Spain cracks King Ferdinand's 500-year-old secret code

Ferdinand of Aragon's letters have tantalised historians for centuries. He was behind the final reconquest of Spain from the Moors in 1492 and Columbus's journeys to the Americas.
 The letters include instructions on strategy during military campaigns in Italy in the early 16th Century. They were written using secret code in case they fell into enemy hands.
 The letters, on display at Spain's Army Museum in Toledo, use "over 200 symbols", curator Jesús Anson explained. It took intelligence services almost half a year to decipher four of them, some of which went on for over 20 pages. The code-cracking has been described by some as a "Rosetta Stone" moment, amid hopes that it could lead to more coded letters being deciphered.
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