Diana:
Casanova's 1765 encounter with the cards is detailed in Vol III of the modern edition of his memoirs on pages 407-8. Unfortunately, I have only Vols. I-II, but the incident is cited in Decker et. al. on page 74. Casanova says that the slave girl he had purchased and renamed Zaire had a "blind faith in what the cards she consulted every day told her." When he returned to his lodgings one morning after spending a night out without her, she began raising a ruckus, and "She points to a square of twenty-five cards, in which she makes me read in symbols the whole of the debauch which had kept me out all night...I saw nothing; but she imagined she saw everything...(I) threw her accursed abracadabra into the fire."
Twenty-five is a significant number, because it indicates that Zaire was either using a full 78-card (or more) tarot deck, or a pack of regular playing cards. In either case, she was using at least some suited cards for this reading. I don't know Zaire's ethnicity. Was she a Gypsy? If so, I'd bet money she was using a 52-card pack. I need to get hold of Casanova, Vol III and find out more about her. I know she was with him because he bought her, and would imagine he disposed of her by selling her.
Umbrae:
Your questions are all good ones, and have mostly been answered at length in places such as Tom Tadfor Little's TarotL History Information Sheet at
www.tarothermit.com and in Decker, DePaulis and Dummet: "A Wicked Pack of Cards." However, to recapitulate just a bit...
Playing cards, the 52-card deck, arrived in Europe from the Muslim world during the last half of the 14th century, probably about 1375, either through Venice or by way of Islamic Spain. This deck used suits of cups, coins, swords and polo sticks, and each suit had three court cards consisting of a King (or Caliph) and two of his deputies. Since Italians didn't recognize polo sticks for what they were, that suit was modified into batons, and, in Spanish- speaking countries, clubs.
A French miniature in "The Romance of King Meliadus of Leonnois" of about 1390 shows the King and two attendants playing cards, and the suits of batons and coins are clearly visible. It's reproduced in Catherine Perry Hargrave, "A History of Playing Cards," page 39.
The set of 56 suited cards only came into existence with the invention of the tarot pack, about 1440-50, so there was never a free-standing 56-card deck. Queens were added to the suits which, along with the female figures among the trumps, relieved the monotony of the male-dominated Muslim-derived cards.
No firm date can be established for cartomantic divination of any kind, so by extension we really don't know when divination using a 52-card deck may have begun. It may have started with the Gypsies, who began arriving in Western Europe in large numbers late in the 15th century. They, of course, were well known as fortune tellers, but had no familiarity with cards when they first moved into France, Germany, Italy, England and the Low Countries. At that point they only did palmistry, tea-leaf reading, etc. When they discovered people expected them to use cards as well, they adopted them, although when they did so remains an open question. It is known that until this century they used only standard 52-card decks of playing cards for their readings.
My introduction to this whole subject was a reading done for me by a woman at the college I attended, known around the department only as "Gypsy," which she was. She used a spread of 25 regular playing cards, and her reading proved to be amazingly accurate. This was 36 years ago, and it initiated my lifelong fascination with card reading.
(Catboxer)