07/04/2026

Recent Studies on Ciphers in the Reign of Emperor Charles V

When working on some recent posts, I noticed there has been active research about ciphers in the time of Emperor Charles V in the past few years. I outlined them in a new article, "Scholarly Studies on Ciphers in the Reign of Emperor Charles V" with some observations from cryptographer's perspective.

Most of the many ciphers reconstructed by scholars from archival materials are not covered in my article, "Ciphers during the Reign of Emperor Charles V", while my article also has some not covered by their work. In a few cases where we work on the same cipher, independent reconstructions will supplement each other.