Huck wrote

I saw once pictures of colored playing cards printed by woodcuts c. 1400 or 1410 or something like this ... in Spanish. The info and the page has disappeared. It would be something like the oldest woodcuts.
I could imagine, that Spain had been the first with woodcut cards. Germany mentions usually the Christopher of 1418 as the oldest woodcut.

Well, perhaps we can find them. First, are they

http://www.wopc.co.uk/spain/morsica or http://www.wopc.co.uk/spain/moorish/index

If not, when you say "cards" do you mean individual cards or a sheet of uncut cards?

No, not these. I think, they were a sheet and they had more colors.

The article seemed to announce a new finding of old playing cards. It was Spanish text (press article ?) and my understanding of the text was limited. The picture was rather small and the article not very long. Maybe this was around 2007-10.

Ross (2005, http://www.tarotforum.net/archive/index ... 51471.html ) once referred to ...

http://www.wopc.co.uk/history/earlyrefs.html

"The word naip appears in a Catalan rhyme dictionary of 1371, the Llibre de Concordances, compiled by the poet Jaume March. The presence of the word in such a dictionary denotes that it was already in familiar use in that region. The Llibre de Concordances or Diccionari de Rims exists in three manuscripts - one in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, another in the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona and the third in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid. It was written 'at the request of the most high and powerful Lord Pedro by the grace of God King of Aragon and completed in the year MCCCLXXJ" (the reference is to Pedro IV of Aragon and III of Catalonia). A printed edition, edited by A. Griera, appeared in Barcelona in 1921 and is one of a series of philological studies published for the Institute of the Catalan Language (A. Griera, ed. Diccionari de Rims de Jaume March, (Barcelona: Institut d'Estudi Catalani) 1921, p. 63). Under the words ending -ip we find 'Macip, felip, garip, xorip, naip, estip, dip'. In Catalan, no meaning other than 'playing-card' has ever been attributed to the word"

(Trevor Denning, The Playing-Cards of Spain (London, Cygnus Arts, 1996) p. 14).

At the same place he referred to a note in Siena 1377:

"Siena Stat. No. 42 (Iudex) f. 95, e No. 43, f. 45: 'Ludens ad naibos puniatur sicut luderet ad zardum' 1377, VI Novembris".
(Ludovico Zdekauer, "Il Giuoco in Italia nei secoli XIII e XIV e specialmente in Firenze" (Archivio Storico Italiano IV, XVIII (1886) p. 64; rpt. in Zdekauer, "Il Gioco d'Azzardo nel Medioevo Italiano", Salimbeni, Firenze, 1993 p. 61).

A statute of the city of Siena on 6 November 1377 states that "Playing cards will be punished the same as if playing dice".

Muslim Mercenaries in Italy

I keep circling back to the prerequisite for card-playing: LEISURE. Besides the small courts of nobles, in the 14th century we are primarily talking clerics, soldiers, and perhaps the nascent notarial class that would form the backbone of 15th century humanism. Given the Church’s stance on gaming, it seems soldiers would be the most likely means of diffusion as they campaign far and wide and had plenty of down time garrisoning and in the winter months (e.g., the time of year when Sforza famously ordered 2 decks of tarot – December 11, 1450).

The 14th century saw the emergence of mercenary “free companies” (e.g., the infamous White Company of Hawkwood) which were effectively standing armies that saw its men transverse Europe with impunity. The two earliest references to card-playing in Italy were in cities embroiled in the mercenary armies: Viterbo and Florence. The latter’s connection is obvious (just look at Uccello's painting of Hawkwood in the Duomo or his famous Battle of San Romano paintings of Niccolo Tolentino and Michelotto da Cotignola) and the former was often home to the non-Avignon Popes and then a mercenary despot: “Without the popes, the city fell into the hands of the Di Vicos. In the fourteenth century, Giovanni di Vico had created a seignory extending to Civitavecchia, Tarquinia, Bolsena, Orvieto, Todi, Narni and Amelia. His dominion was crushed by Cardinal Gil de Albornoz in 1354, sent by the Avignonese popes to recover the Papal States, who built the castle. In 1375, the city gave its keys to Francesco Di Vico, son of the previous tyrant, but thirteen years later the people killed him and assigned the city first to Pope Urban VI, and then to Giovanni di Sciarra di Vico, Francesco's cousin. But Pope Boniface IX's troops drove him away in 1396 and established a firm papal suzerainty over the city.”

The Spanish cardinal Albornoz, is interesting in his own right as the leader of the Papal armies that reduced Viterbo and much else of the Papal States. He could have provided both a conduit for card-playing, as it developed in Italy, back to both France (Avignon) and Spain as well as a means of diffusion of card-playing throughout Italy itself via his widespread campaigns. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gil_%C3%8 ... e_Albornoz

Finally, to the heart of my point: do we really need to trace trade routes back to Islamic lands when there was a sizeable Muslim population in Italy? Around 20,000 Muslims were moved from Sicily to Lucera, where the more prosperous of them were mercenaries for both the Angevin and Hohenstaufen armies in Italy, until the community was destroyed in 1300 (which would have just been one more cause for diffusion, particularly via those elite families that converted to Christianity). Again, we have a mercenary connection and now a means of diffusion even into Germany.

For Lucera, see: Julie Taylor, Muslims in Medieval Italy: The Colony at Lucera, 2005 (especially their military service at 102f). http://www.amazon.com/Muslims-Medieval- ... 0739114840

Phaeded

Your suggestion of Muslim mercenaries is worth pursuing, Phaeded. The problem with Muslim mercenaries in the early period, up to 1300, is that it seems prima facie too early. Cards are mentioned in the Arabian Nights, but these stories are from the area between Persia and Egypt, according to Wikipedia's article on that book. I wonder in fact if the story mentioning cards is not from the second layer of stories, from Syria and Egypt of the 13th century onward--i.e. the Mamluks--which Wikipedia says included many "showing a preoccupation with sex, magic or low life" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thous ... One_Nights).

So all we really know about in relation to "Muslim cards" is the Mamluks, and even then we cannot assume that the Mamluks had the cards before they existed in Christian Europe. From the Mamluks' possession of cards it may be inferred perhaps that cards had been known in the areas from which they had been taken, chiefly in the Caucasus and southern Caspian Sea area (and again we can't assume any particular date). But what is the connection between the Muslims of 13th century Sicily/Southern Italy (who under Frederick II did go north to fight) and playing cards? We can't assume there was one that early.

After 1300, Taylor in the book you referred to has no reports of Muslim soldiers in Angevin Italy. I cannot imagine that even Christian converts would have been trusted in any responsible position, because of the intense repression of Muslims at that period. Their military role seems to have been limited to armament making. The Muslims of Lucera were not simply dispersed; they were mostly expropriated and sold into slavery. Their slave status remained even if they converted to Christianity. Mosques were not permitted, nor were the traditional calls to prayer (Taylor p. 203). For this period, the only mention of Muslims in southern Italy--and there is no mention of them going elsewhere--is that 'in 1302 Charles II permitted the establishment of 200 Muslim hearths in the land of Civitate" (Ibid.).

Nor would it have been much better in Sicily, which after 1282 was in Aragonese hands. Aragon had enslaved the Muslims of Minorca, Taylor reports. Before that, they had routinely enslaved prisoners of war in the conquest of Valencia, I learn on other websites. Taylor does not elaborate on Aragonese policy toward Muslims in Sicily. In any case, there is no suggestion of playing cards in either Sicily or Southern Italy in the early reports.

There remains, yes, Northern Italy. But again there is the problem of documenting any Muslims with cards except the Mamluks. Also, if Muslims fleeing north in the late 13th century had playing cards, it seems that we would have heard about playing cards there before 1377, and there would have been reports closer to the border with the Angevin kingdom.

What remains, it seems to me, is the possibility that Northern Italy and parts of the Spanish peninsula had among its mercenaries Mamluks themselves, who by the 14th century were hardly slaves, given that they ran Egyptian Sultanate. However it seems to me that unless documents can be found to that effect, we cannot assume that this was the case, given how threatened the Christian powers felt from the growing power of the Ottomans, the newly Muslimized Mongols, and the Mamluks themselves, who continued to rule over Palestine.

Mike,
Granted, three generations from the time of the destruction of Lucera (1300) to the time we hear of card-playing in written records (c. 1370) is considerable, but perhaps the question needs to be placed in the context of woodcut printing production. Hand-painted Mamluk decks would have been rare and thus perhaps some limited version of mass production (inclusive of the arrival of paper) was needed before it was ubiquitous enough:

… by 1276 [paper]mills were established in Fabriano, Italy and in Treviso and other northern Italian towns by 1340. Papermaking then spread further northwards, with evidence of paper being made in Troyes, France by 1348, in Holland sometime around 1340–1350, in Mainz, Germany in 1320, and in Nuremberg by 1390 in a mill set up by Ulman Stromer.[23] This was just about the time when the woodcut printmaking technique was transferred from fabric to paper in the old master print and popular prints. (paper – Wiki)

So we need these two historical processes:
1. Muslims and Christians interacting on a social enough of a level for the former to teach the game to the latter; either that happened in the Holy Land during the crusades or via the Muslims serving in Italy, or both. Given the hostilities in the Holy Land the default answer would seem to be Muslims in Italy serving alongside Christians as fellow mercenaries when there was time to share pastimes. And mercenaries tend to be multi-generational - it was a "trade" passed on to one's son, like Muzio to Francesco Sforza. No reason the Muslims did not behave the same way. And given the dissolute lifestyle of mercenaries (e.g., see Petrarch on this subject), I don't see conversion as that big of a problem for a Muslim soldier, who would not have been in Lucera when it was destroyed, but in an army....perhaps for generations.
2. Ubiquity of the game for notice by chroniclers – the arrival of paper and transfer of woodcut printing to paper; this happens in the time-frame of the earliest notices of cards.

Mikeh wrote:
Mosques were not permitted, nor were the traditional calls to prayer

All the more reason to convert cards with Arab script to something Christian or at least “European,” especially by those who were literally converts (one way to retain a modicum of one’s culture).
And the issue of slavery does not preclude the military emphasis – slaves were often pushed into military roles, especially if that was their background.

I understand all of this is conjecture, but there needs to be some hypothesis bridging the spatial-temporal gap of “Mamluk” and card-production in Europe. Cards existed prior to the military involvement of Muslims in either Sicily or on the Italian peninsula, so its necessarily a logical possibility.

Phaeded

PS Just found this - this would be in favor of the Crusader theory (the timing, 1365, is "impeccable"), but why a brutally sacked and enslaved Mamluk Alexandria would want to teach their conquerors a game begs the question. And why no early evidence of cards in Venice (the returning crusaders, rich with plunder, by way of Rhodes and Cyprus)? At all events - an interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandrian_Crusade

Phaeded wrote

I understand all of this is conjecture, but there needs to be some hypothesis bridging the spatial-temporal gap of “Mamluk” and card-production in Europe. Cards existed prior to the military involvement of Muslims in either Sicily or on the Italian peninsula, so its necessarily a logical possibility.

How do we know that playing card existed in Sicily or the Italian peninsula prior to the military involvement of Muslims there? That would be of the time of Frederick II's conflict with the Pope, i.e. 1250 or so. That is quite dubious, given that Ghengis Khan's army only arrived in the Middle East around that time.

It is also seems to me uncertain that Muslims with military expertise would as slaves been entrusted with combat responsibilities in Italian Christian armies, even ones fighting only other Christians, because of a general antipathy to Muslims by the papacy and the secular authorities in Italy after 1300. In Taylor's book, examples stop after 1300. It is not ruled out, because Christians might have liked to see in practice what Muslim military technique was like, but it needs some verification.

I have been reading Rosenthal's book. The problem of Islamic cards in the Mediterranean area--even including Persia--seems, from what he provides, to be essentially the same as that of Christian cards: what is the verification of their existence there before 1377?

There is the word kanjifah, which occurs in the Arabian Nights. But the fact that games of kanjifah are not talked about at all, unlike the games of chess and nard suggests that the word might be a later interpolation. Also, the Arabian Nights wasn't all written at the same time. The Persian original was very short, contributing the frame story and a few others. Many stories were added, starting in the 13th century, in Egypt and Syria, including after 1377.

The word occurs in the Persian dictionary--of 1892, Rosenthal tells us (note 267, p. 63). That date makes it "very important to know the date of the earliest recorded date of kanjifah and to have references to passages clarifying its use" (same note). He adds (not quoted by Franco)

In the article cited (p. 264), R. Ettinghausen refers to a Persian occurrence from the fifteenth century.

Ettinghausen also speaks, based on information provided by Laila Serageddin, of their use, under the name kanjifah, "for heavy gambling involving considerable sums of money" pp. 62-63). Rosenthal does not say where this was, although he does, in footnote 264 (not quoted by Franco), give the date: 1417-18. That is enough after 1377 as not to rule out Persian acquisition of playing cards (in Persian, ganjifah) from the West or from the Mamluks. There remains the problem of accounting for the term, ganjifah or kanjifah, itself. But that remains in any case, no matter when it came into use. If it indeed comes from the Chinese (itself problematic), it could just as easily have come via the Mamluk homelands of the Black and Caspian Seas in the 15th century as from Persia in the 14th.

There is also the absence of playing cards in discussions where it might be expected to occur, such as the legal discussions of what games were forbidden and which were merely sinful. Even placing bets on the outcome of horse racing or chess games, practices that both were very popular, is discussed. Rosenthal gives many examples, but none mention or suggest cards. There was even a Mamluk sultan, reigning 1346-1347, killed for his excessive indulgence in games--polo, the "stick game", and wrestling, who "encouraged gambling (qimar) and all kinds of gambling sports", in Rosenthal's words (p. 54; that he was Mamluk is stated p. 157). Cards are not mentioned.

On the other hand, it may not be surprising that cards are not mentioned in legal arguments. These arguments depend on precedent, and the precedents are all from the centuries immediately following that of the Prophets, stopping around the 9th century. (But none of the contemporary examples that give rise to the reference to precedent involve cards either.)

If the Mamluks did have cards by the first half of the 14th century, the spread of cards to Muslims elsewhere, including lands with Christians, is not a problem. Games whose main justification was gambling (as opposed to useful training for war, for example) were prohibited, but enforcement was lax. Rosenthal (p. 110):

The truth is that we do not hear much about gamblers being punished by either the legal authorities or the political authorities. Social conditions affecting gambling appear to have prevented most gambling offenses from reaching the courts.

It was mainly when someone filed a complaint, and then when the complaint involved the person's neglect of his important duties, such as supporting his family, was someone prosecuted. A compulsive chess player could be prosecuted in similar circumstances. On the other hand, Rosenthal does mention occasional raids on gambling establishments. It seems rather like the situation during Prohibition in the U.S. There was no lack of liquor and establishments that served liquor, much of it smuggled in from Canada, often with the connivance of American customs agents, even if there were raids and scandals that made headlines.However liquor was mentioned by name; in medieval Egypt, playing cards remain unmentioned. Perhaps they were allowed only to Mamluks, because of their foreign origin and high status.

Given the war in Spain between Muslims and Christians it would not surprise me that Mamluk mercenaries were employed, although documentation would certainly help. From them it would be easy for card games to spread to the non-military Muslim populations and to Muslims in Christian territory (including prisoners of war put into slavery), and then to Christians. The cards themselves would be brought by the mercenaries themselves at first and then made locally, perhaps initially by Arab artisans from elsewhere. But all this remains on the level of conjecture.

Even the Muslim origin of the term naibi is not conclusive regarding their Muslim origin, I think. Two games are mentioned in the summer 1377 Florentine records, zara and naibi. "Zara" is a word that probably derives from a Muslim source. If you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, you will see it suggested that "hazard" comes from the Turkish "zara". "Zara" is a dice game. I find it highly unlikely that cubic dice, dadi in Italian, were not known in Italy before the late 14th century. Their documentation in Europe is widespread. Perhaps zara was an Arab or Turkish game.

A friend of mine, Chrissy LaVeille, called my attention to a painting of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1454), at http://www.history.com/topics/hundred-years-war, top of the page, that shows two men in turbans, apparently Muslim mercenaries. One is in the center, with a red turban, and the other at the far right, in a white turban. Now all we need to know is why they were put there. Was it just for novelty or on the basis of some tradition? And when the painting was done. It looks 18th or 19th century to me, and not at all likely from the time and place in question. However it is something.

mikeh wrote:A friend of mine, Chrissy LaVeille, called my attention to a painting of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1454), at http://www.history.com/topics/hundred-years-war ...

The link don't work.

It works when I click on it. Maybe it somehow doesn't meet EU requirements, I don't know. I was able to download the image and then upload it to my blog of images. It doesn't have the blurb saying it is the Hudred Years' War, but at least you can see one of the "Mamluks", the one in the center.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1f-29kQib6c/ ... war-H.jpeg

I can't find the one on the right margin; it seems to have got lost. Looking at images of Mamluk soldiers at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamluk, it seems to me improbable that a Mamluk actually would have worn a turban into battle, as opposed to a more protective option. However the depiction is very similar to one of Wikipedia's images, notably one done in the 18th century by Carle Vernet.