Blaise de Vigenère

Blaise de Vigenère (5 April 1523 to 19 February 1596) was a French diplomat, cryptographer, translator and alchemist, born in Saint-Pourçain in Bourbonnais. He served as a secretary in the courts of Francis I and the House of Nevers, went to the Diet of Worms in 1545, and spent several years in Rome, where he read about cryptography and met cryptologists. In 1567 and 1568 he devised an autokey cipher, which he published in 1586 in his Traicté des chiffres ou secrètes manières d'escrire. It used ten alphabets in a reciprocal table and a letter agreed beforehand as the primer, and it differs from the method Giovan Battista Bellaso published in 1553. That earlier method was misattributed to Vigenère in the nineteenth century and became widely known as the Vigenère cipher. Vigenère retired to Paris in 1570 and wrote or translated more than twenty books. He died of throat cancer in 1596.