Yes exactly
Look at the threads which are converging here.
(I didn't know that the military text was already mentioned on trionfi.com)
We have information from the "games only" history of the pack - thanks to you.
And also here, as With the "flos-' cards, we have a common form: a 'battle of 2's' which give a series of consecutive-linked images, to each of which is attached a section from a 'lesson' - here in a short, sharp easily memorised form.
So far, so good. We can suppose a 'text' either verbal or in a book, accompanying the first use of the floskaatjes, because After all, it is said that by means of these floskaartjes the children are supposed to learn moral lessons.
So here we have the same pattern of activity - a combination of image and 'moral/training text' - as that which we have recorded for the other kinds of 'tutorial' giuocos in Italy... my written-up example being the one I describe as the 'Joc of the Alphabet'. That was played by members of the neo-Platonic academies, many of whose most eminent members were in the legal profession.
The verbal-contest games of token-and-text played by the neo-Platonics in Italy are a direct continuation of other moral-dissertation games, developed in 12thC Provence, and termed jocs.
Then, between the provencal, and the Italian versions of this kind of 'joc', we hear of a pack of tokens being wanted, and it is specified they are for the 'joc Moresche' or the Saracen joc.
Given the example of Tawaddud, and the practical fact that her dissertation-contests are said to be aided by the use of "signs and tokens of the Almanac makers'.. we find that the mathematical structures of our 52-card pack, and the tarot, as well as the emblems for the tarot's arcana minor, are precisely the ones incorporated in a visual Almanac made for the king of France in 1375 - the so-called Atlas Catala. Until the previous year, the king of France (as king of Provence) had ruled Majorca for several hundred years.
On the one hand, that 'Atlas' charts contain the same matter as Tawaddud expounds by means of her 'signs(emblems?) and tokens. On the other, the Atlas includes one of the new kinds of chart, derived from the maritime chart, and brought into Europe from Genoa - just down the road from Ventimiglia.
The term "ludus cartarum" may, in fact, be translated in a number of ways, including the meaning "chart- map- letter- pieces" excercise.
John of Rheinfelden is speaking within a couple of years of the Atlas Catala's completion.
The 'Joc of hte Alphabet' *is* about using a letter of the alphabet (with/instead of) a picture on the paper, to prompt memory, and thus through a battle of each player's memorised 'florilegia' to create a conceptual journey-map.
An exercise or 'game' - a contest exercise - using 'papyrus/paper pieces' is already recorded in 12thC Sicily, under the Norman kings. The Sicilian style of rhetoric was renowned in Europe.
So.. altogether, what we may be able to posit is this: that what changed the already popular form of the verbal memory-contest game into the new "Saracen' game was simply the addition of tokens - perhaps always on paper. Remember - the 1001 Nights was one of the texts which was known to the chart-maker who created the visual Almanac and worldmap of the Atlas Catala. He quotes it in the brief, 'memory-jogging' captions associated with each region, and its pictorial figure.
The military manual, like the Floskaartjes, and like the context for John of Rheinfelden's dissertation, as well as like the 'Joc of the Alphabet'... and like Tawaddud's use of the Almanac-makers tokens... ALL occur in an atmosphere of teaching and memorised learning.
(I won't go into the reasons why John of Rheinfelden is *very* unlikely to have delivered his exposition in a parish church. They have to do with canon law, and the rules under which the Dominican preachers had to operate..It is entirely most likely that he was instructing young graduates in suitable tutorial exercises. One only needs to compare his comments on other 'games' with those of Erasmus to see what his central topic is)
But doesn't this help make sense of much that otherwise seems to make little sense: such as that reference to the cardinals' game 'not played in the children's way, but as Holy Wisdom contested ('Played') before God.
This possible schema for cards' evolution and transmission would also explain why in John of Rheinfelden's description, we find nothing remotely like rules for the number-sort of card games we now consider the 'ordinary' ones.
As some will know, it also allows us to account for references earlier than 1377 which have been dismissed hitherto - such as the game of 'paginas' that monks were forbidden from playing, or that other early reference to a monk whose pleasure was to make cards for people.
The "ordinary games only" thesis has to reject these, because it sees no place for monks in the present thesis of how cards were used.
A contest-game which was chiefly about seeing could best remember their given associations for a teaching-picture - of any sort, including images of the saints or whatever - enables us to explain, again, why the Charles VI images should be such detailed mnemonic figures.
AND explains why they should be so large, and have a pin-hole in their centre. A tutor could pin them up, and let the children 'compete'.
Extend that use to practice in a mathematical text... and maybe you have a reason for the western number-games.
I long for the day that a mathematician interested in game theory and in medieval mathematical texts will decide to explore the logic of our number-games.
OK... let's leave that bit...
As to relevant people and locations: the region of Liguria contains the renowned centre of wine-making round Ventimiglia, and Polcevera. Wine-themes very common on cards.
One finds a pronounced influence from Arabs there; - well, I've talked about that side of it.
One also finds an older stratum of Celtic, and then Gaulish presence - possibly even the Celtic 'bardic' thesis may prove itself here.
Teh same regions becomes an early centre of card-making;
It is also heavily influenced by the Norman-Sicilian court.
Ventimiglia is right near the border of modern day France.
The sort of map found in the Atlas Catala is directly related to the radically new kind of gridded map introduced at the beginning of the fourteenth century by the Vesconti of Genoa.
In genoa, too, the Chinese-Uigur-Persian Nestorians stayed through the winter at the end of the 13th century. We know they put "Names" on pieces of paper and use them for 'divination' - in particular during the elevation of a member to a high ecclesiastical office.
And Ventimiglia is also the home of the 'Battle of Flowers' - a peaceful counterpart to the *military* Battle of Pairs.
For native speakers, as for Latin speakers in medieval Europe, the same pairing of military 'campus stellae' with earthly "field of flowers" was an entrenched pairing. (Sorry for those allergic to medieval Christianity, but the key to this close link of ideas comes from the literature everyone knew so well - Biblical text).
In this way, the apparently different strands of argument about cards' origins, forms of use, and transmission, look to me as if they are tending towards a common meeting point - likely in this region.
And, incidentally, this was where the embassy had landed from Harun ar Raschid's Baghad, en route to Charlemagne, at Aachen some centuries earlier.
The embassy was most likely again composed of Nestorian Christians. It was held up for a considerable time in this area by local clerics - afraid to permit those peculiar foreigners from going any further. Charlemagne's biographers tell the story.
That last item won't seem exciting here, I expect. But it does to me, because this is just about this exact time that the moralised heavens, which later appear on early Atouts, become seen most clearly in European monastic art.
Its actually not even difficult to link Ventimiglia's 'Battle of the Flos' to imagery of the Egyptian gods, but only by reference to a traditional parade of North Africa, where older images were preserved as late as the 1940s... but I'll leave that for another time.
(Whew!)
