The Immortal Game Read online

  Following Muhammad’s death in 632, the empire grew at a staggering pace, expanding into Persia, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Nubia, Libya, Morocco, Cyprus, Sicily, and parts of Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Afghanistan, India, and China. By 900, Muslim armies controlled an uninterrupted stretch of land and sea from the Himalayas all the way across North Africa and into Spain.

  So also went Islamic culture. In 1005 the Egyptian ruler al-Hakim tried to outlaw chess and ordered the burning of all chess sets in his territory. But it was too late to stop the game’s march across North Africa. Murray discovered references to Muslim players in Cairo, Tripoli, Sicily, Sijilmasa, Fez, Seville, and Córdoba.

  The game may have enjoyed its European debut in 822, having been introduced to the emir of Córdoba, Abd-al-Rahman II, by an outcast Persian Muslim nicknamed Ziriab. A onetime slave, Ziriab had trained in Baghdad with the legendary musician Ishaq at the court of Harun ar-Rashid. Then he became too good at his job: after Ziriab had the audacity to outshine his mentor in the presence of their caliph, Ishaq stepped in to protect his ground. “Jealousy is the oldest human evil,” Ishaq warned Ziriab. “No one is immune to it, not even I. There is not room enough at this court for both of us. You can choose between two things. Either you stay here and I’ll have you killed, or you go so far away from here that I’ll never hear of you again. If you choose this, I’ll give you the [travel] money.” Thus began an epic journey, wives and children in tow, across North Africa, into Morocco, and finally across the Strait of Gibraltar into Muslim Spain. When he arrived in Córdoba, this unwitting ambassador from Baghdad brought an early glimpse of the Islamic enlightenment. Famous for the sounds of his gut-stringed lute, Ziriab also dazzled Emir Abd-al-Rahman II and friends with refinements in cooking, fashion, hygiene, home decor, and recreation. Baghdad’s favorite new board game of symbolic warfare was apparently an instant hit in Spain. The very next emir, Mohammed I, was personally devoted to the game.

  Meanwhile, chess also made its way into Italy via Sicily. Bands of Muslims from modern-day Spain, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt attacked and eventually conquered Sicily in the ninth century. The new Sicilians modeled their city of Bahl’harm (modern-day Palermo) on glorious Baghdad. These same groups also tentatively occupied areas on the Italian mainland near Naples and Rome. Not long after this, the poet and expert chess player Muhammad ibn Ammar was said to have saved the Islamic Kingdom of Seville from attack by winning a game of chess against the Christian King Alfonso VI of Leon and Castile. They played a chess game, that is, in lieu of clashing in a real war.*5 Whether this was fact or legend, the mere suggestion of replacing bloody conflict with a board game contest foreshadowed a crucial advance in civilization: the replacement of violent struggle for resources with nonviolent competition.

  In between the long, brutal Muslim-Christian battles, scholars, spiritual figures, and even sovereigns exchanged a voluminous quantity of customs and knowledge. “It is a paradoxical but well-established fact,” reports historian Richard Eales, “that even in the period of the Crusades more new learning came to the West from the Muslim ‘enemy’ than through eastern Christian civilization. This was true not only of science and mathematics, some of which, like chess, originated in India, but also of classical literature. The Aristotelian texts which were to revolutionize European philosophy were first translated into Latin in the twelfth century from Arabic, and the main translating centers were in areas of cultural coexistence: Spain and Sicily, and to a lesser extent the Latin states founded in Palestine by the Crusaders.*6

  The importance of this massive transfer of knowledge cannot be overstated. Through much of the twentieth century, historians taught that Western civilization passed directly from Greece and Rome to Europe. But in fact the Islamic Renaissance was a critical middle ground for much of the knowledge that would make the European Renaissance possible.

  Tracking chess’s migration is also a way of tracking the larger transmission of knowledge. Records show chess spreading to a Swiss monastery by 997; to northern, Christian-controlled Spain by 1008; to southern Germany by 1050; and to central Italy by 1061. Everywhere the game appeared in Europe, it seemed to take root quickly. By the early twelfth century it was ubiquitous, so ensconced in the culture of medieval chivalry that it was listed as one of seven essential skills for every knight (along with riding, swimming, archery, boxing, hawking, and verse writing).

  Not surprisingly, the game had a few distinctive European modifications by then. The Elephant, an animal largely foreign to Europe, was replaced by the Bishop—except in France, where that piece became le fou (the jester or fool)—and the King’s Minister was replaced by the Queen.†1 The board, which had been divided into sixty-four monochrome squares (as shown in the tenth-century illustration on Chapter 2), now saw the introduction of dark and light checkered squares—not out of any vital necessity, but simply to make movements easier for the eye to track. Since Christianity has no prohibition against representational images, the design of chessmen also slowly moved back toward more literal imagery. Finally, the game’s name shifted from the Arabic shatranj to the Latin ludus scacorum (“the game of the chessmen”), and from there to the Italian scacchi, the French eschecs, the German schachspiel, the Dutch schaakspel, the Icelandic ska’ktafle, the Polish szachy, and the English chess.

  Europe’s kings personally embraced the game as sultans, caliphs, and emirs had before them. The medieval historian Alexander Neckam reported on a battle, in 1110, for control over Gisors, in Normandy, where the French King Louis VI suddenly found himself seized by an enemy knight.

  “The king is taken,” shouted the knight.

  “Ignorant and insolent knight,” replied the king. “Not even in chess can a King be taken.”

  The spread continued. By 1200 or so, the game was established in Britain and Scandinavia. The Lewis Chessmen had been carved in Norway, and the game was utterly adored in Iceland. It was an unstoppable force—not simply because people loved the game, but also because it served a function. “There was a demand for a game like chess from its earliest appearance,” suggests Richard Eales, “a demand sufficient to change it from an oriental curiosity into a regular feature of noble and courtly life.”

  The proof is in how thoroughly chess became woven into the fabric—and literally tiled onto the floor—of Christian medieval European society. In the twelfth century a mosaic artist laying the floor of the San Savino Basilica in Piacenza, Italy (about forty-five miles southeast of Milan), used tiny black and white tiles to illustrate a dramatic philosophical divide. In the lower left corner he depicted a dice game in progress; in the lower right-hand panel he conjured a chess scene—probably chess instruction rather than an actual game.

  Mosaic floor in San Savino Basilica

  Notice the correct number of squares on the board, and the differentiation of the pieces. Such a detailed, familiar chess landscape rendered at such an early date demonstrates how quickly the game had become embedded into the European medieval consciousness. And in a house of worship, no less. There was no explicitly religious iconography in the mosaic, but its church setting was no accident. The panels presented a sharp moral sermon about one of mankind’s great existential choices in the Middle Ages. The dice game, explained art historian William Tronzo, “represents the state of man’s life in which he commits himself to the unstable forces of the world. Captivated by them, life becomes lawless and chaotic.

  “On the right [where chess is located], man orders his world with intelligences and virtue and imbues it with law and harmony.”

  For moralists of the day, dice and chess nicely symbolized these opposing choices—just as it had for the earlier Islamic historian al-Mas’udi. Dice, the older game, represented a consciousness resigned to a world dominated by fate; chess stood for the new empowerment, the idea of making one’s way in the world based on one’s own effort and ability. The juxtaposition even became embedded into twelfth-century Italian law, which prohibited dice but allowed chess because the g
ame depended “on one’s own talents. One is not entrusted to the powers of fortune.”

  Implanting chess into basilica floors and even into legal doctrine, though, was just a prelude. One century later, a monk from the nearby coastal city of Genoa produced what would become by far the most influential chess book of all time. Whereas San Savino’s mosaic never left the ground and was probably meant to be seen by only a few hundred pairs of eyes, the text penned by Dominican monk Jacobus de Cessolis in the halls of San Domenico Basilica, about one hundred miles away from San Savino, traveled great distances. Shortly after its inception around 1300, Cessolis’s potent work spread far beyond Italy, having an impact on all of Europe as virtually no other piece of writing in the Middle Ages did. As if carried by an interpretive wind, the Latin manuscript was eventually transformed into eighteen separate versions and translated into Italian, French, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Czech. “No other work of medieval times was so much copied,” concluded Harold Murray. “Its popularity…must have almost rivaled that of the Bible itself.”

  A chess book almost as popular as the Bible? Obviously Cessolis was speaking to something much greater than a board game. And so suggests the book title: Liber de moribus hominum et officiis nobilium ac popularium sive super ludo scacchorum (The book of the morals of men and the duties of nobles and commoners—or, On the game of chess). The work was actually a collection of sermons about how each person should act in society. Cessolis was concerned with nothing less than the clarification and refinement of social norms. In chess, he found a superb model, a near-literal miniaturization of medieval society. Each chess piece could be correlated to a distinct social ranking—starting with the obvious correlations of the King, Queen, and Knight. Rooks represented the King’s emissaries in his scheme. To each of the eight Pawns, Cessolis assigned a different peasant-class profession:

  Tillers of the earth

  Metal workers

  Tailors and notaries

  Merchants and money changers

  Physicians and apothecaries

  Tavern and hotel workers

  City guards

  Couriers

  Further, Cessolis was almost comically specific in describing how the powers and restrictions of each piece matched the rights and responsibilities of that piece’s human counterpart:

  When the queen, which is accompanied unto the king, beginneth to move from her proper place, she goeth in double manner…she may go on the right side and come to the square before the notary…. Secondly on the left side where the knight is. And thirdly indirectly unto the black point before the physician. And the reason why is for as much as she hath in her self by grace the authority that the rooks have…she may give and grant many things to her subjects graciously. And thus also ought she to have flawless wisdom.

  —From a fifteenth-century English translation of Cessolis

  Cessolis also included a practical guide for playing the game, encouraging his audience to experience the symbolism in action. It was the right sermon about the right game at the right time. After many centuries with little real intellectual progress, the twelfth century had seen an “early Renaissance” with a vast increase in literacy, the birth of the great northern European universities, and important intellectual contributions from Peter Abelard, St. Bernard, and John of Salisbury, among others. All of this eventually fueled a seismic shift into a new political consciousness in the noble class. Liber de moribus used the chess metaphor to help individuals track their evolving relationship to society, and its popularity marked a real turning point. “Before the Liber,” argues University of Massachusetts medievalist Jenny Adams, “the predominant metaphor for the state was the human body, which represented types of people as parts subordinate to the body as a whole….If the head [i.e., the King] of a body decided that the body should walk, the feet would have to follow. By contrast, the chess allegory imagines its subjects to possess independent bodies in the form of pieces bound to the state by rules rather than biology. If the chess King advances, the Pawns are not beholden to do the same.”

  This new consciousness did not, of course, alter the fundamental class division between the tiny noble minority and the serf majority—a division that the Middle Ages had inherited from the older Mediterranean society. But it did change the way that those divisions were enforced. Throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, feudal society developed an elaborate legal justification for itself, enabling what Adams calls a “shift from physical to non-physical coercion.” Knights, shopkeepers, farmers, and other classes now felt a moral and legal responsibility to the state. They had more physical control of their own actions, but were mindful of their role in society, and of being watched by others. Cessolis’s use of the chess metaphor modeled this dynamic beautifully. “A Knight playing the game cannot move himself anywhere but must act according to [his legal moves],” says Adams. “Failure to do so will place both his own body and his community in jeopardy. Nor will this failure be hidden but exposed publicly on the board…. If one can see one’s own ‘self’ on the board, other players can see one’s own ‘self’ too.”

  Enabling people to see themselves on the board would turn out to be the second great metaphorical contribution of chess over the centuries, after chess’s capacity for demonstrating enormous complexity. Would the intellectuals of the Middle Ages have been able to understand themselves without chess as social mirror? Undoubtedly. But in chess’s absence, something like chess would have had to be invented—something universal that could symbolize the dynamic rudiments of society. Metaphor—the art of symbolic comparison—is not an optional accessory, but a vital cultural necessity that dates back to the very earliest points in human communication. A substantial degree of everyday language is built on top of it. Metaphor helps us organize our thoughts and at the same time frees us from previous contextual restraints. So much about the experience of living is intangible. To understand these intangibles, we need choice comparisons and symbols to help frame our thinking, and expand those frames, to make more and more sense of what we see, hear, and feel—and to convey that understanding to others. Aristotle considered symbolic metaphor a tool so powerful that he urged the state to regulate its use. Slaves, he warned, should not be permitted to utilize it.

  One particular use of symbolic metaphor is to help us navigate complexity by reducing it to simpler, more manageable concepts. Chess is a powerful reducing agent. It can reduce a whole battlefield or city or planet down to sixty-four squares. And yet, within that simplistic frame, chess retains its active quality; like a snow globe, it shrinks things down, but retains its dynamic essence.

  MORALITY AND POLITICS were not the only things being transformed in medieval Europe. Influential medieval poets were also busy inventing the notion of romantic love, and using chess to convey it.

  Strange as it might seem, the Western conception of romance did not much exist before the twelfth century. So-called courtly love was an invention of medieval poets who at first imagined it—rather narrowly by today’s standards—as a knight’s unrequited crush on a noblewoman who was unable to return the affection. Gradually, the romantic ideal evolved to become more of a mutual matter, and to spread beyond the ruling class.

  Many epic romantic poems from the late twelfth century onward struggled to adequately articulate this new ideal of overt intimacy and to reconcile such expression with other social obligations. Indeed, the game of chess began to come in handy as a courting ritual. Young men and women played each other as an excuse for romantic intimacy—this in an age where physical privacy was otherwise almost nonexistent.

  Chess became ubiquitous in romantic medieval poetry. In the Carolingian romance Huon de Bordeaux, the strikingly titled Les échecs amoureux (The chess of love), Jacques de Longuyon’s Voeux du paon, Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess, and many others, chess served to advance romantic plots and to symbolically depict feudal figures and rules.

  Players, meanwhile, tinkered with the game—and in some cas
es contaminated it outright. The changes should not have been such a surprise considering the surrounding social turbulence. A five-hundred-year-old Persian/Islamic game was now stumbling into a very different world—or, more accurately, an array of different worlds. In contrast with the relatively unified Islamic Empire, Europe was a collection of separated fragments with different languages, customs, political realities, and thick cultural and physical barriers. The Continent was slowly being brought together into a more unified spiritual-political hegemony under increasingly powerful kings and the Church, and it was sharing more ideas and culture through the development of cities and universities; but it remained relatively balkanized until the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

  Thus chess, now with many different names, was also essentially many different local games—called assizes. It was as if the game had been shot out of Arabia like a shotgun shell, scattering similar but distinct fragments all across the Continent. The so-called Lombard assize allowed the King an extended leap over other pieces, as well as permitted the King and Queen to move together for their first move. England had two separate sets of rules for a short game and long game. In Germany, four of the eight Pawns were allowed the double-square initial move. Iceland accelerated changes in the endgame and placed enormous emphasis on the higher and lower forms of checkmate. “It took time for a happy improvement discovered perhaps in Spain to reach Germany, England or Iceland,” writes Murray, “and all the modifications did not commend themselves to players in other countries.”