Century Cryptography to the New Millennium — The Last 500 Years - Codes: The Guide to Secrecy from Ancient to Modern Times - page 59

Chapter 2

From Sixteenth-Century
Cryptography to the New
Millennium — The Last
500 Years

The age of chivalry is gone. That of sophists, economists, and calculators,
has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
Edmund Burke (1729-97) , Irish-born whig politician and writer
— from Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

2.1 Three Post-Renaissance Centuries

We begin with cryptographic tales surrounding the French, British, and
Spanish monarchs in the sixteenth century. In 1556, Philip II of Spain ascended
to the throne. In that year, he decided to discard the (deeply compromised)
ciphers used by his father Charles V. Philip turned to an idea of Giovani
Soro (a cryptographer we discussed in Section 1.5 (see page 58), by dividing his
cryptosystems into two sets: cifra general , used for communications between the
king and his ambassadors; and cifra particular , used by an individual messenger
and the king. Philip's use of Soro's ideas became the template for Spanish
cryptography well into the seventeenth century.
Meanwhile, in France there was a mathematician named Francois Seigneur
De La Bigotiere Viete, (1540-1603). Viete, as shown in Figure 2.1, is known
as the father of modern algebraic notation, largely due to his topic, In Artem
Analyticem Isagoge ,or Introduction to the Analytical Art , published in 1591.
This topic could actually pass as a modern text in elementary algebra. His
ability at cryptanalysis, however, is our chief interest. He was an assistant