Absztrakt

A quantitative analysis of 16th–17th-century Hungarian ciphers reveals that besides the dominance of diplomatic use of cryptography, there is a presence of “private” applications as well. The social and political background, the intentions, the cryptographic skill and choice of tools of those people who used cryptographic methods in these centuries show a much more significant variation in the private sphere than the political-diplomatic-military practice alone would indicate. The article attempts to reconstruct the main reasons and goals why historical actors chose to use ciphers in a diary or private letter, when no political or military reason was present. Only a close analysis of the practices of secrecy may shed light on the question. Just as the users were not all politicians, the purpose of ciphering was not necessarily political either: private life, love affairs, intimate relationships, excessive drinking, fear, family feuds, moral sins were all topics that cried for enciphering. As the first author on secrecy, Georg Simmel pointed out, shame is often the main motivating factor behind secrecy, and this is indeed a major explication for several ciphers in the diaries under study. A close examination of the relation of enciphered and unenciphered texts provides a deeper understanding of the concept of secret of the people in the past. Levels of secrecy and privacy can be identified: hardly anything was ever completely encrypted, most encrypted sources also made some sense to the reader without a clavis, and only a more concrete understanding required more elaborate tools of decrypting. As the level of decoding was gradual, so was access to the secret: one community had more direct access to a particular letter, codex, diary or message than the other.