Spain intelligence agency cracks 500-year-old letters between King Ferdinand II and commander

MADE up of more than 200 codes and 88 symbols, the secret letters between a famous Spanish king and his general confused historians for centuries.

A HISTORIC code, once used as the way one of Spain’s most famous monarchs and a military commander communicated, has finally been cracked.

The Centro Nacional de Inteligencia (CNI), Spain’s national intelligence agency, managed to crack the 500-year-old code that has puzzled historians for centuries.

The code between Ferdinand II of Aragon and his revered general Gonzalo Fernandez de Cordoba was made up of 88 different symbols and 237 combined letter codes.

King Ferdinand II of Aragon and his wife Isabella I of Castile.

Each letter was represented by two to six characters, such as triangles, stripes or numbers and to make matters worse, the letters were written without separating words.

The Army Museum in Toledo, a town in central Spain, put the historic letters on display in 2015, appealing to the CNI for help.

The museum then gave the intelligence agency two letters, one from 1502 and another from 1506.

At the bottom of one of the letters were a few sentences de Cordoba had translated, allowing the experts to get a foothold on the code.

Years later, the CNI has cracked the code, calling it “one of the great mysteries in the history of Spain” in an interview with newspaper ABC.

Encrypted letters were common in Europe at the time, in case the letters fell into enemy hands, but the intelligence agency said the code between the two Spaniards was “very well thought out”.

A page of the Ferdinand of Aragon letters. Picture: Radio Television Espanola

Cracking the code is being described as a Rosetta Stone moment, the stone discovered in 1799 that became the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The intelligence agency has since deciphered four of the letters, some of which went for more than 20 pages.

Ferdinand of Aragon is one of Spain’s most famous monarchs and was behind the final recapture of Spain from the Moors in 1492 and sponsored Christopher Columbus’ journey to the Americas.