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John B. Dillon
JACOPO DE CESSOLIS
(f1. 1275–1322)
Jacopo Jacobus was born in the small town of Cessole,
near Asti, in Piedmont. He entered the Dominican or-
der, probably at the convent of Santa Maddalena near
Asti. From 1317 to 1322, he lived in Genoa, where he
became vicar of the Inquisition attached to the convent
of San Domenico. At the request of fellow Dominicans
and several laypeople, he wrote his only extant work,
De moribus hominum ed de offi ciis nobilum super ludo
scaccorum (On the Customs of Men and Their Noble
Actions with Regard to the Game of Chess), known
simply as Ludus scaccorum.
Ludus scaccorum is a moralized explanation of chess
based on the medieval estates, whereby each chess piece
represents a different social class. It consists of twenty-
four chapters divided into four sections (tractatus). The
fi rst section consists of three chapters that narrate when,
how, and by whom chess was invented. The narrative,
in the form of a medieval exemplum, recounts how a
Greek philosopher named Xerxes or Perses invented
the game to show his cruel king Evilmerodach “the
maners and conditicions of a kynge of the nobles and
of the comun people and of theyr offi ces and how they
shold be touchid and drawen. And how he shold amende
hymself & become vertuous.” Xerxes explains that he
invented the game to keep the king from “ydlenesse,”
which can induce men to sin, and to satisfy man’s desire
for “noueltees & tydynges,” which in turn sharpen the
mind. The exemplum ends with Evilmerodach’s eventual
conversion, thus setting a precedent for using chess to
teach people how to behave.
The second section is divided into fi ve chapters de-
scribing, respectively, the fi ve different chess pieces in
the fi rst row: (1) king, (2) queen, (3) alphinus (judge), (4)
knight, and (5) rook (legate). Each piece is described in
terms of its clothing, its symbols of power, the moral sig-
nifi cance of those symbols, and—most important—the
way a represented by the piece must behave in society.
Jacopo narrates several exempla to illustrate the kind of
behavior he has in mind for each person.
The third section deals with the pawns and is divided
into eight chapters, each taking up a particular group
of commoners (one pawn representing one group): (1)
laborers (farmers), (2) smiths, (3) notaries, (4) mer-
chants, (5) physicians, (6) innkeepers, (7) city watchmen
and guards, and (8) ribalds and town couriers. Each
pawn is described in terms of the tools of its trade, its
relationship to the chess piece behind it, and how the
person represented should behave. For each group of
commoners, Jacopo narrates one or more exempla, il-
lustrating either appropriate or inappropriate behavior
of that group.
The fourth section is also divided into eight chapters.
The fi rst chapter describes the chessboard as an alle-
gorical representation of Babylon, where the game was
presumably invented. The next six chapters deal with
the actual moves of each chess piece on the chessboard.
These moves refl ect the rules of chess that were then
in effect in Lombardy and are allegorized to illustrate
a moral. For example, when a pawn becomes a queen,
the fact that many great rulers had humble origins is il-
lustrated. In the eighth chapter in this section—the fi nal
chapter—Jacopo reiterates the history of the origins of
chess, reminding his readers that chess is a social alle-
gory of the various classes of medieval society working
together for the common good.
As Kaeppeli (1960) noted, the convent of San Do-
menico in Genoa produced a considerable amount of
popular religious literature. It is not surprising, there-
fore, that Ludus scaccorum spread rapidly throughout
western and eastern Europe; there were even a Scottish
translation and a Czech translation. When Ludus scac-
corum was translated from Latin into a vernacular, or
from one vernacular into another, the content was some-
times modifi ed to refl ect a country’s particular ways of
representing its own social classes (Buuren 1997).
The diffusion and popularity of Ludus scaccorum
during the fourteenth and fi fteenrh centuries are refl ected
in the numerous manuscripts and early printed editions
of the work. It was the second book to be printed in the
English language: William Caxton printed an English
translation of Jehan de Vignay’s French translation
(c. 1350) of Ludus scaccorum in 1474. Despite the
popularity of Ludus scaccorum in the late Middle
Ages and the early Renaissance, there are no critical
editions in print of the Latin original, nor are there anyJACOPO DA MILANO