Solution of enciphered letter from 1645 - Prince Maurice writes to Lord George Digby
Staff of the British National Archives mentioned on their website the one very interesting letter from a very difficult times - English Civil War - when Parliamentarians and Royalists stood still against each other. The letter have been wrote by Prince Maurice of the Palatinate on the 31 August 1645, to the Lord George Digby . It contents was about military operations, scouting and information gathering on number of soldiers, morale and exact locations of the enemy units. Information about unsolved letter I got from Klaus Schmeh blog about other useful crypto stuff. As we might see, character of used cipher - the "nomenclator" with nulls - not allowed use most know technique - simple frequency analysis of a single letters, bigrams, trigrams - in large scale, because in message are also used codenames for common words and expressions, which make final solution as quite difficult. After several hours of effort using likely cribs (syllabes, words, places, etc.), by trial a...