Very early European playing cards, c. 1390?

Forty cards measuring c. 65×95 mm survive from this deck dated to the first decades of European playing cards.

The suit system is the so-called Portuguese type which was prevalent in the southern parts of both the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Its primary characterisic is that the swords in the pip cards are straight like in the Spanish type from northern Spain, but long and interlaced like in the Italian type from northern Italy. In this deck, however, the batons are uniquely strongly reminiscent of the polo-sticks of the Mamluk cards, unlike the ceremonial batons of Italian cards and the rough cudgels normally found in Portuguese cards, and even more pronounced in Spanish ones.

The ranks are the same twelve as in later Portugese and Spanish cards, differing from the Italian and Mamluk ones in that the tens are lacking. If the tens were originally present, they must have been deliberately discarded during the decks's period of use, as the probability that all four tens accidentally should have been lost along with the eight other random missing cards is vanishingly small. Also, the elegant placement pattern of the suit symbols in cups and coins from the fives to nines (and probably even the lost fours) could not easily be extended to tens.

	Swords	Batons	Cups	Coins
Ace
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Knave
Knight
King

A mid 16th century descendant

For such a unique early deck it is extremely surprising to find a deck with some cards practically unchanged a century and a half later. Yet this is the case for a mid 16th century deck assumed to be from from Provence. The few numeral cards known to me utilises the exact same unusual principles for the placement of the suit symbols, and while most court cards are quite different, the knight of swords is immediately recognisable as a mirror image of the older card.

The knight of batons is alone of the three surviving knights drawn as a centaur as in the minchiate decks. Unlike other tarots, these have Portuguese-style straight interlaced swords.

	Swords	Batons	Cups	Coins
Ace
2
8
9
Knave
Knight
King