of Bourgogne during the 15th and early 16th centuries. By 1519 this area was under the benevolent control of Holy Roman emperor Charles V, of the Spanish branch of the house of Habsburg, who was also king of Spain. In 1555, however, Charles resigned both Spain and the Netherlands to his son, Philip II, who was Spanish by birth and education and had little liking for his northern European territories. His oppressive rule led to the epochal war of independence waged from 1568 to 1648 by the Dutch against Spain, then the most powerful nation in Europe. (3) 2.5 The Struggle for Independence The political disaffection between the Low Countries and Spain coincided with the Protestant revolt against the Roman Catholic Church, which was the state church of Spain. Calvinism, a Protestant movement, rapidly gained ground during this period; its adherents established in the
He won his commission as a second lieutenant three years later, in 1825—and did not budge out of that rank for 14 years. But he remained a first lieutenant only three years before he was promoted to captain and company commander, a post he held for nine years. He retired in 1852 with the rank of major, and though he served from 1860 to 1868 as the commander of a National Guard-like battalion, he found sufficient leisure to devote some to cryptology, for in 1863 his short but epochal book was published in Berlin by the respected house of Mittler & Sohn. Three quarters of Die Geheimschriften und die Dechif-frir-kunst concentrates on answering the problem that had vexed cryptanalysts for more than 300 years: how to achieve a general solution for polyalphabetic ciphers with repeating keywords. (One chapter zeroes in on "The Decipherment of French Writing"—a rather ominous portent in a book dedicated to the Count Albrecht von Roon, the Prussian minister of
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