The 550-Year-Old Playing Card Deck That May Have Mocked a Medieval Court
by Jason Collins © Gifts for Card Players
Most playing cards aren’t really built for immortality. Over time, many become bent, stained, lost beneath furniture, and eventually replaced when their edges become too soft or damaged. Some decks are eventually thrown away. That practice was just as true in the fifteenth century as it is today, which makes the survival of a deck that old rather difficult to explain.
Of course, we’re referring to the survival of the Cloisters Playing Cards deck. Made in the Burgundian Netherlands around the 1480s, the deck still contains all 52 of its original cards. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the deck as the only known complete illuminated deck of ordinary playing cards, meaning non-tarot cards, to survive from the 15th century. What’s even stranger, the cards appear to have seen very little actual play.
However, they aren’t your standard playing cards. There are kings, queens, knaves, and numbered cards from one to ten, just like in your typical deck. But there are no hearts, diamonds, clubs, or spades. Instead, players would have held hands filled with dog collars, hunting horns, hound tethers, and nooses used for carrying birds or small game.
And there are the people on the court (face) cards, dressed so extravagantly that historians have wondered whether someone was having a laugh at the expense of one of the richest courts in Europe.
A Familiar Deck With Very Unfamiliar Suits
Structurally, the Cloisters deck is surprisingly recognizable, as each of its four suits contains 13 cards: a king, queen, knave, and ten numbered cards. There’s no knight, as there would be in many tarot decks, and no separate group of trump cards. In that sense, the Cloisters are much closer to the basic 52-card deck sitting in a kitchen drawer today.
The suits are a different matter altogether. Instead of the typical French suits that eventually became hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades, the Cloisters drew from the aristocratic hunting culture of the time. Collars belonged to hunting dogs, tethers restrained hounds, horns communicated during the hunt, and nooses were used to carry captured birds or small animals from the belt.
This kind of variety wasn’t unusual for Medieval Europe because contemporary decks hadn’t yet settled into one universal set of symbols. German cards in particular experimented freely with suits involving animals, plants, household objects, and hunting equipment. Considering that the French suits became standardized in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the Cloister deck gives a glimpse of a period when the visual language of playing cards was still open to invention.
These Were Not Cheap Cards
The way these cards are made makes the imagery even more interesting. Each card consists of four layers of paper formed into pasteboard. The figures were drawn with pen and ink before being colored with opaque pigments and glazes. Gold and silver were added on top, turning the cards into miniature painted artworks. Also, each card measures approximately 5” by 2¾”. This is notably larger than a modern poker card.
Further examination of the cards also suggests a mixture of repetition and hand craftsmanship. X-ray analysis showed that stencils were used to establish the basic shapes of the suit symbols on numbered cards, after which details were finished by hand. Gold was applied using gold-beater’s skin, a technique in which extremely thin gold leaf was attached to an animal membrane to make the delicate material easier to handle.
This was hardly the cheapest way to make something destined to be shuffled across a table. TO be fair, luxury cards did exist in late medieval Europe, but only three hand-painted decks from that particular period are known to have survived, while other examples were produced using engraving and woodblock printing.
It’s possible that some luxury decks were almost certainly created as prestigious objects rather than everyday gaming equipment. That possibility becomes particularly important with the Cloisters cards because their condition suggests they were barely played with at all.
Was Someone Making Fun of Burgundy?
The court cards are where the deck begins to look less like an expensive toy and more like a possible medieval joke. A very elaborate and expensive joke.
Their kings and queens wear enormous quantities of fur, jewelry, embroidered decoration, gold, and elaborate clothing. The general style belongs to the wealthy Burgundian court of the later fifteenth century, famous for displays of luxury and ceremony. Yet some details do not quite fit.
According to Met ( The Metropolitan Museum of Art) curator Timothy Husband, several figures wear clothing or insignia that would normally have belonged to courtiers, knights, or heralds, rather than royalty. The King of Nooses, for example, wears a short doublet, which is often associated with a courtier.
The King of Collars, on the other hand, appears in a type of emblazoned garment more appropriate for a knight or herald. Other figures display hunting equipment almost as though dog collars and tethers were royal emblems.
That mismatch may have been deliberate, and Husband has suggested that the exaggerated costumes could represent a parody of Burgundian excess, with the cards turning the court’s obsession with clothing, rank, display, and consumption into something slightly ridiculous. If so, the anonymous patron probably wasn’t a Burgundian duke commissioning flattering portraits of himself and his circle.
One possibility is that the deck belonged to a prosperous member of the urban merchant class, wealthy enough to commission such an object and socially confident enough to poke fun at aristocratic pretensions. It remains a theory rather than an identification, but the timing is intriguing. Charles the Bold, the last great Valois duke of Burgundy, died in battle in 1477, right in the middle of the period to which the deck has been dated. His death helped bring the old Burgundian courtly order to an end.
If the cards really were satire, their target was already beginning to disappear.
But Were They Ever Actually Played?
While the Cloisters cards were certainly expensive, and potentially a very bold joke, we still haven’t answered the most basic question: what did someone do with them, considering they were barely played with?
Middle Ages are known for widespread card playing across social classes, and authorities frequently disliked playing cards, largely because of gambling. Medieval sermons and civic regulations condemned card games as wasteful, morally dangerous, and financially ruinous. Yet historians know very little about the precise rules used in many early decks and games, because the cards weren’t standardized and descriptions of individual games aren’t complete.
The Cloisters cards could certainly function as a deck. Their rounded corners even make handling easier. But the Met notes that their excellent condition shows little evidence that they were regularly shuffled and dealt, raising the possibility that they were created as a collector’s curiosity or luxury object instead, both of which weren’t unheard of in Medieval times.
Their condition suggests that they were very rarely used for play, if ever. It’s entirely possible that the owner of these had this made only for the pleasure of owning something that nobody else had.
Final Thoughts
In the end, the uncertainty of their origin and use is what makes the Cloisters Playing Cards so interesting. They still resemble a modern deck closely enough to feel familiar, but almost every detail leads somewhere unexpected. The suits belong to the hunt, the cards glitter with precious materials, and their kings may be more dressed for ridicule than respect.
Whatever joke, game, or private meaning their first owner saw in these cards has been, sadly, lost with time. The deck itself, against all odds, has not.
Jason Collins is a writer with more than 10 years of experience and a bachelor’s degree in English. His work often takes him into fascinating corners of history, where fact and legend have a habit of getting mixed together. He enjoys digging into the people, events, and unlikely stories behind the history we think we know.
