One must get used to the fact—and this will be said time and again—that even now we know precious little of such everyday things as playing cards.
Detlef Hoffmann
The following list was developed initially from items in Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot and the first two volumes of Stuart Kaplan's The Encyclopedia of Tarot. It includes some items pertaining specifically to dice, quite a bit about regular cards and unique decks, a few chess allegories, and even some card tricks, as part of the larger historical context of Tarot. The purpose of presenting details of Tarot history in a context of other cards, games, and allegorizations is to contrast with Tarot's almost universally presupposed esoteric and divinatory history, i.e., eighteenth and nineteenth-century Masonic fiction and late twentieth-century crypto-Masonic apologetics. The reader interested solely in the playing-card history aspects of Tarot may be distracted by the entries about Medieval artistic and literary sources related to the allegorical content of the trumps, and various items related to the development of cartomancy. However, these are all relevant to understanding the history of Tarot.
There are many other games and decks that might be included, as well as additional prohibitions against cards and Tarot, etc., so my selection was usually based on either some relationship to Tarot (such as the Italian suit-signs associated with Trappola and Lansquenet cards) or to a more general significance in the history of card games—reflecting general tendencies, extreme variations, or early examples of popular modern games. I’ve included just about every reference I found about the earliest years of playing cards in Europe, and about the earliest years of Tarot.
Each of the roughly 350 entries has at least one source cited, and multiple sources are cited in many cases. The present version is still very much a work in progress. Most of the desired entries are included, but many citations remain to be added as well as internal cross references and links. Longer entries, such as a discussion of the Karnöffel trump suit or the “Mantegna” cosmographic series, have been put into separate files, linked to their entries. (A list of these linked files is also located at the bottom of this page.) Although my own perceptions inevitably color many of the entries, I have isolated some of the more blatant commentary (whether my own, or mine by adoption) into mini-essays. These are set off from the regular entries by being boxed, titled, and by having a different background. And in no case should what you find here be considered authoritative in any sense—this is only a chronological listing, with some quotes and citations, all second-hand and outside their original context.
Each entry attempts to include date and location, to the extent that is possible from the references used. Dates are used as indices, and no implication of certainty is implied! Some are exact and documented, while others vary greatly in both their precision and likely accuracy; so in a reference to the “1450 Visconti-Sforza deck”, the date is not being stated as fact, (although the dates are taken from the sources cited), but included as an index to this timeline. Italicized citations indicate the source of quotes; bold citations refer to illustrations in Kaplan’s two volumes.
To preserve the flow of the list and reduce the size of the five main files a bit, the entries that include extended descriptions are located in separate files. Each file is linked to its location in the list, and they are also grouped together here. Files online as of the Spring 2004 update have links; the others have yet to be written.
1377 Basel, Switzerland. Johannes von Rheinfelden’s moralization:
Tractatus de moribus.
1423 Bologna, Italy. Saint Bernardine’s Sermon:
Contra alearum ludos.
1429 Nördlingen, Germany. The first known game using trumps:
Karnöffel
The vicinity of Florence, Italy. A collection of early references organized by jurisdiction rather than date, from trionfi.com:
The Vicinity of Florence
1449 Milan, Italy. Letter of transmittal, accompanying Michelino da Besozzo’s cards:
Marcello’s Gift
c.1450 Switzerland. Earliest examples of Swiss suit-system:
Modern Deck Designs.
1457 Ferrara. Two 70-card decks of carte grande da trionfi suggest to some people a 5x14 pre-Tarot deck. Critique of the 5x14 theory:
The 5x14 Theory.
1459 Mantua, Italy. The “Mantegna” Cosmograph:
The “Mantegna” Cosmograph.
c.1470 ? A Dominican friar wrote Sermones de Ludo Cum Aliis:
The Steele Sermon.
c.1475 Ferrara, Italy. A unique allegorical Tarot:
The Boiardo Tarot Deck.
1485 Basil, Switzerland. Playing cards were used with losbuchen, lot books, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries:
A Timeline of Cartomancy.
1491 Ferrara, Italy. A unique classical Tarot:
The Sola Busca Tarot Deck.
1550 Venice, Italy. An ironic verse diatribe against Tarot:
The Invettiva of Lollio.
16th Century, Italy. Other early uses of Tarot:
Tarocchi Appropriati.
1637 France. Abbé Michel de Marolles’ Regles Dv Ieu Des Tarots Règle du Tarot:
1637 Rules of Tarot.