El ajedrez de la dama — the recasting of chess in late fifteenth-century Spain and Lucena's Salamanca book
The game the world plays is not the game that came out of India and Persia. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century the queen and the bishop were given the long moves they still have, and the earliest printed book on the result was written by a student at Salamanca and dated by a dedication to a prince who died in October 1497. Its author had no name for the new game but "de la Dama", and explained its moves by their difference from "el viejo".
Why this wins its question: Ask where modern chess comes from and the answer that wins today is a paragraph about chaturanga and shatranj followed by the vague sentence that "the modern rules emerged in Europe around 1500". The interesting part is missing: that the pieces which changed were the queen and the bishop, that the first printed book on the resulting game was written by a Salamanca student and dated by a dedication to a prince who died in October 1497, that the game had to be given a name to distinguish it from the one it was replacing and the name chosen in Spain was "de la Dama" and in Italy "alla rabiosa", that the en passant rule and the white-square-on-the-right convention are both first written down in that book, and that opening theory begins with a second Spaniard at Alcalá in 1561. All of that is here, transcribed from a full-view 1897 monograph opened page by page, with the priority question left open in the words of the historian usually cited to close it — he assigns the Göttingen manuscript to "about 1500" and then admits he cannot say whether Lucena came first.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The evidence here is one book: the 1897 Leipzig monograph of T. von der Lasa, read page by page. It is a nineteenth-century historian's argument, not a document of the period, and it is used as such. Its author sets out his method on page V — that he consulted the originals in distant libraries where he could, worked from transcripts and photographs where he could not, and reproduced long passages from inaccessible books verbatim so that the reader could judge the material for himself.
The book at the centre of the question was printed at Salamanca, where its author was a student ("zu Salamanca, wo sich der Autor als Studiosus befand"). Its first section does not concern chess; the second and much larger part opens with openings in the newer manner and then gives far more room to problems, which for the author were evidently still the main thing. The 150 problems, furnished with large woodcuts, are of mixed kind: partly new, but for the greater part solvable only by the old rules.
Lucena had no settled name for the game he was describing, and the name he used is the piece that had changed. He calls the newer chess "De la Dama", after what had become the principal piece, for which he never says reina and only rarely, in old endgames, alferezza, but generally dama. In Italy the same new game was called "alla rabiosa" — explained by the greater activity of the pieces furnished with the extended move — and that name is found in all the editions of Damiano printed in Italy from 1512 into the seventeenth century, each reprinting the last.
He was writing at the hinge, and he knew it without taking a side. Lucena pronounces no judgement on the worth either of the existing or of the newer game; he regards the old chess as still subsisting and explains the new moves by their difference from the old — "del viejo" — game. Both names can only have been in temporary use, because the old chess disappeared entirely and no distinction was needed any more.
The book carries no year, and is dated from the person it was written for. Its chess part is dedicated to the crown prince of Spain, already recognised as heir, the son of Ferdinand and Isabella, whose "delphinicas manos" the author kisses. That prince died on 4 October 1497.
What made it a step forward in the literature was not the problems but the prose. It is interesting, the historian writes, "mehr als durch die Probleme", through its discussion of the rules of the game and through the openings it communicates, poor as those still were; through these additions it forms an advance in the literature.
The book also records the manners of the game as it was actually played for money. From Lucena's introductory remarks it appears that chess was at that time commonly played for stakes; the author's advice is that one should set the stake low enough that the loss is not felt as a burden, and that even when playing for nothing one should take back no moves.
One rule of the modern game is first written down here and is still played as he wrote it. The long-disputed question whether a pawn making its first move may pass an advanced enemy pawn without risk of being taken by it must have arisen at once when the innovation of the double step gained currency in Europe; it is first mentioned in Lucena, and present-day general practice corresponds to the rule he gave — the pawn can be taken in passing, but only immediately after it has passed. Damiano's proposed restriction on the case never obtained any force.
The orientation of the board is his too, by implication rather than by rule. In setting up the board Lucena assumes, without saying so directly, that one has a white square at the bottom right — "es muss dies also um 1497 in Spanien üblich gewesen sein, und so ist es denn auch bis auf den heutigen Tag überall geblieben". He himself attaches no particular weight to it: his advice is that a player who prefers the black pieces and finds his opponent claiming them too should turn the board half round and play the white pieces as though they were the black, caring more for the accustomed position of the king than for the lie of the board.
The claim that Spain made the modern game is not settled by this evidence, and the historian who is usually cited for it says so about himself. He assigns to the transitional period a Latin parchment manuscript discovered by Professor Österley in the Göttingen university library, which contains openings and thirty problems all in the newer manner only, having got rid of the old game entirely, and which was written in French-speaking territory — the pieces in its diagrams are lettered R, da, ro, fo, ch, p, for roi, dame, roc, fol, chevalier, pion. Asked to date it, Göttingen at first thought it might go back to the beginning of the fifteenth century, but on closer examination Director Professor Dziatzko fixed the limit at "gegen oder um 1500". That fits the adoption of the extended moves at the entry into the last quarter of the fifteenth century, but, in the author's own words, it also leaves room for doubt whether the manuscript was the very first manifestation of the new game, as he himself assumes, "oder ob nicht Lucena vorher ging".
The change is visible from the other side as well, in what dropped out of the vocabulary. In an Italian manuscript of the period the bishop is called alfino and never delfino as in Damiano's Rome of 1512, the queen is always Donna and only exceptionally regina or reina, and the Ferzia — the weak medieval counsellor the queen replaced — "ist bereits gänzlich verschwunden". The medieval problem literature that ends with two anonymous Italian manuscripts, at Florence and at Rome dated 1511, carries, like Lucena's work, problems both in the old and in the newer manner, and for the newer manner already presupposes the rules as known.
The first textbook of the modern game in the sense the word still has was also Spanish, and came sixty years later. With the work of the Spaniard Ruy López, Alcalá 1561, the formerly popular problems cease to be the main thing; López himself pays them no attention at all. He is "die grosse Figur, mit der die Theorie der Eröffnungen des neueren Schachs wirklich anhebt", and his work was the first manual that can still count as such in the modern sense — though the Spaniard, the same historian adds, still left something to be desired in the way of explanatory remarks. With him the ordinary openings expand considerably and the knight's and bishop's gambits appear.
The founding book was then almost unread for three and a half centuries, which is part of why the story is undertold. Lucena's work was used by no old author, and probably not even by the Portuguese Damiano who followed him most closely in time; it was W. Lewis who first described it, in 1848, from the copy now in the British Museum. The only older transmission the historian could find was manuscript: a Portuguese codex of Antonio das Neves, folios 134 to 161, bearing the year 1648 at the end and beginning with a translation of López, which he examined himself in the National Library at Lisbon in May 1885. Until then, he writes, it was not known at all that Lucena's work was to be met with there in abridged form, with a selection of 102 of its problems.
What this evidence cannot do is worth stating plainly. A single monograph of 1897, however well documented, establishes what its author had read and how he read it: that Lucena's book is the earliest printed treatise on the game with the extended queen and bishop, that its author called that game the queen's chess, that it was printed at Salamanca and dated by a dedication to a prince who died in 1497, and that Ruy López's Alcalá 1561 is where opening theory begins. It does not establish who first moved the queen, or where, or in what year — the author declines to settle that himself — and it cannot report work done after 1897. Nothing here should be read as a claim that chess is a Spanish invention: the game it recast came to Iberia from the Islamic world, and the source cited is explicit that well-known chess collections and problem literature existed across Italy, France and Germany before any of these books.