Playing your cards right

Packs of cards are ubiquitous, from the drawing room to the camp fire and the pub snug, but how did they end up here? Where do the suits we know and love actually come from? Matthew Dennison shuffles the deck

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THE crowd gathered outside Nuremberg's Frauenkirche in 1452 is clustered around a fire.

Its focus is divided: some stare at the flames at their feet, growing minute by minute in intensity, whereas others turn towards the Franciscan preacher, who, from a makeshift pulpit, exhorts them to abandon worldly vanities. In a contemporary woodblock depicting the scene, made by a German printmaker known simply as 'Monogrammist HS', the fire is not consuming heretics, but gambling accessories. According to one account, sexagenarian Cardinal Johannes Capistranus had persuaded Nuremberg's citizens to burn '3,612 backgammon boards and more than 20,000 dice, and playing cards without number'.

By the middle of the 15th century, the city was among the playing-card-making centres of Europe. Religious authorities and priests—such as the future St John of Capistrano—worried about the propriety of card games. Although the first treatise attempting a moral defence of them was written in 1377 by a Dominican friar, John of Rheinfelden, the Reformist theologian Martin Luther would claim that, in his youth a century later, priests refused card-makers the sacraments. Yet, from high to low, the people of Europe were in the midst of a craze that proved long lasting.

Playing cards had almost certainly reached Germany, the Netherlands and France by the final quarter of the 14th century from Italy, notably Florence and Venice, the latter in the medieval period a leading maritime trading centre with links to the Near and Middle East. Playing cards are also recorded as having existed in Spain at a similar date, imported from the Near East and North Africa.