It was in the seventeenth century that ciphers mainly consisting of Arabic figures became the mainstream form of cipher in France, while figure ciphers had already been common in Italy in the sixteenth century. There were instances of French numerical ciphers from the sixteenth century, but it has been observed that they tended to be (albeit not exclusively) related to Italy (my 2021 blogpost; Desenclos and Lasry (HistoCrypt2024) section 4). So when I found an unsolved numerical cipher, with cleartext in Italian, from Francis I's time, I wondered whether Italian ciphers were shared with the French court so early.
The letter is BnF Clair. 331 (Gallica), f.156-157, titled "Lettre sur Copie d'une Lettre escrite au Roy, du 15.e de mars, et d'une y jointe a M.r le Grand Maistre du 15. dud. mois."
Daniel Bourdeau solved this in September 2026. It turned out to be a simple substitution cipher with some homophones and code symbols (The reading of the code symbols are discussed in Bourdeau's write-up.).
Bourdeau finds that the addressee is Francis I because the ciphertext occurs before the valediction and the letter to the Grand Master. Also, he seems to have found existing evidence that the sender is Giovan Gioacchino da Passano (Jean Joachim, sieur de Vaux) ("the existing identification and London diplomatic context") (see his notes). Considering that his write-up refers to f.149 (a different letter in Italian with a ciphertext in a different cipher; see the next section), he seems to refer to "Signor Joachim" on f.149. He also finds another letter by Vaux in Letters and Papers, iv, no.6307 (British History Online).
Giovan Gioacchino da Passano, also known as Monseigneur de Vaulx, was a Genoese friar and an agent for Francis I. He was knowledgeable in the financial field and had connections to bankers in Genoa. He was employed as a secret agent by the regent, Louise of Savoy, in the summer of 1524 during the absence of the king. He led the French delegation to negotiate with Wolsey to conclude an alliance with England against the Emperor. In 1530, he was again resident in London (Guillaume Alonge (2018), "Au service du roi, au service de l'Évangelie", in C. Michon & L. Petris (eds.), Le cardinal Jean du Bellay (OpenEdition).
Signor Joachim to Montmorency, 10 and 13 March 1530.
Bourdeau seems to consider this Joachim is Passano above.
The original of this copy is in BnF fr.3012 no.51 (f.109, view 164), which is referred to by Bourdeau's write-up for another achievement mentioned below.
This seems to remain unsolved.
(October 2026) Craig Vander Galien solved it by using OpenAI Codex and Anthropic Claude (received on 1 October 2026). He found that the ciphertext can be read with "Gaspar Sormano's Cipher" identified by George Lasry from letters in BnF fr.3096 (see another article) and also identified the key as a nineteenth-century reconstruction by Paul Friedmann (BnF NAF 4206 no.5). Now I see that Sormano's use of this cipher with Joachin de Vaulx was on record. I verified the reading as follows.
One symbol for S, not in Friedmann's reconstruction, better fits SS (volentierisimo, posibil, trovase) but the original assignment S is kept until it is checked against BnF fr.3096 letters.
Count Guido Rangone to Montmorency, 24 December 1529
Count Guido Rangone to Montmorency, 10 January 1530
Daniel Bourdeau solved these. He also identified the originals of these copies are BnF fr.3070 f.81 (DECDE R4249) and BnF fr.3082, f.42.
This cipher employs arbitrary symbols rather than Arabic figures.