Church Sermons Against the Trumps in the Fifteenth Century

Why did preachers stand in city squares and condemn a card game by name? A sermon against tarot cards sounds like an odd thing to survive five centuries, yet several do, and they are some of the earliest written evidence that the trionfi game, the direct ancestor of the deck discussed throughout this series through The Tarocchino of Bologna and Its Shortened Deck, existed at all. Moralists did not write treatises about the cards' symbolism. They wrote sermons telling people to stop playing and burn their decks.

Bernardino of Siena and the bonfires

The Franciscan friar Bernardino of Siena preached across Italian cities in the 1420s against gambling, dice and playing cards generally, part of a wider campaign against what he saw as vanity and moral corruption in urban life. His sermons are credited with inspiring the "bonfires of vanities," public burnings in town squares where residents brought gaming equipment, cosmetics and other condemned items to be destroyed, a practice later made famous by Savonarola in Florence at the end of the century. Bernardino's targets were playing cards in general rather than trionfi specifically, since the expanded trump-bearing deck was only beginning to spread through courts in the 1420s and 1430s. Even so, his campaigns set the tone: cards as an object of suspicion, a drain on time and money that a godly city should resist.

Naming the trumps: a sermon against tarot cards

More specific condemnations followed as trionfi decks spread beyond courtly circles into wider use. Surviving sermon manuscripts from the middle of the fifteenth century list forbidden games by name, and scholars treat these lists as among the earliest textual evidence for the trump cards under that name, predating most surviving decks and court records that mention them. Tradition holds that these texts came from preachers working the same moral circuit as Bernardino, often Franciscan or Dominican, addressing congregations in Italian cities where card games had become genuinely popular entertainment rather than a rare courtly novelty. The sermons rarely describe the cards' imagery. Their interest was moral, not descriptive: naming a game was enough to condemn it.

Why cards drew this attention

Card games attracted religious criticism for practical reasons as much as symbolic ones. They involved money changing hands, encouraged gambling debts, and kept people from Mass or honest labour on feast days. Trionfi decks, with twenty-two extra trump cards layered onto an ordinary four-suit pack, were more expensive and more elaborate than plain playing cards, which made them a visible marker of leisure spending among those who could afford them. A preacher condemning cards was condemning idleness and waste as much as the specific mechanics of trick-taking with trumps. The complaint pattern repeats across European moral literature of the period, aimed at dice, cards and other games of chance without much distinction between them.

What the sermons do not say

It is worth noting plainly what these texts never claim. No surviving fifteenth-century sermon reads the trionfi cards as Egyptian wisdom, Hebrew letters, or a map of the soul; that reading arrives centuries later, examined elsewhere in this series through Nicolas Conver and the Tarot de Marseille of 1760 and the turning point of the 1780s. The sermons treat the cards exactly as what they were: a popular, slightly disreputable game, no different in moral weight from dice or backgammon. This absence matters as evidence. If fifteenth-century preachers who made condemning games their life's work saw nothing hidden or esoteric in the trumps, it strengthens the case that no such meaning existed yet to be condemned or praised.

Where a sermon against tarot cards survives

Most of these texts survive by accident, bound into collections of model sermons that preachers copied and reused across parishes, rather than preserved because anyone thought the card references mattered. A model sermon circulated for other preachers to adapt listed acceptable and forbidden pastimes as a block, trionfi included, the way a modern pamphlet might list banned substances without elaborating on each one. That incidental survival is a reminder of how little attention the cards themselves received outside condemnation. Nobody copied these passages to preserve knowledge of the trumps; they were copied because the sermon as a whole was considered useful, and the gambling list came along with it.

Reading the record carefully

Historians such as Michael Dummett treated these sermon fragments with appropriate caution, noting that moral literature of this kind tends to exaggerate the scale of a problem to justify the preacher's alarm. A sermon naming trionfi among forbidden games is evidence the game existed and had spread widely enough to draw notice, not proof of a city in the grip of card-driven ruin. Readers tracing the deck's documented early history can consult the overview of the game's origins at the Wikipedia entry on Tarot card games, which gathers the surviving references scholars still argue over today.

A record worth keeping

These sermons leave a strange legacy: a handful of moralising paragraphs, meant to shame a congregation into giving up an evening's entertainment, now serve historians as among the firmest dated evidence for when and where the trionfi game had reached. The preachers who wrote them would likely be astonished to find their condemnations cited centuries later, not as proof of sin, but as the clearest proof available that the game, plain and un-esoteric, truly existed when they say it did.