5. Ciphers in Hungary: the source material

Abstract

A historian of early modern Hungary, Ágnes R. Várkonyi examined the causes of the “particularly widespread” practices of cryptography in the region. It is hard to judge how far her impressions were right compared to the source material of neighboring countries, because there is no systematic study on the Polish, Czech and Austrian enciphered source materials in the early modern period, and prior to the present monograph, there was no general overview about the Hungarian sources, either. However, as will be evident in the following sub-chapter, the percentage of surviving code tables and ciphered messages is considerably high, my – far from being confirmed – impressions are similar to those of Várkonyi. Although it is neither necessary nor possible to summarize the history of Hungary in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries here, it is worth pointing out that this high percentage of enciphered sources is by no means surprising in light of Hungary’s political history. This region became a clash zone in these centuries where Christian and Ottoman armies fought, Western culture was confronted by Islamic culture, Catholicism was challenged by the Reformation, and, to a certain degree, Western Christianity met Eastern Christianity. Hungary, covering the whole of the Carpathian Basin, was seen by contemporaries as a powerful and rich country in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries until 1526, when it was first defeated and then, after the fall of its capital, Buda, in 1541, partly occupied by the Ottoman Empire. Subsequently, as one historian has recently put it, Hungary became “a complicated set of lands caught up in an intricate network of alliances, belonging to and claimed by several ruling houses and dynasties”. As a result of a series of internal fights, the kingdom became divided into three. Its central part remained occupied by the Ottoman sultan until the end of the seventeenth century. Its western and northern regions continued their existence