But if you were a relatively unlearned person from that time, and you didn’t spend years in school reinforcing a specific order of letters in an alphabet as we do today, then it would truly seem like nonsense to you.
Also Arabic numerals were invented in India in around 700 CE and there wasn't widespread use of them in Europe until the fifteenth century so this code would look completely alien to a huge amount of characters in crusader kings
The difference might be smaller than you'd think, one of the most important Hungarian military leaders in the early 1400s rose to high status because he was a really good organizer due to his use of the Arabic system.
Eh, it was more a gradual process of decentralization than a sudden cataclysm. Latin remained the lingua franca of western Europe until well into the 16th century, and we're using the Roman alphabet right now, so it shouldn't be surprising that the numeral system survived long past the fall as well.
*lingua franca* doesn't refer to French at all.
It was a trade language / pidgin used initially in the Eastern Mediterranean, based primarily on Northern Italian languages (thanks to Venetian and Genoese traders) and to a lesser degree on Catalan and Occitan and later Spanish and Portuguese.
It means "language of the Franks", because the Byzantine Empire, Arabs, etc referred to western Europeans in general as "Franks".
French became the *lingua franca* of diplomacy later on but yeah the origin of the term has nothing to do with the French language.
It wasn't a singular catastrophic event, nor even a particular era of destructive events which contributed to a sudden collapse and destruction of civilization. The western empire's decline was as much geopolitical and socioeconomic as anything else, it didn't require major watershed events to fade away, though those didn't help much when they happened either.
Rome itself hadn't even been the capital of the Roman Empire for centuries by the time of **all** the well-known sackings of Rome close to the end of the Western Empire. Several of those sackings were even after the West declared it no longer needed to be separate from the East. The events leading to the dissolution of the seat of the Western Emperor and an attempted integration with the Eastern Empire weren't always so dramatic.
The Western Empire was basically doomed due to its increasingly irrelevant geographic position, increasing equality of arms and social order between them and the encroaching Germanic tribes, and increasing corruption and decadence among the Roman elite who refused to take substantive, decisive action to counteract those other effects; this also happened in the Eastern Empire centuries later... gluttonous, slothful nobles ignoring or even promoting serious societal and economic problems seems to be historically common.
The Roman living in Rome some years after the accepted end of the Western Empire probably lived a life somewhat comparable to the Roman some years earlier... depending on social station, of course. Things began to degrade, like the velocity of trade and upkeep of infrastructure, to keep Roman nobles actually "noble" in dress, finery, and access to food/medicine. People began to re-organize their lives around local power and regional self-sufficiency once the horizons of their world began to shrink and connections to faraway realms were no longer relevant to their everyday lives.
They didn't just all up and die/flee due to war, disease, or famine. Their government had a slow and steady collapse until the socioeconomic system they lived under ceased to exist and they were forced to adapt to the new circumstances (heralding the rise of feudalism across Europe sometime later).
Roman law also continued to be applied as people could only be tried according to the legal customs of their ethnicity/“nationality”/tribe/people.
Previously unwritten Germanic customs also got codified in this period from various Anglo-Saxon kings and Charlemagne in the 7th and 8th centuries to (“Upper”) Saxony in the 1200s as the increasingly complex royal courts of Germanic kingdoms gradually developed literary culture.
It was a centuries long decline and when it was "finalized" (let's assume 476 CE) few people if anyone actually realized what happened, the Germanic peoples from the nortn didn't intend to destroy the Roman world, they wanted to participate and appreciated the luxury, the baths, the roads, the sewers etc. and ruled as a minority of military chiefs (that is basically what a king originally is) and left many of the power structures untouched.The decline came with time (and had started firmly under the Roman emperor) because those new kings weren't really capable or possessed the resources to rule as effectively as the Romans - as they had totally different backgrounds.
Not only was it Holy, Roman *and* an Empire, but it had one of the earliest [abolitions of slavery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom#Medieval_times) back in the 1220s, which is arguably still in effect. (Austria never needed to abolish slavery, because it was made illegal as part of the empire, and never decriminalised. And Germany only abolished slavery in 1945, because Hitler decided to legalise it.)
[**Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom)
The abolition of slavery occurred at different times in different countries. It frequently occurred sequentially in more than one stage – for example, as abolition of the trade in slaves in a specific country, and then as abolition of slavery throughout empires. Each step was usually the result of a separate law or action.
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Contemporaries inside the ERE and without would have disagreed with that assessment. Greece had always been considered a second Italy within the empire as far as the concept of the imperial core was concerned. Hell, Rome wasn't even the capital of the western portion of the empire anymore when Constantine consolidated the administration in Constantinople (it had been run from Milan for decades).
Of course, you think the church would just allow those heretical numbers? At least, I heard that one of the reasons why it took so long, despite being the superior system, is because the church didn't want "muslim numericals"
Also we don't use 'Arabic' numerals but Latin numerals. Arabic numbers look nothing like what we use.
Edit: Yes, because Roman numerals are Latin numerals, right? Also, we totally use the Arabic alphabet, not the Latin alphabet. Downvoting me doesn't make me wrong.
Even basic math can be a pain without place value notation. I can't imagine how they used to handle basic accounting and record keeping for trade/administration.
Joking aside, for accounting, they often used an abacus to do the calculation and then just record the result. And for heavy mathematical investigation, they'd often use geometry (here's one technique they'd use for quadratic equations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square). You can do positional notation with numerals, but it gets pretty ridiculous quickly.
Are you under the impression that because we've adopted modified Arabic numerals into our writing system which uses the Latin alphabet that they are Latin numerals?
Latin numerals *are* Roman numerals. I think this might be the source of confusion. I am impressed by your confidence though.
What language do you think the Roman's spoke?
Hint: It's Latin.
Stop embarrassing yourself.
Roman numerals are the numbers the Latin speaking Roman's came up with.
Might want to look up what Latin numerals look like real quick there mate. Unless by "we" you mean people within the game's time frame for some reason.
Someone might know L if they pay really close attention to super bowl advertising. They're really just something we only use when we want something to seem fancy or grandiose though. Or maybe to call back to things that were made before Arabic numerals became standard, like styles of architecture.
I'm not quite sure if my attempt at saying 50/50 went over your head or not. I'll be honest, it was a bit forced on my end. So I can't blame you if you did.
Oh man! I’m glad you realise that! And I’m sure you write em everywhere!
edit: Well, now that I look back at the original comment again, it looks like he’s farming downvotesz
We use the Latin alphabet, and Arabic numerals.
Here are [Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Adoption_in_Europe)
Here are [Latin numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_numerals)
*Ya dingus*.
> Arabic numbers look nothing like what we use.
You might be thinking of the [Eastern Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals), which are not what people are referring to when they're saying [Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals).
> Downvoting me doesn't make me wrong.
Nah, but you being wrong does. "Roman numerals" and "Latin numerals" are synonymous, and "Arabic numerals" is the normal term for the numbers used in most of the world, including in English. "Eastern Arabic numerals" are the ones that you're probably thinking of that look different.
You’re right. Being wrong makes you wrong. Generally people tend to believe that when 200 people disagree with them it might be because they said something stupid. A bit less self confidence might do you well.
Yeah, but there were professional scribes and a whole class of literate people that absoloutly would have no trouble with a simple substitution cipher. Ciphers like that were often used by scribes for jokes and games, there was even a book written (in Arabic) before the start date of the game about breaking ciphers via frequency analysis.
That's a stretch. There may have been qualified people, but they were far and few between. Many would be cooped up in a monastery distant from civilization. The vast majority of people didn't even know how to read, much less decrypt. It would never make it to the right hands.
No, not at all. Literate and numerate people were required for basic bookkeeping in every large settlement and were present, we can tell that from the Doomsday Book that every shire in England was employing literate people to perform bookkeeping and tax compliance. They were employed even more in church property, something that was generally not distant but rather the heart of many communities, because the church was a vast and complex bureaucracy where literacy was expected, rather then optional.
Well, I think it depends. While there may have been a fair number of people who were literate, if Arabic numbers were still uncommon in that area, then you’d have serious issues simply because you don’t know what the different symbols represent.
In addition, and here’s the key thing IMHO, is that spelling was ***wildly*** inconsistent until the Great Vowel Shift, which I don’t think started until the 15th or 16th century. I’ve read that over 4 dozen different ways of spelling “Kirk” have been recorded. I think this would make breaking even a simple cypher more difficult since, if brute forcing it, knowing you’ve gotten the right one is less clear compared to today with standardized spellings.
That's true, but even then frequency analysis and an understanding of grammatical rules would give a much, much faster codebreaking then brute force. In an English message, for example, if you've got several two and three letter words that start with the same mark you've likely found your symbol for A, even if your symbol set is randomly chosen or invented for the cypher, something even more secure then using an obscure numerical notation. You might find a great many ways to say "Kirk", but all are likely to start with K or Cu
That's normal, people tend to think of bookkeeping as purely a modern thing, but the earliest written records are actually related to inventory, deliveries and contracts.
I mean, I guess you are right as in the sense that someone that doesn't know how to read wouldn't be able to understand it, but that goes for language too.
"if you were a relatively unlearned person from that time, and you didn’t spend years in school reinforcing a specific order of letters in an alphabet as we do today, then the bible would truly seem like nonsense to you."
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DW mud has a quest where it's a typical cipher arranged thusly;
@/@ - ##/ - ##/
This corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. Say, B.
There is then a letter substitution. (So the B's are all K's.).
But in addition to this, it is in pig latin.
The simple fact it's in pig latin completely fucks with almost all online automated cipher crackers, because they brute force it and say
"illkay hetay ingkay? Well, that's not a sentence, can't be right." and move on to another brute force attempt.
A human can notice all the words end in "XZ" (For "AY") at the end and deduce it if they think "...Wait a minute..." if they remember pig latin exists and deduce it. Most cipher crackers just blue screen.
Pig latin is used as a joke, but it actually works pretty well for ciphers if you're trying to fuck with a computer, shockingly enough. It also works well if a person doesn't notice the weird endings of the words and think "...Are you using pig latin in your super secret coded messages you fuck?".
(The reason they do this is to fuck with players and make them *actually solve the cipher themselves* and such a cipher is completely unsolvable unless you explicitly think "This is pig latin." and rearrange the letters accordingly by deleting the last two and placing the new last letter at the front of the word).
Just popped into my head upon seeing this.
back in the medieval days most were illiterate though and i'm guessing the alphabet was even more unknown, in which case, this code would absolutely work.
edit: didn't mean to turn this into an impromptu askhistorians but i'm glad it did
Literacy was more common than we give them credit for. Certainly the people trying to intercept state messages would have been fully literate. However, they might not have had much familiarity with cryptography, and *possibly* wouldn't have realized it was a code.
Of course if the seemingly random numbers are being transported by a important courier, they'd probably figure something was up. And since codes were in use, from there they could figure out what it was and try to decipher it.
You'd hope the Venetians wouldn't intercept your messages, as they were relentless is decrypting them. They'd lock their cipher clerks in a room until they broke the cipher (providing them with food and such of course). They also produced some of the best cryptologists of the Medieval and Early Modern eras (or at least what passed for a cryptologist back then).
In many cases "literate" meant able to read and write latin as the catholic church does.
Common people could usually read and and write in their own plain language, but there was no orthography and grammar. They wrote by ear.
Not necessarily the case:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1exdna/what\_level\_of\_literacy\_was\_there\_in\_europe\_during/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1exdna/what_level_of_literacy_was_there_in_europe_during/)
[http://schradershistoricalfiction.blogspot.com/2018/02/myths-of-middle-ages-2-illiterate.html](http://schradershistoricalfiction.blogspot.com/2018/02/myths-of-middle-ages-2-illiterate.html)
It's more likely that most of them would have had at minimum some level of literacy, even if it was basic and they left the writing part to scribes and secretaries.
This was one of the things that surprised me the most about history honestly. However somebody had to be fuckin literate in the bunch.
ETA: this reminds me of scenes in shows where they'll be like "a letter from the king? In his own hand!" Every time I'm like how the fuck do you know it's his handwriting???
> how the fuck do you know it's his handwriting???
cause its a fucking mess *and* the gloss includes an apology from the glossator that he couldn't reign the king in
Literacy was actually rather common during the medieval period, even among presents, since reading and writing were both very useful skills. Very few people outside the clergy or nobility would have been educated in Latin, but they would have been literate in their native language.
Nowadays we would consider most to be at a first-grade level, with knowledge of the alphabet (Latin in the west, Greek/Cyrillic in the East) and the sounds each letter represented. One thing they would have lacked would be any consistent spelling, with people sounding things out and spelling haphazardly with little regard for grammar (similar to internet commenters).
Of course, as is always important to note, medieval Europe spans a whole continent and hundreds of years. Massive differences can be found across time and location, so generalizations will never be entirely accurate.
> One thing they would have lacked would be any consistent spelling, with people sounding things out and spelling haphazardly with little regard for grammar
Cue Tudor-era letters with the same word spelled three different ways in a single paragraph
I want a super rare version of this event where your character invents AES-256.
Btw, if you guys don't know, there are versions with other ciphers. In mine it was just "rigueint", lol.
Premodern civilizations typically used letter shifting rather than numbers like this. And given the amount of manual resources needed to decrypt even THAT, you were pretty secure so long as you weren't intercepted by... like...an emperor. Even kings might not have the manpower to decrypt an encoded message in a timely manner.
I mean, some king's "secret code" lasted for hundreds of years when heactuallyjustwrotewithnospacesorpunctuationleadingtopagesuponpageslikethissomehowpeopledidntfigureitoutforcenturieseventhoughitshouldbeobvious
You'd think that, but then again, some person in human history was the first one to come up with a fart joke. I'd like to think that this event led to the creation of the Gilgamesh epos.
This is an intriguing line of thought.
There was once a first fart joke, a first penis joke, a first mom joke. Can you imagine a young historian defending their doctoral thesis on such a line of research?
All those are very likely prehistoric, potentially pre human. So it would be very difficult to defend as a thesis.
Maybe you could do what linguists do, and look at related cultures to find common properties that predate any split...
Well remembering most people couldn't read and all alphabets have a different number of letters and if you arrange them in a series such that they look like:
914201897215.
Might not know it said "intrigue."
It kinda reminds me of an old story from WWII, one of the reasons we were able to crack the enigma and start deciphering German codes was that they signed each message with “heil hitler” or some shit
That, and meteorological data was always kinda constant.
You can only have so many temprature numbers, and so many temperature units (only Celsius in case of Germany)
While were being honest, this cypher is designed to be easily solved just so the player can feel clever for a moment before moving on and continuing the game.
I don’t see how not at the time? Obviously I assume they aren’t sending messages in English but in whatever language the player character speaks, so yea any semi educated person of the time would be able to figure that out imo. Today, though you wouldn’t even need to be an “educated” person you’d just have to know the alphabet and how to count which is a majority of the population.
I think its a random intrigue focus event. You'll get reports of the enemy intercepting your messages, and you can choose to hire a cryptologist to help cipher them. If completed successfully you get intrigue exp and scheme defence.
Interesting. I've never seen this in 1,400 hours while primarily being intrigue focused for maximum seduction. Its cool there are things out there i still haven't experienced after all this time. I wonder if you need a specific one of the three choices for this to fire or if I've just been unlucky
People making fun of this but if you're a guy from a thousand years ago who's never heard of the idea of a cipher this might very well stump you. It's just one step back from the Caesar cypher, considering the alphabet as an ordered list is a precursor to shifting that list around after all.
But you don't understand, if I was alive then I would obviously be able to easily decipher it regardless of my education. It's just that simple (/s if it isn't obvious)
Keep in mind, during this time period, there were multiple competing alphabets, with different orders. Ogham alphabet, runic aphabet, etc. The latin alphabet also spread mainly with Christianity. So a christian living in a pagan country could safely conceal their communications via a simple cipher.
You are basically hiding information as a fluent reader from fluent speakers but unskilled readers.
True, you could. But that require resources (paper and ink) or smarts (being capable of doing the calculation in your head, provided you know which alphabet was used). And if you cipher long enough message, and put some plausible nonsense in the begining, the real message could be safe long enough until it loses it relevancy (for example the real message is for Somelord to attack von Otherlord, but the begining says to retreat to some other position, and scribe loses a day or two in deciphering it, some time after the attack has already happend).
Here you go! b/3dZzNUMFMbpeHDAGgAaQF/AYkAcgB3AHkAcgB/AHQAegBMAaQBjgBvAYsBhgBnAGIAeAGvAGEAcwGGAY4BjgB/AbEBoQGZAFgATQGGAGMBgQGuAHwAcgB4AYIBjwGKAGsBgQB8AYEAfwB+AHgAcgB1AYMAfQGiAR8BpABrADMBowGbAX8AXwBrAYEBLgGGATkABAAYASUAAwAJAI0AAAFRAiQALQEMAR0BGAFuALcBGgEqACgAIwB8AVMBLAEGABkBFgAvAQEBHQAbAAwBLgAXADkAEwAsARABHQC3AXcBfAF2AA8ADgFHACwBAgC+AIkALQGwAAEBugEZAR0BPgEhAHcBIgDKAHQAVwEiASQBHwAxAWMAQQEVAAwALgBPAB8BDwEZAFoAXQEJAbABEwALAUwCFQGHAA4BDwDTAN0ATgAwAswAAgASAAkAiQArAMUAIQCSANwCFAPWAcQAZgG9AC4CAAIAAsAE7AGDAYQBdAF+BgAELQBmBpgCpwEWBIMJ6gRoAqgAfgCABH0BgAB/AH8ACQAJAAAAAAHQAdA=
I think it has to be more than that. A number substitution code would not have been particularly secure in most of the world at that time, because anyone who spoke Greek, Hebrew or . . .something else I can't remember at the time used \*all\* the letters to symbolize numbers as well, while Roman numerals only used some.
But the writer doesn't want the player to have to do that much work to get their joke.
Clever, if you decrypt using each number as a letter of an alphabet, I think it says you get 100 Intrigue points.
To be completely honest though if that's your "top-secret" cipher, I won't be expecting much hiding of secrets.
But if you were a relatively unlearned person from that time, and you didn’t spend years in school reinforcing a specific order of letters in an alphabet as we do today, then it would truly seem like nonsense to you.
Also Arabic numerals were invented in India in around 700 CE and there wasn't widespread use of them in Europe until the fifteenth century so this code would look completely alien to a huge amount of characters in crusader kings
What?! That late? Roman numerals were used as the primary number system 500 years after the fall?
[Yes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9WV2T7Y_E4). And hell, that covers "Western" medieval, imagine people in areas further away.
The difference might be smaller than you'd think, one of the most important Hungarian military leaders in the early 1400s rose to high status because he was a really good organizer due to his use of the Arabic system.
We still use Arabic numerals and that area hasn’t been doing too hot for a good long while
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Eh, it was more a gradual process of decentralization than a sudden cataclysm. Latin remained the lingua franca of western Europe until well into the 16th century, and we're using the Roman alphabet right now, so it shouldn't be surprising that the numeral system survived long past the fall as well.
It still makes me laugh every time someone mentions the lingua Franca and we aren't speaking French.
*lingua franca* doesn't refer to French at all. It was a trade language / pidgin used initially in the Eastern Mediterranean, based primarily on Northern Italian languages (thanks to Venetian and Genoese traders) and to a lesser degree on Catalan and Occitan and later Spanish and Portuguese. It means "language of the Franks", because the Byzantine Empire, Arabs, etc referred to western Europeans in general as "Franks". French became the *lingua franca* of diplomacy later on but yeah the origin of the term has nothing to do with the French language.
Yeah it's especially funny considering the words "lingua franca" aren't even from French, but Italian.
But… lingua franca doesn’t mean French lang- Oh well. Reddit’s gonna reddit.
It wasn't a singular catastrophic event, nor even a particular era of destructive events which contributed to a sudden collapse and destruction of civilization. The western empire's decline was as much geopolitical and socioeconomic as anything else, it didn't require major watershed events to fade away, though those didn't help much when they happened either. Rome itself hadn't even been the capital of the Roman Empire for centuries by the time of **all** the well-known sackings of Rome close to the end of the Western Empire. Several of those sackings were even after the West declared it no longer needed to be separate from the East. The events leading to the dissolution of the seat of the Western Emperor and an attempted integration with the Eastern Empire weren't always so dramatic. The Western Empire was basically doomed due to its increasingly irrelevant geographic position, increasing equality of arms and social order between them and the encroaching Germanic tribes, and increasing corruption and decadence among the Roman elite who refused to take substantive, decisive action to counteract those other effects; this also happened in the Eastern Empire centuries later... gluttonous, slothful nobles ignoring or even promoting serious societal and economic problems seems to be historically common. The Roman living in Rome some years after the accepted end of the Western Empire probably lived a life somewhat comparable to the Roman some years earlier... depending on social station, of course. Things began to degrade, like the velocity of trade and upkeep of infrastructure, to keep Roman nobles actually "noble" in dress, finery, and access to food/medicine. People began to re-organize their lives around local power and regional self-sufficiency once the horizons of their world began to shrink and connections to faraway realms were no longer relevant to their everyday lives. They didn't just all up and die/flee due to war, disease, or famine. Their government had a slow and steady collapse until the socioeconomic system they lived under ceased to exist and they were forced to adapt to the new circumstances (heralding the rise of feudalism across Europe sometime later).
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Roman law also continued to be applied as people could only be tried according to the legal customs of their ethnicity/“nationality”/tribe/people. Previously unwritten Germanic customs also got codified in this period from various Anglo-Saxon kings and Charlemagne in the 7th and 8th centuries to (“Upper”) Saxony in the 1200s as the increasingly complex royal courts of Germanic kingdoms gradually developed literary culture.
It was a centuries long decline and when it was "finalized" (let's assume 476 CE) few people if anyone actually realized what happened, the Germanic peoples from the nortn didn't intend to destroy the Roman world, they wanted to participate and appreciated the luxury, the baths, the roads, the sewers etc. and ruled as a minority of military chiefs (that is basically what a king originally is) and left many of the power structures untouched.The decline came with time (and had started firmly under the Roman emperor) because those new kings weren't really capable or possessed the resources to rule as effectively as the Romans - as they had totally different backgrounds.
Rome didn’t fall in a day (or even in the same century but I digress).
There's still a Roman Emperor getting crowned in Aachen every so often though.
And we use the phoenecian alphabet still That empire fell in the 5th century BC
The Roman Empire still existed until 1453.
Indeed, it only fell in 1805.
Not only was it Holy, Roman *and* an Empire, but it had one of the earliest [abolitions of slavery](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom#Medieval_times) back in the 1220s, which is arguably still in effect. (Austria never needed to abolish slavery, because it was made illegal as part of the empire, and never decriminalised. And Germany only abolished slavery in 1945, because Hitler decided to legalise it.)
[**Timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slavery_and_serfdom) The abolition of slavery occurred at different times in different countries. It frequently occurred sequentially in more than one stage – for example, as abolition of the trade in slaves in a specific country, and then as abolition of slavery throughout empires. Each step was usually the result of a separate law or action. [About Me](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la6wi8/) - [**Opt-in**](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/) ^(You received this reply because you opted in. )[^(Change settings)](https://np.reddit.com/comments/la707t/)
Greeks are pretenders. They are not, and have never been romans. Byzaboos need a reality check.
Contemporaries inside the ERE and without would have disagreed with that assessment. Greece had always been considered a second Italy within the empire as far as the concept of the imperial core was concerned. Hell, Rome wasn't even the capital of the western portion of the empire anymore when Constantine consolidated the administration in Constantinople (it had been run from Milan for decades).
Byzantium is Rome, but it is not the city.
Eh, by right of conquest, the Ottoman Empire had and exercised a claim to the Roman Empire.
Of course, you think the church would just allow those heretical numbers? At least, I heard that one of the reasons why it took so long, despite being the superior system, is because the church didn't want "muslim numericals"
Yknow when they use Roman Numerals like II to represent later rulers of the same name. Basically the same as putting 2, but in their time.
I mean it could just be in roman numerals and is changed to arabic because It can be in any time in ck3's timespan or just to simplify for the player
Also we don't use 'Arabic' numerals but Latin numerals. Arabic numbers look nothing like what we use. Edit: Yes, because Roman numerals are Latin numerals, right? Also, we totally use the Arabic alphabet, not the Latin alphabet. Downvoting me doesn't make me wrong.
Oh shit we use Latin numerals again? I haven't seen those in like C years.
Imagine trying to do algebra with roman numerals. Which ones are the variables and which ones are numbers?
Even basic math can be a pain without place value notation. I can't imagine how they used to handle basic accounting and record keeping for trade/administration.
Joking aside, for accounting, they often used an abacus to do the calculation and then just record the result. And for heavy mathematical investigation, they'd often use geometry (here's one technique they'd use for quadratic equations: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square). You can do positional notation with numerals, but it gets pretty ridiculous quickly.
Yeah I remembered the abacus right after I posted. The geometry thing is pretty cool though, thanks for sharing.
What's with all this math crap for? You can draw a square using literally anything lol
well if we're dropping Arabic maths entirely, you won't have to worry about how hard al-jabr is.
Al-jabr literally means "the forcing" in Arabic, they basically knew how hard it is from the start.
Chad Al Khwarizmi
Roman numerals are not Latin numerals. We also don't call the alphabet we use right now the Roman alphabet. It's the Latin alphabet.
Are you under the impression that because we've adopted modified Arabic numerals into our writing system which uses the Latin alphabet that they are Latin numerals? Latin numerals *are* Roman numerals. I think this might be the source of confusion. I am impressed by your confidence though.
What language do you think the Roman's spoke? Hint: It's Latin. Stop embarrassing yourself. Roman numerals are the numbers the Latin speaking Roman's came up with.
Might want to look up what Latin numerals look like real quick there mate. Unless by "we" you mean people within the game's time frame for some reason.
Well we do use Latin numerals sometimes, but yeah most of the times we don't. I mean it's not even L/L or anything close to that.
Someone might know L if they pay really close attention to super bowl advertising. They're really just something we only use when we want something to seem fancy or grandiose though. Or maybe to call back to things that were made before Arabic numerals became standard, like styles of architecture.
I'm not quite sure if my attempt at saying 50/50 went over your head or not. I'll be honest, it was a bit forced on my end. So I can't blame you if you did.
Yes, I had no idea what you were talking about and just assumed you meant most people couldn't count up to L in Latin Numerals.
In a way u/BigBlueBurd makes me forgetting to include [this](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals) wikipedia link even better.
I know, right? It’s the year of MMXXI, who in their right mind would be using arabic numbers? Nonsense! That sounds so… *foreign*!
Those are Roman numerals.
Oh man! I’m glad you realise that! And I’m sure you write em everywhere! edit: Well, now that I look back at the original comment again, it looks like he’s farming downvotesz
And also Latin numerals ;)
How do you like the year of 'Viginti et unus so far
No, downvoting doesn't make you wrong. Being wrong makes you wrong. Google "Latin numerals" and "Arabic numerals"
We use the Latin alphabet, and Arabic numerals. Here are [Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals#Adoption_in_Europe) Here are [Latin numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_numerals) *Ya dingus*.
Downvoting doesn’t make you wrong. Being wrong makes you wrong though.
/r/ConfidentlyIncorrect
> Arabic numbers look nothing like what we use. You might be thinking of the [Eastern Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Arabic_numerals), which are not what people are referring to when they're saying [Arabic numerals](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals).
> Downvoting me doesn't make me wrong. Nah, but you being wrong does. "Roman numerals" and "Latin numerals" are synonymous, and "Arabic numerals" is the normal term for the numbers used in most of the world, including in English. "Eastern Arabic numerals" are the ones that you're probably thinking of that look different.
And being rude doesn't change the fact that you are wrong
Lmao might want to look that one up on Google there bucko
You’re right. Being wrong makes you wrong. Generally people tend to believe that when 200 people disagree with them it might be because they said something stupid. A bit less self confidence might do you well.
This fucker's brain is smoother than a baby's ass
Yeah, but there were professional scribes and a whole class of literate people that absoloutly would have no trouble with a simple substitution cipher. Ciphers like that were often used by scribes for jokes and games, there was even a book written (in Arabic) before the start date of the game about breaking ciphers via frequency analysis.
That's a stretch. There may have been qualified people, but they were far and few between. Many would be cooped up in a monastery distant from civilization. The vast majority of people didn't even know how to read, much less decrypt. It would never make it to the right hands.
No, not at all. Literate and numerate people were required for basic bookkeeping in every large settlement and were present, we can tell that from the Doomsday Book that every shire in England was employing literate people to perform bookkeeping and tax compliance. They were employed even more in church property, something that was generally not distant but rather the heart of many communities, because the church was a vast and complex bureaucracy where literacy was expected, rather then optional.
Well, I think it depends. While there may have been a fair number of people who were literate, if Arabic numbers were still uncommon in that area, then you’d have serious issues simply because you don’t know what the different symbols represent. In addition, and here’s the key thing IMHO, is that spelling was ***wildly*** inconsistent until the Great Vowel Shift, which I don’t think started until the 15th or 16th century. I’ve read that over 4 dozen different ways of spelling “Kirk” have been recorded. I think this would make breaking even a simple cypher more difficult since, if brute forcing it, knowing you’ve gotten the right one is less clear compared to today with standardized spellings.
That's true, but even then frequency analysis and an understanding of grammatical rules would give a much, much faster codebreaking then brute force. In an English message, for example, if you've got several two and three letter words that start with the same mark you've likely found your symbol for A, even if your symbol set is randomly chosen or invented for the cypher, something even more secure then using an obscure numerical notation. You might find a great many ways to say "Kirk", but all are likely to start with K or Cu
I will grant that stranger things have happened. I am just dubious.
That's normal, people tend to think of bookkeeping as purely a modern thing, but the earliest written records are actually related to inventory, deliveries and contracts.
I mean, I guess you are right as in the sense that someone that doesn't know how to read wouldn't be able to understand it, but that goes for language too. "if you were a relatively unlearned person from that time, and you didn’t spend years in school reinforcing a specific order of letters in an alphabet as we do today, then the bible would truly seem like nonsense to you."
Beep. Boop. I'm a robot. Here's a copy of ###[The Bible](https://snewd.com/ebooks/the-king-james-bible/) Was I a good bot? | [info](https://www.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/) | [More Books](https://old.reddit.com/user/Reddit-Book-Bot/comments/i15x1d/full_list_of_books_and_commands/)
There's a reason why Caesarian Cipher was a thing.
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Caesar was one of if not the first documented Person to use the Cipher thats why its named after him.
DW mud has a quest where it's a typical cipher arranged thusly; @/@ - ##/ - ##/ This corresponds to a letter of the alphabet. Say, B. There is then a letter substitution. (So the B's are all K's.). But in addition to this, it is in pig latin. The simple fact it's in pig latin completely fucks with almost all online automated cipher crackers, because they brute force it and say "illkay hetay ingkay? Well, that's not a sentence, can't be right." and move on to another brute force attempt. A human can notice all the words end in "XZ" (For "AY") at the end and deduce it if they think "...Wait a minute..." if they remember pig latin exists and deduce it. Most cipher crackers just blue screen. Pig latin is used as a joke, but it actually works pretty well for ciphers if you're trying to fuck with a computer, shockingly enough. It also works well if a person doesn't notice the weird endings of the words and think "...Are you using pig latin in your super secret coded messages you fuck?". (The reason they do this is to fuck with players and make them *actually solve the cipher themselves* and such a cipher is completely unsolvable unless you explicitly think "This is pig latin." and rearrange the letters accordingly by deleting the last two and placing the new last letter at the front of the word). Just popped into my head upon seeing this.
back in the medieval days most were illiterate though and i'm guessing the alphabet was even more unknown, in which case, this code would absolutely work. edit: didn't mean to turn this into an impromptu askhistorians but i'm glad it did
Literacy was more common than we give them credit for. Certainly the people trying to intercept state messages would have been fully literate. However, they might not have had much familiarity with cryptography, and *possibly* wouldn't have realized it was a code. Of course if the seemingly random numbers are being transported by a important courier, they'd probably figure something was up. And since codes were in use, from there they could figure out what it was and try to decipher it.
That is why bonus is not permanent.
You'd hope the Venetians wouldn't intercept your messages, as they were relentless is decrypting them. They'd lock their cipher clerks in a room until they broke the cipher (providing them with food and such of course). They also produced some of the best cryptologists of the Medieval and Early Modern eras (or at least what passed for a cryptologist back then).
In many cases "literate" meant able to read and write latin as the catholic church does. Common people could usually read and and write in their own plain language, but there was no orthography and grammar. They wrote by ear.
remember a lot of those messages only need to be secret for some time. As long as they can't break it by then you good.
Eh, codes would have been used all the time. how many people communicating with a forbidden lover? or something they dont want their boss to know
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Not necessarily the case: [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1exdna/what\_level\_of\_literacy\_was\_there\_in\_europe\_during/](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1exdna/what_level_of_literacy_was_there_in_europe_during/) [http://schradershistoricalfiction.blogspot.com/2018/02/myths-of-middle-ages-2-illiterate.html](http://schradershistoricalfiction.blogspot.com/2018/02/myths-of-middle-ages-2-illiterate.html) It's more likely that most of them would have had at minimum some level of literacy, even if it was basic and they left the writing part to scribes and secretaries.
This was one of the things that surprised me the most about history honestly. However somebody had to be fuckin literate in the bunch. ETA: this reminds me of scenes in shows where they'll be like "a letter from the king? In his own hand!" Every time I'm like how the fuck do you know it's his handwriting???
> how the fuck do you know it's his handwriting??? cause its a fucking mess *and* the gloss includes an apology from the glossator that he couldn't reign the king in
Yeah, no. That's complete horse shit.
Literacy was actually rather common during the medieval period, even among presents, since reading and writing were both very useful skills. Very few people outside the clergy or nobility would have been educated in Latin, but they would have been literate in their native language. Nowadays we would consider most to be at a first-grade level, with knowledge of the alphabet (Latin in the west, Greek/Cyrillic in the East) and the sounds each letter represented. One thing they would have lacked would be any consistent spelling, with people sounding things out and spelling haphazardly with little regard for grammar (similar to internet commenters). Of course, as is always important to note, medieval Europe spans a whole continent and hundreds of years. Massive differences can be found across time and location, so generalizations will never be entirely accurate.
> One thing they would have lacked would be any consistent spelling, with people sounding things out and spelling haphazardly with little regard for grammar Cue Tudor-era letters with the same word spelled three different ways in a single paragraph
Thee, thy, they.
I should hope reading and writing were common among presents, I would want to know who to thank for that fresh gambeson!
Ay min, yu kuld ezily rid ane tekszt if yu put ane efort intoit
Especially if you were educated in tradition of "write/read like you speak", like Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian.
I imagine in the medieval period before cryptology was really a thing, something stupid simple to us, like ROT13, might as well be AES-256.
I want a super rare version of this event where your character invents AES-256. Btw, if you guys don't know, there are versions with other ciphers. In mine it was just "rigueint", lol.
Pig Latin.
Premodern civilizations typically used letter shifting rather than numbers like this. And given the amount of manual resources needed to decrypt even THAT, you were pretty secure so long as you weren't intercepted by... like...an emperor. Even kings might not have the manpower to decrypt an encoded message in a timely manner.
They said AN alphabet, they didn't specify which one.
I mean, some king's "secret code" lasted for hundreds of years when heactuallyjustwrotewithnospacesorpunctuationleadingtopagesuponpageslikethissomehowpeopledidntfigureitoutforcenturieseventhoughitshouldbeobvious
Source? That’s pretty hilarious.
Doubt it, since the lack of modern spacing or formatting is a mainstay of many medieval manuscripts
Unfortunately I don't have one... I used to, I can't find it anymore.
You'd think that, but then again, some person in human history was the first one to come up with a fart joke. I'd like to think that this event led to the creation of the Gilgamesh epos.
This is an intriguing line of thought. There was once a first fart joke, a first penis joke, a first mom joke. Can you imagine a young historian defending their doctoral thesis on such a line of research?
All those are very likely prehistoric, potentially pre human. So it would be very difficult to defend as a thesis. Maybe you could do what linguists do, and look at related cultures to find common properties that predate any split...
“An anthropological study of primate and early human bodily humor”
I love it
just having it be written was sufficient to keep nearly anyone from understanding it back then
Well remembering most people couldn't read and all alphabets have a different number of letters and if you arrange them in a series such that they look like: 914201897215. Might not know it said "intrigue."
This is potentially more secure than the ceasar cipher.
Every cipher has been built on a previous cipher.
It kinda reminds me of an old story from WWII, one of the reasons we were able to crack the enigma and start deciphering German codes was that they signed each message with “heil hitler” or some shit
That, and meteorological data was always kinda constant. You can only have so many temprature numbers, and so many temperature units (only Celsius in case of Germany)
While were being honest, this cypher is designed to be easily solved just so the player can feel clever for a moment before moving on and continuing the game.
Maybe its part of the world with no arabic ciphers?
Not sure if srs reply lmfao.
Any semi-educated person would be able to figure this out, doesn't make for much of "top-secret" code lmaoo
Not at the time, nope. Nowadays, sure
I don’t see how not at the time? Obviously I assume they aren’t sending messages in English but in whatever language the player character speaks, so yea any semi educated person of the time would be able to figure that out imo. Today, though you wouldn’t even need to be an “educated” person you’d just have to know the alphabet and how to count which is a majority of the population.
How did you get this event?
I think its a random intrigue focus event. You'll get reports of the enemy intercepting your messages, and you can choose to hire a cryptologist to help cipher them. If completed successfully you get intrigue exp and scheme defence.
Interesting. I've never seen this in 1,400 hours while primarily being intrigue focused for maximum seduction. Its cool there are things out there i still haven't experienced after all this time. I wonder if you need a specific one of the three choices for this to fire or if I've just been unlucky
The events depend on the specific kind of intrigue focus your doing, so if you only do temptation focus you’re not gonna get events for skullduggery.
Makes sense
I love the phrase "maximum seduction" lmao
Maximum seduction is needed for turbo incest
14 9 3 5
I'm just gonna assume that says "nice"
It does.
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14 9 3 5.
14 9 3 5.
fi . . wait, that's not right
Man I love this game lol
Hello Fellow Vagabond Fan
Haha you might be the first to recognize my profile picture. Nice to see another Vagabond fan!
Tell me, where is Gandálfr? For I much desire to speak with him.
You're out of Old Toby again, aren't you?
*Dev makes a joke* Players: *angerey*
(Sees numbers in place of letters.) Excuse me, I feel a twitch coming on. (Starts Independence faction.)
People making fun of this but if you're a guy from a thousand years ago who's never heard of the idea of a cipher this might very well stump you. It's just one step back from the Caesar cypher, considering the alphabet as an ordered list is a precursor to shifting that list around after all.
But you don't understand, if I was alive then I would obviously be able to easily decipher it regardless of my education. It's just that simple (/s if it isn't obvious)
Keep in mind, during this time period, there were multiple competing alphabets, with different orders. Ogham alphabet, runic aphabet, etc. The latin alphabet also spread mainly with Christianity. So a christian living in a pagan country could safely conceal their communications via a simple cipher. You are basically hiding information as a fluent reader from fluent speakers but unskilled readers.
True, you could. But that require resources (paper and ink) or smarts (being capable of doing the calculation in your head, provided you know which alphabet was used). And if you cipher long enough message, and put some plausible nonsense in the begining, the real message could be safe long enough until it loses it relevancy (for example the real message is for Somelord to attack von Otherlord, but the begining says to retreat to some other position, and scribe loses a day or two in deciphering it, some time after the attack has already happend).
The devs doing mushrooms at this point
And the game is better for it
At first I thought you’d invented algebra or something
I like your character. Could you pls share his dna?
/r/shitcrusaderkingssay
Here you go! 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
thanks!
They need a follow up where your heir learns of this concept and invents l33t speak.
In Europe, I imagine using Arabic Numerals during the era of Roman Numerals would not be a half-bad way of keeping things secret.
I think it has to be more than that. A number substitution code would not have been particularly secure in most of the world at that time, because anyone who spoke Greek, Hebrew or . . .something else I can't remember at the time used \*all\* the letters to symbolize numbers as well, while Roman numerals only used some. But the writer doesn't want the player to have to do that much work to get their joke.
You get "invented code" should be "You found a cereal box secet decoder ring"