088 The Origin of the Checkers (Volume II) and Modern Chess Game.

312 pages

Until now the different scholars practically limited themselves to indicating  France  as  the  country of origin of  the  draughts game,  among  them the famous chess scholar Harold James  Ruthven Murray  is emphasized.  With respect to the new powerful dama in  the modern chess game that was developed around the end of the XV century, the situation is not much better, since the scholars of this game believe that France, as well as Italy, could be the native countries of  this  modality of the game,  in spite of the fact  that  the first chess book,  Francesch Vicent, with such new modality dates from 1495 and is of Spanish origin.

In draughts  we see a similar situation,  since  the  first Spanish  books about the game of draughts have a very high  level  and date from the XVI century,  while the first French book comes from the XVII century and  the game described is a very elemental one.  Contrary to this evidence,  the scholars did not consider it  necessary to grant Spain the honour of being the  creative  country of the game of draughts and of the  new modality in the chess game  with the new dama.   How is it possible that the  different scholars never took into account the rich Spanish bibliography on both  games?   Was  it a linguistic  problem or were there  other existing circumstances that forbade this reasoning?  In the  case of  draughts,  this could be a reasonable  cause  for  the  Dutch scholars that did not master the Spanish language, but not  for  the English scholar Murray who knew several  languages,  among  them Arabic.   On the other hand,  regarding the chess game it  is difficult  to  accept  that none of  them  knew  the  Spanish language. Therefore  there had to be other motives  for them to deny that Spain could be the country of origin of the new powerful dama in chess.