The Minchiate of Florence: A Tarot with Ninety-Seven Cards

What made the minchiate florence tarot different from every other regional deck? Numbers. Where the Marseille pattern settled at seventy-eight cards, the Florentine game known as minchiate ran to ninety-seven, swelling the trump sequence with the zodiac, the four elements, and a fuller set of virtues. It is the clearest proof that "the tarot" was never one fixed object before the esotericists got hold of it: it was a regional game, reshaped city by city to fit local taste.

A Florentine expansion

Minchiate (sometimes called germini) emerged in Florence by the sixteenth century, built on the same basic logic as the Marseille-pattern game examined through Nicolas Conver and the Tarot de Marseille of 1760: four suits, numeral cards, court cards, and a separate sequence of trump cards that outrank them all. Florentine card makers simply kept adding. Where the standard pattern carried twenty-two trumps, minchiate carried forty-one, plus the Fool, for a total of ninety-seven cards in the full pack. The extra trumps did not appear at random. They filled out the symbolic vocabulary the city's card players expected: the twelve signs of the zodiac, the four classical elements, and a complete set of theological virtues alongside the cardinal ones already present in most tarot packs.

Counting to ninety-seven

The arithmetic works out cleanly once the categories are laid side by side. Four suits of fourteen cards each (ten numerals and four court figures) give fifty-six minor cards, the same structure found in most Italian-suited tarot packs. The trump sequence is where minchiate swells: standard subjects such as the Magician, the Popess, the Chariot and the Wheel sit alongside the Four Elements, the Twelve Signs, and additional virtue cards, bringing the triumphal sequence to forty-one plus the Fool. Historian Michael Dummett, who did more than anyone to document regional tarot variants, treated minchiate as a serious case study precisely because its expansion shows how freely a local card-making tradition could rework a shared template without inventing a new game from scratch.

A game, not a grimoire

It is worth saying plainly: minchiate was played, not read. Florentine households used it for an evening card game with its own scoring rules and point values attached to specific trumps. Its social reputation was serious enough that moralists occasionally complained about time lost to it, much as preachers elsewhere complained about trionfi more generally. The extra allegorical cards were not esoteric additions smuggled in by a hidden school; they were simply more material for a wealthy city's taste for elaborate, decorative packs. Reading backward from later occult tarot, it is tempting to see the zodiac and virtue cards as proto-kabbalistic layering. Tradition holds otherwise: Florence added them for visual richness and gameplay variety, long before anyone treated the trumps as a philosophical sequence.

Why the minchiate florence tarot still matters

The minchiate pack matters to a modern reader of the Thoth deck for a specific reason. It shows that expanding or rearranging the trumps was always possible within Italian card culture. That happened well before Court de Gébelin's Egyptian theory reframed the whole deck as sacred text. A reader who assumes the trump sequence was carved in stone from the start will find minchiate a useful corrective. Crowley and Harris built an entirely new symbolic apparatus onto the Thoth deck centuries later. They were not the first to decide that twenty-two trumps were not necessarily the final word; Florence had already proved the sequence was negotiable, for reasons having nothing to do with mysticism. The zodiac trumps alone show how naturally card players folded astrology into a game deck long before any reader sat down to a modern Astrological wheel.

A practical note for curious readers

A common misconception treats minchiate's zodiac and virtue cards as a lost esoteric key, something later occultists simply forgot to use. The evidence says otherwise: contemporary account books and guild records describe minchiate purely in terms of trick-taking scores and point values. Anyone comparing it with The Fool in a standard pack will notice the same character doing the same structural job in both decks, a wild card above ordinary rank, regardless of how many other trumps surround it.

Decline of a complex deck

Minchiate fell out of common use by the nineteenth century, partly because ninety-seven cards made for a cumbersome, expensive deck compared to the simpler seventy-eight card patterns that dominated the rest of France and northern Italy. Printers had less incentive to keep cutting the extra blocks once player habits shifted toward smaller packs. A handful of surviving decks and printed sheets, now held in museum and private collections, let historians reconstruct the full sequence, and modern reproductions occasionally bring the pattern back for collectors and curious readers rather than active players. The Wikipedia entry on Minchiate lays out the surviving card list card by card for anyone who wants the full inventory.

A regional variant worth remembering

Minchiate deserves a place in any serious history of the cards, not as a curiosity but as evidence. The tarot that later generations treated as a single, stable symbol system was, for centuries, a live regional game subject to local expansion, contraction and redesign. Florence chose more cards; other cities, as later parts of this series will show, chose fewer. Both choices were made by card players, not occultists, and both still shape how we read the deck's history today.