Shame, Love, and Alcohol: Private Ciphers in Early Modern Hungary

Abstract

A quantitative analysis of sixteenth-century to seventeenth-century Hungarian ciphers (300 cipher keys and 1,600 partly or entirely enciphered letters) reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there is a presence of “private” applications as well. The article attempts to reconstruct the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diary or private letter, when no political or military reason was present. Only a close analysis of the practices of secrecy may shed light on the question. As the first author on secrecy, Georg Simmel, pointed out, often shame is the main motivating factor behind secrecy, and this is indeed a major explication for several ciphers in the diaries under study.

Keywords:

• early modern history
• Ferenc II. Rákóczi
• homophonic ciphers
• monoalphabetic ciphers
• privacy
• secrecy

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the translation work of Teodóra Király and Levente Zoltán Király from Hungarian into English. I thank Dániel Kálmán for his helpful research assistance.

Notes

¹On the political uses of cryptography in early modern Hungary, see more in [5, 6, 9, 10].

²Hungarian National Archives, G 15 Caps. C. Fasc 44.

³Ráday Archives C64-4d2-25. 5.sz.

⁴Hungarian National Archives, Microfilm Reading Room Mf. 8620.

⁵[8, p. 67]: “Con la cyfra havemo antiquamente con Yostra Signoria con la quale la fara cavare, et accioche cla qua avante Yostra Signoria et suo consorte possa serivere ala Maesta de nostro marito et ad nuj, ne li mandamo qui alligata un altra nova, con la quale le Signorie Yostre potrano serivere, che cossi fara nostro marito, et nuj ancora con essa medesimo seriveremo ad Yostra Ill-ma Signoria, ala quale le ce recommandamo, et si dignara Yostra Signoria da parte nostra basarerre tutti soi Ill-mi figlioli, li quali tutti salutamo.”

⁶Hungarian National Archives, p. 398, The archives of the Károlyi family, the age of Rákóczi: no. 35409, 1706.04.13.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Benedek Láng

Benedek Lang is a historian (MA, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, 1998) and a medievalist (PhD, Central European University, Medieval Studies Department, 2003). He works as a professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. In 2012–2013, he was a fellow in the Collegium de Lyon. He is a historian of science, specialized on two major topics: late medieval manuscripts of learned magic and early modern secret communication (artificial languages and cipher systems). His monograph, entitled Unlocked Books, Manuscripts of Learned Magic in the Medieval Libraries of Central Europe, was published by Penn State University Press in 2008, and two of his last articles (“Why don't We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System? The Codex of Rohonc” and “People's Secrets: Towards a Social History of Early Modern Cryptography”) in Cryptologia (2010) and in The Sixteenth Century Journal (2014).