One of my Italian professors from undergrad, Marcello Simonetta, also cracked a 500 year-old code. He found an encrypted letter [1] sent by Federico da Montefel

One of my Italian professors from undergrad, Marcello Simonetta, also cracked a 500 year-old code. He found an encrypted letter [1] sent by Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Urbino, that showed he had helped orchestrate the Pazzi conspiracy [2] to assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici. Interestingly, to break the code he relied on a code-breaking manual written by one of his own ancestors, Cicco Simonetta [3]! When I first learned about this, I thought it was incredibly silly that he didn't ask a modern cryptographer for help. But in some ways, Cicco's manual, written around the same time, is more useful: it focuses on precisely the kind of codes that would have been used for the letter, and the techniques it describes are reasonably effective (essentially frequency analysis, with some specific tricks for documents written in Latin or Italian). And it is certainly more narratively satisfying that he ended up breaking it on his own, following his ancestor's manual! If you want to know more, he wrote a book on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001AL6656/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001AL6656/ And as another fun bit of trivia, he ended up consulting on the historical aspects of Assassin's Creed II, which takes place in Florence around the time of the Pazzi conspiracy! [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/books/1478-assassination-solved-the-humanist-did-it.html http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/books/1478-assassination-s... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazzi_conspiracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazzi_conspiracy [3] http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/voynich-manuscript/cicco-simonettas-regule/cicco-simonettas-treatise-decipherment/ http://cipherfoundation.org/older-ciphers/voynich-manuscript...