foolish said:
i've got to admit, huck, you're losing me on the first part of your message regarding history and experience. maybe it's a language issue. in any event, i don't see the point of labeling the cathars as the bad guys and the church as the good guys simply because that was the way people engaged in war. the result of such an atrocity would have left increadible scars - enough to burn your hand and make you never forget.
The church and their individual actors had an interest to make their opponents, often called heretics, look bad and themselves good ... as other poltical interests have the same desire. That's why you can't trust even "documents" ... Essentially you have to think for yourself in historic matters. The church made a a lot of the documents, on which we have to rely often ... though we're advised to be always skeptical.
The historian is generally advised to attempt to have neutral positions ...
which definitely is not always possible or at least difficult.
moving on... i must appologize - i think i may have been caught again in making the mistake of relying on a source (in this case, weiss) without checking into it further. when i read her statement about belibaste, it obviously sounded like a good connection. i understand that most people date the begining of cards in europe at around 1370. in 1377, an ordinance in paris forbade card games on workdays. this would mean that cards would have to have been around at least a little bit before that. well, i guess i can live with that - unless, we can make a case out of the possibility that cards were brought back by crusaders returning from the east, where the card game of "naibbe" was believed to have been imported from. this could put the presence of cards in europe at an earlier date, but, as you have pointed out, there still doesn't appear to be solid evidence of any card making shops at the time belibaste was being burnt at the stake. what was weiss thinking?
hi Robert,
Thanks, that you brought the Belibaste passage of Weiss to our attention. Even, if it's a forgery, or if it is a humble error (carding comb ... Ross' explanation looks well-founded), we actually love to know such things.
We naturally have to react with skepticism and great care ... from the given situation of playing card history.
Generally at Trionfi.com we promote a theory, according which there were earlier ... somehow before 1350 and the great plague ... some isolated regional playing card use and possibly also some production in Europe.
We've found ourselves 3-4 older sources, which, as far we know, were not considered in the earlier summaries, which had led to the general assumption, that playing card didn't exist in Europe before 1370. A lot of existing material, which pointed to earlier dates, were then declared as "insecure", forged, interpolated etc. Kaplan has a long list "Interpolations and Translation Erors" and additionally "Omissions" (Kaplan I, 31-34).
We found 3-4 older sources (also "insecure" in our own estimation, but "insecure" means not "definitely wrong") say, that in 1303 three card players were killed by a lightning in Brieg (near Breslau), that Werner of Orseln, leader of the German knight order (central place: Marienburg), had a statute, that knights shouldn't play cards before 1330, that playing cards were in use in Polish nobility before 1340, that the later emperor Charles IV in 1340 allowed playing cards, that card playing was considered a game of skill by law in Bohemia and not forbidden , and that a card producer Jonathan Kraysel from Nurremberg worked 1354 in Prague.
The major find was a book about early Bohemian trade by a German researcher F. L. Hübsch in 1849, who en passant also talks about playing cards. We reported it here ...
http://trionfi.com/0/p/95/
Well, he gives no references or only few, but he's not very interested in the topic and he had no reason to lie ... he wasn't fixed on this theme. And he must have seen at least 3-4 different documents, which he summarized to his short statements. He might have 1 or 2, but an argument, that he wrong in each case, looks weak.
Actually we believe, that playing cards were produced in Bohemia still after the Great Plague (Bohemia is one of few places in Europe, which stayed more or less not attacked by plague around 1350). We think, that in other regions of Europe possibly also isolated imports or small beginnings of playing card industry had been, but that they lost the trace by the radical changes through the peste. Generally culture should have dropped to another, lower, level, and a lot of things had to find new reorganization after the impact ... and some other things disappeared also then, possibly also some forerunners of paper mills ... another disputed point, see:
We think, that the greater wave of (since now generally) accepted playing card notes since 1377 was triggered by the condition, that Emperor Charles IV with great entourage went to Aachen to have his son Wenzel (14 years old) crowned as a King of the Roman Empire in 1376, the journey possibly being accompanied by Bohemian playing card dealers.
As a basic condition for this "Bohemian origin theory" we assume, that there were not only the playing card import way China - Mongols (or Persia, or India, whatever) - Mamluks - Spain, as common playing card history assumes, but also the way China - Mongols (Goldene Horde) - trading way Krim - Kiew - Breslau - Prague or trading way Krim - Kiew - Nowgorod - Baltic Sea - Hanse of relevance.
These trading ways decreased during 14th century, as the trade lines via Venice and Genova grew in importance.
German playing card distribution didn't depend on the Latin suits, which probably had been the style of the Mamluks production.
Generally there's the note of Meister Ingold of 1432, that playing cards reached Germany in the year 1300 ... not accepted in playing card history, as it's not a contemporary report. But Ingold had read this in an old book and hadn't reason to lie about it.
The playing card note from Brieg in 1303 (not naturally a solid remark) seems to confirm this. Brieg is located at the trading way Breslau-Kiew. Nobility of Brieg had close contact to the Court of Prague, and this might have been the "Polish nobility", about which F. L. Hübsch stated, that they already played with playing cards before 1340.
This might have been the young boy (later grown-up, as the picture demonstrates), who brought playing cards to Prague for the first time ... just in 1303.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolesław_III_the_Generous
... more to him and Werner von Orseln at the other Forum.
So - actually - we have personally nothing against Belibaste as a playing card producer in 1313. ... .-) ...
It's a pity, that there was only a carding comb producer, well, and it's a general pity, that a lot of things around the Cathars have the call to depend occasionally on forgery.
25 years ago, I met a young history student, and he told me from the Cathars, and that there were people claiming to sit on documents, which they didn't publish and this all would complicate the matter. Possibly this has changed meanwhile, but generally there was the situation, that one couldn't trust anything. Also there's the argument, that catharism is a tourism factor ...
Well, and the "carding combe" looks suggestive.
We worked earlier on this one ... a note about 1337 in Marseille ...
http://trionfi.com/0/p/93/
... another insecure document.