The King is Dead, Long Live the Game: Alfonso X, el Sabio, and the Libro de açedrex, dados e tablas 1

Abstract

In the context of the centralization, abstraction and expansion of political authority of the European High and Late Middle Ages, this study examines MS Escorial T.I.6—Alfonso X el Sabio's Libro de çedrex, dados e tablas (1283)—and the relations of its text, images and ideas to Alfonso's ambitious political and cultural enterprises. Games such as chess, backgammon, and dice are presented in Alfonso's treatise as co-extensive with legislation and other cultural products aimed at the shaping of the moral and civiccharacter of his subjects. As ruler of a nascent nation-state and would-be empire, Alfonso perceived games as not just entertainment but also political technologies capable of representing and re-shaping existential and political realities and ideals. Ludic tools of control and signs of the growing impersonality of domination, the Alfonsine games thus, like his laws, marked the transfer of authority from the person of the king to abstract sets of rules and to subjects regulated by their own desire to be part of the games of emerging modern powers.

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