Chess set

While extant chessboard have been dated as far back as the third millennium B.C. and found in many cultures, chess pieces seem to have been invented rather later. They probably originated in India between 455 and 543, and rapidly reached Persia (before 578) under the name shatrang. Discovered by the Arabs at the time of the conquest in the seventh century, the game was rapidly adopted in the Islamic world. According to tradition, caliph Harun al-Rashid offered a chess set to Charlemagne; however the so-called ‘Charlemagne’ set, held in the medal room of the Bibliothèque nationale de France has in fact been attributed to Italian workshops of the eleventh century and the ‘Charlemagne pawn’, also in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, was probably produced in India after the tenth century. It is more likely that chess reached the West around the year 1000, and that its transmission was facilitated by the Crusades. In any event, an Italian painting depicting a Christian and a Muslim playing at chess in a tent[1] demonstrates that several centuries later, the game was known on both sides of the Mediterranean. 

Islamic pieces, unlike their European counterparts, are never figurative. It is principally by their size that the king, the minister (roughly equivalent to the queen in the West), the elephant (bishop), chariot (rook), horse (knight) and foot soldier (pawn) are recognisable. The Topkapi Sarayi set is no exception. Its thirty two pieces in rock crystal have geometric forms: a slightly concave, cylindrical body with a domed top. These forms may be simple (in the case of the king and the queen); decorated with two grooves (for the pawn) or in the form of a baluster pillar (for the knight and the rook). Only the bishop (?), in a palmette form, is more complex. Another set of pieces of Iranian or Ottoman origin in agate and turquoise, also held in the Topkapi Palace, are almost identical in shape.

Rock crystal, indeed hardstone in general, was particularly prized by the Ottomans. The treasury of the Topkapi Palace holds several rock crystal jugs inlaid with precious stones. This predilection is not new to Islamic arts: from the Fatimid period, chess sets, ewers and phials have been carved from rock crystal[2]. It was also used in the West from the Carolingian period [3] up to at least the nineteenth century.

Two types of precious stone embellish the chess pieces to distinguish each player. The rubies probably came from Burma or Afghanistan; however, from the end of the sixteenth century, emeralds from Asia were increasingly neglected in favour of more beautiful stones brought back from Colombia by the Portuguese. The stones were table cut[4] (a gold work technique which survived in Byzantium and the West from the early Middle Ages) and then set in lobed mounts to secure them to the crystal. The beginnings of stone inlays on precious metals dates back to the twelfth century in eastern Iran but it was probably only under the Timurids (1370 – 1506) that craftsmen began to inlay precious stones. This practice continued in Iran into the sixteenth century and expanded into India and to the Ottoman Empire following the capture of many Iranian works and artists after the conquest of Tabriz in 1514.

[2]Chess set in rock crystal, Llerida, Diocesan Museum, 1473.

[3] Print Suzanne, France or Germany, 855 – 869, rock crystal, London, British Museum, 1855.12-1.5.

[4] i.e., with a flat surface.