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Who invented the cards? Playing cards. What cards do we play? Card kings: best among equals

Today, eight out of every ten UK homes play card games, but in the rest, if you look hard enough, you can find a deck of cards. Playing cards is so familiar to most of us that it even seems to us that they have always existed.

Perhaps playing cards have been known since the creation of fine art by man. Their history goes back so far that no one can say exactly when and where they first appeared.

Who invented playing cards?

For a long time it was believed that playing cards were invented by the Chinese, since previously paper money and playing cards in China were almost identical. We know that playing cards existed in China a thousand years ago! But at present it is not clear who should give priority to the invention of maps: the Chinese, Egyptians, Arabs or Indians.

Since their inception, cards have become one of the ways to predict fate. It is quite possible that they were used for this purpose before they were used for various gambling. In the Middle Ages, with the help playing cards sorcerers predicted the future.

When did playing cards come to Europe? Some believe that the crusaders brought them from their campaigns. Others say that through the Saracens they came to Spain or Italy, others say that the gypsies brought them to Eastern Europe. There is no doubt, however, that playing cards have been known in Europe since the 13th century.

Originally there were many different types of playing cards. For example, figured cards were common (there were 22 of them in the deck, and there were no numbers among them) and digital cards (there were 56 cards in this deck - and not a single picture). The French were the first to create a deck of 52 cards. They used digital cards and kept the king, queen, and jack from the face cards. This 52-card deck was adopted by the British.

The earliest cards were drawn by hand, but with the development of wood carving, playing cards became cheaper and spread very quickly among the common people.

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Rarely a modern person did not hold playing cards in his hands. There are several versions of their appearance, and researchers have not yet come to a consensus on this matter.

Cards have an ancient and very dramatic history. The long-held belief that cards were invented in France to amuse the mentally ill King Charles VI the Mad is just a legend. Already in Ancient Egypt they played with cuttings with numbers marked on them, in India - with ivory plates or shells; In China, maps similar to modern ones have been known since the 12th century.

There are two main versions. The first is Chinese, although many still do not want to believe in it. The Chinese and japanese maps and by appearance, and by the nature of the game, which is more like dominoes. However, there is no doubt that already in the 8th century in China, first sticks and then strips of paper with the designations of various symbols were used for games. These distant ancestors of cards were also used instead of money, so they had three suits: a coin, two coins and many coins. And in India, playing cards depicted the figure of a four-armed Shiva holding a cup, a sword, a coin and a staff. Some believe that these symbols of the four Indian classes gave rise to modern card suits.

The Chinese complicated the game of dice and got dominoes. Then, instead of dots, the tablets began to depict figures, flowers, and everyday scenes. Such signs were used for the solitaire-like game mahjong, common in China and Japan. The essence of the game is to make pairs of identical ones from the many tablets poured onto the table. From Asia, Italian travelers brought to Europe the idea of using cards with images for games. Surprisingly, neither dice, nor dominoes, nor mahjong disappeared with the advent of cards - a perfect example of the coexistence of different branches of evolution.

But the Egyptian version of the origin of the cards, replicated by modern occultists, is much more popular. They claimed that in ancient times, Egyptian priests wrote down all the wisdom of the world on 78 golden tablets, which were also depicted in the symbolic form of cards. 56 of them - the "Minor Arcana" - became ordinary playing cards, and the remaining 22 "Major Arcana" became part of the mysterious Tarot deck used for fortune telling. This version was first published in 1785 by the French occultist Etteila, and his successors, the French Eliphas Levi and Dr. Papus and the English Mathers and Crowley, created their own systems for interpreting Tarot cards. The name supposedly comes from the Egyptian “ta rosh” (“the path of kings”), and the maps themselves were brought to Europe either by Arabs or gypsies, who were often considered to have come from Egypt.

True, scientists were unable to find any evidence of such an early existence of the Tarot deck.

According to the third version (European version), regular cards appeared on the European continent no later than the 14th century. Back in 1367, card games were banned in the city of Bern, and ten years later, a shocked papal envoy watched in horror as the monks enthusiastically played cards near the walls of their monastery. In 1392, Jacquemin Gringonner, the jester of the mentally ill French King Charles VI, drew a deck of cards to amuse his master. The deck of that time differed from the current one in one detail: it had only 32 cards. There were four ladies missing, whose presence seemed unnecessary at the time. Only in the next century did Italian artists begin to depict Madonnas not only in paintings, but also on maps.

There is an assumption that a deck is not a random collection of cards. 52 cards are the number of weeks in a year, four suits are the four seasons. Green suit is a symbol of energy and vitality, spring, west, water. In medieval cards, the sign of the suit was depicted using a rod, staff, or stick with green leaves, which were simplified to black spades when printing cards. The red color symbolized beauty, north, spirituality. Cups, bowls, hearts, and books were depicted on the card of this suit. The yellow suit is a symbol of intelligence, fire, south, and business success. The playing card depicted a coin, a rhombus, a lit torch, the sun, fire, and a golden bell. Blue suit is a symbol of simplicity and decency. The sign of this suit was an acorn, crossed swords, swords.

Cards at that time were 22 centimeters long, which made them extremely inconvenient to play.

There was no uniformity in card suits. In early Italian decks they were called "swords", "cups", "denarii" (coins) and "wands". It seems, as in India, to be associated with classes: the nobility, clergy and merchant class, while the rod symbolized the royal power that stood over them. In French version swords became "spades", cups - into "hearts", denarii - into "diamonds", and "wands" - into "crosses", or "clubs" (the latter word in French means "clover leaf"). These names still sound different in different languages; for example, in England and Germany these are “shovels”, “hearts”, “diamonds” and “bludgeons”, and in Italy they are “spears”, “hearts”, “squares” and “flowers”. On German cards you can still find the old names of the suits: “acorns”, “hearts”, “bells” and “leaves”. As for the Russian word "hearts", it comes from the word "chervonny" ("red"): it is clear that "hearts" originally referred to the red suit.

Early card games were quite complex, because in addition to 56 standard cards they used 22 “Major Arcana” plus another 20 trump cards, named after the signs of the Zodiac and the elements. IN different countries these cards were called differently and the rules were so confused that it became simply impossible to play. In addition, the cards were hand-colored and were so expensive that only the rich could purchase them. In the 16th century, the cards were radically simplified - almost all the pictures disappeared from them, with the exception of the four “high suits” and the jester (joker).

Interestingly, all card images had real or legendary prototypes. For example, the Four Kings are the greatest monarchs of antiquity: Charlemagne (hearts), the biblical King David (spades), Julius Caesar (diamonds) and Alexander the Great (clubs). There was no such unanimity regarding the ladies - for example, the Queen of Hearts was either Judith, Helen of Troy, or Dido. The Queen of Spades was traditionally depicted as the goddess of war - Athena, Minerva and even Joan of Arc. After much debate, the biblical Rachel began to be portrayed as the Queen of Spades: she was ideal for the role of the “queen of money”, since she robbed her own father. Finally, the Queen of Clubs, in the early Italian maps who acted as the virtuous Lucretia, turned into Argina - an allegory of vanity and vanity.

- a frivolous figure in tights, a jester's cap, bells... And in his hands - a scepter with a man's head strung on it, which has now been replaced by humane artists with musical "cymbals". In pre-revolutionary stage performances similar character called Fradiavolo. " " is taller than all, it has no suit and is considered the strongest in the game. Thus, at the top of the pyramid is not the King, but Daus...

Ace is a word of Polish origin from the German Daus. The German-Russian dictionary indicates the meaning of the word: Daus - devil. It is quite possible that Daus is a corruption of the Greek "diabolos" - a dispeller of slander.

The most complex figure in the card pantheon is the jack, or, in English terminology, the squire. The very word “jack” at first meant a servant or even a jester, but later a different meaning was established - a not entirely honest, although brave, adventurer. That's exactly what everyone was like real prototypes jacks - the French knight La Hire, nicknamed Satan (hearts), as well as the heroes of the epic Ogier the Dane (spades), Roland (diamonds) and Lancelot the Lake (clubs).

“Trump” cards, their very name, have their own special purpose. "Kosher" i.e. Talmudists call ritual sacrifices “pure”... which, as you understand, is connected with Kabbalah.

Nevertheless, each researcher gives his own interpretations of suits and figures. Father Menestrier believed that the cards are symbols of the great monarchies (Jewish, Greek, Roman, French), and the four ladies are nothing more than the main female virtues: piety, motherhood, wisdom and beauty. Others believe that “ladies” depict such historical figures as Maria of Anjou, Agnes Sorel, Isabella of Bavaria and Joan of Arc. But hypotheses remain hypotheses.

He returned to the palace, took Odysseus’s son Telemachus from the cradle, brought him to the field and laid him in a furrow in front of a team of oxen and a donkey. Odysseus, of course, turned to the side, thereby giving himself away. This cunning of Palamedes was the basis for various inventions being attributed to him. He allegedly invented scales, letters, dice, some measures, and during the many-year siege of Troy -. And this happened 1000 years BC!

For example, in France in the 17th century, householders in whose apartments played gambling card games paid a fine and lost civil rights and were expelled from the city. Card debts were not recognized by law, and parents could recover a large sum from the person who won money from their child. After the French Revolution, indirect taxes on the game were abolished, which stimulated its development. The “pictures” themselves also changed - since the kings were in disgrace, it was customary to draw geniuses instead, ladies now symbolized virtues - in other words, a new social structure came to card symbolism. True, already in 1813, jacks, queens and kings returned to the cards. The indirect tax on game cards was only abolished in France in 1945.

A decree of 1696 under Peter I ordered that anyone suspected of wanting to play cards be searched, "... and anyone whose cards are taken out should be beaten with a whip." These punitive sanctions and similar ones that followed were due to the costs associated with the spread of gambling card games. Along with them, there were the so-called commercial card games, as well as the use of cards for performing tricks and playing solitaire.

The development of “innocent” forms of using cards was facilitated by Elizabeth Petrovna’s decree of 1761 dividing the use of cards into those prohibited for gambling and those permitted for commercial games. The route of penetration of cards into Russia is not entirely clear. Most likely, they became widespread in connection with the Polish-Swedish intervention during the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 18th century.

In the 19th century The development of new designs for playing cards began. Academicians of painting Adolf Iosifovich Charlemagne and Alexander Egorovich Beideman studied it. It is worth noting that their sketches are currently stored in the State Russian Museum and the Peterhof Card Museum. However, the drawings of Academician Adolf Iosifovich Charlemagne, which we now know as Atlas Maps, were put into production.

A.I. Charlemagne did not create a fundamentally new card style. The drawings on the Atlas maps were based on the so-called “North German picture”, which also came from the very ancient folk French deck of cards.

The new map sketches that were created did not have their own names. The concept of “satin” in the mid-19th century referred to the technology of their manufacture. Satin is a special type of smooth, glossy, shiny silk fabric. The paper on which they were printed was first rubbed with talcum powder on special rolling machines. In 1855, a dozen decks of satin cards cost 5 rubles 40 kopecks.

From the end of the 18th century, the present began, covering the entire Russian culture. For example, in his youth Derzhavin lived mainly on money won at cards, and Pushkin in police reports was listed not as a poet, but as “a well-known banker in Moscow.” Gambling Nekrasov and Dostoevsky often lost their last kopecks, while the cautious Turgenev preferred playing “for fun.” In the secular society of that time, especially provincial ones, almost the only entertainment was cards and the scandals associated with them.

Gradually, card games were divided into commercial ones, based on clear mathematical calculations, and gambling games, where chance ruled everything. If the first (vint, whist, bridge, etc.) have established themselves among educated people, then the second (seka, "point", shtoss and hundreds of others, even the harmless " a fool") reigned supreme among the common people.

In the West, “mental” card games that train logical thinking have even been included in the school curriculum. However, cards began to be used for completely non-intellectual activities. If they depict naked girls, there is no time for bridge. But this is a completely different game.

It must be said that over the centuries there have been many people who want to modernize card images, replacing them with animals, birds, and household items. For political purposes, decks were produced where Napoleon or the German Emperor Wilhelm acted as kings. And in the USSR, during the NEP years, there were attempts to depict workers with peasants on maps and even introduce new colors - “sickles”, “hammers” and “stars”. True, such amateur activity was quickly stopped, and maps were stopped printing for a long time as “attributes of bourgeois decay.”

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Rarely a modern person did not hold playing cards in his hands.

There are several versions of their appearance, and researchers have not yet come to a consensus on this matter.
Cards have an ancient and very dramatic history. It has long been believed that cards were invented in France to amuse the mentally ill King Charles VI the Mad, but this is just a legend. After all, already in Ancient Egypt they played with cuttings with numbers marked on them, in India with ivory plates or shells; In China, maps similar to modern ones have been known since the 12th century.

There are several versions of the origin of the cards:

The first is Chinese, although many still do not want to believe in it.
Chinese and Japanese cards are too unusual for us both in appearance and in the nature of the game, which is more like dominoes.
However, there is no doubt that already in the 8th century in China, first sticks and then strips of paper with the designations of various symbols were used for games.
These distant ancestors of cards were also used instead of money, so they had three suits: a coin, two coins and many coins.
And in India, playing cards depicted the figure of a four-armed Shiva holding a cup, a sword, a coin and a staff.
Some believe that these symbols of the four Indian classes gave rise to modern card suits.

But the Egyptian version of the origin of the cards, replicated by modern occultists, is much more popular.
They claimed that in ancient times, Egyptian priests wrote down all the wisdom of the world on 78 golden tablets, which were also depicted in the symbolic form of cards. 56 of them - the "Minor Arcana" - became ordinary playing cards, and the remaining 22 "Major Arcana" became part of the mysterious Tarot deck used for fortune telling.
This version was first published in 1785 by the French occultist Etteila, and his successors, the French Eliphas Levi and Dr. Papus and the English Mathers and Crowley, created their own systems for interpreting Tarot cards.
The name supposedly comes from the Egyptian “ta rosh” (“the path of kings”), and the maps themselves were brought to Europe either by Arabs or gypsies, who were often considered to have come from Egypt.
True, scientists were unable to find any evidence of such an early existence of the Tarot deck.

According to the third version (European version), ordinary maps appeared on the European continent no later than the 14th century.
Back in 1367, card games were banned in the city of Bern, and ten years later, a shocked papal envoy watched in horror as the monks enthusiastically played cards near the walls of their monastery.
In 1392, Jacquemin Gringonner, the jester of the mentally ill French King Charles VI, drew a deck of cards to amuse his master.
The deck of that time differed from the current one in one detail: it had only 32 cards.
There were four ladies missing, whose presence seemed unnecessary at the time.
Only in the next century did Italian artists begin to depict Madonnas not only in paintings, but also on maps.

There is an assumption that a deck is not a random collection of cards.
52 cards are the number of weeks in a year, four suits are the four seasons.
Green suit is a symbol of energy and vitality, spring, west, water.
In medieval cards, the sign of the suit was depicted using a rod, staff, or stick with green leaves, which were simplified to black spades when printing cards.
The red color symbolized beauty, north, spirituality. Cups, bowls, hearts, and books were depicted on the card of this suit.
The yellow suit is a symbol of intelligence, fire, south, and business success.
The playing card depicted a coin, a rhombus, a lit torch, the sun, fire, and a golden bell. Blue suit is a symbol of simplicity and decency. The sign of this suit was an acorn, crossed swords, swords. Cards at that time were 22 centimeters long, which made them extremely inconvenient to play.

There was no uniformity in card suits.
In early Italian decks they were called "swords", "cups", "denarii" (coins) and "wands".
It seems, as in India, to be associated with classes: the nobility, clergy and merchant class, while the rod symbolized the royal power that stood over them.
In the French version, swords became “spades”, cups became “hearts”, denarii became “diamonds”, and “wands” became “crosses” or “clubs” (the latter word means “clover leaf” in French). . These names still sound different in different languages; for example, in England and Germany these are “shovels”, “hearts”, “diamonds” and “bludgeons”, and in Italy they are “spears”, “hearts”, “squares” and “flowers”.
On German cards you can still find the old names of the suits: “acorns”, “hearts”, “bells” and “leaves”.
As for the Russian word "hearts", it comes from the word "chervonny" ("red"): it is clear that "hearts" originally referred to the red suit.

Early card games were quite complex, because in addition to 56 standard cards, they used 22 “Major Arcana” plus another 20 trump cards, named after the signs of the Zodiac and the elements.
In different countries these cards were called differently and the rules were so confused that it became simply impossible to play.
In addition, the cards were hand-colored and were so expensive that only the rich could purchase them. In the 16th century, the cards were radically simplified - almost all the pictures disappeared from them, with the exception of the four “high suits” and the jester (joker).

Interestingly, all card images had real or legendary prototypes. For example, the Four Kings are the greatest monarchs of antiquity: Charlemagne (hearts), the biblical King David (spades), Julius Caesar (diamonds) and Alexander the Great (clubs).
There was no such unanimity regarding the ladies - for example, the Queen of Hearts was either Judith, Helen of Troy, or Dido.
The Queen of Spades has traditionally been depicted as the goddess of war - Athena, Minerva and even Joan of Arc.
After much debate, the biblical Rachel began to be portrayed as the queen of spades: she was ideally suited for the role of the “queen of money”, since she robbed her own father.
Finally, the Queen of Clubs, who appeared on early Italian cards as the virtuous Lucretia, turned into Argina, an allegory of vanity and vanity.

By the 13th century, maps were already known and popular throughout Europe.
From this moment on, the history of the development of cards becomes clearer, but rather monotonous. In the Middle Ages, both fortune telling and gambling were considered sinful.
In addition, cards have become the most popular game during the working day - a terrible sin, according to employers of all times.
Therefore, from the middle of the 13th century, the history of the development of cards turns into the history of prohibitions associated with them.
For example, in France in the 17th century, householders in whose apartments played gambling card games paid a fine, were deprived of their civil rights and were expelled from the city.
Card debts were not recognized by law, and parents could recover a large sum from the person who won money from their child.
After the French Revolution, indirect taxes on the game were abolished, which stimulated its development.
The “pictures” themselves also changed - since the kings were in disgrace, it was customary to draw geniuses instead, ladies now symbolized virtues - in other words, a new social structure came to card symbolism.
True, already in 1813, jacks, queens and kings returned to the cards.
The indirect tax on game cards was only abolished in France in 1945.

Maps appeared in Russia at the beginning of the 17th century.
By the middle of this century, they had already gained popularity as a “path” to crimes and inciting passions. In the “Code” of 1649 under Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, it was prescribed to deal with players “as it is written about the tatas,” that is, to beat them with a whip and deprive them of fingers and hands by cutting off.
A decree of 1696 under Peter I ordered that anyone suspected of wanting to play cards be searched, "... and anyone whose cards are taken out should be beaten with a whip." These punitive sanctions and similar ones that followed were due to the costs associated with the spread of gambling card games.
Along with them, there were the so-called commercial card games, as well as the use of cards for performing tricks and playing solitaire.
The development of “innocent” forms of using cards was facilitated by Elizabeth Petrovna’s decree of 1761 dividing the use of cards into what was prohibited for gambling and what was permitted for commercial games.
The route of penetration of cards into Russia is not entirely clear.
Most likely, they became widespread in connection with the Polish-Swedish intervention during the Time of Troubles at the beginning of the 18th century.
In the 19th century The development of new designs for playing cards began.
Academicians of painting Adolf Iosifovich Charlemagne and Alexander Egorovich Beideman studied it.
It is worth noting that their sketches are currently stored in the State Russian Museum and the Peterhof Card Museum.
However, the drawings of Academician Adolf Iosifovich Charlemagne, which we now know as Atlas Maps, were put into production.
A.I. Charlemagne did not create a fundamentally new card style.
The drawings on the Atlas cards were based on the so-called “North German picture”, which also came from a very ancient folk French card deck.
The new map sketches that were created did not have their own names.
The concept of “satin” in the mid-19th century referred to the technology of their manufacture.
Satin is a special type of smooth, glossy, shiny silk fabric.
The paper on which they were printed was first rubbed with talcum powder on special rolling machines.
In 1855, a dozen decks of satin cards cost 5 rubles 40 kopecks.

From the end of the 18th century, a real card boom began, sweeping the entire Russian culture.
For example, in his youth Derzhavin lived mainly on money won at cards, and Pushkin in police reports was listed not as a poet, but as “a well-known banker in Moscow.”
Gambling Nekrasov and Dostoevsky often lost their last kopecks, while the cautious Turgenev preferred playing “for fun.”
In the secular society of that time, especially provincial ones, almost the only entertainment was cards and the scandals associated with them.
Gradually, card games were divided into commercial ones, based on clear mathematical calculations, and gambling games, where chance ruled everything.
If the first (vint, whist, preference, bridge, poker) established themselves among educated people, then the second (sec, "point", shtoss and hundreds of others, right down to the harmless "throwing fool") reigned supreme among the common people.
In the West, “mental” card games that train logical thinking have even been included in the school curriculum.
However, cards began to be used for completely non-intellectual activities.
If they depict naked girls, there is no time for bridge.
But this is a completely different game.
It must be said that over the centuries there have been many people who want to modernize card images, replacing them with animals, birds, and household items.
For political purposes, decks were produced where Napoleon or the German Emperor Wilhelm acted as kings.
And in the USSR, during the NEP years, there were attempts to depict workers with peasants on maps and even introduce new colors - “sickles”, “hammers” and “stars”.
True, such amateur activity was quickly stopped, and maps were stopped printing for a long time as “attributes of bourgeois decay.”

When historians became interested in the question of who invented playing cards, the invention was attributed to the artist Jacqueline Grangonner. It was believed that in the 14th century, a Frenchman drew pictures on pieces of cardboard to entertain Charles VI, who suffered from mood swings.

However, it turned out that the cards are much “younger”. They are mentioned in earlier documents that talk about the ban on card games for clergy. In fact, analogues have appeared modern maps in East Asia.

Ancient maps

The prototype of the cards, oblong sheets, is mentioned in the sources of the Tang Dynasty, this is 618-917. Even before that, similar rectangular tablets were made from other materials: bone, wood, bamboo. In India, cards called ganjifa were round in shape. The Japanese played uta-garuta, where instead of a deck they used mussel shells with various designs.

Playing cards, as close as possible to modern ones, were already used in Korea and the Middle Kingdom in the 12th century. It is believed that from there they came to India, then Persia, Egypt and only then to Europe.

For a long time, proud Europeans denied the merit of Muslims in inventing maps. But the Arabs had their own deck, something like Tarot cards. Consisted of 22 trump cards of four suits and 56 minor arcana. The Koran forbade drawing people, so only ornaments, so-called arabesques, were applied. The suits were cups, swords, staves and pentacles in the form of coins.

Maps in Europe

Arab sailors and traders brought maps to Europe. They are mentioned in ancient chronicles starting in 1367. As a rule, all records about cards relate to prohibition. But since the 16th century, the aristocracy, without embarrassment, has welcomed their depiction in their portraits.

It was Grangonner who managed to improve the pictures by depicting figures on cards that have remained virtually unchanged to this day.

Each card depicting a person has a historical prototype. The king of spades is the biblical David, the king of diamonds is Julius Caesar, the king of clubs is Alexander the Great. But in Grangonner’s time they were correlated with one of their contemporaries. For example, the queen of spades is Athena (aka Joan of Arc), the queen of diamonds is Rachel (in France she was drawn from the beautiful Agnes Sorel), the queen of hearts is Helen of Troy (Isabella of Bavaria), and the queen of clubs is Argina (wife of Charles VII Maria). Four brave royal knights became jacks, i.e. squires.

Inanimate virtues were given military-metaphorical meanings. Hearts were made a symbol of courage, diamonds with spades symbolized weapons, clubs - food supplies. The most valuable card, the ace, has become the embodiment of money.

In Russia, maps came into use around 1600. There is a version that Ukrainian Cossacks played them much earlier, having borrowed them from the Germans. Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich showed severity; card games were punished by torture with a hot iron and tearing out of the nostrils. But under Peter, two small card factories opened in Moscow, giving merchants the opportunity to make good money.

Back then, cards were made from poor quality paper. To somehow increase its strength, it was rubbed with talcum powder. When shuffled, such sheets slipped, and since then the name “satin” has stuck.

Atlas maps were well known in the USSR. Fortunately, progress does not stand still and today there are more durable options, plastic coated or 100% plastic.

Very long time invention of playing cards was attributed to the 14th century French painter Jacqueline Grangonner, who allegedly first invented these small painted cardboard sheets. And he did this in order to amuse Charles VI with them in moments of enlightenment of His Majesty’s darkened mind.

This version was first refuted in the 18th century by two learned writers, Abbots de Longru and Reeve, who in their dissertations convincingly proved that cards and card games appeared long before the reign of this poor sovereign.

The first indisputable proof of this is the authentic act of the Cologne Cathedral, which prohibited card games for clergy.

This act appeared much earlier than the time when Grangonner handed over the maps he had drawn to the insanity-stricken monarch. The decent fee he received for these cards encouraged the artist to be creative, and he began to actively work on improving the design of the cards. He replaced some figures on the maps, and during the reign of Charles VII he made further changes to the images on the maps and came up with the names for the figures that they still bear.

So, at the whim of the artist David, the peak king, was the emblem of Charles VII, and the king of hearts was named Charlemagne. Queen Regina in Clubs lady depicted Mary, wife of Charles VII.

Pallas, the Queen of Spades, personified the Virgin of Orleans, Joan of Arc. Rachel, the queen of diamonds - the gentle Agnes Sorel, and the queen of hearts Judith - the light "moral" Isabella of Bavaria. Four jack(squires) meant four brave knights: Ogier and Lancelot under Charlemagne, Hector de Gallard and La Hire under Charles VII. And other names of the cards were designed by the artist in the taste of that time - a warlike allegory. Hearts were an emblem of courage, spades and diamonds represented weapons, clubs represented food supplies, fodder and ammunition. And finally, ace(ac) in its Latin meaning represented what has always been recognized as the main wealth of war - money.

The painter Grangonner, therefore, although not inventor of cards, but left to his compatriots and everyone a legacy, which greatly contributed and continues to contribute to the entertainment of people, and not only leisure, but also business, and led to a variety of activities in all levels of society.

The phenomenon of rapid distribution of maps throughout the world is unprecedented. Cards are played in all corners of the globe. Maps can be a topic of study for a philosopher and psychologist, a statistician and an economist, a moralist and a clergyman...

We must admit that origin of the cards is still covered in impenetrable darkness. Scientists realized it too late; time had managed to destroy monuments that could have shed light on the history of the appearance of maps. However, many learned people have devoted most of their lives to researching the history of playing cards.

But, despite all their efforts, this story is still replete with many blank spots, confused, and it is safe to say that it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to find out when cards actually appeared and when for the first time The first players sat down at the gaming table.

What were playing cards made of?

In fact, to play a card game, it is not necessary to have the playing cards that we currently know: rectangular, oval, round or any other shape, made of thick cardboard. They can be made of wood, leather, ivory or even metal. Such maps can be seen in many museums around the world. In some countries, cards are still made from wood, in some places from plastic materials in the shape of dominoes, especially for card games such as Rams And Canasta. Thus, the material from which the cards are made may vary. The most suitable, however, turned out to be cards made from special paper. Moreover, such paper appeared almost simultaneously in many countries.

If paper was indeed invented in China back in 105 AD, then paper maps apparently appeared not much later.

There are many legends regarding the invention of cards. According to one of them, in prehistoric times, a robber was kidnapped beautiful princess. While in captivity, she made cards from leather and taught her enslaver to play them. The robber was supposedly so enchanted by the game of cards that he released the princess as a sign of gratitude.

One Greek legend attributes the invention of cards to Palamedes, the son of the Euboean king Nauplias, a very smart and cunning man who managed, for example, to expose Odysseus himself. Odysseus wanted to stay away from the Greek war against Troy. When Palamedes found him in connection with this. Odysseus pretended to be crazy. And he did it this way: he also harnessed a donkey to the plow with his oxen, and began to sow the field not with grains, but to scatter salt into the furrows. However, Palamedes immediately saw through the deception. He returned to the palace, took Odysseus's son Telemachus from the cradle, brought him to the field and laid him in a furrow in front of a team of oxen and a donkey. Odysseus, of course, turned to the side, thereby giving himself away. This cunning of Palamedes was the basis for various inventions being attributed to him. He allegedly invented scales, letters, dice, some measures, and during the many years of the siege of Troy, playing cards. And this happened 1000 years BC!

There are researchers who name another person who allegedly invented cards. He is supposedly one of the seven wise men of ancient Greece, namely the philosopher Cylon, who wanted to help the poor forget about food. To do this, he invented cards that the poor began to play and during the game they completely forgot about hunger.

The list of legends and tales about the invention of cards can be continued, but it is clear that they are not the invention of one single person.

How were the rules of old card games developed?

It can be assumed that these were, first of all, combination games like the current games Rams and Canasta, i.e. games in which it was considered necessary to combine cards by pictures, colors, etc. as quickly as possible. This is evidenced by the fact that there were games that used cards not only with 3 and 4 images, but also with 5, 6 and more. In Korea, cards are played with the image of 8 figures: man, horse, antelope, rabbit, pheasant, crow, fish and star. And for each of these figures there are 10 different cards, i.e. the deck consists of 80 cards.

In the old days, the Chinese even played on devalued banknotes. Since there were few coins, and long travel with a large amount of money was dangerous, already in the 7th century the state allowed the so-called “flying money”. For the wasteful life of their courts, the rulers needed more and more money and ordered to print whole heaps of it. Money depreciated at a catastrophic rate, and it got to the point where in the 9th century it lost all value. Old banknotes were exchanged for new ones in the ratio of 1:100, 1:500, 1:1000, 1:2000... It was at this time that cards began to be played with old money. And these money cards existed in China almost until the end of the 9th century. In China, they still play cards that depict a general, two advisers, elephants, horses, war chariots, guns, and 5 soldiers. These 16 figures are colored red, white, yellow and green. Each suit is repeated twice, and thus the total number of cards in the deck is 128. Characteristic for Chinese cards There has always been their shape: they are long and narrow.

Indian cards have a completely different shape; they are square and sometimes round. Indian cards usually had 4 suits, but there were also 12 colored cards, and each color had 12 cards, i.e. the number of cards in the deck was 144.

When did playing cards appear in Russia?

Presumably, maps appeared in Russia shortly after their appearance in Europe, in particular in Germany and France. They quickly penetrated primarily into the ruling circles. In any case, already under Anna Ioannovna and Elizaveta Petrovna, card games, especially in court circles, flourished, and card games reached their highest peak during the reign of Catherine II. It is reliably known that almost all of Catherine’s nobles played. Many of them put colossal fortunes at stake, while losing lands of tens of thousands of dessiatines and serfs. Quite often, peasants woke up in the morning to find out that, at the whim of the owner, they had been lost to another person and became his property. Household girls, especially beautiful ones, were sometimes put on the map for a colossal sum, and along with them, hunting dogs and thoroughbred horses were put on the line.

There is no exact information about when cards appeared in Russia. Some researchers believe that this happened quite late, approximately in the second quarter of the 9th century. However, this contradicts other obvious facts. Researcher Yu. Dmitriev reports that back in 1759, mechanic Pyotr Dumolin, who came to Moscow, demonstrated “moving maps” in one of the houses in the German settlement. And another Russian researcher A. Vyatkin dates the appearance of cards in Russia to an even earlier date, to the 7th century, and substantiates this with the well-known Tsarist Code of 1649, which prescribed that players should be treated “as with thieves,” i.e. thieves. According to the same Vyatkin, cards came to Russia through Ukraine, from Germany (“the local Cossacks whiled away their time playing cards”).

The fact that cards appeared in Russia simultaneously with their arrival in Europe is also evidenced by the fact that the Russians “kept in step” with the Europeans in mastering the secrets of many card games.

Video: History of playing cards