3. The Four Papi

Above the Bagattino came, in Bologna, the four Papi. Everywhere else these four were distinguished as two papal and two imperial, a male and a female in each category. These hierarchies are a natural in a suit whose cards are all more powerful than the cards of the four suits; each suit is a kingdom, and above kingdoms are emperors and popes. That they are low in their own suit indicates that even they are subject to powers above them, such as the virtues, fortune, old age, and traitors.

In Bologna as elsewhere, these figures wore both papal and imperial crowns, but, except in the 1602 composition by Giulio Cesare Croce (see section one), at least by the late seventeenth century, all had the same title, Papa, a word that meant not only “Pope” but any esteemed authority. The Grande dizionario della lingua italiano says, “The best, the ablest, the most esteemed in a category of people, in a social group.”[1] In 1660-70, Mitelli’s deck, the earliest extant with these cards, shows all four as clearly male (above); but this is a non-standard deck. In the more standard Dalla Torre deck, 1670-1700 (below), three of them are more ambiguously drawn, and only one has a beard.[2] 

It is true that popes were typically clean-shaven, but both look rather effeminate. There is some differentiation between the two: only one gives the sign of blessing associated elsewhere with the Pope and holds the silver and gold keys of St. Peter, also associated with popes. The other bears the stigmata of Christ on his or her hands, a trait associated more with the founder of an order of monks, St. Francis, than with popes. Also, while the three-barred cross is a papal cross, the other’s cross-staff is found in the earliest Popess card as well as in depictions of the theological virtue Faith.[3] Either as Faith or the Church, the title Papessa thus had some justification in orthodoxy, [4] even if some preachers declared it sacrilege to have images of either papal figure in a game they considered immoral. 

How did it come about that these four cards came to be of undifferentiated gender, and none ranked above the others? One possibility is that in Bologna, as a papal state, pressure was put on the card makers not to acknowledge a card with a female pope, since there was no such person; it would have suggested the legendary Pope Joan, who in the story became pope by disguising herself as a man. Rather than removing the card, as in Florence (in Minchiate and the ca. 1500 strambotto),[5] players in Bologna treated them all the same. 

If the cards were already equal in trick-taking power, such a collective designation would have been natural, even without any pressure, and even if they at one time had individual titles. Most decisively, a collective name would naturally have arisen to indicate them as a group that scored extra points. In the Bolognese game, there were extra points for winning three or four of these dignitaries, just as there were for having three or four kings or queens.[6] A similar rule existed in Minchiate, but for a sequence among the first five triumphs; that rule would explain why all five in that game had the designation Papa, even if the first was also the Papino (or Bagatello), and the fifth also Amore. And even though once in Minchiate there were an Empress, Emperor, and Pope,[7] over time these titles stopped being used, in favor of Papa Due, Papa Tre, and Papa Quattro. Since in Minchiate they were not of equal power, their rank in the sequence also needed to be specified.

That still leaves the question, how would it have come about that there were four cards of equal rank in a sequence that was otherwise strictly hierarchical? As Ross Caldwell argues elsewhere in this volume, it was most likely an original practice, not one adopted later, because it would have been hard to introduce later in a lasting way: it goes against the hierarchical principle governing all the other triumphs.[8]

It is significant, as Caldwell points out, that a similar rule seems to have existed in Piedmont, which was not a papal state and so not subject to papal pressure. The Piedmontese author Francesco Piscina, writing about the Tarot he knew in 1565, said “Now you do not have to be surprised that when playing the Emperor, of a lesser authority than the Popes, sometimes he wins and takes them.”[9] The same rule in two places surely isn’t a coincidence, but what is the explanation?

One possibility is that the game was introduced into Piedmont directly from Bologna, via traders selling the packs. Piedmont also had another Bolognese feature: the Angel was ranked higher than the World. The problem with that answer is that in other respects the order of triumphs is as reported in Lombardy of that time, which was different from that in Bologna, most notably in its placement of the three virtues, one after the other in Bologna but more scattered and in a different order in Lombardy and Piedmont, similar in both places.[10]

Another possibility is that the game originally spread to Piedmont from Lombardy at a time when the “equal papi” rule existed there, too, but that it later died out. If so, the deck in Lombardy would have included a Popess and an Empress, as those subjects are well documented there, from the 1450s for the first and the 1440s for the second. That such male and female cards might have had equal status is not implausible, given that women players were prevalent in frescoes and that one of the earliest surviving decks there, the so-called Cary-Yale, had male and female pages and knights in every suit.[11] In Bologna, too, there were at one time female pages, called fantesche, maids, in two suits, Coins and Cups, and male fanti, foot soldiers or footmen, in the other two, all of the same rank in their own suits (at right, the fante of Batons and the fantesca of Coins, from a deck dated 1770 on the former's shield).[12] And in Germany, the court cards of the “Stuttgart Hunting Deck,” ca. 1430, were all female in two suits and male in the other two.[13] 

Such equality between male and female court figures might have extended to emperors and popes, including, for symmetry, a Popess. The rule could have spread west to Piedmont and east to Bologna. Piscina did not mention an Empress or Popess, but since Avignon is documented in 1505 as supplying Pignerol, in Piedmont, with four dozen packs of “cartarum vulgo appelatarum taraux” (cards commonly known as taraux),[14] using a French word in a Latin text, the cards would have been similar to those of France, which in order and appearance most closely resembled those of Lombardy, both places with an Empress and a Popess.[15]

Alternatively, it might have been all males in Bologna to start with, then changed to two males and two females elsewhere, but with the same rule, which again would have died out everywhere except in isolated Piedmont and in stubborn Bologna, proud of a game which many considered as originating in their city, thus needing to be preserved in its original state.[16]44

Piedmont in Piscina’s time was controlled by Savoy, allied with France. From the French perspective, popes did abuse their power and were not immune from being overruled. Piscina cites the case of Bonifacio VIII, whom he said had been “for fault and rightful causes” imprisoned by an Emperor.[17] This happened in 1303, and although done by a king of France or his underling, the point is that for people in Piedmont, popes were not above committing grave wrongs for which they could justly be overcome by other rulers, and the game allegorically illustrated that point.

Unlike Piedmont, however, Bologna was part of the Papal State. So even if there had been a deck with a Popess, it would have been advisable for its citizens simply to refer to the card as one of the Papi. But there was also the differentiation in crowns, two papal and two imperials. Wouldn’t it have been offensive to the papal authorities to have someone looking like an emperor triumphing over one looking like a pope, or to suggest that there could be two popes, either of which could triumph over the other? Wouldn’t that be as offensive as a female pope?

One answer is suggested by literary sources found by Andrea Vitali and Ross Caldwell. A chronicle ending in 1580 by the Mamellini family of Bologna has it that:

The Tarot, then, under an intricate politics of obtuseness of things, keeps all the great business of the Guelphs and Ghibellines hidden within it, which in Bologna were the factions of Germei and Lambertazzi, being there (in the Tarot) pope and antipope, true and excommunicated emperor, with the cities of the one and the other league . . .[18]

Since all the other references in this part of the chronicle are to the eleventh to fourteenth centuries, the author probably had that period in mind.[19] In the twelfth century, Emperor Frederick I, excommunicated by one pope, simply attached himself to an antipope (Victor IV, Paschal II, etc.). The “real” pope in turn declared his own choice for emperor, a member of the rival German house of Welf, from which the term Guelf (or Guelph) derives. Frederick’s supporters were called in Germany the Wibbilungen, in Italy, Ghibellines. The Geremei and the Lambertazzi were Bologna’s thirteenth-century versions of the two sides, mentioned specifically in relation to the Tarot by Giuseppe Maria Buini in 1736.[20] Another example is in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Pope John XXII excommunicated emperor Louis IV and his antipope Nicholas V. John soon favored Charles of Bohemia, who after Louis’s death became “true emperor” Charles IV.[21] Here is a pope, an antipope, an excommunicated emperor, and a true emperor, each independent of the others.

Among the excommunicated Ghibellines in John XXII’s time was Castruccio Castracani, ruler of Lucca.[22] His significance for us is his mention in what is inscribed on a seventeenth-century painting in Bologna, identifying a certain Prince Fibbia as inventor of the Tarocchini (probably intending the original Tarot); it also identified Castruccio as that Prince’s ancestor. Andrea Vitali has verified Francesco Fibbia’s presence in several Fibbia family trees showing him descended from Castruccio, and with members of the family, including him, described as allied with the Bentivoglio family. That family, which went on to rule Bologna for a time, claimed ancestry from the excommunicated thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II by way of his son Enzo, whom the Bolognese Guelphs had imprisoned, while also being allied with the Guelph ruling power of Florence.[23]

Such a family self-identification, for both the Fibbia and the Bentivoglio, lends itself well to a game with four dignitaries none by rank superior to the others, because for them the history of popes and emperors was one of contention among claimants, none by his office inherently superior to another, distinguished only by their policies and alignments.

The opposing factions did not end in the fourteenth century. In 1390 there were again two factions each recognizing a different emperor, Wenceslaus and Rupert, one favored by the Visconti and the other by Rome, which at the time were also contending over Bologna; there were also two popes, the other in Avignon. In 1410-16 there were even three. In 1439 there were again two popes, with Bologna again caught in between, as Caldwell points out in his essay. Moreover, he observes, there was the contention between Pope and Patriarch over the “true” practice of Christianity, each with its own empire and emperor, a contention that in physical terms had so severely weakened Constantinople by 1400 that it had lost most of its territory to yet another empire, that of the Ottoman Turks, and the city itself was in danger of falling. Even a unity council in 1438-39 did not prevent its fall in 1453.  

Of related interest is an anonymous Discorso on the Tarot from east-central Italy of ca. 1565. Although in the order of Ferrara, it called the four dignitaries “two Popes, one with reign and one without, and after these the Emperor and the King, who are the highest dignities; in the spiritual, Cardinal and Pope, in the temporal, King and Emperor.”[24] An illegitimate pope would only be a cardinal, and an emperor uncrowned by a true pope just a king.

In Bologna any of the four papi would allegorically be ruled over both by another papa played later in the same trick, and by all the trumps above the four, whether love, the virtues, fortune, death, the devil, etc., all ruling over these papi. In that way the Tarocchi “keeps all the great business of the Guelphs and Ghibellines hidden within it,” as the Mamellini chronicle declared.[25] Having two popes and two emperors, all contending and triumphing over one another, sometimes one and sometimes another, simply reflects that former reality.

 However, the original reason for the “equal papi” rule may have had nothing to do with Guelphs and Ghibellines. There is one more type of source: other card games with trumps. A game called VIII Imperadori is recorded in 1423 Ferrara, purchased from Florence; nothing else is known but that it was ordered by the Marchexana, who would have been Parasina, age 18 or 19, wife of Marquess Nicolo III, and that a game called Imperatori appeared in 1434, and again in the 1440s, the time when the game of Triumphs is first recorded, in Florence and Ferrara.[26] Franco Pratesi has speculated that two Imperatore figures might have been assigned to each suit, as the highest cards in their suits and also trump cards.[27] As Emperors, they would have been entitled to range outside their own kingdom and capture others, if they could. As such they need not have formed a separate hierarchy; they could all have been equal, or four of them higher than the other four, one set higher than Kings, the other set higher than Queens, for example. In that case priority among equals might have been decided by which was played last, as with the Papi in Bologna.

Four Papi, for four suits, would be half of eight, all as equal as the suits with which they were associated, Empresses with the “feminine” suits of Coins and Cups, Emperors with the “masculine” ones of Swords and Batons. There would have been some rule connecting suits with their associated imperials, in trick-taking or scoring. (An example of the latter would be in sequences of the same suit.) In such a scenario, the Papi could have been all male at the start, or two male and two female, at first as extensions of the suits that also functioned as trumps, meaning cards that could capture cards in other suits. Then, in response to the allegories put upon them, the cards acquire papal as well as imperial crowns, all contending with one another for supremacy.

If a pope has no more authority than an emperor, and one pope no more than another, the game reflects a certain cynicism about all of them. We may recall (from section one) the tarocchi composition in which the Papi cards were given to four ladies “because all full of nonsense,” and another where the men so assigned were “all buffoons.”[28] If the contention reminded people of the bad old days of civil strife, so much the better, because of a shared belief that the game, having originated there, reflected that history – and how much better it was now. For the papal authorities, such an interpretation would have been less objectionable than having a Popess. If Croce’s referred to an Empress, well, that was all right, as long as it stopped there. There remains the question of how the Angel would have been higher than the World in Piedmont without direct influence from Bologna, since in Lombardy the World was highest. I will discuss that issue in section 6. In essence my answer will be that even in Lombardy the Angel was probably highest originally.

To go to the next section, click on https://bologneseorder.blogspot.com/2023/09/4-from-amore-to-carro.html, or on "older post" at the bottom right of this page.

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[1] Accademia della Crusca, Grande dizionario (see here n. 25), entry papa, secondary meaning: “Il migliore, il più valente, il più stimato in una categoria di persone, in un gruppo social.”

[2] Both decks are on Gallica, website of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; search “tarots bolonais.” The Arabic numbers on the “Dalla Torre” cards follow the French order, quite different from the Bolognese, and so obviously were added in France.

[3] This Popess is in the Visconti-Sforza deck (also known as Pierpont-Morgan-Bergamo and Colleoni-Bagliati), reproduced in Michael Dummett, The Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards (New York: George Brazilier 1986), p. 107, and on the website of the Pierpont Morgan Library. It is one of fourteen triumphs in one style, dating to the 1450s, to which were joined six in a later style (Fig. 43a is an example of the later style). For Faith, see Giotto’s Fide in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua (ca. 1305) and the Faith card in the Cary-Yale Tarocchi (on the website of the Beinecke Library, search “Visconti Tarot”) and the same in Minchiate (see its Wikipedia entry).

[4] The late fifteenth century “Sermo de Ludo” (discussed here in the previous section), said of the Popess, “La papessa. O miseri quod negat Christiana fides” (The Popess. O miserable ones, which the Christian faith denies [i.e., that she existed]), and of the Pope, “El papa. qui debet omni sanctitate polere, et isti ribaldi faciunt ipsorum capitaneum” (The Pope. to him every sanctity is owed, and these rogues make him their captain). For other examples treating the word as denoting a woman, an imagined non-existent head of the papacy rather than an abstraction, see, in Italian, (1) Rodolfo Renier in “Tarocchi di Matteo Maria Boiardo,” in N. Campanini, ed., Studi su M. M. Boiardo (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1894), p. 256, in archive.org; and (2) Giancarlo Passeroni, Il Cicerone, Parte Seconda, Tomo III (Milan: Antonio Agnelli, 1768), Canto Settimo, Ottava VII, p. 162, online in Google Books. Both translated in Vitali and Howard, ed., Bologna and the Tarot, an Italian Legacy from the Renaissance: History Art Symbology Literature (Riola, Italy: Mutus Liber, 2022), pp. 148 and 303.

[5] Thierry Depaulis at https://www.academia.edu/30193559/Early_Italian_Lists_of_Tarot_Trumps_The_Playing_Card_vol_36_n_1_July_Sept_2007_p_39_50, pp. 41-42. Trans. in Vitali and Howard, ed., p. 121.

[6] [Carlo Pisarri], Istruzioni necessarie per chi volesse imparare il giuoco dilettevole delli Tarocchini di Bologna (Bologna: Ferdinando Pisarri, 1754), in Google Books and archive.org, p. 22: “Li quattro Mori ancor essi fanno un’ altra sequenza, . . .” (The four Moors make still another sequence, . . .”)

[7] Nazario Renzoni, “Some remarks on Germini in Bronzino’s Capitolo in lode della Zanzara,” The Playing-Card 41, No.2 (Oct.-Dec. 2012), pp. 85–87: the Emperor and Pope are in a version of 1530-35, while the Empress is mentioned in a later version.

[8] Ross G. R. Caldwell, “The Priority of the Equal Papi Rule in Bologna,” in Vitali and Howard, ed., pp. 185-199, and https://www.academia.edu/102191609/Priority_of_the_Equal_Papi_Rule_in_Bolognese_Tarocchi.

[9] Francesco Piscina, Discorso . . . sopra l’ordine delle figure de Tarocchi (Monte Regale, Piedmont: Lionardo Torrentino, 1565), in Ross Sinclair Caldwell, Thierry Depaulis, and Marco Ponzi, eds. and trans., con gli occhi et con l’intelletto: Explaining the Tarot in Sixteenth Century Italy (Lulu.com, 2019), original p. 16, trans., p. 17 (these pp. in Google Books): “Non è adeso maraviglia che giuocando l’imperatore di minor dignità & authorità de i Papi alcune volte gli vinca è pigli, percioche questo altro.”

[10] Ibid., editors’ introduction, pp. 7-8.

[11] The Cary-Yale, named for its last private and current institutional owner, is also called the Visconti Tarot, for the family that probably commissioned it, and the Visconti di Modrone, for a former owner. Dating from the 1440s, all its cards are online at the website of the Beinecke Library, Yale University; search “Visconti Tarot.”

[12] The examples are from Andrea Vitali and Terry Zanetti, Il Tarocchino di Bologna (Bologna: Edizioni Martina, 2005), pp. 53 and 54 for fantesche, 56 and 58 for fante.

[13] Timothy B. Husband, The World in Play: Luxury Cards 1430-1540 (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2015), p. 16.

[14] Thierry Depaulis, Le Tarot Révélé, une histoire du tarot d’après les documents (La-Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland: Swiss Museum of Games, 2013), p. 36. 

[15] Ibid., p. 25.

[16] See Andrea Vitali, “The Prince Fibbia Inventor of the Ludus” (2022), http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=942&lng=ENG.

[17]  Piscina, Discorso (see above n. 9), pp. 16-17: “alcune volti per culpa e legitime causa.”

[18]  Cinzi Fenetti, ed., Memoriali dei Mamellini, notai bolognesi: legami familiari, vita quotidiana, realtà politica, secc. XV-XVI, CLUEB, Bologna, 2008, p. 171. For more of this text, including the original, see Caldwell, “The Priority of the Equal Papi Rule” (see above, n. 8), sec. 2.

[19] Ibid. Caldwell adds that this portion is by Giulio Cesare Mamellini (1546-1620), who says he found this information about Bologna in vieche papers and chronicles.

[20] Caldwell, “Priority” (see above n. 8) and Vitali, “The Prince Fibbia: Inventor of the Ludus” (see above, n. 16).

[21] Nicolò Machiavelli, History of Florence and of the Affairs of Italy, Book I, Chapter VI, written 1521-25, English translation at http://ebooks.lib.ntu.edu.tw/1_file/Gutenberg/2464/2464-h.htm.

[22] Ibid.

[23] For Fibbia and the Bentivoglio, see Vitali, “The Prince Fibbia” (see above n. 16).

[24] Discorso perche fosse il gioco, particolarmente quello del Tarocco . . . , author unidentified, in Caldwell, Depaulis, and Ponzi (see above n. 9), pp. 54-55: “Due Papi, uno col Regno e l’altro senza e dopo questi l’Imperatore, e il Re, che sono le due supreme dignità; nello spirituale Cardinale e Papa, nel temporale Re, et Imperatore.”

[25] See here text corresponding to n. 18, from Fenetti, ed., Memoriali.

[26] Parasina: Adriano Franceschini, Artisti a Ferrara in età umanistica e rinascimentale. Testimonianze archivistiche. Parte I dal 1341 al 1471 (Ferrara: Corbo, 1993), p.170. Cited at http://trionfi.com/0/p/12: Camera Ducale Estense, entries for 1422-24, lines 137ff under “i.” 1440s: Francescini, “Note d’archivio sulle carte ferraresi,” Ludica 2 (1996), pp. 170-74. Both cited and trans. by Ross Gregory Caldwell, http://trionfi.com/imperatori-cards-ferrara-1423. 1434: Franco Pratesi, “Les ‘Imperatori’ des Florence à la cour de Ferrare,” L’As de Trèfle, N. 54 (1995), pp. 16-17, at http://naibi.net.

[27] “In Search of Tarot Sources, Part 2,” The Playing-Card 27:3 (1998), p. 112, online in http://naibi.net; Pratesi, “Altri Commenti sui Trionfi” (2016), same website, translated at http://pratesitranslations.blogspot.com/2016/02/jan-11-2015-other-comments-qabout.html.

[28] In Italian, see Andrea Vitali, "Tarocchi e Tarocchini Appropriati a Bologna," http://www.associazioneletarot.it/page.aspx?id=869: “perché tutte piene di dabbenaggine” and “buffoni”); trans. Howard and Vitali, ed.,  pp. 129 and 136.