Louis XIV used the Great Cipher, invented by Antoine and Bonaventure Rossignol, throughout the seventeenth century. Following the death of the Rossignols, The Great Cipher remained an unsolved mystery until the nineteenth century, when new texts encrypted by The Great Cipher were discovered and passed on to a French cryptographer Bazeries. Bazeries struggled with the cipher for years, but eventually was able to successfully decipher several key historical messages and crack The Great Cipher.

The Great Cipher utilized 587 different numbers and was not a homophonic cipher, as Bazeries found after many failed attempts. Bazeries then explored the idea that the Great Cipher was based off of digraphs, or pairs of letters. Although this idea was wrong, it ultimately led him to his discovery that The Great Cipher paired numbers to syllables. The cipher proved to be even more complicated as certain numbers stood for single letters only while others stood for syllables. There were also tricks embedded in the cipher; for example, certain numbers meant that the number before it should be deleted.

The Great Cipher was protected for 200 years due to its great complexity and ingenuity for the time period. The manipulation of syllables as opposed to letters was revolutionary in the cryptography world. The added complexity through the use of single letters and nulls made Bazeries’s task even more difficult. The Great Cipher was a remarkably secure cipher that stumped the finest cryptographers for 200 years.