The crowd gathered outside Nuremberg’s Frauenkirche in 1452 is clustered around a fire. Its focus is divided: some stare at the flames at their feet, growing minute by minute in intensity, whereas others turn towards the Franciscan preacher, who, from a makeshift pulpit, exhorts them to abandon worldly vanities.
In a contemporary woodblock depicting the scene, made by a German printmaker known simply as ‘Monogrammist HS’, the fire is not consuming heretics, but gambling accessories. According to one account, sexagenarian Cardinal Johannes Capistranus had persuaded Nuremberg’s citizens to burn ‘3,612 backgammon boards and more than 20,000 dice, and playing cards without number’.
By the middle of the 15th century, the city was among the playing-card-making centres of Europe. Religious authorities and priests — such as the future St John of Capistrano — worried about the propriety of card games. Although the first treatise attempting a moral defence of them was written in 1377 by a Dominican friar, John of Rheinfelden, the Reformist theologian Martin Luther would claim that, in his youth a century later, priests refused card-makers the sacraments. Yet, from high to low, the people of Europe were in the midst of a craze that proved long lasting.
A Friend in Need by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge.
Playing cards had almost certainly reached Germany, the Netherlands and France by the final quarter of the 14th century from Italy, notably Florence and Venice, the latter in the medieval period a leading maritime trading centre with links to the Near and Middle East.
Playing cards are also recorded as having existed in Spain at a similar date, imported from the Near East and North Africa. By the early 1390s, Charles VI of France owned at least three sets of playing cards. In subsequent decades, in the German town of Ulm, cards were produced in such quantities that they were exported in hogsheads and, as demand spread, a German card-maker’s wife, Barbel Winterperkin, travelled across Bavaria selling her husband’s cards at local fairs.
The first playing cards in England were probably French imports, arriving early in the 15th century. By 1463, there were enough English card-makers for Edward IV’s government to pass a law that prohibited the import of foreign playing cards (alongside foreign-made dice and tennis balls) in order to protect native craftsmen.
As on the Continent, card games had achieved widespread popularity swiftly; they were enjoyed by English men and women of all sorts, including middle-class families, such as the letter-writing Pastons and their Norfolk neighbours. On Christmas Eve 1459, Margery Paston wrote to her husband, John, that the widowed Lady Morlee had given permission to her servants to play ‘schesse [chess] and cardys [cards]’ in her house of mourning, although she forbade them to dance, sing and play the lute or harp.
The cards that took medieval Europe by storm originated in China, possibly as early as the 9th century. There, according to one theory, cards began as money tokens in gambling games, a practical solution to the difficulties of playing games using paper currency that was easily torn or damaged. Later, playing cards became popular in Persia and Egypt. Persian card games such as ganjifa, played with 96 cards in eight suits, were exported to India, where local makers replaced rectangular playing cards with circular cards, vividly coloured and lacquered to safeguard their longevity.
Six Indian Ganjifa cards, from the 18th/19th century.
The earliest playing cards of European manufacture were handpainted, too, and costly as a result. Card games began as an elite pastime, their components decorated with imagery drawn from an aristocratic world of royal power and the hunt, including hounds and stags. As today, the earliest packs featured four suits, initially swords, clubs, cups and coins, or cups, swords, polo sticks and coins, with today’s clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades a French innovation of the third quarter of the 15th century (in Germany, by contrast, acorns, leaves, bells and hearts made up the suits).
In an engraving of about 1500, the Grand Duke and Duchess of Bavaria play at a table in a window alcove, both clasping their cards close to their chests, as the Grand Duchess points coquettishly to the four of hearts that lies between them. In place of today’s queen, early playing cards included a king and two viceroys, an entirely male affair. Advances in printing account for the democratisation of the playing card from the second quarter of the 15th century. No longer did designs have to be drawn or painted by hand: instead, illustrations were engraved onto wood blocks, usually with a number of different images printed on the same sheet, which was then coloured by hand. The card itself consisted of ‘3 or 4 peices of white paper pasted togather and made verie smooth’.
In some instances, playing cards were instructive, as well as decorative. A pack of cards made to designs by William Bowes in 1590 includes annotated English and Welsh county maps. Appropriately for cards made in the aftermath of England’s victory over the Spanish Armada, there is a celebratory bullishness to their vision of the British Isles. Of Middlesex, players are informed that the county has ‘a very sweete & fine ayer, Fertile soile, and full of statelye buildings’, whereas another card notes that Denbighshire is ‘but thinlye Inhabited… hylly & barren’, although ‘othersome very fertile’, and another praises London, its description ending with a prayer: ‘O Lord, grant London long in blisse to blome.’
In 1619, a manufacturer in Paris issued a French equivalent of Bowes’s geographical designs. The Florentine engraver Stefano della Bella accepted a commission in 1644 to make four sets of playing cards, possibly for the six-year-old Louis XIV. These were principally educational, intended to instruct the little King in geography, mythology and his own royal inheritance, with one pack depicting his predecessors as rulers of France, and another, the ‘Jeu des Reynes Renommées’, displaying distinguished women rulers, including Louis’s own mother, Anne of Austria, the Amazon Queen Penthesilea and Elizabeth I.
A homelier note was struck on cards printed in London in 1700 intended to teach users how to carve meat and fish. The king of clubs, for example, illustrates how best to slice a pickled herring. Yet despite this creative fertility, in essentials playing cards have changed little over half a millennium. French revolutionaries insisted on kings who wore berets in place of crowns, but the iconography of king, queen and jack, and graphic impact of red and black suits, scarcely alters.
The playing card’s journey may have been a long one both culturally and geographically, but the enduring popularity of games such as bridge, whist, poker and rummy ensures the playing card retains a continuing place in every British home.