11 - The rise of cryptology in the European Renaissance

Abstract

This chapter discusses the rise of cryptology in the European renaissance. The rise of cryptology in the Europe of the Renaissance period cannot consider this 15th-century development in a vacuum. It is true that the increasing power of the Italian city states and a growing papal authority may have hastened the perceived need for modern cryptographic methods, but this phenomenon has to be seen from a historical perspective. The various cryptographic methods developed in classical antiquity had been mostly lost during the Middle Ages. For this reason, it is interesting to see how gradually and over a period of perhaps 150 years early modern cryptologists became increasingly aware of classical western materials even though the entire body of advanced Arabic-Islamic cryptology remained inaccessible.