The History of Chess. H. J. R. Murray
hostility to the game. It is at least singular to find that the first ecclesiastical denunciation of chess on the part of the Eastern Church was voiced by John Zonares, who, after filling the post of commander of the Emperor’s bodyguard, retired as a monk to the Monastery of Mt. Athos and died there in 1118. It was during his retirement that he wrote, his commentary on the canons of the Eastern Church.
That the early mediaeval Church viewed the use of dice with strong disfavour is evident from the attempts that were made to suppress it by legislation. The early list of rules known as the Apostolic Canons16 requires both clergy and laity to give up the use of dice.
42. A Bishop, Priest, or Deacon addicted to dice (Gk. κύßoι, Lat. alea) shall either give them up, or be deposed.
43. A Sub-deacon, Reader, or Singer doing the same shall either give them up, or be deposed. So also the laity.
These rules were adopted by the Trullan Synod (Third Council of Constantinople) in 680,17 and have since then formed part of the Nomo-canon of the Eastern Church. It was natural that, in the course of time, the attempt should be made to explain the prohibition of kuboi or alea by defining exactly the games which were to be included under these terms. This attempt was not confined to the Eastern Church: the later Latin use of alea as the name of a game helped to confuse the lawyers of the Western Church, and we shall find Cardinal Damiani arguing in a letter of 1061 that the prohibition of alea extended to chess. The Western Church took this view for a considerable time.
Zonares makes the following note on the 42nd rule of the Apostolic Canons:
Because there are some of the Bishops and clergy who depart from virtue and play chess (zatrikion) or dice or drink to excess, the Rule commands that such shall cease to do so or be excluded; and if a Bishop or elder or deacon or subdeacon or reader or singer do not cease so to do, he shall be cast out: and if laymen be given to chess-playing and drunkenness they shall be excluded….
We shall see later that this extension of the term kuboi was for long adopted by the Russian Church, and we may probably account in part for the paucity of references to chess in the Eastern Empire as being due to the intolerance of the Church.
The beginning of the 13th century saw the Latin or Western Emperors established in Constantinople, who must have known chess in Western Europe before they laid hands on the Empire of the East. The result of this may be detected in the latest reference to Zatrikion in Byzantine Greek. The history of Ducas, written about 1400, nearly at the close of the Eastern Empire, contains an account of the incidents which led to the naming of Tīmūr’s son Shāhrukh from a technicality of chess. In this passage Ducas adds the information that the Persians call zatrikion santratz (σαντρàτζ), and the Latins call it scacum (σκáκον). Later on he uses σκáκον for a chessman and σκáκον πατγνíον for the game of chess, which are evidently adaptations from the Latin scacus, a chessman, and scacorum ludus, the game of chess. Shāhrukh is transliterated Siachrouch (σιαχρούχ), with the information that the Latins call it σκáκω ζóγκω, a curious misrendering of scac-roc. It seems clear to me that Ducas knew more of the Latin than of the Greek chess.
There is one branch of the later Greek literature, fairly circumscribed in extent, which might possibly give us some reference to chess earlier in date than any I have cited. The mathematical problem known as ‘the doubling of the squares of the chessboard’ may have been known to the later Greek mathematicians, as we find it included in the oldest Western mediaeval MSS. on mathematics. The Greek MSS. have not so far been examined for this purpose.
With the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the last outposts of independent Christianity in Asia Minor (1461), the last vestiges of the Byzantine Empire passed away, and the Greeks became a subject race and largely adopted the language of their conquerors. The game of zatrikion, whatever special points and rules it may have possessed, must be held to have become obsolete, and its very name soon passed into oblivion. Whatever chess was played would assuredly be the Turkish chess of the ruling race. A curious confirmation of this at the very end of the Turkish dominion over Greece itself is to be found in the name, ‘the Greek Defence’, which Allgaier, following the usage of Viennese chess-players, gave to the Fianchetto defences, which are still to-day a striking characteristic of the native Turkish chess. This result was probably assisted both by the small degree of popularity that chess would seem to have secured among the Greeks,18 and by the ecclesiastical opposition to its practice.
With zatrikion forgotten, it is only natural to discover the use of a new name more closely representing the Turkish shaṭranj. The poverty of the Greek alphabet necessitated changes in the form of this word when the attempt was made to reproduce it in a Greek dress. The Semitic sh was variously replaced by s or si, the j by tz or z. Shaṭranj accordingly gives rise regularly to santratz, as in Ducas, or santraz, the form which Hyde gives as in use in his time.19 Modern dictionaries give santratsi as in vulgar use, and add still another form, Satrengion (Σατρένγιον, σατρέγγιον), which is a modern adaptation from the Egyptian dialect of Arabic.20
Turkish chess has met the same fate in Greece that befell zatrikion, and the modern Greek has turned to the West for his knowledge of chess, and the name of the game, skaki (σκáκι), and the translations from the French which do duty for the names of the chessmen, betray at once the origin of the modern Greek chess of our day. The attempt to revive the word zatrikion, as seen in the title of the only Greek work on the game, the Encheiridion Zatrikion of Leo Olivier (Athens, 1894), is due to the workings of national aspirations.
CHAPTER X
THE ARABIC AND PERSIAN LITERATURE OF CHESS
The chess works mentioned in the Fihrist, and other bibliographies.—MSS. used for the present work.—Other MSS. in European libraries.—Poems and impromptus on chess, &c.
The beginnings of the vast literature of chess are to be found in the Golden Age of Arabic, the first two centuries of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate, that short period during which alone Islam has shown any powers of original thought and discovery. In b. Isḥāq an-Nadīm’s great bibliographical work, the K. al-fihrist, compiled 377/988, we find a section devoted to the authors of books on chess.
These are the chess-players who wrote books on chess.
AL-‘ADLĪ. His name is (left blank). He wrote Kitāb ash-shaṭranj (Book of the chess). He also wrote Kitāb an-nard (Book of the nard).
AR-RĀZĪ. His name is (left blank). He was of equal strength with al-‘Adlī. They used to play together before Mutawakkil (Caliph, 233/847 – 248/862). The book Latīf fī’sh-shaṭranj (Elegance in chess) is by him.
AṢ-ṢULĪ. Abū-Bakr Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā, who has been mentioned already. He wrote Kitāb ash-shaṭranj, the first work, and Kitāb ash-shaṭranj, the second work.
AL-LAJLĀJ. Abū’l-Faraj Muḥammad b. ‘Obaidallāh. I have seen him. He went to Shīrāz to the king ‘Adudaddaula (ruled 338/949 – 366/976), and died there in the year 360/970 and a few. He was excellent at the game, and among the books on it Kitāb manṣūbāt ash-shaṭranj (Book of chess-positions or problems) belongs to him.
B. ALIQLĪDISĪ. Abū Isḥāq Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ. He is reckoned among the brilliant players, and wrote the Kitāb majmu‘fī manṣūbāt ash-shaṭranj (Collection of chess problems).
The other much later great Arabic bibliography, the Kashf aẓ-ẓunūn fī asāmī’l-kutub wal funūn of Ḥājjī Khalīfa (D. 1068/1658) has a shorter catalogue of chess books.
10224. Kitāb ash-shaṭranj by the authors Abū’l–‘Abbās Aḥmad b. Muḥammad as-Sarakhsī, the physician, who died in the year 286/899; Yaḥyā b. Muḥammad aṣ-Ṣūlī; and a later author who wrote in Persian and boasts not without arrogance that he was the best player of that