“If [a man] walk, let him go gently; for it will be more wholesome for him and better for his body, and more in accordance with the saying of the Almighty, ‘Walk not proudly upon the earth.”[1]

The slave woman Tawaddud, in the Thousand and One Nights

Beginning, roughly, from 1377 - and thus fourteen years after the plague cycle of 1346-53 ended - we find documents in Sicily, France, Italy, and Germany referring to ‘naiby’ or to the ‘joc Sarracines’ or ‘joc Moresche,’ to the ‘quartres Moresche’ or the ‘giuoco della carte’ or ‘ludus cartarum’. Although the terms do not necessarily refer to precisely the same activity or object, all are presently believed to refer in some way to cards, or to card-packs, or to forms of card-use then known.

Some of our earliest known references carry a suggestion that, during the earlier part of this period, card-use was associated with medicine, its study and its texts. Individually, the allusions are not strong, but together imply what one might call a ‘map of vertu’ – ‘virtue’ being that benefit or innate goodness natural to our world, and its furniture, and to body or soul.

In this regard, we hear of an entry in the town chronicles of Viterbo for 1379. Viterbo lies about 60 kilometres north-west of Rome, on the ancient ‘via triumphalis.’ It was then a papal seat second only to Rome in importance, the town to which popes retired when political problems made Rome too uncomfortable, and where the older generations of popes had been buried. A later report says, of that entry, that a ‘giuoco della carte’ is noted as arriving ‘at last’ in 1379. And one– but only one – copy of the later report, says further that the ‘giuoco della carte’ was introduced by a Saracen named Hayl.



Al Majusi, ‘Hayl’:
There certainly was a Saracen called ‘Hayl’, a physician widely respected by the educated of late medieval Europe, but he could only introduce a giuoco della carte in 1379 by a reading from his written works. By 1379 Hayl was four hundred years dead.

He had been a physician in tenth-century Baghdad and his ‘Complete Art of Medicine’ - though famous in medieval Europe - was very rare in its complete manuscript. What usually circulated instead were handbooks of extracts, called epitomes. These bore such Latin titles as ‘Liber Regius’ (The King’s Book or ‘the register’), Regalis disposition, or “Pantegnum.”[2] In Persian, the text was known as al-Malaki, suggesting at once a royal, and an angelic quality, and perhaps meant to refer to the Malakite community of Egypt, an ancient Christian priesthood which shared with the Persian Nestorian Christian community an emphasis on physic as intrinsic to priestly ministry. [3] Islamic medicine gained its content, and something of its presentation, from the example and teachings of older, eastern Christian, medical schools.

In early Christianity, Christ was perceived as a new Asclepius, a great angel (malaki) whose dual ministry to body and soul healed the whole person. The earliest eastern churches perceived such to be the duty of a Christian priest, and from their centuries of knowledge, texts and practices, the Arabs had their first access to the corpus of ancient, classical, Egyptian, Roman and Syrian medical traditions. Hayl himself was among the earliest generations of Muslim physicians trained in this way.

‘Al Hayl’ or simply ‘Hayl’ (d.994ad) was a member of staff at Baghdad’s Al-Adudi hospital in the tenth century. Properly, his name is ‘Alī ibn-al-‘Abbās al-Majūsi (i.e. Ali son of al-Abbas, from Majus) shortened by speakers of Arabic to al-Majusi. But because European custom combines personal name with patronymic, so Latin copies render his name “Alī …..‘Abbās”, or “Haily Abbas” [4] or even more simply ‘Haly’ or ‘Hayl’. Epitomes of his text circulated so widely in Europe that even today, and in some Islamic histories of medicine, one may find Majusi’s name in its Latinised forms.[5]


Since Majusi’s Complete Art of Medicine was very large, and the cost of its full copying prohibitively expensive, it was the sort of book which only a king, or a pope could hope to own in full. It is indicative, then, that we should hear of Hayl’s work introducing a giuoco della carte in Viterbo only two years after the return to Italy of the Roman Papacy, which had for the previous seventy years resided in Avignon. Despite the protests of the French king, Charles V, Urban V had returned to Italy with his court in 1368. However, the concerted opposition of the Medici family of Florence, and the Visconti of Milan had permitted to Papal court to advance no futher than Viterbo where it remained three years, until Urban was obliged to turn again towards France. His successor, Gregory XI, achieved Urban’s hopes, setting foot at last in Rome in January of 1377.

From that year – 1377 - we have another suggestion that card-use might be linked with the study of medicine. Exclaiming on the marvels of a new ludus cartarum, a Dominican friar in that year described a set of 52 tokens for commoners not as ‘cartes’ but as cos. Cos had a number of connotations, including that of the imperial counsellor in Roman times, and the sort of pebbles used in particular forms of calculation, but another of its meanings was as the name of the island long noted as the birthplace of Hippocrates and where the great temple of Asclepius, with its healer-priests, had existed in classical times.

That Dominican, however, speaks of the cos as representing the form of the ludus cartarum “as it first reached us”, implying that the game had a new, or much broader reference, which reached “us” in that year. We may then suppose that allusion to the virtues of physic was but one aspect of play, and not central to the games he knew.

When the techniques and attitudes of the older medical traditions, including those of ‘Asclepian’ Hellenistic medicine reached Europe in the context of the Islamic synthesis, the eastern Christian theme of religious ministry was largely absent, but the habit of ordering medical information by the categories of the world itself: winds, seasons, stars and regions remained, becoming the hallmark of medicine in the ‘Saracenic’ style. That habit is certainly present in Majusi’s work and in all the works which have their roots in the medical schools of Baghdad, during its golden age from the eighth to tenth centuries. If Viterbo’s gioco della carte were introduced by Majusi’s work, readings from almost any other from that period would be equally appropriate.

It will be most convenient, here, to explain the salient features of Majusi’s ‘Saracenic’ style, not by quoting his Complete Art, but by considering a much shorter work written in the same style. Moreover, this is one certainly known to have been circulating in Europe in 1379. It will illustrate the connection between Islamic medical works, the western ecclesiastical hierarchy, the town of Viterbo, the family of the Visconti (from whom we have some of our earliest remaining tarot) and the patterns of the 52 card pack, whose tokens in 1377 are described as cos.

The Tacuinum Sanitatis
Known in Latin translation as the Tacuinum Sanitatis, or ‘Tablets of Health’ this work was composed by a ‘Saracen’ named Ibn Botlan. We are told that he converted (from the Muslim or eastern Christian way) to the Byzantine church, and that he died in a monastery of Antioch in 1065. He belongs therefore to the period and generation following Majusi, and may be supposed trained in that Arab-Nestorian tradition of Baghdad. For the text’s brevity and known connection to the Visconti of Milan, we may consider its provenace in some detail. We quote Judith Spencer, the modern editor of one manuscript:

[The known fourteenth-century manuscript copies] have been traced to a single formative source… the artistic culture and activity of Giovannino de’ Grassi who is… one of the greatest personalities of Milanese art of his time, which is also that of Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. .. The complete artist, Giovannino de’Grassi had been born around 1340 and died in 1398…His name appears in the records of the building of Milan Cathedral with the designation “architect in charge”….

[One] manuscript copy is thought to have belonged to Verde Visconti, married to Leopold of Austria in 1365.

A [second] is the Book of the Cerrutti Family. This may earlier have belonged to George of Lichtenstein.[6] Louise Coglisti Arano wrote, “The manuscript could have been executed for George…when he became bishop [of Trento], hence immediately after 1390. It is highly probable that the bishop turned to an artist employed by the Visconti and Della Scala families. It is tempting to suggest that his desire to acquire this type of work was stimulated by his knowledge of the valuable Tacuinum owned by Verdi Visconti, wife of Duke Leopold of Austria.

In 1407, the bishop was driven from Trento, and in 1410 the city was taken by Frederick of Tyrol, in whose inventory is noted a herbalarium cum figuris pictis….

A lot of the above is conjectural, of course, as most reconstructions of motives must be. One could offer alternative reasons for the coat of arms - which appears to be George’s - being impressed on the Cerruti manuscript. It is certainly unfair to accuse George of cupidity on such slender evidence. He may not have sought or commissioned the manuscript himself. His librarian, for example, might have bought an existing copy, or George may been given one at the time of his appointment.

It is quite the sort of gift one could expect of the Visconti, for it would imply a compliment to the new bishop, while also giving clear intimation that the Visconti themselves were of a social position to have access to such a rare manuscript, and one with the financial resources to have it copied yet again. In fact, it would imply that the family was so placed as to confer favours even more substantial than those which a papal representative could offer in return. The Visconti, it will be remembered, were opposed to the re-establishment of the papal court within Italy, wanting to carve out for themselves a Lombardic kingdom. The book might even offer an insinuation that the Visconti were more religiously correct even than the pope himself, for Majusi was undoubtedly a Muslim, while the author of the Tacuinum was just as certainly a Christian. In any case, this book would be entirely suitable as a gift for a new bishop, and more so if the ‘giuoco della carte’ had come to Europe from contact with the papal court of Avignon.

Its ‘Saracenic’ quality lies in the way the Tacuinum is composed as four seasonal ‘books.’ An additional, miscellaneous, fifth section describes seasonal activities such as hunting, in relation to health. For each of the principal four parts, an introductory passage is given, describing that season and its dominant wind/s in medicinal terms. This introduction is followed by the catalogue of that season’s produce and other goods. Each item is headed (in the Cerruti manuscript) by a separate header-picture, under which a terse text refers to the good’s balance in terms of the four medical humours and, not infrequently, the geographic quarter from which it is best taken. The modern editor has included a very useful diagram, showing the usual pattern of correspondences in ‘Saracenic’ medicinal works.

{Note: the diagram has not transferred. it is two squares, interlocked at right angles. Directions, humors, ages, etc. assigned to the eight points. Will try to mount it later}


Since the 52-card pack is marked by a division into quarters, and the presence of twelve cards similarly arranged into quarters - all by reference to the same four 'quarter-emblems' or suit-signs - it is worth considering the natural correspondences between the form of this smaller western pack and the content of Saracenic medical works in the style of al-Majusi's school.

As an example of the 'Saracenic' medical style, we cite Ibn Botlan’s notes on the West wind, which description introduces the Spring quarter. We quote Spencer's modern translation, which expands the original’s terse points. It will illustrate the range of matter naturally integrated into the overall pattern of world-description:
The West Wind.
“The best [type of west wind] .. shows signs of veering northward.
Like the east wind, it suits moderate temperaments.
[And] in the Spring, in the east, this [West wind] induces men to hunt along the cliffs with bow and arrow.
They who take to the sea greet [this wind] joyfully if they are bound for Laiazzo, Alexandria or Acre.
On land it activates the digestion, but causes shivering “and cold. … [7]

We are first given the wind’s medicinal humor (‘dry’). Then we are told of the virtue which is natural to the West wind’s “upper” supporter – the north-veering wind.

Ibn Botlan is referring to a windrose of twelve parts, the most common rose of classical texts and the 'Rose' used by laymen in Medieval Europe, as in medieval Islam.

The circuit of twelve winds was routinely linked with the circuit of the 12 months and with the 12 zodiacal constellations of such importance to medicine.

and in this case the same circuit of direction, and its quarters are connected to the sea and navigation:

It is important to remember that a link mentioned, as between moderate temperament and the Spring wind, or between seasonal activities and medical matter, was not considered any individual’s “association” of ideas but as almost scientific understanding of that divinely and deliberately ordered structure – the God-given world.
In every case, the Tacuinum Sanitatis orders its descriptions by running through seven invariable points, or qualities:
• nature: complexio
• preferred characteristics: electio
• usefulness (positive value): iuvamentum
• harm (negative value): nocumentum
• means to drive off harm: remotio nocumentum
• affect: …quid generat
• age, season, region when most advantageous.

That same series of characteristics, viz:- complexion, opposition, complementarity, age, season and region are directly and plainly connected to the compass of the world.
We may illustrate the underlying attitude by considering a chart from the Atlas Maior of 1665, published by Ottens. Ottens’s chart consciously revives a consciously ‘antique’ custom and while his correspondences are not precisely the medieval ones, they do show how directions were then linked to the winds, and again to regional races and characteristics. His character for ‘north’ for example is rightly an old man, and a cold wind emerges from North. But Ottens balances this by representing South as a youth where in earlier times, this direction was associated with the sort of figure Ottens has put to his ‘east’. Apart from such particular differences, Ottens’ chart gives a useful image, correctly invoking the ways of the mariner. The Chart is entitled ‘The Circuit of Navigational Winds’ (Anemographica seu Pyxis nautica).


{Image exceeds quota for this host. Apologies to readers)

The quarters of medicine are thus inseparable from those of geography and navigation, a layer of reference which supplements those others. Medieval custom was not to divide studies into separate subjects, but to embroider on a given theme, or word, by reference to a primary text, and as many others as the teacher might happen to know.

We have already explained the nature of the ‘marginal comment’ (peri-potamoi) in an earlier paper, and in relation to the Hellenistic Greek medical work, the Kyranides.

The illustrations of the Tacuinum, and some early cards, like others of monastic origin, bear the motif of the marginal ‘figure’. It indicates the use of images as a means to dilate on a given subject, and also implies allusion to the discussion of physical virtue. We will return in another paper to consider this motif when discussing geographic works of the late thirteenth to late fourteenth centuries.

From the Tacuinum, now, we consider a product from the Winter quarter. This season is represented by the ‘sleigh-bell’ or ‘eutochios’ emblem within some types of 52-card pack. In the more sophisticated, and more directly near eastern style of the tarot, the equivalent quarter would be that of the sword, emblematic of winter and North.

Most of the products described in the Tacuinum are vegetable or animal, but we will take a product from the winter quarter, to show how health, climate, season, ages, elements and so on might be fused in a single system. (Spencer renders the terse ‘points’ of the original text into more readable prose):

Vestis lanea:
Clothes are suited to praeparatio aeri, or the adaptation of the climate to life, which is one of the seven things essential to good health. Clothes made of wool, whose nature is warm and dry, are beneficial in the winter to old people, to life in northern regions, cold constitutions, all things that, of the four elements, correspond to water. These clothes, especially those in fine Flemish (northern) wool are to be preferred, drawing the inner heat from the body and keeping it warm. The advantage of wool can also be a disadvantage: as too much warmth is harmful, wear a thin linen garment under the wool.

One sees from this that North is associated with cold, and water, and winter, just as on Otten’s chart.

The arrangement of our 52-card pack easily suits such description of the world. The number of its suits is four, which is the number of seasons and cardinal directions. The number of its kings-&-courts is twelve, which is the number of months and of the zodiacal constellations which were thought to determine seasonal vertu in herbs and other products. The standard emblems of the western card-pack had motifs of seasonal and directional quarters. The fifty-two card pack, for example, might use the leaf of Spring, the rose of Summer, the nut of Autumn and the winter bell or ‘eutochios’. However, mass-produced printed packs soon lost their coherence, diverging from those natural assignments in a way that suggests number-games a primary use for such cards.

Whether or not the giuoco della carte that came ‘finally’ to Viterbo in 1379 was introduced by readings from al-Majusi’s Complete Art or any other work of the sort, the very fact that a later report should suggest card-use in connection with Saracenic medicine is telling. ‘Hayl’ was a figure of such eminence that we may feel confident in assuming the second reporter meant to make such an implication, and believed the earliest form of ‘card-game’ known in Viterbo (at least) was one which described the world in such terms.

The same Dominican friar who speaks of the tokens as cos in 1377, also tells his audience that the ludus cartarum [chart-sections/page-sections] game, is one by which the world may be surveyed by description and ‘figure’. The figure (‘figura’) was not just a physical image but a verbal figure - as we say ‘a figure of speech’. Ottens chart, like many pictures seen on early cards, realises conventional verbal imagery and is further intended to prompt one’s memory of the characters and qualities associated with each direction of the compass-card.

Magic and Medicine:
Three more items suggest a connection between eastern medicine, with its derivation from older Christian – and specifically Nestorian – precedents.

From a later, and hostile source, we hear that Urban V, last of the popes to die in Avignon, at one time prepared a healing ‘periapt’ for the King of the Graecians. Apparently a shield against plague, this object will be described below, but the point here is that the image which was impressed on that tablet was one meant to indicate the priest’s power to address physical and spiritual ills together.

Known as the ‘Agnus dei’ it was also used as the papal seal-impression on the Indulgence document, a testimonial that the bearer was remitted some of his assigned time in Purgatory before entry into heaven after death. One of our earliest remaining cards shows precisely the same healing figure, while demonstrating the direct influence of eastern Egyptian Christian art. An important work on the causes of plague in Egypt had been written in the generation after Majusi. It was composed in Egypt by Abu Jafar Ahmed ben Ibrahim ben Abu Chalid Ibn el-Jezzar (d. 1009), known to the west simply as Jafar. The Arabic term later applied to a card-game, ‘K[h]anjifah’ could mean ‘The [plague] winds of Jafar’, since the word Khann in Arabic means a rhumb, that is, the line taken by a ship on a specific following wind.

Urban V’s style of priestly medicine was plainly modelled on ancient eastern Christian practices. Like the older priests, he accepted no distinction between biological and inanimate objects as the means by which virtu might be transmitted by God to mankind. Such ideas are often wrongly called ‘magical’ in modern works, but our definition of magic looks to form rather than intent. Medieval Europe defined magic from an opposite point of view, which explains many apparent paradoxes found in medieval works and attitudes.

Urban’s periapt, which we will soon describe, was not intended as a magical item, but as evidence of religious faith. The distinction maintained then between faith and magic was in many ways a clearer and more coherent that our own. The critical indicator was the idea of force. If one’s intention was to appeal to God, to invoke his aid through the agency of exemplary characters - called ‘saints’ - or through the action of standard religious ritual, or objects, then the act was seen as one of religious faith. If one did not intend to force, but to request, and so long as there one held no desire to subvert the natural (i.e. God-given) order of the world, the act was not magic. In other words: intention, and not deed, was the focus.

By definition, souls of the saints and angels being higher than the human, could not be coerced or obliged save by God himself. It therefore followed (in the logic of medieval Christian thought), that no human act which aimed at coercion could be directed to any but inferior or equal souls: animals, fellow humans, objects, devils and so forth.

Coercive words and deeds were by definition Magic, attempting to control and coerce the lower orders. Moreover, they had to aim at subverting nature or God’s will. For this reason, attempting to foretell the future was generally prohibited, implying an intent to know future events in order to forestall or reverse God’s intentions at that future time. However, if a prediction derived from comment on a sacred text, or came from some person of impeccable moral character, it was taken not as magic but as the divine gift of prophecy, even if generated by less orthodox means.

One could thus use mathematics to project the positions of stars and planets for the purposes of medicine, or the closely-related matter of the religious calendar, but one was not supposed to use astrology to suggest determinism, or the hour of a person’s death. Death came as God willed, and determinism in any form was absolutely contrary to Christian Roman doctrine.

Urban’s periapt was not intended to subvert the divine will, but to act as a vehicle for divinely sanctioned healing. Its images were meant to convey the authority then supposed given the Pope by Christ to serve as ‘minister-healer.’ But by the sixteenth century, Roman aversion to the older eastern churches and all associated with them was pronounced, and poor Marsilio Ficino who hoped to revive the eastern Christian ways, was executed for heresy after recommending practices derived directly from Nestorian medicine, and of which Urban might well have wholeheartedly approved.

Urban’s periapt or hollow tablet for the ‘King of the Graecians’ - presumably the emperor of Byzantium is described in a seventeenth century English work of extraordinary bigotry, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, by Scot. Scot tells us it contained a copy of the Gospel of John “inscribed on fine paper” together with a verse setting forth the spiritual and physical vertu of the herbs and other ingredients inserted into the tablet. The verses actually explain those ingredients in terms of religious doctrine.

Impressed on one side of the periapt was a head of Christ, and on the other the figure called the ‘agnus dei’. It shows John the Baptist dressed in skins, bearing a banner in the presence of a lamb, or in other versions simply as the lamb and banner.

Among our earliest remaining cards, one found in a German monastery carries precisely this figure, and it is also that which has the ‘heaven and earth’ symbols of Egyptian Coptic art.

We may assume, then, that in 1369 when Urban reached Viterbo, and again in 1377 when Gregory transferred the papal court to Rome, such attitudes influenced medical and religious thought in Italy – at least for a time. The papal court may also have brought the use of cards, but in connection with word- and memory-games of the sort described in an earlier paper, and which normally did begin from the reading of an introductory page, or letter. Our earliest remaining cards derive from France, the Medici and the Visconti.

Subsequent to the contact re-established between the papacy and the Byzantine court, during the period of the Byzantines’ Paleologan dynasty, where truly magical practice in the neo-Platonic style was enjoying a revival, the Roman church increasingly became alarmed by the attachment shown by its own political opponents (including the Visconti and Medici) to the undoubtedly older and more authentic forms of eastern Christianity . Earlier, there had been no systematic association of religious medical practice with heresy or magic.

Thereafter, any hint that one admired the ‘eastern way’, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, was increasingly condemned and punished. Ficino’s literal imitation of eastern priestly medicine might have been accepted and admired by Urban V, but in 1599 it resulted in Ficino’s execution on a charge of heresy.

The card-pack is perfectly suited to use as an aid in describing and ‘figuring’ eastern medical themes: direction, season, winds and time. We have the packs’ lower forty cards quartered into four sequences of ten, offering a natural mirror to habits for describing the circuit of the world. Over the forty we have (in the smaller pack) a circuit of 12 cards to which the zodiacal constellations and/or the twelve fold wind-rose may be described. Correspondence between the earth and the body of ‘adam’ was well established by the late fourteenth century, fully enunciated late in the third by Augustine. Augustine lived fully three hundred years before the birth of the Prophet of Islam.

Baghdad had remained the principal centre for Islamic medical studies until at least the end of the twelfth century. And it is connection with that city, where Majusi gained his knowledge of medicine, that yet another link between token-use and medicinal studies, is offered us.

Tawaddud’s Medicine

In the collection of traditional Egyptian market-place tales, made a collection called the Thousand and One Nights in the twelfth century, is the story of a slave woman called Tawaddud. A prodigy and paragon of learning, she explains her extraordinary range of knowledge, and capacious memory, by saying to her king that commoners are able to learn ‘somewhat’ by practice with “certain signs and tokens which the Almanac-makers have.” Extant manuscripts, later than the twelfth century, also include a cursory and somewhat dubious allusion to ‘ Kanjifah’, as the name of a card-game known later in Persia, and thereafter in other Arabic-speaking regions.

Tawaddud’s story, like all those in the Nights, has its present form from the twelfth century, but its fictional setting is ninth century Baghdad during the Caliphate of Harun ar Raschid. Tawaddud’s practice with the ‘signs and tokens’ is not meant to suggest practices of the Muslim or Arab, since in calling Tawaddud a slave, the compiler means to indicate other origins and a different native faith. It was prohibited to enslave any born Muslim.

Tawaddud’s mention of those signs and tokens occurs during an interval between her besting the Caliph’s expert on the subject of medicine and medicinal astronomy, and her trouncing of the Calipih’s expert in formal astronomy, astrology, and determinations of the calendar. Such matter was routinely included in medieval Almanacs.

Against Muslim contestants with whom the Caliph presents her in each field of study, Tawaddud’s demeanour is that of a woman on trial, who becomes (as the test progresses) an accusing judge. That her examiners begin their examinations as a form of inquisition - as if she were a hostile, or an untruthful witness – is to be taken as another indication that Tawaddud represents a ‘type’ for pre- or non-Islamic scholarship, and her signs and tokens, like the form of the Almanac itself, to be understood as of similar antiquity.[8]

For present readers who may have already have read widely on the subject of western cards, we will quote in full a passage from the first section of the story, since it will doubtless strike a number of familiar chords. Tawaddud was, of course, converted to Islam after enslavement.

Said the doctor [of Qur’anic law and custom]
Tell me, young woman, who is thy Lord, who is thy prophet (Na’ib), who thy Guide, what is the point of direction for prayer, and who are thy brothers? Also – what is your spiritual path, and what your highroad?

She answered: Allah is my Lord, and Mohammed my prophet, and the Qur’an my Guide, and towards the Ka’abah my point of direction for prayer, and all true believers are my brothers. The practice of good [virtue] is my path, and [the Muslim sect of ] Sunna my highway.”

The doctor continues to question her until there is nothing more he can find to ask, and confesses as much to the Caliph. In response, Tawaddud is permitted to question the doctor with the condition that, if she ask a question which he cannot answer, but she can, he forfeit his clothes. The question is put; the doctor is silent. Tawaddud then gives the 22 branches of the “superstructure” [as spiritual architecture] of Islam. Since the Caliph has guaranteed the forfeit, it is paid. The name for the Victory suit (Cups) in some eastern packs shows a pair of trousers. It is not meant to refer to Tawaddud, but rather both refer to a common pattern of allusion to the ‘myriad’ of divine power, wisdom and seed.

Other professors of Qur’anic law, traditions, customs and orthography then test her, the last asking, for example, which sign or verse of the Qur’an contains nine signs or wonders, to which she replies:
Truly:
of the creation of the Heaven
and the Earth;
and the vicissitudes of Night
and Day;
and the ship which sails through the sea laden with what is profitable for mankind;
and water that God sends from heaven, quickening the dead ground and replenishing the same with all sorts of cattle;
and the change of winds and in the clouds[9] compelled to do service between the Heaven and the Earth.
[Thus are 9 contained in 7]

By the beginning of Night 449, Tawaddud may move from doctrine to other areas of learning. Now comes the doctor of physiology who asks, “Tell me, how is man made; and how many veins, bones and arteries are there in his body – to the third part of which question Tawaddud addresses herself first.

She describes Adam as measure of the world, then numbers and names the 7 apertures of the body, its 4 humours and their admixtures, 360 veins, 249 bones, three souls: animal, rational and natural, and then the purpose, placement and number of internal organs, and five faculties, including perception and memory.

In Night 450, she not only numbers and names but precisely locates the bones which form the human skeleton, and thus provides - in two nights - a full record of sequential dissection. Had a western student of medicine, in the fourteenth century, committed the Tale of Tawaddud to memory, he might have advanced from mere student to a Master of medicine and of surgery within a week!

Thereafter follows a condensed compendium of practical medical symptoms and treatments, both preventative and effective, with religious moralia included, thus:
“If [a man] walk, let him go gently; for it will be more wholesome for him and better for his body, and more in accordance with the saying of the Almighty, ‘Walk not proudly upon the earth.”[10]

Similar injunctions are found in the Tacuinum, and in Ficino’s Liber Vitae:


This questioning of Tawaddud by the physician continues until he retires defeated in the first part of Night 454. What Tawaddud has summarised to now is the complete Hippocratic corpus, in both its branches: that of Cos being chiefly concerned with dietetics and practical observation, where the alternative school, of Cnidus worked from theory to practice, informing those famous Hippocratic “Aphorisms” which Tawaddud also has by heart.

Her knowledge of anatomy derives, ultimately, from Egypt. In Alexandria, the Hellenistic Greek capital in Egypt, one finds under the Ptolemies that the older style of Greek dietetic medicine exemplified by the Hippocratic corpus is supplemented by a growing knowledge of anatomy. Herophilus of Chalcedon (about 300 B.C.) and Erasistratus of Iulis (about 330-240 B.C.) are mentioned in this connection. Erasistratus as well as Philinus, a colonial, attacked the doctrine of humors (humoral pathology), developed in the Hippocratic schools, but which was nonetheless retained in eastern medicine and in western medicine as late as the early nineteenth century.

The Alexandrians had sought the seat of disease instead in the body’s solid parts, and not in blood, mucus, black and yellow gall. Part of the reason that the older view persisted and was promulgated still in the Tacuinum and related works, is that after the rise of Muslim rule in the seventh Christian century, independent investigation into anatomy and physiology was forbidden by Qur’anic law. The ancient reports, therefore, especially those of Galen and Hippocrates, were maintained as the standard works on that subject.

In regard to the Cerruti manuscript, it is fascinating to note how the figure shown in the frontispiece as the ‘master physician is not’ as in other copies, a figure of the author Ibn Botlan, but of one whose name combines that of a Spanish surgeon “Ellbochasim” with the medical schools of Baghdad. Abu'l Kasim Chalaf ben Abbas el-Zahrewi (912-1013) – called Ellbochasim” in Europe - again belongs to that golden period of Persian medicine which lasted from the ninth to the eleventh Christian centuries. The inscription suggests that he too, like so many Islamic physicians known to us, had travelled to Baghdad for his studies. Most secondary histories have it that that Abu’l Kasim was a Spanish Muslim, although one finds scant attention paid to him in Spain. That silence may be because el-Zahrewi wrote on surgery, a field little cultivated by the Arabs and one considered somewhat shameful. Zahrewi’s work became best known in the west after its translation into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (1187), therafter being widely adopted in Christian Europe for its remarkably clear and observant style. It is far from impossible that ‘Elbochasim’ (12th century) rather than Hayl, was the original author who “introduced’ Viterbo’s gioco della carte.

Thus far, Tawaddud’s sources for both dietetic and surgical medicine have been appropriate to the period of Islamic studies of the ninth and the eleventh centuries, well within the twelfth-century date for the Night’s formation which Burton proposed. If, however, the story belongs to the later (12th) century, it antedates, or coincides with, rather than precedes, the rise of the Sicilian medical schools and the mention of card-use in Norman Sicily and Norman England in the twelfth century. In other words, we might be supposed to infer that Tawaddud and her ‘signs and tokens’ are of eastern Christian origin.

As we have seen in earlier papers, Islamic sources seem to imply that early card-use is to be associated with foreigners (the Persian Ganjifah for example adapts a word from Syriac), and with Christian mamluks impressed into Muslim service. It is not difficult, given the date for the compilation, to see how the final form given Tawaddud’s story may draw less on knowledge of the court of Raschid in the ninth century, than on the equally multi-cultural and Christian-Islamic environment of Norman Sicily at that time. Roger II and Frederick II were proverbially called ‘Baptised Saracens’. (We have elsewhere noted that in the twelfth century, Ibn Jubayr remarks with surprise on the practice of a ‘papyrus pieces’ exercise in Sicily, having seen nothing like it in his native Spain, nor during his previous two years as he toured the near east and Mecca..)

Tawaddud now having dispatched the physician, is questioned on astronomy. She first describes the patterns of heaven, the 12 fold path of sun and 28 parts of the lunar path, the 12 zodiacal constellations and the complementary set of lunar asterisms, called the manzil (lunar mansions). She correlates the two, using a formal scheme by which one zodiacal constellation is related to two-and-a-half manzil. Our western card-packs contain the relevant mathematical factors (of 12 and 28).[11] The same matter, of course, is routinely included in the Almanacs desseminated in islam from about the twelfth century.

The next night (455) Tawaddud deals with the planets and those matters today classified separately from standard astronomy e.g. “Mercury’s house is Gemini-Virgo, his ascendant Virgo, his descendant Pisces, his sinister aspect Taurus.”
And it is at precisely at this moment that Tawaddud pauses to tell the Caliph how she has acquired her extraordinary breadth of learning, by practical exercise with those “certain signs and tokens” of the Almanac makers”.

“Know that the almanac-makers have certain signs and tokens, referring to the planets and constellations relative to the coming in of the year; and [ordinary] folk have learned something by practical exercise”[12]

It requires no great leap of the imagination to see how the form, and parts, of the western pack might be used to teach, and to recall, just this information. The key is the use of tokens to aid memory of a formal text.

Just as modern card-readers do, one takes a segment of information from a text, attaches it to a particular card, and then uses the card to assist in recall of that item within the overall sequence of textual information. At the same time, one may add items of marginal comment, to enhance any later exposition of this matter. And just so, an orator of sixteenth century England is said to use his set of (actual or conceptual) images:

If to the orator many a sundry tale
One after another treatably be told
Then sundry images in his closed male [satchel or scrip]
Each for a matter he doth then well hold
Like to the tale he doth then so behold
And inwarde a recapitulation
Of each image the moralisation[13]

Though our tarot packs do not refer to the zodiacal constellations, nor to the planets, their reference may be easily associated with the smaller pack by reference to its inherent numerical factors. (Later their depiction within the larger pack came to be habitual, but is certainly not true to the original system). Conversely, the numerical factors of the tarot’s lower levels enable easy allusion to the alternative systems of the 28 lunar mansions, and the ‘wind-compass’ in sixteen (rather than 12) parts. That relvant associations are original is suported further by the emblems or 'devices' used.

Now (Night 456) there follows a brief summary of prognosticatory method, of a sort already familiar to the west by contact with earlier, eastern, Christianity.[14] Tawaddud recites a series of formal, annual predictions based on the day of the week that a New Year’s day falls. Since the patterns of our pack speak naturally to calculations of time and the calendar, it is not unlikely that such prognostications were always one aspect of their use.

Tawaddud’s question to the astronomer, after he has described the planetary ‘shells’ of the universe used by the more technical, for their onion-model runs, ‘Tell me concerning the stars, into how many parts are they divided?’ He cannot answer, but the reader will be able to understand Tawaddud’s answer by considering that among eastern navigators, the compass of direction has points named for stars, rather than for winds. These points are divided into those for the highest part of the sky, those of the southern heavens, and between them those of the equatorial band. Parallel to this is a habit of describing the levels of the world in a simpler three-tiered scheme of (i) earth, (ii) higher heavens and (iii) the intermediary region to which the sun, wind and zodiac were bound.

Tawaddud thus answers her own riddle:
The stars are divided into three parts: wherein one third is hung in the sky of the earth as it were lamps to give light to the earth, and a part (North) is used to shoot the demons withall, when they draw near by stealth to listen to the talk in heaven.[15] The third (southern) part is hung in air to illuminate the seas and give light to what is therein.

Put a little differently, she means the zodiacal stars for ‘the sky of the earth’; the northernmost stars guard the circle of Heaven and include those of the northern celestial circle, while the northern- and southern-most stars (or possibly just the southern), were principally used to guide the navigator. (This last, in fact, was the only known use for the southern stars other than alignment in surveying).

The tripartite division of the world is present in the card-packs, but where the smaller pack’s 12+ 40 refer to the earth’s circuit and the ‘sky of the earth’ the larger pack’s equates to the 40 of earth + 16 of the more detailed wind- compass of the mariner and finally in the original form of the Atouts, to the 17 stars which named the points of the eastern mariner’s compass. The same pack embodies the necessary factor of 28 in its two lower levels (arcana minor) having 56 (28x 2) cards. The same factors of 28 and 17 defined the celestial-terrestrial grid used by sidereal navigator and surveyor-architect. It was a grid used for determining both direction and
time by geometric triangulation. So Tawaddud's "signs and tokens" might conceivably have resembled a form of our 52-card pack and a prototype of our tarot decks.

The astronomer tries to rally for a last attempt, by putting his challenge as a riddle too, “What four contraries are based on four other contraries?” She responds by describing precisely those climatic-medical divisions illustrated above in the diagram of the matter in the Tacuuinum. And Tawaddud further connects the humors to the zodiac:

[Allah created] twelve signs of the Zodiac, … and appointed them of the four humors; three fiery, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius; three earthly, Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn; three airy, Gemini, Libra and Aquarius; and three watery, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces.”

The astronomer retires, defeated.

This is the sort of information conveyed by a reading of Majusi’s work, or indeed any other of the Persian-Islamic medical school. It represents ideas already standard in western Europe. To suggest the same ideas might be attached, almost instinctively, in medieval Europe to the emblems and structures of the 52-card pack is hardly an imaginative leap. It is possible, if one tries, to connect every field of Tawaddud’s learning with one or other form of pack, and the imagery used for them. Addition of moralia, or marginal comment, to figures and number-values is entirely typical of medieval habits, both east and west.

Thus, we have Tawaddud’s bout with the Philosopher, the next to examine her skills. He begins by discussing the world’s arrangement in terms of time: “Time”, says Tawaddud,
is term applied to the hours of night and day, which are but the measures of the courses of the sun and moon in their heavens…Let none of you revile Time, for Time is God; neither revile the world, for she said, ‘May Allah not aid him who reviles me’. Neither revile the Hour…”

With the beginning of Night 458, the sort of mathematical “riddle” always popular with tutors, and of which Erasmus complains in the early fourteenth century is offered. Thus:

Rees me this riddle; A number of pigeons came to a high tree and alighted, some on the tree and others under it. Said those on the tree to those on the ground: If one of you come up to us, you will be a third part of us all in number; and if one of us descend to you, we shall belike you unto number. How many pigeons were there in all?[16]
Tawaddud, of course, answers this easily. Those not comfortable with mental arithmetic will naturally turn to some form of object, or token, to assist.

This is enough to show how the same structures embodied in our card-packs from the late fourteenth century onward were suited to the themes of medicine, and to education which was then based largely on memorised text and verbal exposition. We have indicated how the one (or two) forms of pack might aid and reinforce learning over the full range of the medieval curriculum. Such, we have argued, was the earliest purpose of our western packs. The story of Tawaddud further suggests an origin in the pages (‘carte’) or sheets (napes) or plates (lames) taken from particular type of ready-reckoner: the Almanac.

We need not follow the rest of Tawaddud’s tale, though it involves a further contest in religious philosophy before Tawaddud is allowed a lighter period of post-tutorial activity: contests against foreigners in their native games of chess, tric trac and (possibly) Kanjifah.[17]

Medicine from Baghdad.

Most of the sources mentioned in our description are linked with the style of medicine first disseminated from the schools of Nestorian Nisibis, and Baghdad. These authorities include not only ‘Ellbochasim’ the Spaniard, but Majusi, and Ibn Botlan, whose predecessors and exemplars of the eighth and ninth centuries form a roll of Islam’s greatest lights in medicine. Many are well known to medical histories of Europe, and the earliest are Nestorian Christians.

Abu Zakaria Jahia ben Maseweih (d. 875) was a Nestorian. In medieval Europe he is called Joannes Damascenus, or Mesue the Elder. Ficino cites accurately from his works. Abu Zakaria was one of the first teachers at the al-Adudi hospital, not only supervising translation of the Greek, Roman, Syriac and Egyptian medical works into Arabic but composing his own.

In Italy, at the end of the sixteenth century, Ficino will speak knowledgeably of all four of these pre-Muslim traditions (Greek, Roman, Syrian and Egyptian), quoting accurately from a Medical Herbal composed by the ‘Mesues’ clan.[18] In his defence, against the charge of heresy for having united medical with religious ministry, Ficino directly and correctly refers to the example of these ‘ancient’ i.e. oldest [Christian] priesthoods, and equally correctly asserts that the priests of antiquity combined spiritual with medical ministry in direct emulation of Christ. He avoids mentioning the still older example of those Asclepian priests of Cos.

Another scholar of Baghdad at this time was Abu Yusef Yacob ben Ishak ben el-Subbah al-Kindi (813-73) known to the west as ‘al-Kindi’ or ‘Alchandrinus’ who is presumed to have been a Muslim, though his name tells us he was not of Arab extraction.[19] Al-Kindi wrote a handbook on compound drugs in the Hippocratic and Nestorian style, and an even better known work on stellar rays. Al Kindi’s “radii stellarum” explains the influence of these stellar rays on the world and its produce, giving methods for calculating ‘tides’ of health and annual produce, along with the tides of bodily humors. His work is constantly quoted by clerics and by laymen in medieval Christian Europe.

It should be said that western Christianity and Islam agreed, at that time, in believing that all beneficial quality (‘virtue’) in natural produce descended from heaven through the agency of the stars. A thirteenth century German cleric, for example, speaks of it as a matter of ordinary doctrine, and appeal to the same idea is another aspect of Ficino’s defence against the charge of heresy (1598-9). Medical astronomy is, of course, an essential element in Majusi’s work, as it was generally, and we may suppose that in Viterbo, in the fourteenth century, reference to the medicinal stars and their rays was not considered objectionable.

Another of Majusi’s predecessors in Baghdad was Abu Zeid Honein ben Ishak ben Soliman ben Ejjub el ‘Ibadi. Again a Nestorian Christian (809-c.873), he taught in Baghdad, translated the medical works attributed to Hippocrates and also the herbal medical corpus of Discords into Arabic, and wrote a book widely popular in its Latin translation: “Isagogic in artem parvam Galeni.” In the west, he was known as Joannitius

When and how these Persian writers first became known to western Christendom is uncertain, but al-Kindi at least was known to William of Malmsbury, who rather acidly compares Gebert of Aurillac to him. We know that a number of the Persian texts were later translated into Latin during the twelfth century by Constantine the African, a North African scholar who travelled, as so many did, to gain his higher education in Baghdad. Thereafter, Constantine returned to Kairouan of North Africa, earlier noted for the style of Jewish medicine practiced there, and brought to the Greek medical school of Salerno in Sicily a large number of medical treatises. He may now have begun his own work of translation, but the majority of it appears to have been done later, in the medical-monastic centre of Montpellier, connected to Salerno as part of the wider circle of areas influenced by Norman-French-Sicilian culture. Many of Constantine’s translations, like others first made in Norman Sicily, would later be re-made by – or attributed to - Gerard of Cremona.

The Persian, Abu Ali el-Hosein ben Abdallah Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980-1037), lived in Spain. His medical and philosophical system derives almost entirely from the teachings of Roman Galen, rather than of Greek Hippocrates. His chief work, "El-Kanûn" (Canon Medicinae) treated every branch of medical science in an especially clear and brilliant style. The Canon became one of the western physicians’ most important textbooks, to which Majusi’s may be considered second, but we hear remarkably little of Ibn Sina within Muslim Spain. This silence is perhaps due to his proverbial fondness for Plato.

What came new to Sicily and France from about the twelfth century, and later to the rest of Europe as ‘Saracenic’ medicine was not simply this synthesis of various ancient medical traditions, but the characteristic habit of which we have spoken: a habit of categorising all such matter by the order of the world’s natural divisions - directions, regions, winds, seasons and stars.

Given the reference of 1377, in which a learned Dominican chooses the Latin cos to describe the set of 52 tokens, and the allusion to Hayl in the reference to Viterbo’s gioco della carte of 1379, taken in association with the western pack’s form and the known method for tutorial games based on text-dissection, so there is nothing to prevent us from arguing that the ‘giuoco’ of 1379 might indeed been ‘introduced’ by Hayl, the form of play being one of words and tokens, requiring reference to health and the usual associations for the world’s divisions – not only medicine per se, but the quarters, winds, stars, and all such matter.

Ludus cartarum, the phrase naming the new activity in 1377 means, literally, the letter/chart pieces exercise’. The same source says, quite specifically, that the advantage of the new ludus lies in its permitting one to describe (or ‘survey and register’ describeretur)[20] the world by a series of sequential stages: ‘ludus cartarum status mundi describitur et figura’.

The same account of 1377 includes a brief description of 52 tokens, just enough to tell us that the set’s structure and the form of some cards in it resembled those still found in card-packs made today. Again, we are told this is is how “we” first received the game, suggesting alternative and principally oral forms of exercise (and perhaps a new form of pack) as being newer. The speaker ends his description by saying that the game [not the cos themselves] should be ‘based on worthy texts’.

Diane O’Donovan
Newcastle 2006
(re-edited version of text from an unpublished manuscript, Rational Constructions: a discussion of the ‘Moorish Quarters’ with reference to the Charles VI and Visconti-Sforza cards. All material copyright 1998, 2002, 2007).