All of the cards in this deck can be viewed here: http://www.mydearplayingcards.com/2006_ ... orisca.php

In discussing the good/evil "signs" held by the kings and marschalli in another thread I referred to this deck and asked if anyone knew of studies of it - I can't find anything but the most trivial of descriptions, so in part this is a call for links to any studies anyone may know of. Not even the dating seems conclusive but this is clearly one of the oldest decks to survive. I've seen 1390 banded about on various Spanish webpages, but the museum webpage itself gives 1400-1420, while their curated exhibition shows 1390:


What follows is a reconstruction of that deck that shockingly points to a 60 card - the magical number of an ideal deck in JvR.

WOPC offers this: https://www.wopc.co.uk/spain/morsica#:~ ... 0expensive.

Above [image not included, but just some of the cards]: cards from a primitive Latin suited pack, possibly of Swiss or German origin for export to Spain, dated by paper analysis as “early XV century”, which makes this one of the earliest known surviving packs of playing cards. There are Moorish influences in some of the cards: see the double-panelled Saracenic shield on the cavalier of swords (bottom row).

The cards show lingering evidence of a suit system derived from early Arabic cards, which in turn became popular throughout Europe from the 15th century. They have been printed from wood blocks and coloured by a technique known as 'a la morisca' which involved using the fingers dipped into the pigment. This is different from other early packs of cards which were hand-painted or illuminated and therefore more expensive. As their popularity spread, new methods of production were discovered to produce packs of playing cards more cheaply. Cards in the Museo "Fournier" de Naipes de Alava.

Museo "Fournier" de Naipes de Alava Arabako "Fournier" Karta Museoa
Images on this page of cards in the Museo "Fournier" de Naipes de Alava (Diputación Foral de Alava, Cuchillería 54, 01001 Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) are taken from Agudo Ruiz (2000) and Suarez Alba (1991). Used with permission.

Actually the Fournier link just goes to a general link; the deck in question is here: https://apps.euskadi.eus/emsime/catalog ... ninv-44519

The museum webpage gives a fairly large bibliography, but most of these are 1 or 2 page entries that are seemingly cursory descriptions without any broader insights offered. Ross, any chance you have access to the first Dummett article?

BRAUN, Franz. Consolidation of Playing Cards Since 1850. Colonia, Autoedición, 1970-1982. [487]. Nº 1413
PALAU I SALIENT, Doménec. Restauración de 42 naipes del s. XV del Museo Fournier de Vitoria, III Congreso de Restauración de Bienes Culturales. Instituto de Conservación y Restauración de Obras de Arte. Comité Español del ICOM. Valladolid.. 1980. 179-182.
ALFARO FOURNIER, Félix. Los Naipes. Museo Fournier. Vitoria, Heraclio Fournier S.A., 1982. [322], p. 113. Ilustración en p. 110
DUMMETT, Michael. The Earliest Spanish Playing Cards, The Playing-Card. Journal of the International Playing-Card Society, Vol. 18, nº 1. August 1989, pp. 6 - 15
ALFARO FOURNIER, Félix; LLANO GOROSTIZA, Manuel. Vitoria-Gasteiz ciudad del naipe. 75 Aniversario del Museo Fournier. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Caja Vital Kutxa, 1991. [332], p. 20, il. p. 4
DUMMETT, Michael. A Survey of ”Archaic” Italian Cards. A Correction, The Playing-Card. Journal of the International Playing-Card Society, Vol. 19, nº 4. may 1991, pp. 128-131, Addendum
SUAREZ ALBA, Alberto. A Vitoria Barajas. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Diputación Foral de Álava, 1991, il. col. p. 54
DENNING, Trevor. The playing-cards of Spain. A guide for historians and collectors. Londres, 1996. [226].
HOFFMANN, Detlef. Schweizer Spielkarten 1. Die Anfänge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert. Schaffhausen, Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen; Cartophilia Helvetica, 1998. [138], pp. 81 y 82
AGUDO RUIZ, Juan de Dios. Los naipes en España. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Diputación Foral de Álava, 2000, il. col. p. 31
Barajas de colección. Un recorrido por la historia del naipe. Madrid, Ediciones del Prado, 2004. [474], il. col. p. 17
EGUIA LÓPEZ DE SABANDO, José. Naipe de estilo español, ficha del catálogo, Exposición Canciller Ayala. Vitoria-Gasteiz, Diputación Foral de Álava, 2007, p. 296. Ilustraciones en pp. 297-299
GULINELLI, Veber. Delle carte da gioco italiane. Storia e diletto. San Felice sul Panaro, Italia, Edizioni APM, 2011. [488], pp. 15-16, il. col. pp. 17-26
GARRIGUE, Jean-Pierre. La carte à jouer en Catalogne. XIVe & XVe siècles. Saint Estève, Michel Garrigue. Les Presses Littéraires, 2015.

From Denning there is a reference to the earliest Moorish design cards in Barcelona dating to 1414 (Denning, Trevor. The playing-cards of Spain: a guide for historians and collectors. United Kingdom: Cygnus Arts, 1996: 20).

Dummett's 'Archaic' Italian cards article can be read via this Yale viewer here, but not especially helpful: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2053426


Proceeding ignorant to most of the above, the key descriptive observations of the suits:
1. The court suits and the suit pips do not match in the case of the Sword and Batons, which means the alignment of those pips and court cards is somewhat of a guess
2. Pip suits:
- Acorns (shown with oak leaves in the court cards, but just on a section of rounded twig, looking a bit like the bells in other decks
- Bells (a circle with an "s' opening, also shown on the court cards)
- Swords (what is most odd is that the Ace sword is broken with oak leaves(?) attached to either end, and the Flower/rose suit also at the hilt; implications that those suits can take swords?)
- Batons - clearly Mamluk polo sticks have been retained, testifying to this being an early deck.
- Leaves - this fourth suit is problematic as seemingly a single card from this suit survives in a page (if that upper left blotch is indeed the usual spade-shaped leaf found in Swiss-German decks); it also has enigmatic symbols placed around the figure:



3. Court Suits
Idiosyncrasy besides not matching the pips: some of the court cards hold a sword but the suit sign floating in the empty space above or below them would suggest they don't necessarily belong in the suit of swords, that merely being an attribute of their station as male court cards; e.g. knight.
- Acorns - matches pips, but only the 'Saracen', the stance of the horse is different from all of the others and sign is placed beneath the figure like an Unter Knave; moreover the oak leaves has also been uniquely separated from one another. More on that further below.
- Bells - matches pips.
- Flowers/Roses - goes with Sword pips? The four/five petaled flower (usually called a rose) hovers above all of the surviving court cards of this suit.
- Leaves - just the page noted above. This might have gone with Batons/polo sticks for some reason - wood (staves/sticks/batons) being the basis of this suit of leaves (oak leaf from acorn would also fit, but the focus is on the fruit {nut} of the oak tree in that suit).

Some pre-17th c. Swiss/German deck suits:
c. 1523 S. Beham: Acorns, Leafs, Roses, Pomegranates
c. 1530 Anon. Swiss: Acorns, Flowers, Shields and Bells https://www.wopc.co.uk/switzerland/oldcards
c. 1530 E. Schoen: Roses, Leafs, Grapes, Pomegranates
c. 1535 Schaufelein: Acorns, Leafs, Hearts, and Bells
c. 1541 Flötner: Acorns, Leafs, Hearts and Bells
(source: WOPC for the Swiss deck and Timothy B. Husband, The World in Play: Luxury Cards 1430-1540, 2015: 95-125)

I would suggest the closest subsequent deck would be the c. 1530 anonymous Swiss deck. Acorns, Leafs and Bells are all fairly standard. I would suggest Shields, which naturally parley with Swords, were deemed interchangeable suits by whomever did the subsequent c. 1530 deck. But that just explains the pips; Flowers are present in the Morisca deck, so the shields and flowers are combined into one suit there. The shields do feature a Florentine/French lily design so the connection is already there, thus flowers for the court cards, swords for the pips. Still odd. With the shields/flowers combined, what gets added differently in the Morisca is the Leafs suit (whose pips are arguably the polo sticks).

None of that explains why the pips are different from the court suits in the cases of batons/polo sticks and swords; one might pair the king of flowers with sword pips, but the Saracen knight with an acorn also holds a sword and there is a suit of acorns; I argue the court cards in the suit of Leafs is almost wholly missing and again the only reason to link them with the sticks is that wood/leaves have a natural connection. Clearly suits could have been fluid, especially early on, but there is not a good answer for why this was done for only two suits here. One possibility is that a fairly novel deck was being created and it was using two different decks and combined them in an inconsistent manner. On to the reconstruction...

Reconstruction of the Deck

I'm not sure whose webpage this is, but for a laughable reconstruction using the suits of Swords, Batons, Cups, Coins (the latter two are not on any card): https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/

I won't bother with what I've tentatively identified as the page of Leafs, since that appears to be the only surviving card of the suit, but here are the three other suits, with missing cards indicated in grayed-out examples from other suits, with a pip example on the right (which again, is only different in the Flower/Sword and Leaf/polo stick suits - the latter not shown); page shown here with an example of the Baton/polo sticks pips with which those court cards must have been associated (simply by a process of subtraction for the other three suits)




Again, turn to the first link at the top of this post to see all available card, but the bottom line is there is but a single 'Unter Knave' - a court card with the suit sign below, marked out from the 'Ober Knaves' have one horse's front leg prancing, in a different position. Why does this card hold a sword, if not in the suit of swords? I think the answer is simple - the well-worn manuscript tradition of depicting the God-denying fool of Palms (“The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'”, Psalm 14:1; 53:1) holding his club up at God (Giotto's stulticia is basically this), is paralleled by the 'infidel', holding a sword instead. Unfortunately there are no other surviving unter knaves for comparison's sake, but the sign above or below the knave exactly matches that is the later Swiss deck.

What are the ramifications?

This does not 'prove' JvR saw a similar deck, especially since it varies the Maid (what gets called the 'female page' in the CY) for a male Page, but otherwise its an exact match for what he called the "ideal" 15 card suit, forming a deck of 60 cards. Given the deck's early date and pronounced Morisca details (polo sticks and Saracen), its tends towards the probable to my mind.

A final note: Why 60?

JvR has his own reasons for idealizing 60, but he did not create the deck, so the significance of 60 must come from elsewhere...unless of course you want to follow VH and assume JvR actually was the source for novel deck creations (and in this case, a Swiss production for a Spanish market, no less). There is at least one source for which 60 might have been attractive at the time, especially with the inclusion of a queen, which opens up the entire corpus of courtly love: Giovanni Boccaccio's first work, Diana's Hunt, c. 1333-4, has exactly 60 females lead on a hunt lead by Diana (her leadership replaced by the the celestial Venus towards the end), where each of the 60 was named for a real Neapolitan female elites, assuring the work some level of fame. Moreover the 60 females are divided up into four subgroups of 15 for the hunt, making it perfectly suitable for the deck in question, or at least a parallel. The poem was written in terza rima and based on an idea Dante broached in his Vita nuova, for 60 Florentine women (Beatrice of course being the sacred number 9 in his numerology system), but never executed, so Boccaccio ran with it (see Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham, Diana's hunt: Caccia di Diana: Boccaccio's first fiction, 1991: 24-25) . This is of course several decades before the advent of cards but Boccaccio dies in 1375 and his fame of course continued to skyrocket. The Angevins in Naples were very involved with the Greek East and could have easily spread Boccaccio's works to Rhodes (Hospitallers) and throughout France of course. The Grand Seneschal of Naples, the ex-Florentine Niccolò Acciaiuoli, was even gifted Greek possessions; and it was his sister who was the dedicatee of Diana's Hunt, Boccaccio feigning the work was not important enough for Queen Joanna. At all events, a reason why 60 and the insertion of a symbolic queen into playing cards. Boccaccio also dedicated his work on the genealogy of the gods to the father of the Cypriot king who lead the raid on Alexandria in 1365. It seemingly all falls together.

Phaeded

Generally I have the viewing point, that, if we would know all deck types, which existed before 1500 (that's naturally impossible) , that we would know much more, than we can know from real findings.
So I'm not really surprized, when new deck structures appear.
For the same reason I think, that the argument around "the JvR text passage with 6 deck descriptions must be from 1429" a little bit naive.

But a nice information, it's new to me, although I remember, that there was a Spanish article more than 10 years ago, which claimed to have a very early deck. Then it appeared in the web and later I couldn't find again.

Phaeded wrote: 30 May 2022, 19:08 Ross, any chance you have access to the first Dummett article?

Your wish is my command!

Phaeded, did you mention https://l-pollett.tripod.com/cards77.htm.

I have commented here on a certain similarity between the "tortoise-shell" shields of this deck and those of the Rothschild cards. If you use the search function on this forum and enter the term "moorish," the first three pages of links are relevant, of which about 19 links mention the deck, although some are duplicates. I expect you have read them, but perhaps others reading this thread haven't.

Very interesting idea, Phaeded!

I am still thinking about it, however, it seems to me that I do not fully understand you. I'd like to ask you why

Phaeded wrote: 30 May 2022, 19:08 I'm not sure whose webpage this is, but for a laughable reconstruction using the suits of Swords, Batons, Cups, Coins (the latter two are not on any card): https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/

this is really laughable? For me the round objects you call bells could also be coins -- why not ?The Ace is certainly a coin. And what he calls cups --the Ace is certainly one-- can really be cups in light of the depiction of cups with lids,

as in e.g., later Minchiate



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



And why should the seated kings --mostly beardless as in other decks -- be queens? Isn't it the other way round that we have one beatiful example with this deck especially emphasizing the Sarazen origin with the sword suit? And perhaps the sword is broken since the Sarazen power is not as it was in former times (e.g. after the sack of Alexandria)?

As far as I read, the other Spanish decks consist of 48 cards, as https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/ proposes. For me this fits. But perhaps I missed something, please explain.


I am also not sure about this:

Phaeded wrote: 30 May 2022, 19:08 I think the answer is simple - the well-worn manuscript tradition of depicting the God-denying fool of Palms (“The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God'”, Psalm 14:1; 53:1) holding his club up at God (Giotto's stulticia is basically this), is paralleled by the 'infidel', holding a sword instead.

In my eyes, for Giotto's stulticia in the Scrovegni chapel the same argument could hold as in a former post :

vh0610 wrote: 17 Sep 2021, 21:12
Depicted in the Visconti-Sforza deck is not a fool as in the mentioned early Ferrara decks (Charles VI, Ercole d’Este), but a bird catcher [we are in Italy, where singing birds are/were eaten a lot]. This can be seen by the feathered crown and his equipment: the flat club with which he beats the birds under the web, caught at the soil, and his gaiters/cuffs, in order to guard his legs from the beaks of the birds on the ground. A bird catcher is a perfect symbol for a “stultus”- he beats and even kills heavenly objects, birds as ideas. [Note that this symbol has survived, slightly transformed, in the figure of Papageno in Mozart’s magic flute].

The bird catcher is beautifully depicted and described in the Fool's ship of Sebastian Brant:


His action of beating with the not depicted club -unfortunately the club is beyond the left border, but we can deduce it from how holds his hands-- is described:
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/bran ... ap040.html

Ein Narr ist, wer will fangen Sparrn
Und offenkundig stellt das Garn;
Denn leicht ein Vogel dem entflieht,
Wenn er es offen vor sich sieht.
Wer nichts als drohen tut all Tage,
Da sorgt man nicht, daß er fest schlage;

[A fool is one who wants to catch sparrows
And evidently represents the yarn ;
For easily a bird flees him [the fool],
When he [the sparrow] sees it [the yarn] openly in front of him.
Whoever does nothing but threaten every day,
Noone worries that he hits hard;
]

Bird catching in Wikipedia as an old culture technique is given:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogelfang

Abbildung des Vogelfang im alten Ägypten, mit Vögeln gefüllte Schlagnetze

{Depiction of bird catching in old egypt, with birds filled hit nets]

More about even actual bird catching in Italy depicting the nets can be found in https://www.komitee.de/en/campaigns-and ... -in-italy/

Phaeded wrote: 30 May 2022, 19:08 Ross, any chance you have access to the first Dummett article?

Ross wrote: Your wish is my command!

Phaeded [b wrote:DID NOT WRITE ]
Thank you very much, Ross! Especially for doing it so promptly!

You're very welcome!

vh0610 wrote: 31 May 2022, 21:09

Phaeded wrote: 30 May 2022, 19:08 I'm not sure whose webpage this is, but for a laughable reconstruction using the suits of Swords, Batons, Cups, Coins (the latter two are not on any card): https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/

this is really laughable? For me the round objects you call bells could also be coins -- why not ?The Ace is certainly a coin. And what he calls cups --the Ace is certainly one-- can really be cups in light of the depiction of cups with lids,

as in e.g., later Minchiate

First of all, you don't address the differing court card signs in two of the suits, but what you are essentially arguing for is a Swiss/German deck that didn't exist - to reiterate, the surviving suits are:
Acorns, Leafs, Roses, Pomegranates
Acorns, Flowers, Shields and Bells (what I argue is closest, sword replacing Shields - https://www.wopc.co.uk/switzerland/oldcards)
Roses, Leafs, Grapes, Pomegranates (and likely a couple other flower/fruit variants I'm leaving out)
Acorns, Leafs, Hearts, and Bells - the final German standard

No cups or coins.

As for Cups: you're ignoring the court cards with the same suit signs and oak leaves and unlike the Minchiate example there is no flat end to place a "cup" on a surface - one end curves (a section of twig) and the other end is pointed.

As for Coins: the reason there is a simple "S" curve on them, instead of an attempt to replicate a known wappen or actual coin, is that occasionally the cut made into the spherical bell was S-shaped (per the c. 1540, Hans Schäufelein example of S-cut bells in profile below, although there are also plenty of straight cut opening examples). The fact that the circular shapes are spherical on the Morisca deck is indicated by the shading on a number of them - there is no reason for a coin to be half dark.

Why then what you reasonably propose as coin on one of the ace cards? First of all let's acknowledge that there are three surviving aces and none of them are clear cut in how they'd be assigned to the suits, two of which again, are mixed (swords/flowers, batons/leafs - acorns and presumably leafs were consistent).


The ace of swords seemingly is confused by having two other suit signs - acorn(?) leaves and a flower also appear, but let's assign that to swords. That leaves what looks like a mirror and the medal/coin.

The "mirror" is in fact a monstrance. That a monstance could be used on an ace is incontrovertible, as one very Gothic one is used for the Ace of Cups of the Visconti Brera-Brambilla deck, somewhat sacrilegiously placing the biscione where the host would be. Monstrances could also come in around format just like our Baraja example:

What suit does a monstrance go with? In a medieval world full of illiterates, when Mass was said in Latin, the practice was to ring a [sanctus] bell(s) at certain times to call the attention of the faithful to the holiest moments of the Mass - chief among these is the calling down of the Holy Spirit at the epiclesis and at the words of consecration during the Eucharistic Prayer. The monstrance held the Eucharist, thus the suit of bells. The presence of a Saracen has already alerted us to such religious considerations.

That leaves the "ace of coins", and since we have already assigned the aces of Sword and Bells ("mirror"/monstrance), that leaves us with either Acorns or Polo stick/Leaves (all but two polo sticks missing but only one Leaf court card survives, the Page). Acorns are consistent in pips and courts, but since Bells varied in its Ace no reason to think Acorns couldn't as well, although I can think of no reason to assign what appears to be a scholar in profile to Acorns.

That leaves the equally unsatisfactory Polo Sticks with a scholar. Of course Europe didn't play Polo, but they played a number of ball games involving a stick, including the famous Borromeo fresco of a woman hitting a ball to three other wome and we have references to a ball and stick game played in northern France known as La Soule or Choule, the game of Knattleikr played in Northern Europe (see drawing of it below that looks veery much like our polo sticks), etc. I can imagine all manner of variety of different names to the simple act of whacking a ball with a stick; even today the games of tennis, racquetball, baseball, cricket, etc., all are essentially ball and stick (however shaped) games.


So we have a game within a game - a stick/ball game within a card game - how does that get us any closer to the "coin"? Its clearly not a ball, but clearly similar to a medal or coin. And there's the rub - while the Saracen and Polo sticks point us to an early date of c. 1390-1410, I can find no South German or Swiss coins featuring a local ruler's head from c. 1400, certainly not in profile. Renaissance medals we study them here don't really appear until after 1438, but there are proto examples that begin in 1390 and given that date I think we have to push the date of this deck towards the latter range of 1400-1410 before that nascent tradition could spread and be copied.

Scher's introduction to this portrait medal study is worth quoting at length from:

On June 19, 1390, Francesco II da Carrara recaptured the city of Padua from the forces of Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan, who held his father prisoner; and, to commemorate this victory, Francesco ordered medals to be struck, not cast, depicting on the obverse portraits all’antica of father and son.” (Stephen K. Scher, "AN INTRODUCTION TO THE RENAISSANCE PORTRAIT MEDAL", in Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal Portrait Medals of the Renaissance, 1999: 3).

[Heavily influenced by the Roman-reviving Petrarch then living near Padua, portrait bust spread:]

The Sesto family of mint-masters in Venice had produced imitation Roman sestertii at around the same time, and Pandolfo III Malatesta had struck a small silver coin between 1406 and 1408 in Brescia showing his presumed portrait crowned by a wreath of roses. There is no question, however, that the Carrara medals were widely distributed, one specimen, in lead, finally coming to rest in the hands of one of the greatest patrons and collectors in the history of art – Jean de France, duke of Berry, who also possessed a curious series of objects crucial to an understanding of the history of the medal....

[Berry's early medals] These were all large, round, gold pendants with persons or scenes in relief, usually on both sides and usually mounted in rich jeweled frames to be worn around the neck at the end of a chain. It might surprise us to learn that pictured on these gold disks were Julius Caesar, Tiberius, Faustina, Octavian, Livia, and, most importantly, Constantine I, and Heraclius. (figs. 5, 6) Some of these objects were purchased from Italian merchants in Paris, and all, including the Constantine and Heraclius, were accepted until as late as the seventeenth century as being ancient.

With this in mind, there remains one final item described in the duke of Berry’s collections that must be mentioned. It is another round, gold piece of jewelry showing on one side the Virgin and Child under a canopy held by angels and on the other an image of the duke in half length. Could it be that as early as the first years of the fifteenth century a Northern prince, removed, for the most part, from the environment and traditions of Italy and the first stages of the Renaissance humanist movement, commissioned a portrait medal of himself? Since the portrait side of this curious object is lost, we shall never really know what resemblance it may have had to the Italian portrait medal. Perhaps its appearance may be conjectured from the January page of the Trés Riches Heures with the duke seated at table before a large, round fire-screen. (fig. 7) We do possess, however, what is probably the reverse in a circular plaquette in Berlin that matches the inventory description exactly. (fig. 8)

There is one other object that could give us not only some idea of the appearance of what we shall call the Berry portrait medal, but also introduce us to another possible source for the Renaissance medal – the seal. One of the duke of Berry’s seals, dating to the end of the fourteenth century, shows him facing in half-length holding a sword above the battlements of a castle, similar to the composition of the Berlin plaquette and matching the description in the duke’s inventories. (fig. 9) There is no question that the artist who designed this seal meant the representation to be a true portrait of the duke.

The seal must surely have been one of the basic sources for the size, type, and composition of the Renaissance medal. The extraordinary quality of seals attests to their importance and reflects the stature of those artists – goldsmiths and court painters – called upon to design them and possibly even to cut the dies.(ibid, 4).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/St ... ance-Medal

Often Aces have a dedicatory page quality to them - featuring the dedicatee's arms or even a portrait - and are probably to be considered in the context of these seal and medal designers and die cutters.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... ard_36.jpg[/img]


The Sola Busca all but spells out the logic of classical coin appropriation we first witness in Padua in 1390:

The deck in question then would be a very early example of a nascent practice of adapting classical coin profile portraiture to contemporary practices. One of those contemporary practices was the use of seals, per Scher, in which any chancellor-like figure - a head of a monastery, courtly chancellery or university - would frequently use in sealing his voluminous correspondence. I would also suggest the various Trees of Virtues with exempli, genealogical trees with a bust in a tondo, busts in manuscript illuminations, etc., already lent themselves to the simple stylistic updating to show the relevant person in classical profile.



So let's review the basic facts: the deck is early, the game of cards itself no more than a generation old, and features a humanist-type figure who likely used a seal. Using an ace as a dedicatee card of sorts must have happened fairly early and this being an early example. All reasonable but there is a critical contemporary scholarly context we have not considered yet. The ramifications for the adoption of cards in Europe is much bigger than this one deck, but is the notion that the game of cards might be likened to existing game with which is shared various characteristics not likely? Chess is one such example but hardly exhaustive. Consider the Philosophers' Game or Rithmomachia...


The Philosophers' Game / Rithmomachia

German-speakers here will be pleased to note one of the standard works on this extinct game is by a German scholar: Arno Borst, Das mittelalterliche Zahlenkampfspiel, 1986. I will, however, be mainly quoting from this more recent English work: Fulke, William., Moyer, Ann Elizabeth, Lever, Ralph. The Philosophers' Game: Rithmomachia in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, with an Edition of Ralph Lever and William Fulke, The Most Noble, Auncient, and Learned Playe (1563). United Kingdom: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

First the basics:

Rithmomachia (also known as Rithmomachy, Arithmomachia, Rythmomachy, Rhythmomachy, The Philosophers' Game, and other variants) is an early European mathematical board game. Its earliest known description dates from the eleventh century. The name comes loosely from Greek and means "The Battle of the Numbers."[a] The game is somewhat like chess except that most methods of capture depend on the numbers inscribed on each piece.
The game seems to have been designed as an educational tool that teachers could use while teaching arithmetic as part of the quadrivium to those in Western Europe who received a classical education during the medieval period.

The first written evidence of Rithmomachia dates to around 1030, when a monk named Asilo created a game that illustrated the number theory of Boethius' De institutione arithmetica, for the students of monastery schools. De institutione arithmetica was the standard textbook for instruction in arithmetics in the period for those lucky enough to receive a medieval education. The rules of the game were improved shortly thereafter by another monk, Hermannus Contractus from Reichenau [near Constance!], and in the school of Liège. In the following centuries, Rithmomachia spread through schools and monasteries in the southern parts of Germany and France....

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

So we have card-like pieces with numbers - not unlike pips or ordinal ranking of court cards - and diffused in the precise area where our deck would have come from, on the Swiss-Southern German border; Moyer/Lever further specify manuscript productions at monasteries such as Regensburg, Michelsberg, and Tegernsee, and the region of Franconia (2001: 21) - a woodblock/printing center.

Unfortunately Google has scanned in only a small part of this book (certainly worth investigating in more depth), but does offer this:

Borst’s study of the early manuscript tradition has confirmed the opinion of several earlier scholars that the game developed in the ecclesiastical schools of eleventh-century Germany. It first appeared in cathedral schools, but soon spread to monastic ones as well….these game manuals began gradually to include descriptions of an ancient and distinguished (though somewhat obscure) pedigree of the game. Their lists of early devotees included Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and the first Pythagoreans.

The earliest known work, and the copies made from it, indicate that its author, ‘Asilo,’ came from Wurzburg; he was probably Adalbero, son of the count of Carinthis and the future bishop of Wurzburg (named by Henty III in 1045). (20)

We thus have a game of number taking that persisted into the 16th century before petering out, that was linked to an imagined history stretching back to ancient Greece. Seals, manuscript traditions and early medals of portraiture were being adapted to the profiles of classical coins right at the time this card deck was produced. Since Rithmomachia was supposedly invented by an ancient humanist (so imagined, by someone like Pythagoras) then it would be only natural to associate the arrival of cards - in essence representing mathematical numbers - to a variation of this same game. The portrait on the card followed contemporary practice and shows said imagined founder as a contemporary humanist in scholar's hat. So instead of a dedicatee card, as initially suggested above, I'd propose this instead: card-playing entered a German area where Rithmomachia was not only flourishing but whose game rules were refined; a similar ancient pedigree could have also been assumed for this Saracen-derived game (some of Aristotle and other classical texts were transmitted via Arabic sources, hence the classical connection was a natural one) and thus a (classical philosopher-in-contemporary-garb) humanist-founder standing in as the creator of card on this "ace" card. The dedicatee was none other than the game's inventor.

The link to the suits of Batons/Polo Sticks is still obtuse, but one might surmise all games were considered to have a classical pedigree, and that a round object was played with sticks was one such one. The player assumed the position of the inventor and quite literally entered the world of number taking - one was bounced about in an arena of number, like a pinball, but in a more complex manner in trying to land the right combination. Cards, whether just unnumbered court cards or countable objects in the pips, all had an ordinal ranking arranged into four suits that could allusively parallel the quadrivium, the four “mathematical arts” of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The "coin" is an imagined seal of the inventor.

Phaeded

Phaeded wrote: 05 Jun 2022, 21:51 First of all, you don't address the differing court card signs in two of the suits, but what you are essentially arguing for is a Swiss/German deck that didn't exist - to reiterate, the surviving suits are:
Acorns, Leafs, Roses, Pomegranates
Acorns, Flowers, Shields and Bells (what I argue is closest, sword replacing Shields - https://www.wopc.co.uk/switzerland/oldcards)
Roses, Leafs, Grapes, Pomegranates (and likely a couple other flower/fruit variants I'm leaving out)
Acorns, Leafs, Hearts, and Bells - the final German standard

No cups or coins.

Phaeded, I recommend you look at Detlef Hoffmann, Schweizer Spielkarten 1. Die Anfänge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert (Schaffhausen: Museum zu Allerheiligen und Cartophilia Helvetica, 1998). This book is essential for any serious discussion of early Swiss cards. The part especially relevant to your present discussion is the chapter entitled "Die Spiele mit italienischen Farbzeichen" (The Decks with Italian Suit Signs). Hoffmann presents several 15th and 16th century decks believed to be from the contiguous region of southwestern Germany/Switzerland/Provence, all of which have the Italian suit signs of cups, coins, swords, and batons. The "Baraja Morisca" and the other deck on Tor Gjerde's excellent website are two of these decks. The others are the 15th century "Liechtenstein deck" (which also had a suit of shields in addition to the four Italian suits), and several almost identical decks from the early 16th century. The Liechtenstein deck and the early 16th century decks all have the distinctly German/Swiss features of Obers and Unters (holding the suit sign up or down, respectively), and the 16th century decks also feature the typically Swiss "banner tens." The coins and the cups (which are always lidded, like those of the Budapest decks and the Minchiate deck) are unmistakable as such; they are definitely not bells or acorns. All these decks (including the "Baraja Morisca") share certain features which reinforce the impression that they are all part of a single card design family, with variations branching off at various times.

I think it's quite obvious from all these decks, when viewed together, that the Swiss/German suits of acorns and bells evolved directly from the Italian suits of (lidded) cups and coins respectively, and the "Baraja Morisca" is from the moment of transition between these two stages. Moreover, the batons briefly gave rise to a Swiss suit of feathers in much the same way (the feathers were depicted bent over at one end, like the batons in the Baraja Morisca and the Liechtenstein deck). For a fascinating discussion of this and more, see the brilliant analysis by Marianne Rumpf, “Zur Entwicklung der Spielkartenfarben in der Schweiz, in Deutschland und in Frankreich,” Schweizerischen Archiv fur Volkskunde 72, no. 1-2 (1976): 1–32. She traces the evolution of all the Swiss and German signs (and thence the French ones) from the four Italian (i.e. Turkish/Arab) suits, including the leaves, hearts, and shields. Even if you can't read the German, her diagrams on the final pages should be quite enlightening alone.

Nathaniel wrote: 06 Jun 2022, 11:21 The "Baraja Morisca" and the other deck on Tor Gjerde's excellent website are two of these decks. The others are the 15th century "Liechtenstein deck" (which also had a suit of shields in addition to the four Italian suits), and several almost identical decks from the early 16th century.... The coins and the cups (which are always lidded, like those of the Budapest decks and the Minchiate deck) are unmistakable as such; they are definitely not bells or acorns. All these decks (including the "Baraja Morisca") share certain features which reinforce the impression that they are all part of a single card design family, with variations branching off at various times.

Will definitely check out Hoffman and Rumpf - thanks for the head's up, but I find these studies are often far from infallible.

I linked the reconstruction of Tor Gjerde's reconstruction in my original post. His cups comparable are all on rounded saucer-like bases and all perfectly straight; the Morisca are randomly oriented - like nuts on a tree - and have oddly concave bases; is there a comparable cup ever depicted that way?
A basic problem remains: The Morisca shows non-Italian suit signs before we have evidence of Italian suit signs. Any later Swiss/German decks could have been influenced by Italian deck suits, but the Baraja Morisca is especially early, with the tell-tale sign of retaining the Mamluk polo stick. Gjerde's reconstruction splits up the court cards clearly holding upward the exact same flower into the suits of Swords and Batons for no reason (and without noting the pips - at least the batons - are of a different suit than the court cards). That there is a non-Italian suit of Flowers in the Morisca court cards is clear (highlighted in yellow here), especially when compared to a later Swiss deck that does feature suits close to the Morisca (the Unter is missing in the Flowers, which would be depicted like the Saracen knight, and again, I would argue there are a total of 5 court cards per suit, king, queen, ober marshal, unter marshal and page):


But the Saracen in the Morisa has its acorn/"cup" (with attached oak leaves by the way - why would a cup have that?) beneath him and his horse's attitude is different than the other knaves (both front legs rearing, instead of one leg stepping, like the bad horse in Plato), so clearly is the Unter.

And can you deny that is an acorn beneath the Saracen? The other acorn court cards have the oak leaves separately from the acorn nut to possibly indicate they are more civilized than the Saracen (perhaps the nut is shucked from its base shell and leaves) and of course to simply differentiate the cards.

Unfortunately the Unter Knave of acorns/cups is the only surviving Unter. The three surviving walking Pages all have their signs above them (not sure why Gjerde's reconstruction has one upside down like the Hanged Man), so we have a mounted knight with sign above, mounted knight with sign below, page with sign above, a king, and what I'd argue is clearly a queen. Even when a man is shown with a belt from this time period it is closer to his waist - this "king" with cinched wait beneath the breast is cross-dressing and has implants (comparable is from a contemporary tacuinum sanitatis manuscript):

Because of the strong evidence of Italian influence - in Germany and especially France - there seems to be an unfounded predilection for assuming the Morisca was following an Italian deck, for which we have no earlier evidence. In fact the Southern German luxury decks show an independent willingness to make up their own suits. The fact that the likes of de Grassi's copybooks were being used on both sides of the Alps merely shows that cross-fertilization of the deck designs - like all artistic works - was rampant. To draw inferences from the mid-16th century as the sole means for explaining a c. 1410 deck seems like bad methodology to me. The Morisca has confused some suits in terms of its differing court cards and pips, and seems to be an early stab at a deck design that included an expanded court. But its idiosyncrasies are not adequately explained by the Italian standard suits in the least.

There is no way the Morisca had just 3 court cards per suit (there would just be king and a mounted Ober "Knave" and Unter "Knave" - not the queen and Pages) and that the court suits differed from the pips in at least the case of Polo Sticks and whatever the fourth suit was (I argue for Leafs, but the object on that Page is blurred beyond recognition at this resolution).

It is just as likely that card-playing took off especially early in the Upper Rhine, for all of the reasons I've mentioned (the previous local invention of a similar and popular numbers-taking game of Rithmomachia predisposing the region to an early adoption of cards, the strong presence of Hospitallers locally as a means of diffusion of Mamluks, etc.), without major Italian influence in the beginning. The two regional streams of card production could have influenced one another over time, so that claiming one-way influence is dubious. That an acorn could be deemed a lidded cup or vice versa in different deck productions does not require a leap of the imagination. And the Liechtenstein deck you referenced already shows confusion of the two trends - its Italian suits have a fifth one of shields. There simply wasn't standardization early on and to force the Morisca into the standard Italian suit format is not warranted by the obvious deviations in that deck.

Phaeded

Phaeded wrote: 05 Jun 2022, 21:51 First of all, you don't address the differing court card signs in two of the suits, but what you are essentially arguing for is a Swiss/German deck that didn't exist - to reiterate, the surviving suits are:
Acorns, Leafs, Roses, Pomegranates
Acorns, Flowers, Shields and Bells (what I argue is closest, sword replacing Shields - https://www.wopc.co.uk/switzerland/oldcards)
Roses, Leafs, Grapes, Pomegranates (and likely a couple other flower/fruit variants I'm leaving out)
Acorns, Leafs, Hearts, and Bells - the final German standard

No cups or coins.

As for Cups: you're ignoring the court cards with the same suit signs and oak leaves and unlike the Minchiate example there is no flat end to place a "cup" on a surface - one end curves (a section of twig) and the other end is pointed.

As for Coins: the reason there is a simple "S" curve on them, instead of an attempt to replicate a known wappen or actual coin, is that occasionally the cut made into the spherical bell was S-shaped (per the c. 1540, Hans Schäufelein example of S-cut bells in profile below, although there are also plenty of straight cut opening examples). The fact that the circular shapes are spherical on the Morisca deck is indicated by the shading on a number of them - there is no reason for a coin to be half dark.

[...]

So let's review the basic facts: the deck is early, the game of cards itself no more than a generation old,

Thanks, Phaeded for your detailed answer and elaboration.

However, I still see this subject and the cards differently than you, also in the big historical picture (and evidently: I might not be right, it is just my perspective, which might be blurred or straightforwardly wrong):

We agree on the fact:

So let's review the basic facts: the deck is early, the game of cards itself no more than a generation old,

However, I deduce from this that we rather have to see this deck from beginning of 1400f as an early adoption of the Mamluk deck, of which all the Mamluk suits --swords, clubs, cups, coins-- are depicted. This is the most plausible picture for me, since we should remember Decker (1989):

But a new game can travel quickly whereas new forms of a game evolve slowly (an observation that I owe to Michael Dummet).

Decker's and Dummet's argument are convincing for me and to be considered in any history of the cards.

Now, if we add that in

Marianne Rumpf( 1976). Zur Entwicklung der Spielkartenfarben in der Schweiz, in Deutschland und in Frankreich. Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde, 72, p.1-31

it is beautifully shown that the Swiss/Southern German suit sign are derived from the Mamluk design. E.g., coins become bells etc.

[The work of Rumpf is also important for Karnöffel, since she clearly points out that two of the Swiss suits have Carnival aspects: Tätsch and Fugel. I will come to it when I will finally have time to describe it in details.]


Since all surviving Swiss/German decks are much later, I see the Morisca Deck coming from Switzerland/South German region from the early 1400f as a superb example how a Mamluk deck is transformed into the later Swiss/German deck. We can even observe this transformation in the ongoing, including a depreciation of the Mamluks depicted in the sword suit -- the game is appropriated by the Swiss/Germans, even by signs.

I want to support that hypothesis that "We can even observe this transformation in the ongoing," by the fact that we find (acorn) leaves and flowers also on other cards in the morisca deck in the other suits, as on the ace of cups, ace of swords, two of swords, four of swords and fours of clubs, and then on many figure cards in all suits. It seems to me that (acorn) leaves and flowers should represent the unifying aspect of all four suits – leaves and flowers symbolize life.

Hopefully by the above argument I give some answer to

As for Coins: the reason there is a simple "S" curve on them, instead of an attempt to replicate a known wappen or actual coin, is that occasionally the cut made into the spherical bell was S-shaped (per the c. 1540, Hans Schäufelein example of S-cut bells in profile below, although there are also plenty of straight cut opening examples). The fact that the circular shapes are spherical on the Morisca deck is indicated by the shading on a number of them - there is no reason for a coin to be half dark.

I admit that I do not read the half darkness of the coins as an indication for sphericalness, since the dark parts of the coins are red, red is not necessarily dark. The red is also reflected in the ace of coins and indicates for me rather gold. And I believe that this multiple colouring of the coins spills simply over from the colouring of the other suits, note that all three other suits are multiply coloured in the pip cards – and interestingly the coins are only coloured with red, not with black.

As for:

As for Cups: you're ignoring the court cards with the same suit signs and oak leaves and unlike the Minchiate example there is no flat end to place a "cup" on a surface - one end curves (a section of twig) and the other end is pointed.

That one end curves is no problem for me if we understand the depiction as a cross section of the cup as a chalice with lid – in order to graphically depict the sphericalness of the object, a kind of 3d effect. Very often these kinds of chalices only have a flat foot in the sense that the outer circle on which they stand is flat and that the foot is hollow within.

I still see also the Ace as a cup and not as a monstrance: if it were a monstrance then the host would have been shown or at least the host-holder. But what I clearly see is some liquid within the cup.

For these objects being acorns, the “sections of twig” are far too geometrical, the other flower and leaf aspects in the deck are much closer to nature and not geometrical but freer in design. Note also that for acorns there would be no necessity to draw two lines in the object where I see the separation of lid and chalice, respectively. And: the "acorn" the respective king holds in his hands is far too big, by size it must be a larger object.

Now coming to

First of all, you don't address the differing court card signs in two of the suits

For me, the depiction on https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/ reveals the following structure:

All four kings are seated on thrones, all four ober are on horses, all unter we see are not on horses but on foot. Perfect for Switzerland and Germany of that time, ober are Knights/Cavaliers (Ritter/Reiter) unter are knaves (Knappen). Note that the unter are this time rather be identified by being on foot, not necessarily by the sign being very low. For people of that time the differentiation between being on horse or on foot was clear. So I read this as a further evolution of the original Mamluk cards. Note that the unter of the clubs is upwards-down in https://cards.old.no/1400-morisca/ , perhaps because this kind of differentiation was not clear to the author of the website.

Then to the suits: sword suite is clear, the beards indicating a Saracen kingdom (which lost its power in view of the broken sword on the ace) [possible also is a crusader king letting his beard being unshaved (as later Eberhard im Barte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eberhard_ ... Crttemberg
)]. The other kings are shaved and depicted as such, which was normal for European kings in that time.

The cups suite is also clear: the king holds a chalice in his hands – the size is far too big for an acorn. I see also the knight and the knave holding a chalice in their hands, respectively.

The coin suite is also clear with the exception of the king – there I do not see a coin because there is a black spot covering the object. However, depicted is a rich king with expensive clothing.

The club suite is also clear for the king and the knight who hold a club in their hand, respectively. I also see a club in the left hand of the knave, below the club there is sign resembling the other sign between his legs.

[So this is how I see it, but I might be wrong.]