Many German authors claim that playing cards were in common use throughout Germany at a much earlier period. Breitkopf quotes the following passage from a book called the Golden Mirror, said to have been written about the middle of the fifteenth century by a Dominican friar of the name of Ingold: "The game is right deceitful, and, as I have read, was first brought in Germany in the year 1300."[1] Another writer quotes an old chronicle, that describes the emperor Rudolph as amusing himself with cards in the old town of Augsburg at some undefined time before his death in 1291. It cannot be proved that the cards here mentioned were true playing cards. It is more probable that the amusement noticed was the game of king and queen, which was forbidden to the clergy by the synod of Worcester in 1240, and which has sometimes been erroneously understood as a game of cards. The notices of card-makers and card-printers in the town books of Nuremberg and Augsburg should be regarded as the earliest records of the use of playing cards in Germany.[2]
A review of the dates proves that playing cards were not popular in any part of Europe before the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The Italian record which attributes their derivation to the land of the Saracens is fully corroborated by other testimony of authority. Students of oriental literature assure us that the Saracens were taught the uses of playing cards by the inhabitants of Hindostan, in which country they were invented.[3] Playing cards were made in China from printed blocks long before the game was known in Europe.
- ↑ Breitkopf, Versuch den Ursprung der Spielkarten, p. 9, note g. The fac-similes of playing cards in this book are exceedingly grotesque.
- ↑ Cards are not mentioned in a specification of popular games in the Stadtholdt Book of Augsburg for the year 1274. The ordinances of the town of Nuremberg for the period between the years 1286 and 1299 prohibit gambling, but they do not mention cards. For the period between 1380 and 1384, they are both mentioned and permitted.
- ↑ In Singer's Researches into the History of Playing Cards may be found many fac-similes of early Hindostanee cards, some of which, we are told, were engraved on plates of ivory. These fac-similes show that the primitive game was a modification of the old Indian game of chess.
