Konrad Kyeser's Bellifortis

[Bernd]

An interesting article exploring the conections between Fontana, Kyeser and Taccola:
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Conrad Kyeser, the son of South German burghers, authored Bellifortis [Strong in War] between 1402 and 1405 while in exile in his home town of Eichstätt. A strikingly illustrated treatise written in Latin verse, Bellifortis is the earliest fifteenth-century technical book from the German territories. Kyeser was exiled in 1402 when Sigismund, king of Hungary and of Germany, defeated Prague, imprisoned his half-brother, the Bohemian king Wenceslas, and sent the court, presumably including Kyeser, into exile. Banished to his hometown of Eichstätt in Bavaria, Kyeser wrote his treatise in the last years of his life. The manuscript,of which there are at least fourteen exemplars, was illustrated by illuminators from the Prague scriptorium who were passing through Eichstatt after their own expulsion.
Bellifortis is the response of a bitterly angry military physician to the imperial politics of his time. Kyeser had been present at Nicopolis on that "impious day" in 1396 when the Ottoman Turks had precipitated the flight "with unheard of audacity of Prince Sigismund, hermaphroditic Hungarian king," and his imperial army. He was a victim in the struggle between Sigismund and Wenceslas, both sons of the Luxembourg emperor Charles IV.
Kyeser dedicated his treatise to the emperor Ruprecht (ruled 1400-1410) from the Palatinate (Pfalz), a weak emperor chosen by the electors after their unprecedented deposal of Wenceslas in 1400. In Bellifortis Kyeser offers technological strength to the emperor Ruprecht, advertising the efficacy of astrology, sorcery, mechanical technology, and weaponry. The lavish illustrations of the treatise depict cannon, rockets, chariots, a counterweight trebuchet, battering rams, mobile bridges, ships, mills, scaling ladders, incendiary devices, crossbows, and instruments of torture-weapons, machines, and devices both old and new. The large, expensive format,the striking illustrations, and the text in Latin verse all suggest that the emperor Ruprecht to whom the treatise was dedicated was also representative of the intended audience. Kyeser wrote a prince's book, not an engineer's.

We learn that the earliest Bellifortis copies were illustrated by artists from the court or Prague and that - like all high profile medieval manuscripts - the target audience was nobility not craftsmen. The same is true for herbals like Dioscorides.

Unfortunately, Pamela Long does not address Kyeser's codes but she writes on Fontana:

The encryption of the Bellicorum instrumentorum liber can be seen as a display of writing technique involving codification rather than as a means of concealing technical information. In a cogent analysis, the editors of the facsimile edition conclude that the single existing manuscript of the work and the manuscript of Fontana's Secretum were both produced by scribes. They hypothesize that Fontana developed the code when he wrote the Secretum and that he then instructed scribes to use it to copy the earlier Bellicorum instrumentorum liber.
The secrecy embodied in the encryption is unrelated to technological detail. As the editors of the work suggest, Fontana was interested in the idea of the code itself rather than in hiding technological secrets per se.

She concludes:

Although the treatises of Kyeser, Fontana, and Taccola exhibit important differences, they also share a number of characteristics. They are written in Latin, are lavishly illustrated, and display a variety of mechanical contrivances and weapons in lucid detail. They are dedicated to rulers or, in some cases, seem to have been written for rulers or military captains.They directly associate military and political power with technological power in a new way. They enhance the status of mechanical disciplines by explicating them in Latin and by associating them with antiquity and with learning.

There's a lot of other sources listed in the article but I'm out of time for now. I recommend reading it.