enormous complexity. Would the intellectuals of the Middle Ages have been able to understand themselves without chess as social mirror? Undoubtedly. But in chess’s absence, something like chess would have had to be invented—something universal that could symbolize the dynamic rudiments of society. Metaphor—the art of symbolic comparison—is not an optional accessory, but a vital cultural necessity that dates back to the very earliest points in human communication. A substantial degree of everyday language is built on top of it. Metaphor helps us organize our thoughts and at the same time frees us from previous contextual restraints. So much about the experience of living is intangible. To understand these intangibles, we need choice comparisons and symbols to help frame our thinking, and expand those frames, to make more and more sense of what we see, hear, and feel—and to convey that understanding to others. Aristotle considered symbolic metaphor a tool so powerful that he urged the state to regulate its use. Slaves, he warned, should not be permitted to utilize it.
One particular use of symbolic metaphor is to help us navigate complexity by reducing it to simpler, more manageable concepts. Chess is a powerful reducing agent. It can reduce a whole battlefield or city or planet down to sixty-four squares. And yet, within that simplistic frame, chess retains its active quality; like a snow globe, it shrinks things down, but retains its dynamic essence.
M ORALITY AND POLITICS were not the only things being transformed in medieval Europe. Influential medieval poets were also busy inventing the notion of romantic love, and using chess to convey it.
Strange as it might seem, the Western conception of romance did not much exist before the twelfth century. So-called courtly love was an invention of medieval poets who at first imagined it—rather narrowly by today’s standards—as a knight’s unrequited crush on a noblewoman who was unable to return the affection. Gradually, the romantic ideal evolved to become more of a mutual matter, and to spread beyond the ruling class.
Many epic romantic poems from the late twelfth century onward struggled to adequately articulate this new ideal of overt intimacy and to reconcile such expression with other social obligations. Indeed, the game of chess began to come in handy as a courting ritual. Young men and women played each other as an excuse for romantic intimacy—this in an age where physical privacy was otherwise almost nonexistent.
Chess became ubiquitous in romantic medieval poetry. In the Carolingian romance
Huon de Bordeaux
, the strikingly titled
Les échecs amoureux
(The chess of love), Jacques de Longuyon’s
Voeux du paon
, Chaucer’s
Book of the Duchess
, and many others, chess served to advance romantic plots and to symbolically depict feudal figures and rules.
Players, meanwhile, tinkered with the game—and in some cases contaminated it outright. The changes should not have been such a surprise considering the surrounding social turbulence. A five-hundred-year-old Persian/Islamic game was now stumbling into a very different world—or, more accurately, an array of different worlds. In contrast with the relatively unified Islamic Empire, Europe was a collection of separated fragments with different languages, customs, political realities, and thick cultural and physical barriers. The Continent was slowly being brought together into a more unified spiritual-political hegemony under increasingly powerful kings and the Church, and it was sharing more ideas and culture through the development of cities and universities; but it remained relatively balkanized until the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Thus chess, now with many different names, was also essentially many different local games—called
assizes
. It was as if the game had been shot out of Arabia like a shotgun shell, scattering similar but distinct fragments
One particular use of symbolic metaphor is to help us navigate complexity by reducing it to simpler, more manageable concepts. Chess is a powerful reducing agent. It can reduce a whole battlefield or city or planet down to sixty-four squares. And yet, within that simplistic frame, chess retains its active quality; like a snow globe, it shrinks things down, but retains its dynamic essence.
M ORALITY AND POLITICS were not the only things being transformed in medieval Europe. Influential medieval poets were also busy inventing the notion of romantic love, and using chess to convey it.
Strange as it might seem, the Western conception of romance did not much exist before the twelfth century. So-called courtly love was an invention of medieval poets who at first imagined it—rather narrowly by today’s standards—as a knight’s unrequited crush on a noblewoman who was unable to return the affection. Gradually, the romantic ideal evolved to become more of a mutual matter, and to spread beyond the ruling class.
Many epic romantic poems from the late twelfth century onward struggled to adequately articulate this new ideal of overt intimacy and to reconcile such expression with other social obligations. Indeed, the game of chess began to come in handy as a courting ritual. Young men and women played each other as an excuse for romantic intimacy—this in an age where physical privacy was otherwise almost nonexistent.
Chess became ubiquitous in romantic medieval poetry. In the Carolingian romance
Huon de Bordeaux
, the strikingly titled
Les échecs amoureux
(The chess of love), Jacques de Longuyon’s
Voeux du paon
, Chaucer’s
Book of the Duchess
, and many others, chess served to advance romantic plots and to symbolically depict feudal figures and rules.
Players, meanwhile, tinkered with the game—and in some cases contaminated it outright. The changes should not have been such a surprise considering the surrounding social turbulence. A five-hundred-year-old Persian/Islamic game was now stumbling into a very different world—or, more accurately, an array of different worlds. In contrast with the relatively unified Islamic Empire, Europe was a collection of separated fragments with different languages, customs, political realities, and thick cultural and physical barriers. The Continent was slowly being brought together into a more unified spiritual-political hegemony under increasingly powerful kings and the Church, and it was sharing more ideas and culture through the development of cities and universities; but it remained relatively balkanized until the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Thus chess, now with many different names, was also essentially many different local games—called
assizes
. It was as if the game had been shot out of Arabia like a shotgun shell, scattering similar but distinct fragments
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