Today the French deck of 52 cards (made of series of 13 cards of diamonds, clubs, spades and hearts, including kings, queens and jacks) is the default deck. In the early modern period, however, the default was the ‘Spanish’ deck. This consisted of 48 cards made of series of 12 cards of cups, coins, sticks (cudgels) and swords, including kings, knights (horse) and squires. The Iberian deck came straight from the medieval Islamic Mediterranean, along with optics, astrolabes, Galenic medicine and Aristotle. The na’ib and the malik of the Islamic suit begot the viceroy and the king in the Spanish card deck. The na’ib thani yielded the squire. The original Islamic cards did not carry the images of the characters in the deck. The Spanish sword emerged from the Arab scimitar and the cudgel from the shepherd staff. The cup and the coin did not change; socialising drinks and trade were the common currency of Islamic and Christian Mediterranean cultures. One distinct peculiarity of the Islamic deck is that the knights and kings appeared as names in classical Arabic calligraphy, not human representations.

Theology also shaped the Iberian deck, for playing cards in the Hispanic monarchy belonged in larger political and theological worlds. The state monopoly on playing-card decks was first introduced in Spain in the 1550s by Philip II as a tax on vice. More importantly, cards served as metaphors for theology. Preachers used the trope of card tricks to explain transubstantiation. Christ as card player, betting his own life in a game of cards with Satan, illustrated the mystery of salvation. A tradition of villancicos or carols and autos sacramentales (a literary genre of morality plays) emerged that had Christ rising from the death triumphant after a game of cards with Satan and Man. One auto by Luis Mejía de la Cerda, published in 1625, had the triumphant resurrected Christ surrounded by a deck of 48 cards in the shape of a chain of the Hapsburg Golden Fleece.

The Spanish deck arrived in Peru as early as did Pizarro. The contract Hernán Cortés signed with Diego Velázquez explicitly outlawed any member of the large expedition to play cards or shoot dice. When the second audiencia or high court arrived in Mexico in 1529 to investigate Cortés, the judges slapped conquistadors with accumulated fines worth tens of thousands of gold pesos – for eight years’ worth of unregulated gambling. Cortés alone was forced to cough out 12,000 pesos of gold (the price of 300 slaves). In 1530, the empress, Isabella of Portugal, regent of Spain, ordered the treasury to return all the fines taken from the conquistadors. The Council of the Indies argued that the conquistadors used gambling to remain together when surrounded by enemy Indians – not to stray into the enemy lines. Playing cards, the cedula or royal certificate ruled, allowed conquistadors to maintain tight defence infantry lines. By 1538, however, the new viceroy of Mexico Mendoza had imposed regulations on gambling due to the considerable turnover of property and bankruptcies. Despite efforts to put a cap on bets and limit gambling, the early colonial archive regularly documents conflicts over property illegally changing hands because of card playing.

Among the earliest copies of extant printed Spanish American decks in museums are those found in excavations in Lima. There is also a copy of a deck printed in Mexico, along with the 1583 asiento contract of the royal card monopolies. Both the Mexican and Peruvian decks are unusual. They each have a fourth character, the dragon, along with the king, the knight and the squire, and therefore are decks of 52 cards. The Peruvian set had two kings and two queens, which might suggest an audience of Inca lords long accustomed to gender complementarity and dual kingship.

The Mexican deck also suggests the quick adaption of printers to the local demands of indigenous elites. It includes designs of Aztec games (juggling, flying poles, trained monkeys) as well as Aztec rulers and religious heroes: Cuauhtémoc, Moctezuma and Quetzalcoatl. The names of the heroes are printed in Roman script along with their corresponding Aztec logographic signs.

By 1593, Aztec lords had incorporated Christian and classical historiographies into their annals, along with new Iberian legal forms of paperwork, including wills, petitions, probanzas (submissions of evidence) and property deeds. The lords, to be sure, did not exclude playing cards from the new arsenal of manuscript and print culture they chose to consume. Printers in Mexico offered Christian Aztec lords striking images of preconquest Aztec tlatoque and mitotes (pole flyers and dancers in religious festivals) for ludic consumption. Printed cards of dragons, queens and pictograms and logograms of Aztec lords and religious rituals suggest a lively culture of sociability among native lords in Mexico and Peru.

FURTHER READING

Cashner, A.A. (2014) ‘Playing cards at the eucharistic table: Music, theology, and society in a Corpus Christi Villancico from colonial Mexico, 1628’, Journal of Early Modern History, 18: 383–419.

de Covarrubias, P. (1543) Remedio de jugadores (Barcelona).

Fajardo, F.L. (1603) Fiel Desengaño contra la ociosidad y los juegos: utilisisimo a los confesores, penitentes y justicias y demás a cuyo cargo está limpiar de vagabundos, tahúres y fulleros la Republica Cristiana (Madrid).