Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

31
Ross Caldwell wrote: 04 May 2022, 08:52 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 -

"John offers some general reflections..... 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."
...
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.

JvR is moralizing on something he didn't create. The only thing he describes visually on the cards is this:
In the game which men call the game of cards they paint the cards in different manners, and they play with them in one way and another. For the common form and as it first came to us is thus, viz. four kings are depicted on four cards, each of whom sits on a royal throne. And each one holds a certain sign in his hand, of which signs some are reputed good, but others signify evil. Under which kings are two ' marschalli,' the first of whom holds the sign upwards in his hand, in the same manner as the king ; but the other holds the same sign downwards in his hand.

We have many surviving examples of this - for instance this c. 1530 Swiss deck (which I presume to be a successor example of the earliest woodblock cheap decks first produced in Switzerland and the Upper Rhine) where the suit sign is literally "ober" the first knave and "unter" the second knave: https://www.wopc.co.uk/switzerland/oldcards

This visual clue was not taken from Mamluks. What was taken from Mamluks, as you note, is that the two knaves were called 'Na'ib' and that the entire game was called the same, which would have seemed to put extra focus on the knaves. Name for the game aside, etymologically I've not seen this explored, but does Na'ib not seem very close to European names for those two subordinate cards - 'knave', 'knabe/knappe' etc.?

Where things really get interesting is that that JvR doesn't use one of those names, but 'marschalli', with the implication from good and evil ones that one was to be trusted and one was not, and accordingly of higher rank in the game.

But more importantly why the use of 'marschalli'? I would argue an event of international (at least European) renown involving 'marschalli' occurred prior but close enough in time to impact JvR's writing, or rather the earliest European adaptation of the game. And I'll propose that event was the Battle of Poitiers where many of France's aristocracy, including the king, ended up captured and for ransom, or dead. There simply wasn't a comparably notorious event right before both the arrival of the cards to Europe (c. 1365-70) and JvR's writing (1377).

The battle occurred on 1356. The French battle plan was to take out the English archers with two heavy cavalry units each lead by a marshal of France: Jean de Clermont, (c.1288 - 1356) and Arnoul d'Audrehem (c. 1305 – 1370) . The rest of the knights were to dismount since their horses were less armored (lessons from Crecy, where no horse was adequately protected) and fight on foot. The problem is the mounted knights were too far out in front of the supporting ground troops so Clermont cautioned they wait; d'Audrehem taunted Clermont for cowardice with the end result they both lead their respective charges without immediate backing support and ultimately ended in debacle, with Clermont killed and d'Audrehem wounded and captured. Their exchange was famously immortalized in works such as Froissart. Ultimately you have a seasoned and prudent older advisor (Clermont) versus a more impetuous younger one (d'Audrehem). Et voilà: 'marschalli' - each one holds a certain sign in his hand, of which signs some are reputed good, but others signify evil.

The king paired with the 'good' marshal must have been the genesis for 8 cards to be singled out. And as you'll note in the Swiss playing cards link above, the king holds his suit sign aloft just like the good Ober knave/marshal, as described in JvR, so a visual reason to link the two.

Phaeded
Last edited by Phaeded on 04 May 2022, 17:14, edited 3 times in total.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

32
There's no relationship between knave and naib. The "ai" in the word "naib" is not a diphthong. The modern Spanish pronunciation shows the difference.
https://fr.forvo.com/word/naipe/
The "a" in knave is a simple vowel.
But we need not focus on accidents, since the etymology of knave is clear, from Old English "cnafa", which pronounced the "c." I don't know when it became silent.

For JvR, my comment was meant to highlight the rule he alludes to "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," which is a complaint about social disruption that we recognize in later complaints about Karnöffel, as well as, possibly, in the Milanese law against certain card games in 1420.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

33
On another of your points, I do find it interesting that neither JvR nor any of the other German sources I can think of use any form of the name naib.

I just remembered that you said something in a previous post, that somebody had interpolated the word "imperator" into JvR after 1377. I don't know what you are referring to. All of the manuscripts are 15th century, I think the earliest is in fact 1423. Dummett and Kopp and other commentators wondered if there were interpolations, given the variety of games JvR mentions, which seemed awfully early for a game that could not have been around much longer than a decade, but all of the manuscripts apparently agree to the point that there is no evidence of changes to John's original text.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

34
Ross Caldwell wrote: 04 May 2022, 17:08 " which is a complaint about social disruption that we recognize in later complaints about Karnöffel, as well as, possibly, in the Milanese law against certain card games in 1420.
Knights Hospitallers, who I credit with seizing the Mamluk cards as part of Pierre I of Cyprus's taking of Alexandria in 1365, were close to to the Dominicans (hence the black cloaks, albeit we eventually see red as well). JvR was Dominican. The whole explosion of woodblock printing early cards is in Germany and predominantly Dominican. For the period you are addressing, the backlash against cards seem to have been spearheaded by a Franciscan, Saint Bernard of Siena. At all events, I can't see that societal rift theme in the earliest decks. A key Hospitaller was present at the Battle of Poitier by the way. I see them as adapting the game of the original decks since they had them from the beginning.

Re. "something in a previous post, that somebody had interpolated the word "imperator" into JvR after 1377."

You misread me or I was not clear; what I meant was someone 'inserted' the name Imperatori into a variant of the card game itself later but before 1423 - not into a text - as JvR does not identify an emperor in the game or 'imperatori." My only point here is JvR is not aware of Imperatori so it likely did not exist by that name in 1377 or was added later.

More looking forward to your take on my theory of 'marshalli'.

Phaeded

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

35
Phaeded wrote: 04 May 2022, 17:25
You misread me or I was not clear; what I meant was someone 'inserted' the name Imperatori into a variant of the card game itself later but before 1423 - not into a text - as JvR does not identify an emperor in the game or 'imperatori." My only point here is JvR is not aware of Imperatori so it likely did not exist by that name in 1377 or was added later.
I'm still not clear, then. Let me try: do you mean that somebody named a game "Imperatori," that had previously not borne that name? And, that JvR alludes to the existence of such a game, as I also suspect?
More looking forward to your take on my theory of 'marshalli'.
This is tougher. I don't have a methodology for judging topical influences on card games that are not explicitly spelled out in the cards, or that seem to have some contemporary support, like the Guelf-Ghibelline interpretation of the Papi, or the Great Schism-Conciliar Controversy (Felix V-Eugene). Any topical specifity is purely coincidental, in my view, since the invention of the game and the election of the anti-pope happened around the same time. But I do think that the generations-long schism and multiple popes of the 1400s and 1410s could have been the background to the equal-papi rule. It made sense to them, in other words.

I like your idea that JvR or the inventors of the game might have had the debacle of Poitiers in mind, but I can't say how much weight can be put on his use of the term "marshals," without learning first how the term was generally understood in his time.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

36
Phaeded wrote: 04 May 2022, 15:54 [images of Judgment, World, Fortune, Death, Chariot, Love]
I figured somebody would come back with that kind of response. Let me try to clarify.

What the images I presented have in common is that they all show the main figure accompanied by much smaller attendant figures. Of the images Phaeded presented, only one shows that, namely the Visconti di Modrone Chariot card. The Issy Chariot card is similar in this respect. But neither of them quite seem to match what is consistently seen on the "personage" trumps from the era: The Visconti di Modrone Chariot has only one attendant, which seems too few (all the others from that era have two or four), and the Issy Chariot figure has six attendants, which seems too many. So neither really fits the pattern of the other cards. This is obvious just from looking at them: it is immediately apparent to the eye that these two Chariot cards do not correspond to the pattern of those other cards.

As for the other images presented by Phaeded, none show a main figure accompanied by disproportionately smaller attendant figures. Either the accompanying figures are roughly the same size as the main figures (Love, Fortune, Judgment), or they cannot really be said to be attendants in any way at all: The figures on the Visconti di Modrone World card are tiny details of a landscape, completely detached from the main figure, whose presence they seem entirely unaware of (and those smaller figures in the landscape are perfectly proportionate when the perspective is taken into account); and the figures on the Death card are simply an entire crowd of people being killed.

To summarize, nothing there fits the pattern established in the images I presented above, which is very consistent, with only one partial exception, namely the Devil—and we have no truly early examples of Devil cards at all, so a degree of variation there is to be expected. Most of the Devil cards we have show no smaller figures whatsoever, which is also the case for the other seven "personage" cards in the later years. There was evidently a general trend to remove the smaller attendant figures from the cards, so we see them on many of the personage cards in the very earliest years, but on hardly any cards in later centuries.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

37
Ross Caldwell wrote: 04 May 2022, 17:38
Phaeded wrote: 04 May 2022, 17:25
You misread me or I was not clear; what I meant was someone 'inserted' the name Imperatori into a variant of the card game itself later but before 1423 - not into a text - as JvR does not identify an emperor in the game or 'imperatori." My only point here is JvR is not aware of Imperatori so it likely did not exist by that name in 1377 or was added later.
I'm still not clear, then. Let me try: do you mean that somebody named a game "Imperatori," that had previously not borne that name? And, that JvR alludes to the existence of such a game, as I also suspect?
Yes and maybe:

Yes, somebody named a game "Imperatori," after JvR wrote (and maybe with a structural change in the decks, but I still think the original 8 being singled out were the 4 kings and 4 "good" marshals/knaves, and that concept 8 was linked to an idea of "emperors").

Maybe, JvR alludes to the existence of such a game, but certainly does not name it as such. So I would lean towards 'no' its not Imperatori per se he saw, but the prerequisite requirements of 8 cards, that number being something Imperatori utilizes. None of us are close to agreeing what those 8 cards are, but visually the Kings and 'good'/Ober Knaves are doing the same thing (holding up the symbol of their suit), so that is the one undeniable visual aspect of the early format of the cards (assuming ones like the Swiss deck reflect original cards) that allows us to posit the number 8. That's all we have to go on.

Phaeded

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

38
Nathaniel wrote: 04 May 2022, 19:03
Phaeded wrote: 04 May 2022, 15:54 [images of Judgment, World, Fortune, Death, Chariot, Love]
I figured somebody would come back with that kind of response. Let me try to clarify.

What the images I presented have in common is that they all show the main figure accompanied by much smaller attendant figures. Of the images Phaeded presented, only one shows that, namely the Visconti di Modrone Chariot card....

As for the other images presented by Phaeded, none show a main figure accompanied by disproportionately smaller attendant figures.....

To summarize, nothing there fits the pattern established in the images I presented above, which is very consistent, with only one partial exception, namely the Devil....
Nathaniel,
I appreciate the working theory you are going off of - classifying the cards by what can be read on them - but I'm still seeing too many qualifications, despite your additional arguments, especially the notion that those random subjects are collectively "Imperatori."

The basic idea of the smaller figures as minions/retainers means the larger figure is a ruler and can thus be likened to an "emperor" or sorts; but the Juggler merely has customers to be swindled - in no way are they his vassals; the Fool even less so as he is mocked or merely erotically charges those engaged with him.

Your emphasis on Petrarch having a role also defeats this notion, as all of those driven before Love are his minions; those cut down before mounted Death are now his; Fortune similarly rules over all, engendering poetic complaints and remedies; etc. Yet you include none of these. There's too much parsing going on in trying to explain which cards have minions and which don't, when one can easily say Love, Death and Fortune have minions...and the Juggler and Fool do not. An objection that the rule of Love/Death/Fortune(and even Judgement) is universal, while some of the other cards have specific retainers, fails when we consider the Juggler (or Fool) - those customers are not his specific minions - all the world's indeed a stage for his swindling games.

Finally, there is no card that shows the "Popess" to have retainers. The reason for that, which has been explained by numerous contentious posts here (and I'm guilty of harboring some wrong-headed ideas about her in the past, namely Moakley's Visconti-Umiliati theory), is that she is a Franciscan variant of Ecclesia - already plural in the nature of her allegory. And this is one of the few trumps with a emperor-like crown (although it is clearly papal), but has absolutely no examples showing minions.

Phaeded

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

39
Phaeded wrote: 04 May 2022, 21:12 The basic idea of the smaller figures as minions/retainers means the larger figure is a ruler and can thus be likened to an "emperor" or sorts; but the Juggler merely has customers to be swindled - in no way are they his vassals; the Fool even less so as he is mocked or merely erotically charges those engaged with him.

Your emphasis on Petrarch having a role also defeats this notion, as all of those driven before Love are his minions; those cut down before mounted Death are now his; Fortune similarly rules over all, engendering poetic complaints and remedies; etc. Yet you include none of these. There's too much parsing going on in trying to explain which cards have minions and which don't, when one can easily say Love, Death and Fortune have minions...and the Juggler and Fool do not. An objection that the rule of Love/Death/Fortune(and even Judgement) is universal, while some of the other cards have specific retainers, fails when we consider the Juggler (or Fool) - those customers are not his specific minions - all the world's indeed a stage for his swindling games.
I don't have anything much to add regarding the Imperatori trumps specifically. I think I've already explained my argument clearly enough, and I've already adequately rebutted your comments about the Popess.

But there is an important general point I would like to make, regarding what I see as a fundamental error of approach, an error made again and again not only by you, but by many others who are interested in tarot history today. I've made this point before, but it is worth repeating (and I'm sure I will have occasion to repeat it again in the future):

You place far too much importance on the meanings of the details you see on the cards, and not nearly enough on the mere visual appearance of those details.

In this particular instance, for example, your approach to understanding the significance of the smaller figures on these cards is to ask what the relationship of the small figures to the large figure could be. You think that the only way to understand why the small figures are on the cards is to work out the meaning of their relationship to the large figure. So you try to create categories defined by the role that the small figures could have: on some cards they look like minions, subservient to the rule of the large figure; on other cards they cannot be minions but have some other relationship to the figure.

All of this very much misses the point of what is really important about these figures.

I never used the word "minions" or "vassals." Instead, I deliberately used the vaguer word "attendants." I also pointed out explicitly that even "attendant" is too precise a term for what I was referring to, because it doesn't really work for the figures accompanying the Devil. I was simply using it as a convenient label. What I was trying to stress was that the main figures on those six "personage" cards are always accompanied by a set of much smaller figures, and that they are always shown together with the main figure in much the same way. What is important is the way the small figures are shown on the card: their small size relative to the main figure, their number (nearly always two, doubled to four in some variants), and also their position, flanking the main figure in the foreground of the image.

It is this appearance of the image, its general layout, the way the image is constructed from these components, which is important. The meaning of the figures' relationship to the main figure is of no real significance to our current discussion.

Why? Because these images are playing cards. What card players want and need is to be able to immediately identify the cards in their hands. For the cardmakers, this has two crucial consequences for the design of the cards they are making:

1. The design needs to be very close to the design of the cards that the players were using before and are already familiar with, so that the players can immediately recognize them.

2. The design of the cards needs to allow each one to be distinguished immediately from all others.

In other words, for both the players and the cardmakers, the visual appearance of the images on the cards is vastly more important than any meaning that those images might have.

I'm not saying that the players and cardmakers do not care at all about the meaning of the images. When a new card was created for the very first time (like the tarot trumps), the meaning was certainly important. And even after that, the cardmakers sometimes did modify the card images so that they "made more sense" (in the cardmaker's opinion). But when creating a new version of an existing card, such considerations always take a very distant second place to the two visual criteria I stated above.

It was by no means unknown for meaning to be lost while visual identity was retained. One of the most notable examples of this is the fate of the hourglass of Time in the tarot deck. As we know, in some decks, it turned into a lantern, with the effect that the meaning of the card as Time was entirely lost—but the visual appearance of the card remained almost exactly the same, because the lantern looked virtually identical to the former hourglass. And that is the only thing that was really important to all concerned. No one seems to have had any problem with the fact that the card had ceased to represent Time and was now just a wise Old Man. But if the cardmaker had been stupid enough to create a new representation of Time which bore no resemblance to the previous one—if, for example, they replaced the old man holding the hourglass with a young naked boy holding a foliot (as seen on some later images of Petrarch's Triumph of Time)—the cardmaker would have lost a lot of money, because no one would have bought the cards.

Cardmakers were even content to create images which contained totally nonsensical elements, and this was never a problem, just as long as the images looked very similar to the previous ones. So in Bologna, the hourglass that was previously sitting on the hunched back of old Father Time (as on the Minchiate card) became a six-sided column that appeared to be growing out of his back! In Rome, the Fool's liripipe (the long tail on his hood, as seen on the closely related Sicilian Fool) turned into a pair of wings, and the Bagatella ended up sitting with one leg across his table, and no one was bothered by such bizarre developments, because the resulting images still resembled the previous ones closely, and that is all that mattered.
Image
Image
.

Playing card history is full of examples like this.

To come back to the instance at hand: When I talk about the "pattern" of the Imperatori trumps, I am talking about the visual appearance of the images on the cards, not the meanings of them. I am talking about the visual similarity of the Bagatella, Fool, Emperor, Empress, Pope, and Devil in those early decks where they are shown with two much smaller figures accompanying them. I don't much care about the relationship of those small figures to the large figures, because the card players and cardmakers of the time would not have cared much about that either. What they cared about was the look of the card, and therefore this is what I care about too. This is why I said "it is immediately apparent to the eye that these two Chariot cards do not correspond to the pattern of those other cards." What matters here is the visual pattern, not any pattern of meaning.

My hypothesis is that the makers of the Imperatori deck decided at some stage to distinguish the trumps of the deck from the court cards by placing two smaller figures on each card, flanking the much larger trump figure. In this way, they created a common visual identity for the trumps, so that all the trumps (possibly with the exception of the Hanged Man) had some visual feature that identified them as belonging to the same subset within the deck, in the same way that all the court cards looked broadly similar, and all the numeral cards looked broadly similar. I hypothesize that this common visual feature was then initially retained when those eight cards were adopted into the tarot deck. But after a while, it was gradually dropped in most cases, because it wasn't present on the other tarot trumps and had therefore lost its raison-d'être: it no longer functioned as a common visual marker indicating their status as trumps, so it could be dropped in order to make the main figure more prominent and more easily visible.

Too many commentators on tarot history are obsessed with the meanings of the images on the cards, to the extent that they overlook the crucial visual dynamics which drove the evolution of those images. It is those visual dynamics which lie at the heart of playing card history.

Re: Imperatori sources and discussion

40
Nathaniel wrote: 05 May 2022, 10:35 You place far too much importance on the meanings of the details you see on the cards, and not nearly enough on the mere visual appearance of those details.
I suppose I share that foible with every medieval and renaissance writer who wrote on them.

But just so I fully understand your theory, more questions:

* Whatever relationship exists between the upper figures and lower figures, that doesn't matter - just that the upper figure is larger; all said cards with larger upper figures get identified as "trumps"? And this would be unique to Imperatori - no comparable medieval or early renaissance artistic series that was comparable?

* the Empress of the CY breaks this rule with two smaller subjects above her, because why?
Image

* Death is clearly larger than those cut down below him, but would not figure as a trump because why?
Image
Same Q with the CY World - upper figure is large, lower figures are small, but not trump why?
Image

* No external or internal theme associates the 8 proposed trumps as a series - they "just are"?

* And the group as a whole is called Emperors because each has small subjects below them?

* "What matters here is the visual pattern, not any pattern of meaning" so when a court card pops up with an upper larger person with smaller lower persons - perfectly fitting your visual pattern of trumps - they are quickly discernible as not trumps....how?
Image

* Or is a large court figure with smaller figures discounted as a trump by having the sign of its suit on it...which means the 8 imperatori are not in a suit and constitute a fifth suit of 8 cards....and the other suits consists of 8 cards each (not mentioned by JvR or anyone?)?



Phaeded