I'm not sure why anyone thought Rumpf was going to clarify anything here - interesting article, if you're interested in 16th century card suit variants, but sheds little light on the question at hand.
Rumpf's methodology: the hypothesis that the cards were misread and that the earliest names associated with the suits misinterpreted, with the bulk of her research based on etymology (in turn based on research of a relative - her dad's? See the footnote on p. 28: "The derivation schemes developed so far for the origin of the playing card suits by W.L. Schreiber136 and Fritz Rumpf137,
Fritz Rumpf, Spielkarten, in: Jahrbuch für historische Volkskunde 3/4 (Berlin 1934) 340).
Where things go awry are using premises without using hardly any 14th/15th century sources - again, no JvR but makes much of a yet another moralizing monk (Augustinian this time) a certain brother Berchtold quoted from a 1460 work, who in turn is essentially plagiarizing St. Bernard of Siena; Rumpf notes: "This text is remarkable in that it names both the Italian and the German playing card suits, with an explicit distinction being made between Italian and German card games....[e.g.] The coins in the Italians signify covetousness, the folly of the staff, or the folly of the bells, as is clear in the Germans, the cups, or they believe, signify drunkenness and lust. It was also
aichel [acorn] in the German records" (7). All that means is that German and Italian suits co-existed; there is no proof of priority here.
At least she admits her assumption, which is not backed up by a single fact:
Details of the game, such as suits, cannot be found in the early records about card games in Germany and Switzerland. One can only assume that it was mainly Italian cards with the suits Spade, Bastoni, Coppe and Denari.(5)
[and]
A German player who does not speak the language, who does not know the meaning of the usual designations for the Italian suits and possibly cannot relate them to the object depicted, also passes on a meaningless foreign word to the manufacturer of the card game. (6)
Its a reasonable hypothesis of course that cards entered ports (Italian, Spanish and French) before hitting the European interior, but that's only meaningful if there was were no means for a quick diffusion for cards throughout Europe (and we have that with the Hospitallers, especially well represented in the region under consideration and headquartered in Rhodes, with numerousLevant connections, and present at the raid on Alexandria). That there were parallel paths of European adaptation can't be ruled out and the earliest surviving evidence of the Morisca points to a "messy" mingling of suits (oddly mixing some Italian pip suits with differing court suit signs).
To reiterate the basic problem - the fly in the Italian ointment answer - is the clear presence of a suit of flowers in the Morisca deck. When one looks at the earliest surviving Mamluk cards one can clearly see why all manner of flower/fruit suits ("Leafs", acorns, roses, pomegranates, etc.) were adapted in German cards - the Mamluk card backgrounds are literally crawling with these devices:
Again, the presence of the polo sticks and the Saracen in the Morisca deck point to contact with the Mamluk decks themselves; the suits of acorns and flowers can easily be understood as a reading of the
horror vacui of the Mamluk cards. The only other contemporary surviving deck besides the Morisca is the "Moorish Sheet" dated to the early 15th century and briefly described here -
https://www.wopc.co.uk/spain/moorish/index - and which features a more abbreviated attempt to replicate the scrolling vines/branches/fruit/flowers of Mamluk cards:
Moorish Sheet of Playing Cards, c. 1410 - detail .jpg
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You'll note above that there is neither cups (not lidded or open) nor acorns for one of the suits, but rather what looks like a
tear-drop balustrade columnar element, clearly holding up the cornice-like horizontal handrails - stacked in parallel courses, except for the two and the three. That the two of "balustrades" has flowers and poppy(pomegranate?) pods, and the three of "balustrades" has acanthus leaves - very much looking like oak leaves - as well as trilobed bases for the tear-drops, allows for one to see how acorns could be derived from this early attempt at replicating the Mamluks. It is therefore possible the Swiss/Germans had such an intermediary deck before them, or simply drew the same conclusions from the Mamluks that a tear-drop shape was warranted, and with the surrounding scrolling plants, added leaves - and came up with the all too familiar acorn. The flowers surrounding the two of batons/polo sticks may have necessarily also lead to the notion of court cards with flowers. One could also imagine that the the triangular bases may have been adapted into the curved element beneath acorns. A stone Islamic balustrade of a more intricate design:
https://islamicart.museumwnf.org/databa ... us21;44;en One in the Met features plant scroll work very much like the Mamluk cards:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/448659 . Of course for a European the low carved stone wall in front of side chapels (sometimes with iron grill work the design may have also evoked) and the church chancel would have been much more familiar:
Catalan church chancel and ironwork (Barcelona cathedral)
Barcelona Cathedral chancery wall and side chapels ironwork.jpg
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Rumpf does have some interesting things to say about the
acorn suit:
In the rhyming chronicle for Duke Ulrich von Württemberg59 the trick card that trumps the king is not called a sow but a pig: «That the king should trump all the cards. That's from the top bit of the pig, Then it wants to be aylfe yelled." Hans Sachs60 calls a player who carries playing cards and dice "elas Schellendaus". The word Daus is a term taken over from the game of dice. It is used to describe a throw with two eyes and is derived from the Ahd. dûs, mhd. ttts and related to the French deux two and Italian duo two. In craps, the dhow is a minor roll followed by the higher values quater four, zincken five, and ses six. In contrast to the dice game, the low values, the one card as an ace in the French-type card game and the two-card as a dhow card in the German game, have gained special significance as trick cards(13)
[and]
In Alsace, the German-French-Swiss contact area on the Upper Rhine, there were apparently all three types of cards or all three Designations for the cue cards are common, which Fischart61 testifies to when he says: "I threw out the Esau, Saw and Datts of the bells, Klee, Hert; but I kept holding the acorn saw [sow]for the sting, it is now stirring». Eichel-Sau is therefore the highest card of the trick cards and, as we already know from Fischart, the trick-free card marked «Pope». In the Grimm dictionary62 exchange is explained as a sow in a card game. It is taken from the work "Anmuter Wisdom hist.-Garten" published in Strasbourg in 1621 by Wolfh, who came from Mansfeld. Quoting Spangenberg as follows: «the four sheets of cards that are called the sew and the exchange. » (14)
[and]
In the Baden dialect63, a dattsch means a saw, i.e. a sow. If you consider that in Swabian the “s” is pronounced very softly, i.e. like “sh”, you can imagine with some imagination that the players in the heat of the game would play the trump card, as is often the case with card players observed, loudly accompanies their triumph by saying the name of the card. Given the preference for drastic expressions, which players still like to use in recent times, it is easy to imagine that the similarity between the French expression Daus for the two-card trick card and the Baden expression Dialect word Dattsch for a sow, the term sow or saw for the two-card in the card game was created. This new term in the card game then probably inspired the card makers to fill in the free space under the two suit signs on the two-number cards with a depiction of a sow or a pig, which at the same time may have contributed to being able to recognize this card more quickly when playing.
The expression Ecker for acorn is not used everywhere in Germany. In Baden, in a document from 1284, the forest yield of acorns and box nuts is referred to as Eckern. In the Wetterau and in Kurhessen the word can be found in documents from 1380, 1405, 1445 and 1485, in the Eifel people still speak of the Eckernmast today, and in the Upper Saxon dialect oak forests are also called Eckernbüsche, as well as the term Eckern for Acorn seems to be common there1'7. If, on the other hand, in Baden18 one speaks of the corner bitben, the corner queen, the corner king, the corner stone ace and the corner stone boy, on the Rhine119 of the corner ace and Ruttenbur, this means a card game with French suits, because the queen replaces the Ober and the ace for Daus or sow is called. Corners or diamonds denote the color [suit] diamond. In Switzerland, Eggstein is also known as a playing card suit, also in the Eggen combination [25] Eggensüw and Eggstein-süw. The Alsatian Daniel Martin 121 names the "roy de quarreait" as German translations "Steinkönig" and "Rantenkönig" for the French game. One can therefore assume that the misunderstood dialectal designation Eckern for acorns gave rise to the names Ecken, Ecksten, Eckstein and Stein and from this again, after the illustration in the French game, the rhombus, Rutten and in France Quarreait, Carreau, from which in turn the German loanword Karo... (24-25)
So we have the two "eyes" of rolling ones in dice, and the 2 card is a high trump in cards, So French yelled Daus for the two card trick and in the Badisch dialect means sow, so the sow was shown on the two card; without the French term, in other words, there is no pig on the cards. But there is no need for this convoluted explanation, since this is putting the horse before the cart, or rather the pig before the acorn. We have early cards, the Morisca, showing acorns and no pig (the "Sararcen" Unter knave unquestionably has an acorn). Because of the acorn and pig association, it naturally followed that pigs were added - there was no need for this French exclamation misinterpretation.
The zodiacal labor of the months for November in medieval psalters (acorns knocked free for pigs is also shown for that tree in the
Tacuinum Sanitatis) almost always shows peasants knocking acorns from trees for pigs to fatten them up right before they are slaughtered in the next month (below various November labor images of acorns being beaten from the trees for the pigs below; second from right is from a
Tacuinum, while the last is a della Robbia ceiling tile from Piero de'Medici's
studiolo - the labors of the months had not gone out of fashion, but apparently the inclusion of pigs was not for him):
That activity is made clear in this study:
An important aspect of the weight-gain process was fattening just before slaughter. The fruit of oak trees (acorns) and beechnuts served as a valuable high caloric food source in the fall months, generally late September through December. According to studies of modern Spanish autumn wood pasture feeding, pigs split their effort between eating grass and acorns equally, which provides a balanced fattening diet since the acorn kernel has a low concentration of crude protein but a very high content of crude fat whereas grass is exactly the opposite [28].
In the Middle Ages, this feeding was institutionalized in the practice of pannage, the feeding pigs on acorn or beech mast in the autumn in exchange for a fee, often as an in-kind payment [24,29]. By feeding on the crop of oak acorns or, in some areas beechnuts, the young pigs would be ready for slaughter in December. Because pigs quickly loose weight if food sources are depleted, owners would not want to keep them over the lean winter months unless they were breeding stock or still too small to be worth killing that year. The cycle of swine fattening on acorns followed by slaughter was so important within the medieval agricultural cycle that it became the standard calendar depiction for either October/November or November/December [30,31]. Numerous medieval artistic depictions provide insights into the practices that facilitated pig feeding. More than being simple tropes copied from one artist to another, these images show familiarity with swine management practices—something which almost everyone would have some knowledge of considering the pervasive medieval swine ownership patterns [26]—making the artistic sources useful for understanding historical agricultural practice. (Dolly Jørgensen, "Pigs and Pollards: Medieval Insights for UK Wood Pasture Restoration," Sustainability, 5, 2013: 387-399, 389)
Rumpf returns to acorns here with yet more late sources:
But how did the acorn, which we can count among the oldest German playing card suits attested in writing, become a card suit in the Latin designation "nolae" and German as "Aichel" as early as 1460 in the Munich manuscript of Brother Berchtold? ? In addition to the bells, Luther knows the acorn: “Ferdinandus is the 4 acorn.... [she goes on to explore late 16th century texts]
In fact another "king", arguably the highest since it was made for the event of his crowning in Bologna, Emperor Maximillian was connected with the suit of Acorns in Flotner's deck of c. 1541. The Met's description of that suit:
"King of Acorns: The king greatly resembles the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I; Upper Knave of Acorns: The Upper Knave is portrayed as a mercenary; Under Knave of Acorns: The messenger has a letter in his hand, and a hare and a sausage hang from a branch over his shoulder; Banner (10) of Acorns: A seated lady holds the banner; 9 of Acorns: Two pigs play trictrac (a version of backgammon); a mound of feces on the edge of the board is apparently the prize. 8 of Acorns: Two pigs roast a large mass of fecal matter on a spit over a cushion sitting in open flames.; 7 of Acorns: Two pigs eat filth off a large charger; 6 of Acorns: A fool playing a fiddle leads two strolling patrician couples; 5 of Acorns: In a coarse parody of the Saint George legend, a hunchbacked dwarf on a goat attacks a pig with a lance; a female onlooker holds a wreath, the victor’s prize, in her hand. 4 of Acorns: A woman takes her hunchbacked daughter to a doctor to assess her marriage prospects; the learned man examines a urine bottle for a prediction and sees only feces. 3 of Acorns: In a coarse visual play on the traditional scene of two angels carrying a soul up to heaven on a bolt of linen, two pigs have a tug-of-war with a cloth in their maws loaded with a mound of feces. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/676605
You'll note the presence of pigs throughout (not just on a 2 of acorns), clearly tying acorns and pigs together. But even the Met misunderstands the significance which is not purely scatological; e.g. for the 3 of acorns "In a coarse visual play on the traditional scene of
two angels carrying a soul up to heaven on a bolt of linen, two pigs have a tug-of-war with a cloth in their maws loaded with a mound of feces." Pure nonsense, as will be explained below.
Actually the pigs' linen is to catch the acorns from the tree, which they will in turn then eat and turn into
Scheiß (Flotner has simply compressed the timeline of eating/defecating into a single image). Sometimes the peasants in the labor of the months are catching the acorns in a basket or in their shirt, not unlike what the pigs are doing in Flotner's 3 of acorns, as below:
Acorns, November peasants obtaining acorns for a herd of swine and Sagittarius. Trin MS B.11.22.f.3r.jpg
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It is just as likely that Swabians identified the scrolling plants of Mamluks, some with fruit, as acorns, which it is one of the oldest known known German suits, and why Flowers is yet another.
Acorn Wappen?
One final thought as to why acorns might have been adopted early, but surely a secondary hypothesis. If Acorns were associated with the top suit per later decks, then that may have been based on an older tradition - perhaps from a family which was associated with a dominion and/or
wappen featuring the acorn, which they may have asked to be depicted on a deck made for them. The town in question is Aichelberg ("Acorn Mountain"), now a municipality in the district of Göppingen in Baden-Württemberg, 30kms SE from Stuttgart and 140 NE of Freiburg im Breisgau. "Upper Rhine" and thus geographically a fit at least.
Rumpf notes the poem associated with Württemberg (rhyming chronicle for Duke Ulrich von Württemberg in which the trick card that trumps the king is a pig, perhaps derived from the acorn) and we know that the House of Württemberg were associated with other luxury decks (the deer antlers on the Stuttgart arguably refer to their antler
wappen), so it is interesting that the the Counts of Aichelberg sold Aichelberg in 1334 to the House of Württemberg under Ulrich III, only 3 some decades before cards arrive. 1519 Aichelberg was almost completely destroyed by soldiers of the Swabian League and in 1525 during the German Peasants' War, the castle was burned down,so little left to suggest its former importance.
Their earlier history is a bit murky to me, but the Khevenhüller family - whose arms feature an acorn with an oak leaf on either side - were associated with the area before taking their main fief further east in Austria (Carinthia - where the earlier game of
Rithomachia was especially popular). Later, Johann IV von Khevenhüller zu Aichelberg (born ca 1420-1462) was the first to hold the family title "of Aichelberg", and I'm not sure of their earlier connection and why it was formally ceded to them. Their coat of arms from a later work on the family's 17th century genealogy:
Finally, you'll note a much earlier use of scrolling acorns about a family's arms (not the arms themselves) - not unlike the busy-work of plants on Mamluk cards - where one can also easily envisage an arc of branch with acorn attached as we find in the Morisca, but unnaturally woven as red and white here (late 14th century so contemporary to the earliest cards):
Acorns, Embroidered hanging for Hessen-Lichtfuss, linked by red and white oak leaves-acorns , late 14th century. Made in probably Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, Germany..jpg
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The Baraja Morisca suit of acorns (just one pip shown)
Phaeded
PS If any of you German speakers want to correct the machine translations above (I only tweaked here and there), please; but I don't think the basic premises are going to chnage