Ludi: Mediæval Games

Merels

Merellus was the Latin name for “game piece”, which may have been corrupted in English to “morris” and given rise to several similarly named games. The popular Roman game Terni Lapilli (“Three Pebbles”) is considered the ancestor of “Three Men’s Morris” which, by extension produced “Six Men’s Morris”, popular in Italy, France and England during the Middle Ages but obsolete by 1600, and “Nine Men’s Morris” or “Merels”. There is even a “Twelve Men’s Morris” that adds four diagonal lines to the board and gives each player twelve gaming pieces.

These games are also known as “Mill” or “Morris” in English and as “Mérelles” in French, “Morels” in Spanish, “Mühle” in German, “Mølle” in Norwegian, “Linea” in Italy and “Luk Tsut Ki” in China. As for the English names, it is believed they are derivations of the French word “merel” which means marker itself derived from the Latin merellus.

The game is played on a board consisting of three concentric squares connected by lines from the middle of each of the inner square's sides to the middle of the corresponding outer square's side. Pieces are played on the corner points and on the points where lines intersect so there are 24 playable points. Accompanying the board there should be 9 black pieces and 9 white pieces usually in the form of round counters.

The basic aim is to make “mills” - vertical or horizontal lines of three stones in a row. Every time this is achieved, an opponent's piece is removed, the overall objective being to reduce the number of opponent's pieces to less than three or to render the opponent unable to play. To begin the board is empty. A coin toss decides which player will play white as white moves first and thus has a slight advantage.

Gameplay: Play is in two phases.

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  To begin, players each take turns to place a piece of their own colour on any unoccupied point until all eighteen pieces have been played. After that, turns alternate and consist of a player moving one piece along a line to an adjacent vacant point.

• During both phases, whenever a player achieves a “mill”, that player immediately removes from the board one piece belonging to their opponent that does not form part of a “mill”.

• If all the opponent’s pieces form ‘“mills”, then an exception is made and the player is allowed to remove any one piece.

• It is only upon the formation of a “mill” that a piece is captured, but a player will often break a “mill” by moving a piece out of it and then, in a subsequent turn, return the piece back thus forming a new “mill” and capturing another opponent’s piece.

• Captured pieces are never replayed onto the board and remain captured for the remainder of the game.

• The game is finished when a player loses either by being reduced to two pieces or by being unable to move.

Sometimes a “wild” rule is played for when a player is reduced to only three pieces. In this case, any player with only three pieces remaining is allowed to move from any point to any other point on the board regardless of lines or whether the destination point is adjacent.

Chess

Chess is the most popular board game in history, originating in 6th-century India as a game simulating a battle. Its earliest form was known as chaturanga meaning “four-limbed” in reference to the four ancient divisions of the Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephantry and chariotry. The different pieces were imbued with different powers reflecting the military regiments on which they were modelled. Chess percolated westward to become a popular game in the Middle Ages amongst the European nobility, hence its sobriquet “the game of kings”, as well as the military, clerics and wealthy households. In doing so the earlier game pieces became the pawns, knights, bishops and rooks familiar to European players. What was once a vizier piece was replaced by the more dynamic queen, influenced by the rise of powerful queens in Europe. 

In the 12th-century young men were taught chess as a lesson in combat, mirroring its Indian origins, and many poets used the game to symbolise fortune or destiny. The 10th-century Abbasid scholar al-Masudi described how chess was used to train military strategy and mathematics. In the later Middle Ages chess became popular as an allegory of love amongst poets and artists. Perhaps the best example being the late 14th-century French poem Echecs Amoureux which includes a long description of a game of chess between a lady and her suitor. Over 200 years later, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Ferdinand and Miranda are discovered clearly flirting over the chessboard.

Gameplay: 

Chess is so well-known and popular that describing the gameplay is best left to the numerous books and online resources already available. That said, you probably know that a game ends when one player’s “king is helpless”. Of course you did. But did you know that Persian players would indicate this with the exclamation Shah mãt which was adopted into English as “checkmate”.

Rithmomachia

Rithmomachia, or the “philosopher’s game”, became important to higher education in Europe around the 11th-century. The game was thought to represent, in aesthetic form, the formal number theory of Greek polymath Pythagoras. The game was a favourite pastime of monks and clerics as church leaders believed it had enlightening qualities. In his 16th-century book “Utopia”, Thomas More has his citizens playing Rithmomachia instead of morally bankrupt games such as dice.

Pythagoras’ mathematical number theory held sway over European scholarship for more than a thousand years. He claimed “all is numbers” but apparently did not believe in all numbers favouring only rational (or whole) numbers such as 1, 2, 3 and simple fractions such as ½ as the foundation of the universe. The mathematical adherents of Pythagoras esteemed rational numbers so much that they actively tried to conceal the existence of irrational numbers (non-repeating decimals including Pi). It is even reputed that they assassinated the Greek philosopher Hippasus who had stumbled on the irrational challengers. The Pythagorean cult set European scholarship back by hundreds of years until, by the 17th-century, new techniques borrowed from India and Persia reinvigorated European mathematics. As Pythagoras’ ideas fell out of favour so too did Rithmomachia’s popularity.

Gameplay: 

Rithmomachia is similar in gameplay to chess. Its different pieces move according to distinct rules and like chess, players vie to capture their opponent’s pieces. Unlike chess, each Rithmomachia piece is inscribed with a number that dictates where and how pieces must be positioned to capture other pieces. To win, a player must arrange several of their pieces on their opponent’s side of the board in a mathematical progression, for example, 2-4-8.

References:

Clancy, K., (2024), “War and pieces”, BBC History Magazine (July edition), pp. 27-31.

Williams, S., (2005), BBC History Magazine Volume 6, Number 2, p. 43.

Ludi: War games

It can be argued that the face of modern Europe was changed by Kriegsspiel or “war game”. In the 18th-century German military strategists meddled with chess, itself an abstraction of war, to create a more realistic military planning tool. Inspired by the success of the scientific method in so many other fields, they hoped to recast war as a science. The game they devised was Kriegsspiel, with which they aimed to test and workshop new strategies. The chess board was first expanded to thousands of squares, colour-coded to represent different terrains. As map-making technology improved, the game was played on scaled maps of actual battlefields that allowed officers to plan their real campaigns in detail.

Each turn of play represented two minutes of warfare, and wooden block troops were constrained to move a realistic distance in that time. Casualty tables derived from actual battle data were used by umpires to predict each simulated action’s effects. As in modern tabletop wargaming, dice throws randomised and determined the damage inflicted by each attack. Kriegsspiel resulted in a remarkably accurate prediction engine allowing German officers to cohere the first German empire in the late 19th-century. Most modern militaries use some form of game simulation in their training and planning.

In 1913 author HG Wells published a simple tabletop war game he called “Little Wars”. As an acknowledged pacifist this seems a little odd, but he hoped that playing at war and witnessing its horrors in miniature would encourage people to avoid it for real. In due course Wells’ Little Wars gave rise to a plethora of new tabletop war games that culminated in Dungeons and Dragons and countless role-playing video games. The impact of playing war games has been far reaching even influencing modern policy. The nuclear war simulation game “Proud Prophet” was played by top US officials in 1983. Every outcome was so harrowing that the exercise convinced President Ronald Reagan’s administration to open arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union.

Bon appétit!

Reference:

Clancy, K., (2024), “War and pieces”, BBC History Magazine (July edition), pp. 27-31.

Dispelling Some Myths: Orgies…not what you might think

Orgies…your first thought is so wrong. How many readers have savoured the knowledge that the ancient Romans, for example, delighted in a good orgy? A wild time of drink, sex and debauchery. It is certainly an image championed in some movies (an especial favourite of the adult film industry). There is only one problem - this is such a narrow-minded and modern notion out of step with its origins.

In ancient Greek religion, ὄργιον, or an orgion, (pl: ὄργια, orgia, “secret rites”) was an ecstatic form of worship characteristic of the Eleusinian Mysteries initiations held every year for the cult of Demeter and Persephone, the Dionysian Mysteries, and the cult of Cybele. The “mystery” (Greek: μυστήρια) element refers to religious movements or cults in the Greco-Roman world for which participation was reserved for initiates (mystai) granted knowledge of its secrets – its mysteries. The particulars of the initiation and the ritual practices could not be revealed to outsiders. One famous example was the orgion integral to the cult celebration of Dionysus, the god of wine [1]. The Greeks also called him Bacchus, a name the ancient Romans adopted. Their celebrations known as Bacchanalia featured “unrestrained” masked dances by torchlight and included animal sacrifices often taking place five times a month. The rites spread to Rome from the Greek colonies in Southern Italy where they had begun as secret rituals only attended by women. Admission to Bacchanalia was extended to men some time later.

The Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus (59 BC - AD 17) - known as Livy in English - writes of the rapid spread of the cult, which he claimed indulged in all kinds of crimes and political conspiracies at its nocturnal meetings. In 186 BC, the Roman Senate prohibited Bacchanalia throughout all Italy except in certain specially approved cases. Although threatened with severe punishments for those found in violation of the Senate’s decree, Bacchanalia survived in Southern Italy long past the attempted repression.

Orgia are popularly thought to have involved sex but, while sexuality and fertility were cultic concerns, the primary goal of orgia was to achieve an ecstatic union with the divine. Indeed, those who partook of Dionysian Mysteries were believed to become possessed and empowered by the god himself. However, over time the connection with sex has given rise to the modern association with parties of consenting adults engaging in sexual activity. So, now you know orgies were originally religious worship...not necessarily a wild sex party. Bon appétit!

Endnote:

1. In ancient Greek religion and myth, Dionysus is the god of winemaking, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre. He was also known as Bacchus (Ancient Greek: Βάκχος Bacchos) by the Greeks (a name later adopted by the Romans) for a frenzy he was said to induce called baccheia. As Dionysus Eleutherius (“the liberator”), his wine, music, and ecstatic dance were said to free his followers from self-conscious fear and care.