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The JEME receives Ferdinand II's letters to the Great Captain after being decoded by the National Intelligence Centre (CNI in Spanish)

Monday, February 5, 2018

Number: 6463

The JEME receives the letters at the Army Museum

The JEME receives the letters at the Army Museum (Photo:J. De los Reyes Martínez/DECET)

One of the decoded letters by the CNI

One of the decoded letters by the CNI (Photo:J. De los Reyes Martínez/DECET)

The chief of general staff of the Spanish Army, general F. Javier Varela Salas, has received this morning, in a symbolic way, and by the Secretary of State's hands, director of the CNI, Feliz Sanz, the decoded letters belonging to King Ferdinand II's encoded correspondence with the Great Captain, at the Army Museum in Toledo.

It consists on four encoded letters sent by King Ferdinand II to Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, in between the 27th of May in 1502 to the 14th of April of 1506, which content was unknown, even though inside the academic frame, there were unsuccessful attempts of decoding them.

Finally, the missives arrived to the CNI's Department of Cryptology which experts, after working very hard and with the help of the computer science, have achieved the equivalence of those encoded letters with other decoded ones that were inside the collection of the Dukes of Maqueda, belonging to their family archive.

This correspondece had been assigned by the family to the Army Museum in order to be exposed in the exhibition dedicated to the Great Captain figure as tribute to his 5th centenary of his death. For his captain, Colonel Ansón, thanks to the CNI's job, "exposing letters that were encoded 500 years" was possible, and he highligthted the "historical importance" of this fact.

 
In the letters, Ferdinand II showed his dissatisfaction with some decitions took by the Great Captain during the Campaing of Nápoles, because he was aware of the risks for his future kingdom.

The general of the Army, Varela, wanted to thank the CNI because of its collaboration in decoding this mistery of the Spanish History, "very imporant for all of us". The director of the CNI, Felix Sanz, highlighted in his intervention the vocation of the CNI's service, and the capacities that it possesses,  which can be put at the society's disposal for the researches of historical value, as it happened with these letters.