Post by samsloanThe older form of chess, shatranj, was known in
Europe no later than the 10th century CE, 500 years earlier
Where is your support for this claim?
For starters, try H.J.R. Murray's "A History of Chess" (Oxford
University Press, 1913), Part II, "Chess In Europe," starting on page
394.
I do not believe that this is true.
Then I would say you are ill-informed or uninformed.
No rather it is YOU, Taylor Kingston, who is uninformed.
No basis nor support of any kind has been found for that statement
made in 1913 by HJR Murray. There is no solid or firm evidence of
chess being played in Europe or anywhere else in the word for that
matter by the 10th Century AD.
If you have any such evidence, please post it here.
OK, how about the will of Ermengaud I, Count of Urgel (in the
Spanish province of Catalonia), dated abouty 1008 or 1010 CE:
"I order you, my executors, to give ... these my chessmen to the
convent of St. Giles, for the work of the church."
That this chess set was considered important enough to mention in a
will clearly indicates that the game had been around a while, i.e.
back into the 900s. Murray also cites (among many other references) a
Latin glossary of the 10th century, the Gloss. Paris, which includes
the word "mattus," deriving from the noun "mattum," meaning "a mate in
chess." See Murray, pages 401-406.
Post by samsloanOK, I'll bite on this one. What is wrong with the chess references in
the letter from Haroun al-Raschid to Nicephorus as evidence? Is this
some trick regarding the definition of chess, so that you are
requiring the modern rules in order to be called chess?
Jerry Spinrad
This is not a trick at all.
When researching my monograph "The Origin of Chess" that I published
in 1985, I went searching for sources for the statements in HJR
Murray's book such as his claim that Ferdosi mentioned chess in the
Shahnama
On page 157 of "A History Of Chess" Murray quotes as follows from
the "Shanama" of Firdawsi (aka Ferdosi):
"O king, may you live as long as the heavens endure! Command your
wise men to examine this chessboard, and to delberate together in
every way in order that they may discover the rules of this noble
game, and recognize the several pieces by their names."
That is only one of several mentions I might cite. Of course, I do
not have the original text of the Shanama and could not read it if I
did, but I am more inclined to trust an Oxford scholar than Sam Sloan
in this matter.
Post by samsloanor that chess was mentioned in the writings of Al Beruni.
What Murray cites from al-Beruni deals with nothing /but/ chess. A
Persian born in 973 CE, al-Beruni traveled extensively in India, and
wrote at length about various proto-forms of chess played there, such
as the four-handed chaturanga.
Post by samsloanI found no evidence or support for such claims.
I was shocked because I had always assumed that Murray has support for
his claims.
Then I would suggest either that Murray suffered major
hallucinations, involving entire pages of imaginary text, or that your
research was inadequate.
Post by samsloanIf such ancient references to chess existed, there would be scholars
at the great universities who study such things who would know about
them.
Well, it appears there are, Sam.
Post by samsloanPlease provide one source that it not a chess player in support for
your statements.
I'm not sure what you're asking for, Sam. As far as shatranj being
played in the Islamic world as early as the 7th century CE, this is so
well documented that it requires no reply. That from there it made its
way to western Europe no later than the 9th or 10th century, by
peaceful trade and/or Muslim conquests in Spain and Italy, is also
well documented. Murray writes "We may state the position quite fairly
thus: contemporary documents establish a knowledge of chess in
Southern Europe at the beginning of the 11th c., but philological
evidence requires that that knowledge must have commenced at least a
century earlier."
And there is a /huge/ amount of evidence that the shatranj form of
chess had spread into Europe beyond Spain and Italy well before the
1434 date of the WCF's fairy tale. For example the Isle of Lewis
chessmen of the 12th century (probably of Scandinavian origin), and
various illustrations such as that of Otto IV, Margrave of Brandenburg
(1266-1308), playing chess in the Book of Manesse. Not to mention
literally hundreds of references in literature, poetry, historical
chronicles, morality plays, ecclesiastic and legal documents, etc. The
manuscripts of hundreds of chess problems from medieval times can
still be found in European libraries.
The Manuscript of Alfonso, dating from about 1280, shows that
Europeans were already modifying the game away from the Arabic
shatranj, for example increasing the queen's move (though not yet to
the extent of the modern game), and allowing a pawn to go two squares
on its first move. Eventuallly there were many local variants, e.g.
the Lombardy rules and the English "long" and "short" assizes.
At some point in the late 1400s the modern game, without limits on
the moves for queen and bishop, came into being. While I won't say
it's impossible that it was brought from China in 1434 by a vastly
expensive and perilous naval expedition involving hundreds of ships
and thousands of slave girls sailing about 20,000 miles through then
largely uncharted waters, I am more inclined to the simpler hypothesis
that it evolved naturally out of the many shatranj variants then being
played throughout Europe.