Tarot History Forum

In a chess or a go club there are many men. In a Bridge club you meet women. That's a matter of practical experience. At least that's a condition of modern playing clubs. But on the old pictures of card players one also can meet women.


If you don't believe it, go to Google pictures and type "Bridge Club". Or "Chess Club".

Ross Caldwell wrote: 02 May 2022, 14:27 I'm not even sure if I'd consider any of them as portraits of Sigismund, or the empress Barbara of Cilli (or Celji). But he did have a distinctive beard, which his successor Frederick III did not have, so maybe the Tarot Emperors are idealisations of how an emperor looks, based to some extent on Sigismund, especially Visconti di Modrone, even though he was dead possibly five years already.

The main reason I think that the face of the Charles VI Emperor was based on Sigismund is because the face of the Pope in the same deck really does look very much as if it was based on Eugene IV, who was pope at the time when Sigismund was emperor. It looks like a matching pair of portraits.

But I expressed myself carelessly: Strictly speaking, I do not believe that the artists who created the Charles VI or Visconti di Modrone cards necessarily thought of their Emperors as portraits of Sigismund. Rather, I think that the designs of those cards were simply derived from an earlier Emperor card which was indeed a deliberate portrait of Sigismund, and that the Pope card at that time was a deliberate portrait of Eugene, because they were the reigning emperor and pope at the time when those earlier cards were made.

Sigismund died in December 1437, so that's probably a little early for tarot, but it's well within the timeframe for Imperatori. So I see this as yet another reason to think that the Pope and Emperor cards were adopted wholesale into the tarot deck from the Imperatori deck.

But I don't think the empress card is very likely to have ever been a portrait of Sigismund's empress, any more than the popess card would have been a portrait of an actual woman connected to Eugene. I doubt that the empress's likeness would have been sufficiently widely recognized to warrant it.

[I don’t know whether I can contribute to this discussion after reading all your impressive posts, all I can offer is my personal perspective:]

Thanks Ross for:

Ross Caldwell wrote: 29 Apr 2022, 15:47 I think Imperatori was Imperatoris was Kaisersspiel was (essentially) Karnöffel.
[...]
What does the hapax "VIII" in "VIII Imperadori" mean? In line with the above, I might interpret it as a variant of Karnöffel with eight "trumps" [...]

I take this as a starting point. So the main question is the “VIII” – first of all, note that it is roman numerals as you will find them later on Tarot cards and minchiate cards. There is an order in these imperadori, it is not “8 imperarodi”. This order is very probably additive, as roman numerals are.

My personal perspective is in short:
Kaiserspiel or Karnöffel was invented at the Council of Constance (This is Huck’s idea at trionfi.com) [Council of Constance is a perfect place to invent the game due to several reasons, of which the main is the Evil Carnival of Basel 1376 and the pope being “beaten by the devil” when falling out of his car in the snow of the Arlbergpass].

It is then transferred over the Alps to the south. There people play this new game with their old cards. The game is implicit in the game and is perturbing society, since the game –as we now from Mysner (1450) and Geiler (1496) – is inverting the society (“der minder sticht den merern”) and brings chaos (“all ding verkehrt”) [both latter aspects are aspects of Carnival]. That the less beats the higher is already an aspect of triumphing over – later called “trumped over”.

This aspect is important for keeping the name Kaiserspiel in its Italian form “imperadori” (Kaiserspiel can be plural in the sense of game of the emperors), since the kings of the resting three coulors can be trumped over by emperors only. The emperors are evidently the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (who is higher than kings, e.g. the Bohemian one), the Pope (who has the clothing of a Roman Emperor after the Donation of Constantine and is higher than the Holy Roman Emperor , since he crowns him) and the Devil, who is an Emperor of the Hell (as Dante wrote in his commedia). The last emperor is the Carnival emperor as in the Roman Saturnalia, carnivalian chaos even beats the well ordered hell. Remember furthermore that in Roman times, the triumph was granted only to emperors.

As we know from Ross Caldwell, in Ferrara there is this order of c. 1422, that people should play cards in the old fashion, not in the new one. And then there is the note in the same Ferrara 1423 with "VIII Imperadori".

My perspective is that people ignored the order and continued to play imperatori – which was easy since it is implicit in the card deck. So the officials and the Este family had only one chance to get out of the situation – make the implicit explicit (this is an idea also MikeH had – as a Platonist, I prefer to say that the same idea had us both..).

Hence an additional trump suite was created for the explication. By doing so, one had to keep the trumping principle and at the same time one wanted to take the chaos out of the game – and make the game a moral one.

For this, one had to deal with the following Figures: the emperor, the pope, the devil, the Carnival emperor. Note that these are figures as the ones depicted on face cards: the king, the queen, the knight and the knave. Hence, one can take the face cards as a model, since emperor and king are close. As there was already a queen in the game, it is clear that the Empress had to go with the Emperor if one is in Renaissance times. For me, the queen was invented in Northern Italy already before 1422 due to the Renaissance culture –who valued noble woman on par with men-- as I already wrote in this very forum. [I know that JvR also writes about Queens – but there is something with him I still can’t grasp. He copies from de Cessolis, from chess as a model, this is clear. It seems as JvR somehow imports the queen from chess, something like this, I still fail to grasp it. At least all early Swiss cards reported by Kopp don’t have queens -- which is strange for me.]

Next, you mild down the highest trump, the Carnival king, and you make him the least – and you put a Carnival figure, a bagatto, a bateleur, an imposter (these were at Carnivals). Note that with these new four face cards (imposter, Empress, Emperor, Pope) you have four persons as you have in each colour (knave, knight, queen, king). All of these four trump over a king, also the imposter because he can trick the king [Does anyone know where the “trick” from “trick taking games” comes from???]. Hence all of them are emperors in a certain sense.

Next, you have to deal with the Devil, which you want to take out of the game in order to make a moral game out of it. However, the Devil is not a person as the other new four face cards (imposter, Empress, Emperor, Pope), it is a higher being, an abstraction. You cannot leave him implicit, you also have to make him explicit. Thus: you mild down the Devil to a higher being far from God [note that the Devil is farest from God in Dante’s commedia.], which can trump over even a pope (and all the other): stultitia. Being fool was being considered as being farest from god (in the general case) [On that I also wrote in this very forum. It is stultitia which will later be the fool after the 14 -> 21 + 0 transition; I write 21 + 0 following the Steele sermon.]. Note that stultitia has a feathered crown (see Scrovegni chapel or the Visconti-Sforza deck), it is also a kind of an emperor. The moral is that everybody can become stupid and has to overcome it.

With this, you open up a higher 4 cards row following Augustinus civitas terrena and civitas coeli in order to have a four plus four model. You lack three more cards trumping over stultitia with a moral sense. I propose to take Time – everyone can overcome his own stupidity with Time, you can change to a moral person. Then Death, because it ends Time, and finally Judgement, which can overcome Death and lead you to God. (By this in the higher rank Stultitia and God are farthest: Stultitia –Time – Death – Judgement (God)). Note that 4 plus 4 = 8. And 8 is the number symbolizing the resurrection at the 8th day (Lexikon der Mittelalterlichen Zahlenbedeutungen, Meyer – Suntrup, p. 566). Note furthermore that the last three: Time – Death – Judgement (God) you could also call Emperors reigning their Empire. So you have eight Emperors trumping over kings, which are in an order: “VIII imperadori”.

I admit that the content of my previous post might all be fantasy. It however builds a logical bridge for the next transition: That one has 8 additional trumps and 14 cards per colour is unsatisfactory for people for whom numerology and symmetry is important. Someone realizes that emperors –and only emperors-- can have triumphs, and realizes that a part of Petrarca’s trionfi, which were in fashion in that time, are already in the game. He puts the rest of Petrarca trionfi in some additional trumps (chastitiy being a problem, because it does not fit for a moral game of normal people or even dukes), puts some Dante in it (Dante being most popular, there were 600 manuscript copies of the commedia) and you end up with the new 14 trumps trump suite, being in symmetry with the other colours [if you are interested I can detail this]. By this you have the 5th Aristotelian element: love.

Next step is then that the trump suite becomes independent of the colours to form a game of its own: someone realizes that there is a very famous triumphal procession in the earthly paradise of Dante’s commedia in the Purgatorio, hence puts the additional lacking virtues to it (including the Christian ones, see e.g. the Visconti Brera-Brambilla deck https://cards.old.no/t/ ) – and gets an independent moral game “for the wise man” played “with open cards” called “ludus triumphus” with 18 cards (or 17, since the half of it must be 9) according to Gerolamo Cardano, Liber Ludus Aleae, chap. 24 (translated by Sydney Gould, 1961):

[...] and triumphus [surpasses everything else] in prudence and imitation of human life. So it is more fitting for the wise man to play at cards than at dice and at triumphus rather than at other games; so it is agreed (but it is not in use) that this is a sort of midway game played with open cards, very close to the game of chess. It has an end when nothing further can be done and every game makes its own end. It is played with nine cards (for this is a satisfactory number) and is the mean between the great and the small; when the cards are placed on the table one begins to play, as one is accustomed to do with hidden cards. Since this is a most ingenious game, I am very much surprised that is has been neglected by so many nations.

[Cardano is very interesting for other information, e.g. for fraud and treachery in card games, for the difference between taro and tarochi [if you read the English version translated by Gould, then beware of the two translation errors], etc.].

Hence the 14 -> 21 + 0 transition was perhaps even a 17|18 -> 21 + 0 transition, under withdrawal of the Christian virtues (and stultitia for the Rosenwald deck).

[I furthermore admit that all that above is based on the Carnival theory for Karnöffel, for which I have some evidence in my eyes. Perhaps I should put it down in this forum at least in a short notation form as soon as I can – unfortunately I have less time for this than I would prefer to have.]

vh0610 wrote: 03 May 2022, 21:33 I take this as a starting point. So the main question is the “VIII” – first of all, note that it is roman numerals as you will find them later on Tarot cards and minchiate cards. There is an order in these imperadori, it is not “8 imperarodi”. This order is very probably additive, as roman numerals are.

My personal perspective is in short:
Kaiserspiel or Karnöffel was invented at the Council of Constance (This is Huck’s idea at trionfi.com) [Council of Constance is a perfect place to invent the game due to several reasons, of which the main is the Evil Carnival of Basel 1376 and the pope being “beaten by the devil” when falling out of his car in the snow of the Arlbergpass].

It is then transferred over the Alps to the south....

This aspect is important for keeping the name Kaiserspiel in its Italian form “imperadori” (Kaiserspiel can be plural in the sense of game of the emperors), since the kings of the resting three coulors can be trumped over by emperors only. The emperors are evidently the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire (who is higher than kings, e.g. the Bohemian one), the Pope (who has the clothing of a Roman Emperor after the Donation of Constantine and is higher than the Holy Roman Emperor , since he crowns him) and the Devil, who is an Emperor of the Hell (as Dante wrote in his commedia). The last emperor is the Carnival emperor as in the Roman Saturnalia, carnivalian chaos even beats the well ordered hell

vh0601,
I'm glad you resurfaced - I'm eventually going to address an important point you make in this old (unrelated) thread:
viewtopic.php?p=24320#p24320

As for your Imperatori theory - too many leaps of faith. Of course no issue with the HRE Emperor, but these three are beyond fanciful:

* In world dominated by the Empire and Papacy, no one is ever going to call the Pope an "emperor." Not with the burning debate of who has civil power as laid out in Dante's Monarchia still lingering.

* "Emperor of Hell" seems like an unprecedented idea - and since you mention Dante in this context: those stuffed into Satan's mouth were the killers of a would-be emperor (Brutus and Cassius, along with Judas). Caesar himself is in Limbo, among the noble heathen. There is no emperor of hell.

* As for "Carnival Emperor" - is this attested anywhere in cards? And I say that because I see survivals of details of suggested in JvR in the likes of Flötner's late card deck of 1545 (where an Emperor and three kings are suggested, one being a Sultan).

What we have with either Kaiserspiel or Karnöffel is the oldest and most "common" deck identified as such by JvR -a King, Ober and Unter knaves (10 as flag would be an innovation). Kaiserspiel or Karnöffel are novel games to play with the standard deck created from Mamluk decks, but it boggles the mind as to how a pre-Reformation pope and devil could figure into a series called "Imperatori". "VIII" being an ordinal series does not exhaust the expectations of what "VIII" would signify; in a world still based on Aristotle, anyone would ask 8 what?

The four flags (the Kaisers in Kaiserpiel) could obviously derive from making the four suits associated with four royal houses (which I would argue came from or was inspired by Imperatori), such as we have in the Stuttgart (which has banners) and Hofamterspiel (which instead uses an armorial on every card). But the suits as (royal) houses by itself does not explain why there are a total of 8 related cards.

I will offer this in regard to the original deck format of King, Ober and Unter knave - JvR opposes the Ober and Unter Knave (and this is mirrored visually in some decks). If the "good" knave is paired with the King we'd get to the magic number 8, but it leads us back to why an underling, even a trusted advisor, would be counted among the Imperatori (at some point between 1377 - JvR does not mention an emperor - and 1423 someone interjected the word Imperatori and there must have been a corresponding change in the ur-deck which allowed that - the insertion of the queen over the knaves).

Phaeded

vh0610 wrote: 03 May 2022, 21:33
My personal perspective is in short:
Kaiserspiel or Karnöffel was invented at the Council of Constance (This is Huck’s idea at trionfi.com) [Council of Constance is a perfect place to invent the game due to several reasons, of which the main is the Evil Carnival of Basel 1376 and the pope being “beaten by the devil” when falling out of his car in the snow of the Arlbergpass].

Interesting in this context is an overlooked remark by Arne Jönsson, in his 1998 essay on JvR in Schweizer Spielkarten 1. It suggests that something like the disruptive social symbolism in Karnöffel was already present in a card game in 1377 -

Johannes einige allgemeine Überlegungen an. So vergleicht er das Kartenspiel in verschiedenen Zusammenhängen mit einem Krieg zwischen mehreren Parteien, und der Spieler, der die Mehrzahl der Karten gewinnt, ist der Sieger. An einem andern Ort weist Johannes darauf hin, dass einige Karten Edelleute vorstellen, andere aber Gewöhnliche, und ihre Begegnung in der Schlacht verläuft so, dass manchmal die Edelleute, manchmal die Gewöhnlichen den Sieg und den Triumph davontragen [Isti sic congrediuntur in loco certaminis quod aliquando nobiles, aliquando communes et populares victoriam obtinent et triumphum]. Hier mag beigefügt werden, dass nach Johannes der untere Marschall elf Punkte zählt, die Magd der Königin zwölf, der obere Marschall 13, die Königin 14 und der König endlich 15 Punkte.

Grund für die Verschlimmerung der Welt ist natürlich die allgemeine Verdorbenheit des Menschen.
Genau dieser Zerfall wird vom Kartenspiel aufgezeigt und dargestellt, denn "die Figurenkarten, welche vornehme Personen bedeuten, übertreffen an Wert die Karten mit gewöhnlichen Leuten, und dennoch verlieren sie oft im Spiel dermassen an Achtung, dass eine der Karten mit gewöhnlichen Leuten mehr wert ist und höher geschätzt wird als eine Karte mit den Edelleuten eines der Königreiche [Cartule ymaginum, que inportant <...> personas nobilium, excellunt cartulas popularium et tum frequenter in ludo sic vilescunt, quod una de cartulis popularium plus valet et amplius appreciatur quam aliqua de cartulis nobilium unius regni]".

(Arne Jönsson, “Der Ludus cartularum moralisatus des Johannes von Rheinfelden,” in Detlef Hoffmann, ed., Schweizer Spielkarten 1. Die Anfänge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert, Schaffhausen, 1998, pp. 135-147; 141, 143)

"John offers some general reflections. For example, he compares the card game in various contexts to a war among several parties, and the player who wins the majority of the cards is the victor. In another place, John points out that some cards present nobles, but others present commoners, and their encounter in battle is such that sometimes the nobles, sometimes the commoners, win the victory and triumph. Here it may be added that according to John the lower marshal counts eleven points, the queen's maid twelve, the upper marshal thirteen, the queen fourteen and the king finally fifteen.

"The reason for the corruption of the world is, of course, the general depravity of man. Exactly this degeneration is shown and represented by the pack of cards, for "the court cards signifying distinguished persons surpass in value the cards with common people, and yet they often lose so much respect in the game that one of the cards with common people is worth more and valued more highly than a card with the nobles of one of the kingdoms". "

Since John's morality makes the numeral cards into common professions, like Cessolis for the pawns in chess, it could be that he is speaking of games where a number card, a common person, becomes a "trump" or the most valuable card in the game, even higher than a King. On the other hand, it could be that he is referring to a Jack or Knave, which would bring it closer to Karnöffel.

I use this passage to bolster my theory that the early name for cards, naib, naipe, etc., comes from the name of the game that the Mamluks transmitted to Spanish and Italians. That is, it might have been called "Naib" because the (lower) Na'ib in the game played a special role just like this, usurping the position of the King. The Mamluks themselves did this, and it would not be surprising that sailors and traders would play a game with this kind of subversive message.

vh0610 wrote: 03 May 2022, 21:33 Remember furthermore that in Roman times, the triumph was granted only to emperors.

As we know from Ross Caldwell, in Ferrara there is this order of c. 1422, that people should play cards in the old fashion, not in the new one. And then there is the note in the same Ferrara 1423 with "VIII Imperadori".

Just two corrections here.

1.
Of course it was only after Rome gained a princeps and perpetual "Imperator" in the person of Octavian that the celebration of triumphs started to become limited to the emperors. Before that, from the 8th century to the early first century, they were awarded mostly to victorious generals.

Here is the classic list on four marble tablets which originally contained over 400 triumphs, "Fasti Triumphales," which lists 210 down to 19 B.C., with about 200 lines missing,
http://www.attalus.org/translate/fasti.html

See also Wikipedia's page -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasti_Triumphales

2.
The second refers to a decree issued by the Vicar of Provisions (Vicario di provvisione) of Milan (not Ferrara), Giacomo Teseo Bussone da Carmagnola, doctor of laws, on 24 February, 1420. The Vicar of Provisions was the duke's representative with the city, with full authority to promulgate and execute laws.

Here is the heart of the text, followed by three translations:

Obviare volentes sceleratis machinationibus et falatiis quibus multi, presertim adolescentes quotidie seducuntur a perfidis deceptoribus in praticam ludendi cum cartexelis ad numerum petendum, ut puta, de prima, tertia, quarta vel per equipolentum modum et aliquando, qui recipiendo carteselas attingunt ad numerum signorum, quod nuncupatur ludus de triginta vel ad aliquem consimilem ludum, unde compertum est multos et potissimum adolescentes maleversari pariterque summe falaciter reddi et sepissime proinde denum ad peiora deduci, utilitate pensata reypublice,
providerunt et ordinaverunt et provident et ordinant quod decetero nullus cuiusvis status et conditionis existat audeat vel presumat in civitate vel ducatu Mediolani aliquo modo ludere nec ludi facere ad aliquem ex predictis vel consimilibus ludis nec ad aliquem ludum carteselarum nisì dumtaxat secundum antiquum et rectum modum, videlicet iactando foras figuras et alia signa pro tali signo et tali figura, nominando enses vel bachulos et tale signum contra tale signum et hec omnia sub pena florenorum decem cuilibet contrafacienti auferenda.

My translation:

Wishing to avoid the wicked manipulations and trickery by which numerous persons, especially youths, are every day corrupted through perfidious deceptions in playing card games for a specified number, for example the first, third, fourth, or some equivalent manner and at once, those who, on receiving the cards, reach a certain number of signs, which is a game called Thirty, or at any similar game, due to which many, especially youths, go wrong, and are also paid back in a particularly deceptive way and, as a result, very often led to worse. Concerned for the interests of the Republic, they (the 12 of Provisions, magistrates) have made provision, and ordered, and provide and order that henceforth no one of whatever status or condition should venture nor presume, in the city or the duchy of Milan, in any way to play or to cause to be played at any of the aforesaid or similar games, nor at any game of cards, except to the extent that it follows the ancient and proper way, that is to say in throwing forth the figures and other signs for such a sign and such a figure, in calling swords or batons and such a sign against such a sign, and all of this under penalty of 10 florins that will be applicable to whoever contravenes.

Thierry Depaulis' translation:

Voulant éviter les machinations et tromperies scélérates par lesquelles nombre de personnes, surtout les jeunes, sont quotidiennement corrompues par de perfides escrocs dans la pratique du jeu de cartes où l'on cherche à obtenir la valeur, par exemple, de la première, de la troisième, de la quatrième [carte], ou de façon équivalente en une fois, et ceux qui atteignent, en recevant les cartes, un [certain] nombre de signes (points), qu'on appelle le jeu du trente (ludus de triginta) ou à tout jeu semblable, où l'on sait que plusieurs — et surtout les jeunes — tournent mal, et sont également entraînés de façon particulièrement trompeuse et, par conséquent, très souvent conduits au pire.
Soucieux de l'intérêt de la République, ils [les magistrats] ont décidé et ordonné, décident et ordonnent que, du reste, personne, de quelque état ou condition que ce soit, dans la ville ou le duché de Milan, n'ose ou n'ait l'audace, d'aucune manière, de jouer ou de faire jouer à un quelconque des jeux susdits ou semblables ni à aucun jeu de cartes, sauf si l'on se borne à la manière ancienne et droite, c'est-à-dire en rejetant les figures et autres signes pour tel signe et telle figure, en désignant les épées ou les bâtons et tel signe contre tel signe, et tout cela sous peine de 10 florins appliquée à quiconque contreviendra.

Google automatic translation of the Latin (a much improved tool since only a few years ago), which needs to be cleaned up only a little:

Wanting to confront the unholy machinations and frauds by which many, especially young people, are daily seduced by treacherous impostors into the practice of playing with cartexelis, to beg for the number, for example, of the first, third, fourth, or equivalent modes and sometimes It is called a game of thirty or a game of a similar kind, from which it has been found that many and most of all young men do evil, and likewise be rendered most slyly, and very often, therefore, even ten, to be brought to worse things, considering the common good,
they have provided, ordained, and provide, and ordained that henceforward no one, of any state and condition, may dare, or presume to play in any way in the state or duchy of Milan, nor play games for any of the aforesaid or similar games, nor for any game of the cartesels, except only according to the ancient and right manner, namely, By tossing out the figures and other signs for such a sign and such a figure, naming the swords or sticks and such a sign against such a sign. Further, a prohibited game, and in like manner, anyone who overcomes such a prohibited game incurs the same penalty.

vh0610 wrote: 03 May 2022, 21:33 My perspective is that people ignored the order and continued to play imperatori – which was easy since it is implicit in the card deck. So the officials and the Este family had only one chance to get out of the situation – make the implicit explicit (this is an idea also MikeH had – as a Platonist, I prefer to say that the same idea had us both..).

Hence an additional trump suite was created for the explication. By doing so, one had to keep the trumping principle and at the same time one wanted to take the chaos out of the game – and make the game a moral one.

I like your basic idea here. It does seem very plausible that the ruling class would want to remove, or at least moderate, the aspect of carnivalesque social disruption in the game of Karnöffel/Imperatori, and this could have been done effectively in the manner you describe, by creating dedicated trump cards instead of repurposing the existing suit cards.

However, I disagree with you about the subjects of those eight trump cards, and I am surprised that you would remove the Devil, as its presence in the tarot sequence together with the Pope and Emperor is one of the main reasons to think there must be some link between tarot, Imperatori, and Karnöffel.

In the 14 + 8 theory thread, I have already given many reasons for having a different view of the identity of the eight Imperatori trumps, but I will present another reason now.

As I explained in my "Step 2" post, my view is that the eight trumps of Imperatori could correspond to the eight "personages" of the tarot trump sequence, the eight trumps which represent actual beings or characters, as opposed to allegories, abstract concepts, or events. This is in part because the special figures in German games like Karnöffel were always actual personages, never allegories. The eight personages in the the tarot trump sequence—and it is noteworthy that there are precisely eight of them—are the Fool, Bagatella, Emperor and Empress, Pope and Popess, Hanged Man (the "Traitor"), and the Devil.

Now, apart from being in that list, what do the following trumps all have in common?
.
.
.
.
.
.

The answer is, of course, that they all have a little retinue of smaller attendant figures accompanying the trump subject.
("retinue" and "attendant" are admittedly perhaps not ideal terms in the case of the damned souls captured by the Devil, but you get the idea.)

These smaller figures are found accompanying six of tarot's eight personages. I think it's fairly safe to assume that they would have accompanied the Popess on the earliest cards too. We have no direct evidence of this because no early Popess cards survive except the one from the Visconti Sforza deck, and that deck appears to have rigorously removed the smaller figures from all the cards that had them. (The Cary sheet figure can't be considered a reliable example because it is a strange pope-popess-bishop hybrid, and its small male attendant could have come from an earlier Pope card.) But given that the Pope, Emperor, and Empress all had these little retinues, it seems a safe assumption that the Popess did too.

This means that these small attendant figures appear to have once accompanied all the Karnöffel-style personages in the tarot deck except the Hanged Man, but they did not appear on any of the other trumps at all. This strengthens the impression that those cards form a distinct subset within the tarot trumps.

When we look at the Rothschild cards—which I think are likely to be our only known surviving example of an Imperatori deck, because they seem too old to be tarot—we find those small figures accompanying the Emperor there too (where they serve the very useful function of helping to distinguish him from the otherwise rather similar King of Coins):
.

So I would hypothesize that the reason these little retinues are found on nearly all the eight personages, but on none of the other tarot trumps, is because those eight personages were the "VIII Imperatori," and in the Imperatori deck, all the trumps except the Hanged Man had their special rank marked out by the addition of these little attendant figures.

In work

1. Matthias Ringmann

In April 1507, Ringmann and Waldseemüller published their Introduction to Cosmography with an accompanying world map. The Introduction was written in Latin and included a Latin translation of the Soderini letter. In a preface to the Letter, Ringmann wrote

I see no reason why anyone could properly disapprove of a name derived from that of Amerigo, the discoverer, a man of sagacious genius. A suitable form would be Amerige, meaning Land of Amerigo, or America, since Europe and Asia have received women's names.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amerigo_Vespucci

Ringmann ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthias_RingmannMatthias Ringmann
invented also a teaching game with cards for Latin grammar ...

Grammatica Figurata (1509)
The Grammatica Figurata was first published by Mathias Ringmann in 1509. This work was an attempt to enliven Donatus' Ars Minor by printing up illustrated card sets for each grammatical rule. Apparently the children would have a card set. The rules are not explained at length, but a few hints are scattered here and there in the work. The final section on "Exclamations" has a sentence on how to figure out which student has won. Each card represented a part of speech, a gender, a case, or a tense, etc. Depending upon the teacher's questions a student would play the appropriate card or cards. Long believed to be lost, one copy of Grammatica figurata was found and reprinted in 1905.[8][9

8 Figures .... Links to the pictures at this page ...
http://dl.ub.uni-freiburg.de/diglit/rin ... 62297cad63
I. De nomine. .... Priest
II. De pronomine. .... ? Gender ? Kaplan ?
III. De verborum. .... King
IV. De adverbio. .... Queen
V. De participio. .... Monk
VI. De coniunctione. .... Cupbearer
VII. De praepositione. .... Bellringer
VIII. De interjectione. ... Fool

Die Idee, ein grammatikalisches Kartenspiel herauszugeben, war übrigens nicht von Ringmann ausgegeben, sondern von Walter Lud, Sekretär des Königs René II von Lothringen (Kinf René II had died 1508) und Kanonikus von St. Dié.

A biography of this man (from 1884) ....
https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz99142.html

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2. ... reported by Master Ingold

Nathaniel wrote: 04 May 2022, 10:15 So I would hypothesize that the reason these little retinues are found on nearly all the eight personages, but on none of the other tarot trumps, is because those eight personages were the "VIII Imperatori," and in the Imperatori deck, all the trumps except the Hanged Man had their special rank marked out by the addition of these little attendant figures.