The origins of tarot: a card game from northern Italy

Anyone picking up tarot cards today thinks of interpretation, symbolism and perhaps ancient mysteries. The history itself is more sober and at the same time more exciting: tarot emerged in the 15th century at the courts of northern Italy as a card game with an additional series of trump cards. This article traces the path from the first playing cards in Europe to the lavish hand-painted decks of the Visconti and Sforza families.

Playing cards reach Europe

Before there could be tarot, there had to be playing cards, and they did not come from Europe. They probably originated in China and made their way to us via the Islamic world. In the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria, people in the 15th century played with cards that seem astonishingly familiar to us: an almost complete pack, now in the Topkapı Palace in Istanbul, has four suits, each with ten number cards and three court cards. The suit signs are cups, coins, swords and polo sticks; the court cards bear calligraphic titles instead of figures.

Such cards reached Europe along the trade routes of the Mediterranean. Until the 1370s there is no reliable trace of them; then, all of a sudden, references multiply. In 1377 Florence banned card playing, and in the same year the Dominican friar Johannes von Rheinfelden described, in a Latin treatise, a game that had “come to us” that very year. Even before 1400, cards had spread across Italy, Spain, France and the German-speaking lands.

The Italians, who did not know polo sticks, turned them into plain staves. This gave rise to the four Italian suits Coppe, Denari, Spade and Bastoni, that is, Cups, Coins, Swords and Staves, which the tarot still bears today. The court cards were the Page, the Knight and the King; the Queen was only added in Europe.

The idea of the trump

What was really new about tarot was not the pack with four suits but a fifth series of cards that beat all the others. There was a forerunner in Milan around 1420: Duke Filippo Maria Visconti had his secretary Marziano da Tortona devise a game in which sixteen gods and heroes of antiquity ranked above the four suits, which in this case were birds. That was not yet a tarot, but the principle of a superior series of pictures had come into the world.

At first, tarot went by a different name: the sources of the 15th century speak of trionfi, triumphs. The word referred to the festive procession of allegorical figures in a fixed order of rank, and it probably also alluded to Petrarch’s cycle of poems of the same name, in which Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time and Eternity overcome one another in turn. This is exactly how the series of trumps works: the Magician stands at the bottom, above him the secular and spiritual rulers, then virtues, powers of fate, heavenly bodies and finally the Last Judgement and the World. Incidentally, our word “trump” derives from this trionfo.

The earliest records: Florence, Ferrara, Milan

The oldest reference known today comes from Florence. The notary Giusto Giusti of Anghiari noted in his diary that in September 1440 he had given the condottiere Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta a pack of naibi a trionfi, decorated with Malatesta’s coat of arms. This entry has only been known since the 2000s; before that, Ferrara was regarded as the oldest record: in the account books of the Este court, a payment for carte da trionfi, intended for young members of the family, is entered in February 1442. Milan provides the most magnificent evidence, Bologna a tradition of its own that is still alive today.

Bologna has a legend attached to it: a prince named Francesco Fibbia, who died in 1419, is said to have invented the game; the claim goes back to a 17th-century portrait and has no contemporary support. All that is certain is that the game becomes traceable almost simultaneously in several northern Italian cities around 1440. At that time the series of trumps had no fixed numbers. Each region played with its own order; scholars distinguish three main orders, for Bologna and Florence, for Ferrara and for Milan.

Visconti-Sforza: works of art to play with

Almost all that survives from this period are the hand-painted luxury decks of the dukes of Milan, which were kept like jewellery; printed everyday cards were worn out and thrown away. The Cary-Yale deck at Yale University was probably made in the 1440s and contains additional cards, such as the theological virtues and female knights. The Brera-Brambilla deck in Milan survives only in fragments. The most complete is the Pierpont Morgan-Bergamo deck of around 1450, divided between New York, Bergamo and private ownership. Of its 78 cards, 74 are present; the Devil, the Tower, the Three of Swords and the Knight of Coins are missing.

The painting is attributed to the Cremonese artist Bonifacio Bembo and his workshop; there is no signature. The cards are large, their backgrounds laid with gold leaf and decorated with punchwork. The trumps bear neither numbers nor names. Anyone who played knew that the Pope ranked above the Emperor and Death above the Hanged Man.

A sermon and the first list of trumps

We owe the names of the early trumps, of all people, to an opponent of the game. In a collection of Latin sermons, the Sermones de ludo cum aliis, written in northern Italy around 1500 (proposed dates range from about 1470 to 1500), a preacher lists the 22 trumps with their numbers in order to castigate this work of the devil. The list begins with El bagatella, the Magician, and ends with the World and the Fool, El matto, without a number. Some names are surprising: the Hermit is called El gobbo, the Hunchback, and in place of the Tower stands La sagitta, the thunderbolt. The pictures were familiar, but their interpretation had not yet hardened.

Sola-Busca: pictures on every card

One deck from this period stands out: the Sola-Busca tarot, named after the Milanese families who once owned it and held by the Pinacoteca di Brera since 2009. It was engraved on copper around 1491 and is the oldest completely preserved tarot with 78 cards. Its trumps show ancient commanders instead of popes and virtues, and, uniquely for the time, every number card bears a scene with figures. More than four hundred years later, Pamela Colman Smith saw photographs of these cards in the British Museum and took up some of their motifs.

What remains

The tarot of the 15th century was a social game for the upper classes: expensive, magnificent and without any claim to secret knowledge. Its trumps are allegories of their time: rulers and Church, virtues, Fortune and Death, the heavenly bodies and the Last Judgement. Nothing about them is Egyptian, and nothing came from the East with travelling people; these stories only arose in the 18th century. But first, the game makes its way across the Alps to France.