Gabriel de Lavinde's collection of ciphers (1379) preserved in the Vatican archives is well-known as early specimens of Western cryptography. I was inspired by Daniel Bourdeau's writing about a cipher of Avignon pope Benedict XIII to re-read the relevant section in Meister (1906) and learned Gabriel de Lavinde was affiliated with the antipope Clement VII in Avignon.
A natural question in discussing this topic is whether it formed the basis of later papal ciphers and whether it had anything to do with the pope's ciphers at Vatican at the time. Meister (1906) tells us that the papal ciphers in Avignon were more advanced than the primitive ciphers at Vatican but ceased to be used with the end of the Avignon papacy.
See my new article, "Papal Ciphers during the Western Schisma".
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