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Ashta’s chess tales

The counsellor who became a queen

Spain and Italy, around 1475 · 2 minute read

For eight hundred years the piece beside the king was the weakest on the board. Then somebody changed one rule.

In the old game, the piece that stood beside the king was his counsellor. It was a timid piece. It could step one square diagonally and no further. From the middle of the board it reached four squares.

Games were slow. Armies crept towards each other for dozens of moves before anything happened.

Then, around 1475, players in Spain and Italy tried something new. They let that piece travel as far as it liked — straight or diagonal — and they called it the queen. At the same time the old elephant, which used to hop two squares, became the sliding bishop.

The difference was enormous. From the middle of the board the new queen reaches twenty-seven squares instead of four. A game could now be won in a handful of moves, and a careless player could be checkmated before lunch. Italians called the new game “mad queen’s chess”.

Within a generation the new rules had spread across Europe and the old slow game was forgotten. The chess you play today is, almost exactly, the game those players invented.

One changed rule. That was all it took.