The History of Playing Cards: From Asia to the Joker

Playing cards are so familiar that their arrival in Europe seems like it should be a settled story. It is not. No inventor is documented, no founding date is certain, and the earliest European records are not celebrations but prohibitions. The most secure of them is a decree of the Florentine council dated March 23, 1376, which is 1377 by modern reckoning because Florence began its year on March 25. It banned a game called naibbe that had only recently taken root in the city. This article follows the documented path of the pack: its probable origins in Asia and the Islamic world, the cluster of European references between 1371 and 1379, the bans and licences that followed, the French suit signs that became the standard, and the American changes that produced the Joker. Gambling runs through all of it. The same cards that entertained courts and town dinners were condemned by authorities as an idle and costly pastime, and the record shows that argument starting almost as soon as the cards arrived.

Where Playing Cards Came From

The origins of the playing card lie outside Europe, but exactly where is debated. The most widely repeated account, set out in historian Simon Wintle’s World of Playing Cards timeline, is that cards began in China and travelled through India and Persia to Mamluk Egypt before reaching Europe in the second half of the 14th century. The Chinese evidence is hard to read. A history of the Liao dynasty, compiled in the 14th century, records an emperor playing cards on New Year’s Eve in 969, but the same timeline cautions that early Chinese words for such items may refer to dominoes or domino cards rather than the pack known today.

The strongest physical link is a Mamluk pack in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, identified by the scholar Leo Ary Mayer in the 1930s. Only 47 cards survive. They use four suits, coins, cups, swords and polo sticks, and the court cards name officials rather than showing human figures. One of those officials was the naib, an Arabic word for deputy, and that word appears in several spellings in the first European records. The philosopher Michael Dummett concluded that cards entered Europe from the Islamic world in packs with essentially the same structure as today’s, though with different suit signs.

Timing mattered too. Cards need cheap paper, and Italy, whose first paper factory was founded at Fabriano about 1276, remained Europe’s most important paper source throughout the 14th century, according to the same timeline. Cards were not an ancient companion of dice. They were a new fashion, arriving in a Europe where dice and certain board games were already long established.

The 1370s: Cards Appear in Europe

Wintle describes a cluster of references between about 1370 and 1380 in inventories, edicts, chronicles and account books, pointing to the sudden arrival of cards in Belgium, Germany, Spain and Italy. His earliest entry is a Catalan rhyming dictionary compiled by the poet Jaume March in 1371, which contains the word naip, a word with no other meaning than playing card.

The firmest dated document is the Florentine decree. Franco Pratesi, who examined the originals in the Florentine state archive, found the text of the March 23, 1376 provision preserved in several near-identical versions, confirming that the game had recently begun to flourish in the city. As transcribed by Pratesi, the decree tied the penalty for playing the new game to the existing penalty for gambling. A year later, in 1377, a Paris ordinance forbade card games on workdays, and in 1379 St Gallen in Switzerland prohibited them.

The records are not all bans. Brussels account books show a payment dated May 14, 1379 for a pack of cards for Duke Wenceslas of Luxembourg and Duchess Joanna of Brabant, the first documentary evidence of cards in Belgium. In Basel, a friar named Johannes of Rheinfelden wrote a Latin moral treatise that used the cards as an allegory of society. The Basel University Library describes it as the oldest description of playing cards known in Europe.

How the Pack Changed Hands and Faces

Three developments turned a novelty into the modern deck. The first was price. The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that cards were enjoyed across social classes, unlike chess, which was mainly an aristocratic pursuit, and the earliest references condemn or ban them. Hand-painted packs stayed luxury goods well into the 15th century, but the United States Playing Card Company’s history credits woodcut printing in the 14th century with beginning mass production.

The second was design. French makers developed simple shapes and flat colours that were cheap to print, and their suits of spades, clubs, diamonds and hearts are the ones in use today. French packs were exported widely and became the standard in England, then in the British colonies of America. A satirical print dated 1499, described in an 1865 history of playing cards, already shows European rulers playing with French-style emblems.

The third was the games themselves. Dummett found that trumps derive from games played with the Tarot pack, introduced in Italy, while bidding came from the Spanish game of Ombre. Both were later European inventions, not features of the Islamic cards that arrived first. Parlett adds that English Trump, mentioned in a 1529 sermon, was originally played with the full 52-card pack.

From Euchre to the Joker: Cards in America

Cards reached America through the British colonies, where English-style packs were the standard, and Americans began making their own packs around 1800, according to the United States Playing Card Company. They added practical refinements: double-headed court cards, varnished surfaces, indexes in the corners and rounded corners that resisted wear. The game that reshaped the pack was euchre. Parlett records that it was already being played on a steamboat trip from Louisville to New Orleans in 1829, that an American Hoyle described it in 1845, and that the first book devoted to it appeared in 1850.

Euchre gave the deck its Joker. Wintle writes that American euchre players of the 1860s wanted an extra trump, first called the Best Bower, and that such cards entered American packs around 1863 and English packs about 1880. The English maker Charles Goodall was printing packs with Jokers for the American market in the 1870s. The United States Playing Card Company dates the card’s origin to around 1870 and suggests that the name came from Juker, a name for euchre, with the jester image appearing by the 1880s. The sources differ by a few years, but agree on euchre and on an American origin.

Disputes, Bans and the Cost of the Game

Several points remain disputed. Pratesi notes that Hellmut Rosenfeld was among the strongest supporters of an Islamic origin of the European pack, while another theory proposed a Spanish origin through a variant of four-handed chess. A Bern ban dated 1367, cited by the scholar Peter Kopp as earlier than Florence’s, comes from a compilation made in 1398. Rosenfeld argued that the card clause was probably inserted later into a dice-game ban, while the Florentine record is much more secure. The date of Johannes of Rheinfelden’s treatise is also contested: surviving copies date from 1429 and 1472, and scholars have argued over whether its card passages were written in 1377 or revised later.

The other side of the story is the cost. Wintle writes that gaming houses attracted card-sharps and swindlers, and that churchmen treated gambling as a mortal sin. Bans were repeated because they were ignored. According to the 1848 history by William Andrew Chatto, reproduced in his timeline, Augsburg issued orders against cards in 1400, 1403 and 1406, with an exception in 1406 for trade meeting-houses. Nördlingen forbade them in 1426, 1436 and 1439, then in 1440 allowed play in public houses. Over time, authorities moved from bans to monopolies and licences that raised revenue.

Playing Card Timeline

Related Stories

Cards joined an older tradition of gambling on chance. The story of that tradition begins with the history of dice, from Ice Age bone lots to the craps table, and continues with the history of lotteries, which grew from medieval Low Countries towns into the modern state lottery. For the game that borrowed the 52-card pack and made it a gambling staple, read the origins of poker, which follows the disputed theories of where the game began and how the pack and its hands changed in the 19th century.

Sources & References

• Tim Husband, The Metropolitan Museum of Art — Welcome to The World in Play: Luxury Cards, 1430–1540 (2016)
• Simon Wintle, The World of Playing Cards — Early History of Playing Cards & Timeline
• Simon Wintle, The World of Playing Cards — Mamluk Cards and the Making of the European Deck
• The World of Playing Cards — The Joker Card
• Franco Pratesi — On the Introduction of Playing Cards in Florence (1987)
• Franco Pratesi — Carte varie a Basilea nel 1377 o nel 1429
• Hellmut Rosenfeld — Zu den frühesten Spielkarten in der Schweiz: Eine Entgegnung (1975)
• e-codices — Basel, Universitätsbibliothek, F IV 43: Johannes von Rheinfelden, Tractatus de moribus et disciplina humanae conversationis
• Michael Dummett — The history of card games (1993)
• David Parlett — Euchre
• United States Playing Card Company — A Brief History of Playing Cards
• Leo Ary Mayer — Mamluk Playing Cards (1939)
• Elaina Zachos, National Geographic — A visual history of trading and playing cards (2023)
• The History of Playing Cards (1865)