Phaeded wrote: 07 Jun 2023, 23:39 Alfonso was from Spain which the Carthaginians had a history in. He is undoubtedly thinking of a Roman triumph, and nothing with chess. Same general thought with Marcello when he had this triumphal-like image made, with the elephant referencing Hannibal's trek over the Alps with elephants, which Rene was threatening to do from France (sans elephants) to join with Sforza vs Venice in 1450. No chess connection. Elephants' significance were as triumphal trappings, as is borne out in Mantegna's triumph series.

It is a known fact that chess was introduced to Europe via Muslim Spain. A musician named
Ziriab traveled from Baghdad to Cordoba in the year 822. There he exercised a tremendous
influence upon the court of the Ummayyad emir Abd-al-Rahma II, introducing the game of
chess, among many other novelties. The historical evidence supporting this claim as well as a
complete bibliography were published by me personally: (R.Calvo "Der Musiker, der das
Schachspiel brachte". - In: Schach-journal, Berlin, 3. jg., 1993, N'1/1993, pp. 86-93 "El
musico que trajo a Europa el ajedrez". In: Artedrez, Pedro Muñoz (Ciudad Real), año 1, 996/97,
N' 2, 1996, pp. 4-11)

As anyone immediately must notice, in this game the bishop and especially the queen, called dama in the manuscript, move in a dramatically different way from the old medieval rules: they wander the board according to our modern rules, and have suddenly become very strong and important pieces. These new rules are also formulated in the manuscript - albeit in a poetical, 'hidden' sort of way. Clearly, something had changed by the time Scachs d'Amor was written. But when did this change take place, and what triggered it? Enter the chess historians, who have done extensive research on this and other questions.First, we must properly indentify the authors of the Scachs manuscript: Francesch de Castellvi, an advisor to the court of King Ferdinand; Narcis Vinyoles, an influential judge and politician; and Mossen Bernat Fenollar, a clergyman from the province of Alicante. All were well-known members of an avant-garde literary circle in Valencia in the late decades of the 15th century. In 1474, the three of them published a piece (which appeared in print) together for a contest in honour of the Virgin Mary. This, together with the Valencian dialect in which the poem is written, easily locates the Scachs-manuscript in Valencia itself, and there is no controversy over this issue among scholars. But can we establish when Scachs d'Amor was actually written? This question is more difficult to answer, but there are many clues. The most basic one is that Castellvi died in 1506, so this is the last theoretical date for the manuscript to have appeared. But it was probably written years before that.